In the Shadow of the Machine

The film was produced as a compilation film. Blum reported in “Film-Kurier“ (5.11.1928): “It will be assembled from excerpts of partly unpublished Ukrainian films. […] Some American footage has also been used. To get material as impressive as possible, a number of films, 0-60, have been viewed.” Based on ideas by Dziga Vertov, and largely assembled from the last reel of his film ‘The Eleventh Year’, this compilation presents an explicit critique of the very technology that Vertov sought to praise, stressing the dark side of industrialization—hands mangled in workplace accidents, train wrecks, coffins—and connects to a particularly German concern with the negative effects of technology stretching from the Romantics to Heidegger, Horkheimer, and Adorno in the twentieth century.