Through the travelogue format, it depicts the multitude of Soviet peoples in remote areas of USSR and details the entirety of the wealth of the Soviet land.A Sixth Part of the World. A Sixth Part of the World. Format: DVDDistributor: Austrian Film Museum. Director: Dziga Vertov. Writer: Dziga Vertov. Original title. Still, through the frozen screens and illegible intertitles, Dziga Vertov’s striking ethnographic and mechanical shots of bygone Soviet Russia and his note- perfect, rhythmic editing shone from the screen. Workers’ faces faded over mechanical cogs; an arctic fox was inspected , eye gleaming in gray scale; sheep were flung into the sea with fleece turning to frothing waves; fruit rolled and hopped into a wooden box in beautiful stop- motion, straw shuffling on top with brown paper following, all with a joyful, playful pace. The Austrian Filmmuseum’s recent DVD release brings the context of these images alive. The film’s (thankfully English!) intertitles sing out an exultant panegyric to socialism. The images become visual prompts; impressionistic examples that bolster Vertov’s message. Lenin is saluted as the . You pave the way for our freighters, to trade our grain, to trade our furs for needed machines, machines that produce other machines which in turn accelerate the rate of growth of production of more machines.’ This unerring belief in industrialisation and endless quest to produce machine after machine conjures up a terrifying vision for 2. Indeed, the politics of the film often appear just as antiquated as a 1. Religion is seen as a dying phenomenon (. Some still recite the rosary. Capitalism cries its final death throes (. A world socialist revolution is seen as inevitable (. They will pour forth into the stream of the united socialist economy’). The capitalist system might have just crashed around us but Vertov’s utopian vision is yet to materialise. Yet, while the political idealism of A Sixth Part of the World might jar with modern scepticism about political spin, the film still appears fresh and vital. Some of Vertov’s views do not provoke cynicism and successfully transcend his era, particularly those regarding race and racial diversity. In fact, the film, at times, acts as a kind of travelogue, chronicling and rejoicing in traditional ways of life, culture and dress. Vertov sent out his cameramen (or . The film asks these disparate ethnicities to unite behind socialism, addressing each in turn (. The film never presents a didactic piece of dogma. While the political idealism of A Sixth Part of the World might jar with modern scepticism about political spin, the film still appears fresh and vital. A Sixth Part of the World is Vertov`s 'state of the USSR report', an extraordinary compilation of images from throughout the Soviet Union that chronicles the spread. Instead the message unfolds slowly, washing over the viewer. Just as Vertov’s later masterpiece Man with a Movie Camera (1. A Sixth Part of the World is extraordinary (and supplemented on this DVD version with a buoyant soundtrack by Michael Nyman). The film, together with the feature Forward Soviet! During his work on the newsreels, Vertov began to experiment with cinematic . The reception was mixed among contemporary critics and Vertov was forced to defend himself on two accounts: for not representing the world as a newsreel should; and, conversely, for not being artistic enough because he renounced fictional staging. A Sixth Part of the World was then, as now, hard to categorise. Indeed, . The poetry of oration: the rhythm and the power of words to uplift. Vertov may be known as a master of visual artistry but it is his language that stands out in this film. Repetitive refrains, inventive juxtapositions and emotional calls to arms ring out from the intertitles. The images are harnessed to support the text - to give the audience time to contemplate and let the words ripple over them. Like poetry, the film does not passively document, but rather attempts to present the viewer with a series of universal truths; truths about humankind as seen by Vertov. The work opens with a shot of a plane and the text . The camera alights on the nape of a bobbed- haired woman: . And You.’ The repetition of . In one self- reflexive moment, Vertov even shows cinema- goers watching an earlier piece of the film (. But it is only at the very end of the film that Vertov suggests that the . The film is far too subtle to set such roles in stone. In his book, Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film, academic Jeremy Hicks has highlighted links between A Sixth Part of the World and the poetry of Walt Whitman, finding analogies between Vertov’s use of the first person and the recurring use of . When Whitman sent the first edition of his anthology, Leaves of Grass, to Emerson, he asserted that the greatest poet should change the character of the reader or listener. With A Sixth Part of the World, Vertov was attempting to do just that.
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