Vertov

Dziga Vertov was a pioneering Soviet documentary film and newsreel filmmaker as well as a cinema theorist. He was born in Russia, with the name David Abelevich Kaufman but he often went by the name Denis Kaufman. He was born on 2 January 1896 and died on 12 February 1954. His filming techniques and theories influenced the Dziga Vertov Group, a radical filmmaking collective active from 1968 to 1972, as well as the cinéma vérité style of documentary filmmaking.

His most famous film was Man with a Movie Camera (1929). This film portrays a day in a Russian city, however, it was filmed in several cities over 4 years. Vertov was heavily influenced by Eisenstein's use of montage and his aesthetic was driven by his political beliefs as a communist.

Vertov believed that film truth should be captured, which is fragments of the actuality that, when organized together, have a deeper truth that cannot be seen by normal people. Vertov's Kino-Pravda focused on everyday experiences, eschewing bourgeois concerns. Vertov also filmed things without even asking for permission.

Vertov is criticized by the obvious stages in this film as beignet odds with Vert's credos of "life as it is" and "life caught unawares". The scene of the women getting out of bed and getting dressed is obviously staged.

Veto believes that "life as it is" means to record life as it would be without the camera present. " Life caught unawares" means to record life when surprised, and perhaps provoked by the presence of a camera, which contradicts his original statement. His slow and fast motion and other camera techniques were a way to dissect the image.