Copyright 2012 J. MacKay 1 Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye (1924) John MacKay A persistently controversial figure in the history of cinema, the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov (born David Abelevich Kaufman in Bialystok, Russian Empire [now Poland], 15 January 1896 [NS]-died Moscow, 12 February 1954) has, since at least the early 1970s, figured centrally in debates about non-fiction cinema, avant-garde cinema, political-propaganda film, and film theory worldwide. His work and thought, as has often been noticed, present a number of apparently intractable paradoxes. Vertov was at once the most uncompromising advocate of documentary (or “non-acted”) film as a means of showing “life as it is” – his neologism “kino-pravda” (film truth), as translated into French by Georges Sadoul, gave us the term “cinéma verité,” a notion with a most problematic relation to Vertov’s actual cinematic practice – and the most radical explorer of the possibilities of montage prior to the emergence of the European and US avant- gardes after the Second World War. He was both the implacable opponent of “scripted” documentary, and the most fanatically “formalist” micro-organizer of image and sound in the history of non-fiction film; he was at once a proud outsider, loudly defending his “kino-eye” doctrines as a bulwark of true revolutionary principle against the backsliding into bourgeois theatricality represented by dominant fiction-film norms, and largely conformist in relation to the policies and rhetoric of the Soviet state. Beyond this, Vertov’s famous writings, often fiercely manifesto-like in character, seem less than adequate keys to the singular complexity of his films, even as certain of their themes (the politicization of the distinction between fiction and non-fiction film, for instance, or the