Dziga Vertov was one of the greatest innovators of Soviet cinema. The radical complexity of his work—in both sound and silent forms—has given it a central place within contemporary theoretical inquiry. Vertov's writings, collected here, range from calculated manifestos setting forth his heroic vision of film's potential to dark ruminations on the inactivity forced upon him by the bureaucratization of the Soviet state.

Dziga Vertov's films include the Kino-Eye and Kino-Pravda series, Man with a Movie Camera, and Enthusiasm.

"This imposing and long awaited collection of Dziga Vertov's writings is a solidly built shrine to a visionary. . . . A handsome volume, magnificently illustrated, copiously footnoted, and indispensable to film historians."—Raymond Durgnat, American Film

"To recognize [Vertov's] centrality is to open oneself to the possibility that the most passionate and inventive movies of the past eight decades may not have been the narrative features at all, but rather the documentaries and the experimental films, the seven-minute animations and the four-minute rock videos. . . . Vertov's case, as the distinguished film scholar and theorist Annette Michelson suggests in her lengthy and brilliantly argued introduction to this collection of the filmmaker's manifestos, journal excerpts, and production notes, is a special one."—J. Hoberman, The New Republic