Ostensibly a film to show how the miners of the Don coal basin were striving to fulfill in four years their part of the Five Year Plan, for Dziga Vertov Enthusiasm presented the challenge of a new cinematic medium-sound-which he used as dynamically as he had the visual image in silent films. "To grasp the feverish reality of life in the Don Basin, to convey as true to life as possible its atmosphere of the clash of hammers, of train whistles, of the songs of workers at rest-this was my aim," he stated. French film historian Georges Sadoul writes in Dictionary of Films, "Vertov made a vivid and unusual use of sound that was considerably ahead of its time. Natural sounds (machinery, voices, debates, songs, etc.) recorded in the mines and villages of the Don Basin were edited by Vertov as freely as he cut visuals, creating a kind of musique concr?te. Chaplin was ecstatic over the film and wrote: 'I would never have believed it possible to assemble mechanical noises to create such beauty. One of the most superb symphonies I have known. Dziga Vertov is a musician.'"