Vertov, along with other kino artists declared it their mission to abolish all non-documentary styles of film-making.

The filmmakers and LEF contributors Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein as well as the documentarist Esfir Shub also regarded their fast-cut, montage style of filmmaking as Constructivist.

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.

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.

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

She began collaborating with Vertov, beginning as his editor but becoming assistant and co-director in subsequent films, such as Man with a Movie Camera ( 1929 ), and Three Songs About Lenin ( 1934 ).

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 clearly intended an active relationship with his audience in the series — in the final segment he includes contact information — but by the 14th episode the series had become so experimental that some critics dismissed Vertov's efforts as " insane ".

By this point in his career, Vertov was clearly and emphatically dissatisfied with narrative tradition, and expresses his hostility towards dramatic fiction of any kind both openly and repeatedly ; he regarded drama as another " opiate of the masses ".

'" 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 ...."

With Lenin's admission of limited private enterprise through his New Economic Policy ( NEP ) of 1921, Russia began receiving fiction films from afar, an occurrence that Vertov regarded with undeniable suspicion, calling drama a " corrupting influence " on the proletarian sensibility (" On ' Kinopravda ,'" 1924 ).

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.

" 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.

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.

For example, in Man with a Movie Camera, two trains are shown almost melting into each other, although we are taught to see trains as not riding that close, Vertov tried to portray the actual sight of two passing trains.

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 .”

" Lines of resistance: Dziga Vertov and the twenties / edited and with an introduction by Yuri Tsivian.

Dziga Vertov's newsreel series Kino-Pravda, the best known of these, lasted from 1922 to 1925 and had a propagandistic bent ; Vertov used the series to promote socialist realism but also to experiment with cinema.

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 clearly intended an active relationship with his audience in the series — in the final segment he includes contact information — but by the fourteenth episode the series had become so experimental that some critics dismissed Vertov's efforts as " insane ".

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.

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 .”

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.

The films of Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, Alexander Dovzhenko, and Vsevolod Pudovkin were instrumental in providing an alternate model from that offered by classical Hollywood.

It regularly presented work by filmmakers such as Ken Jacobs, Johan van der Keuken, Yvonne Rainer, Christine Vachon, Dziga Vertov and many others who created films that were outside of the commercial mainstream in the United States.

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.

New Media theorist Lev Manovich suggested Vertov as one of the early pioneers of database cinema genre in his essay Database as a symbolic form.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

Vertov lost his job at Sovkino in January 1927, possibly as a result of criticizing a film which effectively preaches the line of the Communist Party.