Study of Dziga Vertov

Dziga Vertov was an experimental Soviet film maker in the 20s and 30s of the last century.
Born in 1896 in Poland as Denis Arkadievietch Kaufman,his father was a librarian and his two brothers Mikhail Kaufman and Boris Kaufman both became noted cinematographers.He began writing poetry at the age of ten and at sixteen he was studying violin and and piano at the Bialystok Music Conservatory.A resident of Russia since 1915,he went on to study neurology in St. Petersburg in 1917.It was around this time that he took his pseudonym (loosely translated as "spinning top" or literally "top turning".)
After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917,Vertov was invited to become the editor of Kino-Nedelia/Cinema Weekly,a filmed periodical that contained snippets of the lives of Soviet citizens.He left the film series to edit the full length compilation film Anniversary of the Revolution.Next Vertov started his own newsreel series,Kino-Pravada(Cinema Truth)which he named in honour of the official Soviet newspaper Pravada.During this period,Vertov developed his montage techniques and honed his growing theories about cinema being the art form best suited for the masses.
In 1919 he joined with other intellectuals in debating the issue of art versus the people.That year he also joined with other filmmakers,including his future wife,Elisaveta Svilova,and his brother,Mikhail Kaufman,to form Kino Glaz(Cinema Eye) to promote his idea that the impartial eye of the camera is far better suited to recording and organizing the truth than the subjective and often fawlty human eye.
He was profoundly influenced by Marxism and presented a rather poetic view of it in his many subsequent films,most notably Chelovek s Kinoapparatom/The Man With the Movie Camera in 1929,an avant-garde portrait of Soviet city life that employed numerous innovative camera techniques,including superimposition,fast and slow motion,split screens and rapid montage.
Vertov won a prize at the 1934 Venice Film Festival for his Tri Pesni o Lenine/Three Songs about Lenin although it was not immediatley released in Russia because it was felt that Stalin's role in the film was not developed enough.His film kolybel'naya/The Lullaby (1937) was edited without Vertov's permission to make Stalin's role bigger.
By this point the conservative government began showing more interest in fictional features and Vertov spent the last twenty years editing artless newsreels.A far cry from what this visionary,talented and creative filmmaker was capable to produce.