On 26 February, the Zotov Centre will present Russia’s first retrospective of Dziga Vertov, a key figure of Soviet avant-garde cinema and a pioneer of documentary filmmaking. The exhibition-film invites visitors to immerse themselves in the director’s artistic universe and to discover how his ideas, which influenced modern culture from cinema and mass media to music videos and reels, were formed.

The exhibition presents Dziga Vertov not only as a brilliant director but also as the organiser of a new cinematic vision. In the 1920s, when screen adaptations and melodramas dominated cinema, he called for a complete rejection of feature filmmaking, insisting that the camera should capture reality and that editing should reinterpret it. Vertov’s concept of “life caught unawares” assumed that the director remained at the centre of events, using the Kino-Eye (“film eye”) to capture fragments of everyday life. According to Vertov, a fact of life recorded by the camera could become a tool for emotional impact and transforming consciousness.

Today, when filming everyday life on smartphones has become commonplace, Dziga Vertov appears more modern than many other directors in the century-long history of cinema. His visual manifesto Man with a Movie Camera (1929) is recognised as one of the greatest films ever made and continues to inspire filmmakers worldwide. Vertov’s direct influence can be traced not only in documentary cinema of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries but also in films of various “new waves”. Techniques introduced by Vertov and his group the Kinoks, including hidden camera, slow motion, fast motion, double exposure, split screen, and the Dutch angle, are used by directors of mainstream cinema and by video art creators.

Vertov regarded cinema as a form of thinking and a tool for understanding reality. For this reason, the exhibition devoted to his work is presented in the format of an exhibition-film. The architecture of the exhibition space, which from above resembles a circular film reel, chronologically presents the main stages of the director’s creative biography, the activities of the Kinoks, their like-minded collaborators, critics, and followers. The films are supplemented with photographs, animation, archival materials, and excerpts from diaries and newsreels.

The multi-layered exhibition space, created by the museum bureau Planet9, allows visitors to become active participants in the viewing process. Moving through the sections “The Age of Cinema”, “Kino Week”, “Kino-Pravda”, “Kino-Eye”, “Man with a Movie Camera”, “Enthusiasm”, “The Tale of the Giant”, and “After Vertov”, visitors simultaneously encounter dozens of screens. The concept of the Kino-Eye understood as a hybrid of human vision and the mechanical eye of the camera, forms the foundation of the exhibition and allows visitors not only to observe but also to experience the material through the senses. One of the interactive components of the exhibition is an audio route that combines Vertov’s own recollections, his responses to questions from contemporary viewers, and musical accompaniment. The exhibition also includes an editing table where visitors can experiment with montage principles by manually assembling sequences from frames and intertitles.

The section “After Vertov” is devoted to the director’s legacy and his influence on filmmakers worldwide. It includes works by Russian and international directors who continue Vertov’s traditions, including Jean-Luc Godard, Artavazd Peleshyan, Platon Infante, Viktor Kossakovsky, and others. In the final section, visitors’ own works become part of the exhibition. Visitors are invited to film and edit a short video on their smartphones inspired by the techniques of the Kinoks. Selected videos are shown on a screen, creating a polyphony of people with movie cameras.

Twenty museums and private collections participated in the exhibition, including the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the State Tretyakov Gallery, the State Historical Museum, the Museum of Cinema, Gosfilmofond of Russia, the Polytechnic Museum, the Multimedia Art Museum Moscow, the A. A. Bakhrushin Theatre Museum, the V. V. Mayakovsky State Museum, the S. A. Gerasimov All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography, the Documentary Film Centre, and others.

Curators: Polina Streltsova, Polina Pribytkova, Konstantin Dudakov-Kashuro
Exhibition design and audio concept: Planet9
Graphic design: KROKHA+CHEKED

A large-scale film programme, Dziga Vertov: Experiments in Reality, has been prepared to accompany the exhibition. It brings together a retrospective of Vertov’s films alongside works by his colleagues, followers, and ideological opponents. The programme is divided into three parts. The first presents the director’s own films, offering an overview of all periods of his creative career. The second includes films created by the Kinoks, the like-minded filmmakers of the 1920s to the 1950s. The final section presents documentary films by directors who both developed Vertov’s traditions and actively opposed the methods of the radical Dziga.

The film programme will conclude in July with a film rave. The Original Club will screen several of Vertov’s films consecutively, accompanied by live performances by leading sound artists.

The lecture programme accompanying the exhibition consists of two series. Film historian Kirill Goriachok’s curatorial lecture cycle, “To Hear, To See, To Feel: What Dziga Vertov Taught Us”, explores how Vertov reshaped the sensory perception of Soviet audiences. A second lecture series by film scholar Evgeny Maizel is devoted to the filmography of the master of “visual and sonic materials” and to his prophetic intuition, whose significance has become fully apparent only in the twenty-first century.

In collaboration with the archive and laboratory Cycle, masterclasses will be held on filming using 16 mm film, as well as developing and editing footage. The Fotosushka project invites photographers to reflect on the exhibition theme and present their works in a drying-line display on the first floor of the centre.