In Spring

In the same year that he served as cameraman on his brother Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera, Mikhail Kaufman made his own documentary filled with very similar images, sometimes displaying the rapid cutting, dissolves, superimpositions, and split-screen effects that made Vertov famous. “In Spring is an elegiac and tender observation of a seasonal shift in an old Kyiv. Spring has come, and the Dnipro River dramatically floods half the city. City dwellers clean their houses, children play vigorously, youngsters date on city hills or exercise in the stadium. Unlike Vertov, with his admiration of rhythms of machines, Kaufman adores the natural vibrations of trees, animals, and humans. This brings him closer to the impressionist film poets like Jean Vigo, with whom his third cameraman/brother, Boris Kaufman, collaborated” (Oleksandr Teliuk).