Vertov studied music at Białystok Conservatory until his family fled from the invading German army to Moscow in 1915.

In 1916-1917 Vertov was studying medicine at the Psychoneurological Institute in Saint Petersburg and experimenting with " sound collages " in his free time.

After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, at the age of 22, Vertov began editing for Kino-Nedelya (, the Moscow Cinema Committee's weekly film series, and the first newsreel series in Russia ), which first came out in June 1918.

Vertov freely admitted one criticism leveled at his efforts on the " Kino-Pravda " series — that the series, while influential, had a limited release.

The Vertov Collection at the Austrian Film Museum, Bilingual ( German-English ).

This film is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invents, deploys or develops, such as double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, stop motion animations and a self-reflexive style ( at one point it features a split screen tracking shot ; the sides have opposite Dutch angles ).

Upon the official release of Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov issued a statement at the beginning of the film, which read:

David Abelevich Kaufman () ( 2 January 1896 – 12 February 1954 ) — better known by his pseudonym Dziga Vertov, or Vertof (, " spinning top ") — was a Soviet pioneer documentary film, newsreel director and cinema theorist.

* January 2 – Dziga Vertov, Russian filmmaker ( d. 1954 )

Some have mistakenly stated that many visual ideas, such as the quick editing, the close-ups of machinery, the store window displays, even the shots of a typewriter keyboard are borrowed from Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City ( 1927 ), which predates Man with a Movie Camera by two years, but as Vertov wrote to the German press in 1929, these techniques and images had been developed and employed by him in his Kino-Pravda newsreels and documentaries for the last ten years, all of which predate Berlin.

Alberto Cavalcanti directed Rien que les heures ( 1926 ), Walter Ruttmann directed Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis ( 1927 ), and Dziga Vertov filmed Man With a Movie Camera ( 1929 ), experimental ¨ city symphonies ¨ of Paris, Berlin, and Moscow, respectively.

Vertov believed the camera — with its varied lenses, shot-counter shot editing, time-lapse, ability to slow motion, stop motion and fast-motion — could render reality more accurately than the human eye, and made a film philosophy out of it.

Vertov explains himself in " On ' Kinopravda '": in editing " chance film clippings " together for the Kino-Nedelia series, he " began to doubt the necessity of a literary connection between individual visual elements spliced together ....

'" Towards the end of the same essay, Vertov mentions an upcoming project which seems likely to be Man with the Movie Camera, calling it an " experimental film " made without a scenario ; just three paragraphs above, Vertov mentions a scene from " Kino Pravda " which should be quite familiar to viewers of Man with the Movie Camera: the peasant works, and so does the urban woman, and so too, the woman film editor selecting the negative ...."

" By the later segments of Kino-Pravda, Vertov was experimenting heavily, looking to abandon what he considered film clichés ( and receiving criticism for it ); his experimentation was even more pronounced and dramatic by the time of Man with a Movie Camera, which was filmed in Ukraine.

Vertov believed film was too “ romantic ” and “ theatricalised ” due to the influence of literature, theater, and music, and that these psychological film-dramas “ prevent man from being as precise as a stop watch and hamper his desire for kinship with the machine .”

For his film, however, Vertov had been hired by Mezhrabpomfilm, a Soviet studio that produced mainly propaganda efforts.

Lullaby, perhaps the last film in which Vertov was able to maintain his artistic vision, was released in 1937.

It largely evolved from the works of directors like Germaine Dulac, Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein, Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, and Dziga Vertov and film theorists like Rudolf Arnheim, Béla Balázs and Siegfried Kracauer.

Dziga Vertov claimed in his 1924 manifesto, “ The Birth of Kino-Eye ” that “ the cinema-eye is cinema-truth .” To paraphrase Hilmar Hoffman, this means that in film, only what the camera ‘ sees ’ exists, and the viewer, lacking alternative perspectives, conventionally takes the image for reality.

Eisenstein's first film, Glumov's Diary ( for the theatre production Wiseman ), was also made in that same year with Dziga Vertov hired initially as an " instructor.

Man with a Movie Camera (, Chelovek s kinopparatom ) — sometimes called The Man with the Movie Camera, The Man with a Camera, The Man With the Kinocamera, or Living Russia — is an experimental 1929 silent documentary film, with no story and no actors, by Russian director Dziga Vertov, edited by his wife Elizaveta Svilova.

Vertov was worried that the film would be either destroyed or ignored by the public eye.

French left-wing political filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, under the collective Dziga Vertov Group, made a film depicting the trials in 1970 called Vladimir et Rosa.

The 1929 Russian film Man with a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov featured nudity within the context of naturism.

His filming practices and theories influenced the cinéma vérité style of documentary moviemaking and the Dziga Vertov Group, a radical filmmaking cooperative which was active in the 1960s.

He eventually adopted the name " Dziga Vertov ", which translates loosely as ' spinning top '.

Vertov is known for many early writings, mainly while still in school, that focus on the individual versus the perceptive nature of the camera lens, which he was known to call his " second eye ".

" Cine-Eye " is a montage method developed by Dziga Vertov which was first formulated in his work " WE: Variant of a Manifesto " in 1919.

Whereas Sergei Eisenstein viewed his montage of attractions as a propaganda tool through which the film-viewing masses could be subjected to “ emotional and psychological influence ” and therefore able to perceive “ the ideological aspect ” of the films they were being shown, Vertov believed the Kino-Eye would influence the actual evolution of man, “ from a bumbling citizen through the poetry of the machine to the perfect electric man .”

Around this time he was involved in the creation of the Filmliga based in Amsterdam which drew foreign filmmakers to Holland such as Alberto Cavalcanti, René Clair, Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Dziga Vertov who also became his friends.

This manifesto echoes an earlier one that Vertov wrote in 1922, in which he disavowed popular films he felt were indebted to literature and theater.

By 1968, he had switched to an overtly political phase of revolutionary Maoist-collectivist didactic films with Jean-Pierre Gorin and the Dziga Vertov Group, which lasted for the next six years until 1973.

Dziga Vertov was central to the Soviet Kino-Pravda ( literally, " cinematic truth ") newsreel series of the 1920s.

Vertov was born David Abelevich Kaufman () into a family of Jewish lineage in Białystok, Poland, then a part of the Russian Empire.

The Kaufmans soon settled in Petrograd, where Vertov began writing poetry, science fiction and satire.

Most of Vertov's early work was unpublished, and few manuscripts remain after the Second World War, though some material survived in later films and documentaries created by Vertov and his brothers, Boris Kaufman and Mikhail Kaufman.

Vertov worked on the Kino-Nedelya series for three years, helping establish and run a film-car on Mikhail Kalinin's agit-train during the ongoing Russian Civil War between Communists and counterrevolutionaries.

In 1919, Vertov compiled newsreel footage for his documentary Anniversary of the Revolution ; in 1921 he compiled History of the Civil War.

The so-called " Council of Three ," a group issuing manifestoes in LEF, a radical Russian newsmagazine, was established in 1922 ; the group's " three " were Vertov, his ( future ) wife and editor Elizaveta Svilova, and his brother and cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman.

In 1922, the year that Nanook of the North was released, Vertov started the Kino-Pravda series.

" The Kino-Pravda group began its work in a basement in the centre of Moscow " Vertov explained.

In the " Kino-Pravda " series, Vertov focused on everyday experiences, eschewing bourgeois concerns and filming marketplaces, bars, and schools instead, sometimes with a hidden camera, without asking permission first.

Vertov responds to their criticisms with the assertion that the critics were hacks nipping " revolutionary effort " in the bud, and concludes the essay with his promise to " explode art's tower of Babel.

By the end of the " Kino-Pravda " series, Vertov made liberal use of stop motion, freeze frames, and other cinematic " artificialities ," giving rise to criticisms not just of his trenchant dogmatism, but also of his cinematic technique.

By this time Vertov had been using his newsreel series as a pedestal to vilify dramatic fiction for several years ; he continued his criticisms even after the warm reception of Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin in 1925.

The Ukraine State Studio hired Vertov to create Man with a Movie Camera.

Vertov says in his essay " The Man with a Movie Camera " that he was fighting " for a decisive cleaning up of film-language, for its complete separation from the language of theater and literature.

However, Vertov's two credos, often used interchangeably, are in fact distinct, as Yuri Tsivian points out in the commentary track on the DVD for Man with the Movie Camera: for Vertov, " life as it is " means to record life as it would be without the camera present.