Although Dziga Vertov often found himself at odds with the Soviet regime, much of his writing and theorizing demonstrates a great affinity with Marxist cultural analysis. In his own words, Vertov argues that the movie camera, while intended at the basic technological level to capture and record life, was manipulated by the bourgeoisie for their ideological purposes to, “distract workers’ attention from their fundamental objective, the struggle against their masters” (Crofts and Rose 9). Although Vertov’s approach to film making came from a deep theoretical understanding of Marxism and a criticism of the exploitation of capitalism, his style nevertheless came to odds with the USSR’s officialdom when they began to enforce a rigid adherence to Socialist Realism, the artistic movement created to ensure that art fell in line with official party policy. Of all of his works, Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera presents a more reflective portrayal of proletarian culture as a direct critique to the impending state mandated Socialist Realism that was developing under Stalin’s control.
Man with a Movie Camera was made during a turbulent period in the history of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). By 1929, Stalin had firmly consolidated governmental power, creating a new ruling class of loyalist bureaucrats which formed a surplus-extracting relationship with the working class in order to fund the Soviet military-industrial complex with no working-class power in sight; in other words, Stalin’s take over was the culmination of a counter-revolution that had abandoned the emancipatory principles of the October Revolution a decade prior (Camfield 127). Part of Stalin’s new order was an expansion of the State’s reach into cultural areas through the creation of a doctrine of Socialist Realism. This state-enforced artistic movement, like Stalin’s dictatorship, lost the emancipatory character which had existed partially during the early days of the Revolution and into the 1920s. This new aesthetic – which was enforced through the approval of Stalin himself of any new films – glorified the cult of the Stalin’s leadership, mystified the collective, and painted the Soviet Union as the only progressive utopia on Earth because of its adherence to socialism, without taking into account any of the challenges of socialist rule or of the oppression and exploitation that came with Stalin’s centralization of power (Feigelson 53). This state-mandated artistic movement began to exert control from 1927 when Sovkino, a government agency, took control of film making institutions, and would then solidify in 1932 with a resolution that reorganized “literary and artistic organizations, which effectively signalled the end of [the artistic] experiments of the 1920s.” (Feigelson 49-50). It is within this context of a film scene becoming controlled by the USSR’s officialdom in which Vertov creates Man with a Movie Camera in 1929.
Vertov makes his career’s prerogative to take part in an ideological battle against what he sees as bourgeois tendencies within the emerging Soviet cinema. Vertov saw film making as a tool for raising class consciousness and, “to see and to show the world in the name of the world proletarian revolution” (qtd. in Crofts and Rose 10). This belief almost certainly was formed during Vertov’s experience in the ‘Agit Prop’ industry during the Civil War. While ‘Agit Prop’ is often viewed as propaganda in the negative understanding through Cold War anti-communism in the West, during the Civil War this initiative acted as a source of education for the masses. The ‘Agit Prop’ trains would travel far distances to rural areas and would teach peasants about topics hygiene, sanitation and health care, for example. The Bolshevik policy of agit prop was thus not that of brainwashing, but that of a raising the standards of living for the masses (James 112). Vertov’s cinema is therefore fundamentally centred on the raising of class consciousness of the proletariat through the development of their own understandings of the world around them which is where cinema steps in to assist in this understanding. Vertov’s creative process couldn’t be any further from Socialist Realism in terms of its mission and aims. The latter seeks to impose meanings onto the audience and to create art in their name, while the former uses film to take the audience from passive spectators to active participants of the media they are consuming.
With this understanding of Socialist Realism and Vertov’s theory as a counter to it, Man with a Movie Camera can be seen as Vertov’s magnum opus and as a challenge to Socialist Realism in that it’s intended results adhere more to the emancipatory ideals that Stalin left behind. Man with a Movie Camera is a documentary film that captures everyday life in Moscow, Kyiv and Odessa. It’s guiding figure is that of the film maker, Michael Kaufman, who travels around urban centres to capture everyday life as it exists for the people living there. In line with Vertov’s film theory, Man with a Movie Camera shows ‘life as it is’ as opposed to Socialist Realism’s ‘life as it should be’. What is most notable about Vertov’s directing in this film is that it shows people labouring. It shows firefighters, paramedics, seamstresses and miners as well as the labourers behind the film itself with the director - being the most visible of examples – and the film’s editor in the production process (Man with a Movie Camera 30:27-41:49). This is where Vertov’s challenge to the Soviet regime takes place. Regardless if one might see these sequences as fabrications for the sake of film making, they nevertheless show labour being performed and more specifically the people doing the labour. By adhering to his principle of ‘life as it is’, Vertov is showing how the life which exists everyday is being supported and run by people themselves. Vertov is showing that society is running because at the fundamental level it is the workers fulfilling the essential needs of society. What can be seen here is a discreet criticism of the Soviet officaldom from a Marxist perspective. Vertov, by showing the importance of the labour that builds and maintains society as well as, most importantly, the people who do that labour, shows the realities of the Soviet Union: it is the people, not the party officials, and their material labour, not their adherence to an ideological doctrine, which has created this supposed utopia that Socialist Realism tries to depict in its artist avenues. However, it must be noted that Vertov’s depiction of the urban masses is not utopian, nor is it an explicit critique of how life exists in the USSR of 1929; it is simply, ‘life as it is’ which is what makes it such a powerful critique of the ‘life as it should be’ mantra which would develop through Socialist Realism.
Camfield, David. “From Revolution to Modernising Counter-Revolution in Russia, 1917-1928.” Historical Materialism, vol. 28, no. 2, 2020, pp. 107-139. https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206X-12341798.
Crofts, Stephen, and Olivia Rose. “An Essay Towards Man with a Movie Camera.” Screen (London), vol. 18, no. 1, 1977, pp. 9-60. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/18.1.9.
Feigelson, Kristian. “Socialist realism in Soviet Cinema.” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film vol. 23, 2025, pp. 47-62. https://doi.org/10.1386/ncin_00056_1.
James, Shella. “Educational Media and ‘Agit Prop’: I. The legacy of Vertov.” Journal of Educational Media, vol. 22, no. 2, 2006, pp. 111-123. https://doi.org/10.1080/1358165960220205.
Man with a Movie Camera. Directed by Dziga Vertov, All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration, 1929.