Enthusiasm, much less well-known than Dziga Vertov's other major works Kino-Eye and The Man With a Movie Camera, is nevertheless well worth a look.

The movie is subtitled Symphonia of the Donbass and portrays the implementation of the first five year plan in the industrial regions of Ukraine. If that sounds un-exciting, don't be put off – this is an amazing movie that places sound – the sounds of pulleys and railway wagons, steel plants, the brass bands of the Young Pioneers and the Army, of tractors in the Kolkhoz – at the forefront of everything.

Framed by close-up shots of a young women (later shown to be an artist making the finishing touches to a bust of Lenin) listening to the radio via earphones, the soundtrack of the film takes on a life of its own. Its synchronization with the visual content of the film creates a highly atmospheric portrayal of work and of constant, excessive noise – not just the noise of the work itself but of the streets, with their endless parades and ubiquitous brass bands.

Made in 1931, the film includes more overtly propagandistic content than The Man With a Movie Camera, made in the marginally more liberal (or at least less rigidly controlled) Soviet Union of 1929. However, for me the propaganda element is rendered almost irrelevant by the highly original soundtrack. The ponderous narrative interventions ("Here come the enthusiasts") are ultimately subsumed in the clatter of machine hammers and coal conveyors, brass music and public announcements, simultaneously distancing you from the "enthusiasm" on display and drawing you in to a kind of hyper-real portrayal of physical life (hard work, the streets, demonstrations) that makes you suddenly aware of the un-real nature of everyday urban sound when you leave the cinema. No wonder Soviet critics hated it.

This review is based on the New York Film Annex VHS cassette copyrighted 1998, which I picked up for a buck at Half-Price Books.

The film begins with a lengthy sequence plainly paralleling churchgoers with drunken street bums, as if God and alcohol were comparable. I found myself reminded of some of the apologists for Communism before the fall of the USSR who insisted that the difference between the West and the East was that the East had no homeless. The explanation for the large homeless population in Soviet cities were that they were parasites who were not worthy of consideration.

Much of the remainder of the film is shots of work in mines and factories, living up to he film's subtitle of "Symphony of the Don Basin." Unfortunately, the impact of these sequences is diminished for the American viewer by the fact that the cassette translates neither spoken Russian (by dubbing), or written Russian (by subtitles), and there is quite a bit of both. While the images are interesting, they have lost considerable impact over the years and the many documentaries done on similar subjects since this one. The cassette case includes a blurb by Charlie Chaplin praising the film. I found this interesting inasmuch as Chaplin's major film about industrial order "Modern Times" showed that order to be dehumanizing while this film shows it to be exhilarating.

This film badly needs a major reissue with extensive research and translation. A DVD with a good commentary track would be appreciated. It would give admirers of Dziga Vertov something other than "Man With a Movie Camera" to study.