A Sixth Part Of The World (1926)
A travelogue-essay sweeping from Arctic reindeer herders to Central Asian camel traders and Black Sea fishing crews, cataloguing the peoples, labor, and natural wealth of the Soviet Union as raw material feeding the new socialist economy.
Commissioned as trade-promotion propaganda for the state export agency, A Sixth Part of the World so overran its budget that Vertov was expelled from Sovkino in 1927, though the film’s globe-spanning montage method pointed directly toward his 1929 landmark Man with a Movie Camera.
Background
Vertov’s crew travelled across the Soviet Union for this film, filming peoples and places from the Arctic to Central Asia. The state trading agency Gostorg commissioned it to promote Soviet exports, and Vertov turned that brief into a sweeping essay on labour and geography. Its refrain, addressed to the viewer, is the title itself: the Soviet Union as one sixth of the earth’s land surface.
What to watch for
Look at how the film builds its argument by editing. Vertov cuts between distant places to suggest a connected world of workers, and he addresses the audience directly through intertitles that shift between lists, questions and slogans. It is propaganda, and worth watching with that in mind, but it is also a study in how montage can make an argument without a plot or actors. Compare it with Man with a Movie Camera, made three years later, to see how far his technique moved.
