Astonishing film, not only a culturally fascinating documentary about life in Russian cities but a film about film-making, showing us Mikhail Kaufman filming in all sorts of perilous situations (whilst hand cranking) - though who I wonder is filming him? - and Dziga's wife Elizaveta Svilova at work editing it.
Has sequences of incredible speed and energy and uses a wide variety of other techniques to great effect, such as the superimpositions which show Kaufman towering huge above the city. It wasn't the first use of freeze frame - that honour apparently goes to Hitchcock in 1928's Champagne, which itself is amusing as he was so influenced by Soviet cinema. Vertov may not of course have caught up with this film then. And stop motion photography had been used since the very early days of cinema. But it's the way the sequences are intercut, the relationships between what's in the shot and the one following, the different speeds, that make it so dazzling.
Our version has the Michael Nyman score.
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