Today we have been mostly enjoying Entuziazm: Simfoniya Donbassa (1931) directed by Dziga Vertov, his first after the renowned Man With A Movie Camera, and his first film with sound.

Given that any use of synchronised sound with film was pioneering and experimental at the time, it was furthermore a Sound Film, with capitals: the term “talkie”, as applied to the early Hollywood movies with sound, would be far from appropriate. There is no dialogue, for one thing; Enthusiasm is Soviet propaganda at its most exuberant and optimistic: lots of coal and steel, factories and farms, tractors and harvesters. This is where Constructivism and Futurism come to resemble each other — one way of saying that the diagonals are rather fabulous, the camera suggesting non-human points of view. Vertov had been much influenced by the Futurists, early on. The soundtrack is mostly rousing marches, machine noise and declarative interjections — Vertov was ideally suited to working with sound; he’d made experimental audio recordings years before:

in 1916 Vertov enrolled in Petrograd Psychoneurological Institute. For his studies of human perception, he recorded and edited natural sounds in his ‘Laboratory of Hearing,’ trying to create new forms of sound effects by means of the rhythmic grouping of phonetic units.
(profile of Dziga Vertov at sense of cinema)

The technical innovations showed here elevated his stature for a brief while even above that of Eisenstein, although before the decade was out, Vertov was reduced to turning out dreary public information films,. They don’t make them like this anymore, that’s for sure.

All Movie Database page on Vertov.

Here’s a DVDBeaver review of the movie…

UPDATE: Two days after I post this, Owen Hatherley — launching from (evidently unpublished) remarks by Infinite Thought — has posted some observations around the arrival of synchronised sound in film here, and mentions Enthusiasm with approval…