Short answers, pulled from the story.
Dziga Vertov, born David Abelevich Kaufman, was a Soviet documentary filmmaker and cinema theorist active from 1918 until his death in 1954. He is best known for Man with a Movie Camera (1929), which critics voted the eighth-greatest film ever made in the 2012 Sight and Sound poll, and for developing the Kino-Pravda newsreel series and the Cine-Eye theory of filmmaking.
Dziga Vertov is a Ukrainian-derived pseudonym that translates loosely as "spinning top." He was born David Abelevich Kaufman and later Russified his name to Denis Arkadievich before fully adopting the Vertov pseudonym.
Kino-Pravda was a Soviet newsreel series Vertov began in 1922, running for twenty-three issues over three years. Each issue ran about twenty minutes and covered roughly three topics, focusing on everyday Soviet life - markets, schools, bars, and political events - often filmed with a hidden camera and without prior permission. The title translates literally as "film truth."
Cine-Eye, or Kino-Glaz, was Vertov's theory that the camera was a mechanical eye capable of perceiving the world more precisely than the human eye. First formulated in his 1919 manifesto "WE: Variant of a Manifesto," the theory held that cinematic montage could help humanity evolve toward greater precision and kinship with machines, distinct from Eisenstein's use of montage for emotional persuasion.
Vertov's influence shaped cinéma vérité, the 1960s documentary movement named after his Kino-Pravda series by Edgar Morin. The Free Cinema movement in the United Kingdom, Direct Cinema in North America, and the Candid Eye series in Canada all drew on his approach. Jean Rouch applied his filming theory directly in Chronicle of a Summer (1960), and the Dziga Vertov Group operated from 1968 to 1972 under his name.
With the official rise of socialist realism in 1934, Vertov was forced to cut his personal artistic output significantly and was eventually reduced to editing Soviet newsreels. Lullaby (1937) is regarded as possibly the last film in which he maintained his own artistic vision. He had already lost his job at Sovkino in January 1927, reportedly for criticizing Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, a film the Communist Party endorsed.