It took a telegram from a fan—the great filmmaker Charlie Chaplin—to save it. Chaplin called it "the greatest sound film ever made."
If you search for “enthusiasm movie” today, you might expect a forgotten 80s comedy or a feel-good indie. Instead, you find one of the most radical, abrasive, and brilliant films ever made. This is not a movie about enthusiasm. It is a movie that is enthusiasm—the violent, industrial, revolutionary kind. By 1931, Vertov was already famous for Man with a Movie Camera (1929), a silent film so energetic it seemed to vibrate off the screen. But Enthusiasm was his first talkie. And he hated how other talkies worked. enthusiasm movie
You would think a film celebrating the Five-Year Plan, industrialization, and the defeat of religion (there’s a stunning sequence where the sounds of church bells are literally replaced by factory whistles) would be a propaganda hero. But Stalin’s cultural gatekeepers called it "noise" and "formalism." They wanted heroic portraits. Vertov gave them the grinding, chaotic, sweaty truth of labor. It took a telegram from a fan—the great
We throw the word “enthusiasm” around a lot. It’s the pop of a dopamine hit, the clap of a studio audience, the caffeine jolt of a morning meeting. But what if Enthusiasm was a monster? What if it was a raw, grinding, sonic assault that got you fired up not by making you feel good, but by forcing you to hear the world differently? This is not a movie about enthusiasm