RESEARCH: explore on Dziga Vertov

one of his well known film:

Man With A Movie Camera Dziga Vertov, 1929

Some have criticized the obvious stagings in this film as being at odds with Vertov's credos of "life as it is" and "life caught unawares": the scene of the woman getting out of bed and getting dressed is obviously staged, as is the reversed shot of the chess pieces being pushed off a chess board and the tracking shot that films Mikhail Kaufman, his brother, riding in a car filming a third car.

For Vertov, "life as it is" means to record life as it would be without the camera present. "Life caught unawares" means to record life when surprised, and perhaps provoked, by the presence of a camera. This explanation contradicts the common assumption that for Vertov "life caught unawares" meant "life caught unaware of the camera". His slow motion, fast motion, and other camera techniques were a way to dissect the image, Mikhail Kaufman stated in an interview. It was to be the honest truth of perception. 

For example, in Man with a Movie Camera, two trains are shown almost melting into each other. Although we are taught to see trains as not riding that close, Vertov tried to portray the actual sight of two passing trains. Mikhail spoke about Eisenstein's films as being different from his and his brother's in that Eisenstein "came from the theatre, in the theatre one directs dramas, one strings beads". "We all felt...that through documentary film we could develop a new kind of art. Not only documentary art, or the art of chronicle, but rather an art based on images, the creation of an image-oriented journalism:”