Enthusiasm. Symphony of Donbas

Dziga Vertov, Ukrainfilm (VUFKU), 1930. Churches emptied, factories filled, harvest and coal under the First Five-Year Plan in the Donbas. Vertov took Alexander Shorin's mobile recorder out of the Leningrad studio; a crew carried some 70 kilograms of gear to record marches, congresses, and the mines on location. Chaplin, after a London screening, wrote that he had not known mechanical sounds could be arranged so well and called Vertov a musician. The first Ukrainian sound feature. The picture is an argument that radio-eye could catch noise unawares.