A film about film viewing and film making

"This experimental work aims to create a truly international language of cinema based on a total separation from language of the Theatre and Literature."

Vertov experimented with a lot of editing effects in this film. The ones that I noticed were collage, image-over-image superimposing, slow motion, stop frame, stop-action, dissolve effect, and "rewind" reverse playing. I liked seeing how these effects were used along with the content that seems to comment on film viewing and film making. There were a lot of "spectator" and theatre scenes throughout this film. The spectator scenes consisted of clips of typically spectated activities (athletic feats, magic tricks) with clips of various spectators reacting spliced between them. This created an interesting effect where the spectating crowds and individuals seemed to respond to the "viewed" clips beforehand, while it was still obvious to the film viewer that the event clips and spectator clips did not match up. This same effect showed up in the theatre scenes, but in a different manner. Vertov edited the film by superimposing "viewed clips" of film that he shot onto the screens of theatre viewings that he also shot elsewhere. This effect changes the film that the theatre-goers were watching, as made obvious by subtle inaccuracies. Vertov incorporates a lot of other scenes that can be considered casual nods to the act of film making. The viewer sees camera mechanisms throughout the film, for example with the motif clip of the eye within the camera's lense. Clips of the "man with a movie camera" going to extremes (ladders, under train tracks, on moving vehicles, middle of street, etc) to record footage also relate to this idea. Lastly, there is a solid 10 minute section of clips which make reference to film editing. A woman is shown scouring over film - showing single stop frame images - and splicing clips together - eventually showing the extent of the clips that were shown as stop frames before.