Dziga Vertov

 

 

The creation - or rather discovery - of the essay film in 1940 by Hans Richter, led not only to a series of films in the future to be developed according to the broad definitions of the genre, but also to a retrospective recognition of films which were aligned with the genre ideals. The work of Dziga Vertov, Soviet director known as precursor of the documentary genre, is characterised by many techniques and approaches which became common to most essayists. In order portrait in a movie processes and ideas which are (or at least were at that time) not intelligible through the plain reproduction of reality, Dziga made use of montage and some staged shots. ”the montagists actively made the world even as they revealed it. In doing so they powerfully expressed the dialectic between control and chaos that would come to be not only one of the chief motors of the essay film but the crux of modernity itself.”