Following the European ideology of enlightenment (prosvetitelstvo), in the 1860s-70s, Russia attempted to turn cinema into useful entertainment by spreading their vales of reason and knowledge to the masses. The line between educational cinema and propaganda began to blur because films were supposed to evoke patriotic feelings depicting the war as a national mission. Originally, the “scenic patriotism” of the early Russian travelogues were irrelevant to Soviet ideology: emphasizing class over nation as a unifying principle, the new ideologists had no need to endorse national landscapes, The shift from educational films on the use of hygiene or the use of agricultural and industrial equipment signifies the priorities of the new regime. By the mid-1920s, filmmakers gradually began to record the plurality of the cultures and peoples of the soviet state. While emphasizing diversity within the Soviet union, the authorities did not provide them clear directions on how to represent this diversity. A Sixth Part of the World was originally commissioned as an advertisement, the film was to depict Gostorg’s place in extensive networks of the Soviet and World Economy. It’s original plan began with peasants producing food and Gostorg selling the products and using the profit to buy machinery so that the peasants could produce even more food. Gostorg wanted to create link between the agricultural world and the industrial one. In Vertov’s film, the Soviet Union is depicted as a union of borderlands, opposed to the hostile external world with which it nevertheless remains economically connected. The first part of the film represents the distant land of the Capital. Vertov included footage from local filmmakers, as well as imported films. The unity of this mosaic world is created through montage. A Sixth Part of the World exploits to the full potential of the camera
to see without limits and without distance.