Mikhail Kaufman
Mikhail Kaufman is the only performer listed in the cast, although other people do appear in the film. Those other characters are incidental and mostly amateurs; some even were not entirely aware that they were “acting.” The reality is that the title of the film is doubly referential. The director of the film, Dziga Vertov, is a man with the camera and Mikhail Kaufman is also a man with a camera. Vertov is directing Kaufman to performance several scene in which he is essentially filming the setting up of the scenes that will be edited to create the “meat” of the content produced by the man with a movie camera. The director’s real name is Denis Kaufman. Yes, the part of the cameraman in the film is actually played by the director’s own brother. Mikhail Kaufman actually was a cameraman and also directed two films himself. Unfortunately, he and his brother experienced a professional parting of the ways due to that bugaboo of “artistic differences.” They would never work together again after this film and it would be more than a decade before he would return to work as a cameraman. Na Dunae, released in 1940, would be his last film. Kaufman died in 1980 at age 82.
