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.

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

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 ".

Most of Vertov's early work was unpublished, and few manuscripts remain after the Second World War, though some material survived in later films and documentaries created by Vertov and his brothers,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

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.

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 ".

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.

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

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 .”

With the rise and official sanction of socialist realism in 1934, Vertov was forced to cut his personal artistic output significantly, eventually becoming little more than an editor for Soviet newsreels.

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

In 1962, the first Soviet monograph on Vertov was published, followed by another collection, ' Dziga Vertov: Articles, Diaries, Projects.

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.

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.

Vertov — born David Abelevich Kaufman — was an early pioneer in documentary film-making during the late 1920s.

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

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.

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 ).

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.

Dziga Vertov's 1929 experimental documentary Man with a Movie Camera is known to contain one of the first usages of the Dutch angle, among other innovative techniques discovered by Vertov himself.

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.

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.

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.

'" 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 ...."

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.

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 .”

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

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.

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 ....

During the Russian Civil War between Communists and counter-revolutionaries, the early cinema pioneer Dziga Vertov helped establish and run a film-car on Mikhail Kalinin's agit-train.

Dziga Vertov believed his concept of Kino-Glaz, or " Cine Eye " in English, would help contemporary man evolve from a flawed creature into a higher, more precise form.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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