Shestaya chast mira = The Sixth part of the world

A celebration of the resources of the Soviet Union, by the pioneering Russian film-maker and avant-gardist, Dziga Vertov - a free-flowing sequence of images drawn from all corners of the country showing the wealth of the Soviet people who have overthrown the capitalist class. This film contrasts Soviet industriousness with the decadence of foreign capitalists; and Soviet plenty and freedom with the poverty and slavery of the people in capitalist countries. Dziga Vertov was the founder of the Soviet documentary and headed a group of experimental documentarists who took the name Kinoki, or Kino-Eyes. As a militant theorist he proclaimed the supremacy of what would now be called Cinema-Verite. His films and his theoretical writings have had an enormous and lasting influence on world cinema. ‘The Sixth Part of the World’ is Vertov’s lyrical cinema poem to the vast expanses of the Soviet Union, grand, complicated and exotic.

Credits: Director, writer, editing, Dziga Vertov ; photography, Mikhail Kaufman.