ABSTRACT
Mikhail Kaufman was Dziga Vertov's brother, his longtime cameraman, and a key member of both the Kinoks and the Council of Three, and he's best known to film scholars, cinephiles. Moscow features a rudimentary "day-in-the-life-of-a-city" structure, one that features many of the regular semantic elements of the city symphony style, including shots of street cleaning, factories, construction projects, a zoo, an amusement park and athletics, as well as a fascination with modern industry, modern communications, modern commerce, modern transportation, and modern congestion. Some of Vertov's strongest critics expressed enthusiasm for Kaufman and Ilya Kopalin's film, including Sergei Eisenstein, who called Moscow "brilliant," and argued that it provided a much better model for the path the Kino-Eye movement should take than Vertov's films, and Lev Kuleshov who declared the film "amazing" and praised it alongside Esfir Shub's The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty as being among the greatest triumphs of Soviet cinema.
