This review is based on the New York Film Annex VHS cassette copyrighted 1998, which I picked up for a buck at Half-Price Books.

The film begins with a lengthy sequence plainly paralleling churchgoers with drunken street bums, as if God and alcohol were comparable. I found myself reminded of some of the apologists for Communism before the fall of the USSR who insisted that the difference between the West and the East was that the East had no homeless. The explanation for the large homeless population in Soviet cities were that they were parasites who were not worthy of consideration.

Much of the remainder of the film is shots of work in mines and factories, living up to he film's subtitle of "Symphony of the Don Basin." Unfortunately, the impact of these sequences is diminished for the American viewer by the fact that the cassette translates neither spoken Russian (by dubbing),or written Russian (by subtitles),and there is quite a bit of both. While the images are interesting, they have lost considerable impact over the years and the many documentaries done on similar subjects since this one. The cassette case includes a blurb by Charlie Chaplin praising the film. I found this interesting inasmuch as Chaplin's major film about industrial order "Modern Times" showed that order to be dehumanizing while this film shows it to be exhilarating.

This film badly needs a major reissue with extensive research and translation. A DVD with a good commentary track would be appreciated. It would give admirers of Dziga Vertov something other than "Man With a Movie Camera" to study.

One of the most astounding visual narratives i have ever had the pleasure of witnessing. The simple, yet highly intricate weave of this film still stands as a daunting challenge to the visual baby food served up by Hollywood. Perhaps the nearest we have been since this film, were the efforts of Truffaut and Godard in the late sixties. Dig this one up, its in the archives, but you'll never see anything like it ever again.

The first sound film of Dziga Vertov, this is a tribute to the first Soviet 5 year plan, opening with the forcible transformation of churches to social and political clubs, filming work in the coal mines of the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine, capturing the sights and sounds of steel and locomotive works, and finishing with some scenes of harvests in the Ukraine countryside. Most of the focus is on work and the potential glories of the new Soviet citizens who promise to exceed the quotas of the five year plan. This is a marvel mostly because of Vertov's mastery of the early sound technology which required cameras that weighed over a ton. With speeches and inter-titles shifting between Ukrainian and Russian, there is no narrative, no actors, no script and only some visual references to Eisenstein's fictional works. It is easy to see why this film was more praised outside of the Soviet Union than inside and why so few of the workers filmed had any interest in watching it.