This series of screenings is hosted by renowned scholar of Russian and Soviet cinema and visiting professor Yuri Tsivian, in conjunction with his course Dziga Vertov and His Time: Left-Wing Art, Avant-Garde Filmmaking, Radical Politics. Placing Vertov's work alongside and in the context of his contemporaries, these programs illuminate the differing styles and approaches of artists who contributed to one of the richest, most significant periods in the history of cinema. The filmmakers' views clashed most famously in the public polemic between Vertov and Eisenstein. As Tsivian suggests in his book Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties, "for Eisenstein, art was an essential condition of human society, its inalienable asset," while for Vertov art – like religion – is an opiate of the people; it "becomes otiose in a society where everyone works, and will be banished from such a future republic, where the only form of art will be the art of the artisan."

Screenings will be introduced by Yuri Tsivian, Visiting Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Program notes for films by Dziga Vertov are adapted from Le Giornate Del Cinema Muto's program.