Synopsis

Propaganda film. Shows Don Basin coal miners fulfilling their social roles. Distinctive montage sound. Russian language, with English subtitles. —allmovieguide

How the miners of the Don coal basin (one of the industrial regions of Ukraine) were striving to fulfill in four years their part of the Five Year Plan (Pitiletka).

The film was the director's first sound film and also the first of the Soviet production company Ukrainfilm. The film's score is considered experimental and avant-garde because of its incorporation of factory, industrial, and other machine sounds; human speech plays only a small role in the film's sounds.



Vertov himself described Enthusiasm as "the lead icebreaker in the column of sound newsreels." He considered the film's "complex interaction of sound with image" to be the work's most significant achievement. The director viewed the film as an extended experiment in which the juxtaposition and misalignment of sound were completely intentional. The film is also notable for the fact that it is a documentary filmed on location. Like many of his other films, Vertov worked on Enthusiasm with his wife Elizaveta Svilova