From "The Eleventh Year" to "The Man with a Movie Camera": conceptual search of Dziga Vertov

The objective of this study is to analyze the outcomes of Dziga Vertov’s conceptual search based on his works, The Eleventh Year (1928) and The Man with a Movie Camera (1929), which became the most remarkable documentaries in the Soviet cinematography. The authors also go into the reasons of diametrically opposite reviews of the critics on these films. This article is based on little-known critical publications about these films in the Ukrainian and Russian media in the 1920s. Dziga Vertov came to the All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration (VUFKU) after being fired from Sovkino. Dziga Vertov retained a lot of material shot for the upcoming film, The Man with a Movie Camera, on which he had been working for quite a long time. However, Ukraine stipulated a mandatory condition that he should film The Eleventh Year, a movie about the progress achieved by the republic after the October Revolution. Analysis of Vertov’s contemporaries’ polemics about The Eleventh Year and The Man with a Movie Camera on pages of specialized journals in the 1920s showed that the most common types of publications were: 1. Unconditional recognition (combination of revolutionary ideas with vivid means of expression). 2. Brutal criticism (exaggerated aestheticism and deviation from the Socialist ideology).