Vertov, Dziga (1896–1954)

Polish-born Soviet film director, editor, and theoretician. His pioneering work on editing greatly influenced both the avant-garde and documentary movements of the 1920s and 1930s. Among his most important films are Kino-Glaz/Kino-Eye (1924), Kino-Pravda/Cinema-Truth (1925), Shagai, Soviet/Stride, Soviet (1926), and Chelovek s kinoapparatom/The Man with a Movie Camera (1928).

He made documentaries from 1918, often compiling fragments from everyday life to reveal larger truths. He disdained art created to be aesthetically pleasing.

Because Vertov revelled in the powers of trick photography and animation as well as complex editing, his work was condemned as ‘formalist’ by the Stalinist authorities in the 1930s. As a result, his name drifted into temporary obscurity, until the political and aesthetic example of his work was rediscovered in the 1960s.