Although Dziga Vertov is best known in the west for his celebrated films, Man With a Movie Camera and Enthusiasm, Three Songs of Lenin is generally considered to be his masterpiece. David Bordwell writes (in Film Comment): "Structured on contrasting songs sung by women of Uzbekistan, the film glides freely through time and space to link the women and their music with the life of Lenin. Vertov scoured Soviet archives for newsreels, filmed spontaneous on-the-street interviews, and tracked down recordings of Lenin's speeches; yet he transformed all this raw reportage into a lyrical meditation comparable to Mayakovsky's poem Vladimir Ilyich Lenin of ten years before. Images recur like leitmotifs from song to song; sound and image sometimes converge, sometimes separate; dramatically apt settings reinforce the effect of Vertov's specially shot material. 'This intervention on the director's part,' Abramov observes, '...constitutes his renunciation of theories of passive, contemplative recording of reality and reproduction of life "as it is."' Built out of much stock footage but composed like a poem or a song-cycle, Three Songs of Lenin marks Vertov's reconciliation of documentary reportage with formal control."