Dziga Vertov’s Across One Sixth of the World marked the height of the early revolutionary avant-garde film in the 1920s, before the cultural encroachment of Stalin’s Socialist Realism after the death of Lenin. After Stalin took power, film, and art in general, began to depict a Russo-centric interpretation of the Soviet Union, with the emphasis on Russia as the nation that sparked the revolution of global Communism and toppled the old monarchy to create the first Communist government. Yet, Vertov came far before these cultural restraints and was allowed to work on his own artistic ground, under the project to create a film depicting life in the Soviet Union. So, how did Vertov’s vision manifest itself?
His vision was centered around a literal interpretation of the Soviet top-down ideology of proletarian internationalism. This was the idea of putting class, as Marxist doctrine dictates, above nationality, ethnicity, or any other factor that would be divisive to the unified class struggle. This also means that the ethnic amalgamation that was the Soviet Union was centered around the coexistence of this wide range of people. Vertov’s own interpretation, in a rejection of any Russo-centrality and a pure acceptance of this idea of proletarian internationalism, became Across One Sixth of the World. He depicted the mosaic culture of all the people that are under the banner of the Soviet Union, and a complete rejection of the idea of Russo-dominated homogeneity. His aim was to celebrate how great the idea of Communism was, that it could actually unify this diverse range of people under a common goal which was in keeping with the creation of an international socialist history by Lenin. He was also very critical of the West, mainly Western colonialism, and montaged scenes of slavery, exploitation, poverty, and the decadence of the upper classes and how they are placed above the proletariat in the West. This was Vertov’s “World of Capital,” again in standing with Soviet ideology. So, if viewed from a purely literal ideological standpoint, Verotv’s film should have been the height of Soviet propaganda.
However, Vertov’s work was rejected as not conforming to the Soviet ideology because in the Soviet industrial context, which is the center of Soviet overarching ideology, the depiction of the wide range of nomadic peoples did not stand well in Lenin’s eyes, who wanted to focus on the new Soviet man. Both Lenin and Vertov recognized the Constructivist aspects of film, that it could be building material towards unifying the diverse Soviet body under the Communist ideology. Yet, Vertov focused too much on the “otherness” of the Soviet Union and his avant-garde film looked too much into the idealized future, not the socialist present.