Without any verbal explanations, Ljudyna z kinoaparatom is a dazzling firework of Soviet montage, which reached its absolute zenith in the late 1920s … For Dziga Vertov the film does not have one subject, but an infinity of them, all of which derive from life: “Most exciting life, which passes by the cameraman, but which he is able to stop and capture on film.” Starting from these lived events, it is possible to construct a musical work, with “a flow, repetitions, crescendos, a base melody and accompaniment”. Vertov’s cinematographic language is montage; meaning is produced by the association of images shot in different places and at different times, from Moscow to Kyiv to Odesa. The city in the film is created by cinema … The eye of the camera is more perfect than that of man. The editing establishes otherwise imperceptible relationships. In 1929, a period of violent political clashes, cultural revolution and repression, Vertov is already under suspicion and, having been removed from Moscow, the centre of film production, is working in Kyiv. Ljudyna z kinoaparatom appears to be an apolitical film and as such is condemned by the proletarian organisations that dominate social debate. Yet the irony it shows toward the bourgeois model of life is unmistakable: the film contrasts enjoyment to productivity, the manicured hands of women who do not work to those of female workers; it praises collective life, industrialisation and the huge construction sites of the five-year plan. But it goes further, making language the subject of the filmic investigation, affirming that it must be an instrument of the communist interpretation of the world, and not of alienation and uglification, like alcohol or religion. It is a point of view that has always been deemed unacceptable by sectarianism and the politics of totalitarianism, and so Ljudyna z kinoaparatom becomes the most maligned of Vertov’s films: considered a marginal work and largely ignored, it is forgotten for 40 years.

Bernard Eisenschitz, Čelovek s kinoapparatom, Enciclopedia del Cinema Treccani, Rome 2004