A Sixth Part of the World

The film travels the Soviet Union from one end to the other. Reindeer herders in the north, cotton in Central Asia, sheep in the Caucasus, ships being loaded at the ports. The intertitles address the audience directly as "you" and present every region as part of one shared whole. The telling closes on a single call. Dziga Vertov's 1926 documentary was commissioned by the state foreign trade agency and is openly propaganda in purpose. Today it is also watched as a lesson in editing: Vertov binds the images by rhythm and uses the intertitle like poetry. The picture of a shared future the film draws did not, in the years that followed, come about for some of the peoples it shows.