In the 1920s, the LEF project moved the discussion about the role of “things in film” – as metonymic and metaphoric, photogenic and functional, and as tools that filled gaps in the narrative, stood in for actors, or operated as generic markers – in a distinctly materialist direction. Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov were sharply criticized for turning things into symbols in their films. To avoid this aesthetic dispute, Tret’iakov advocated production scripts based on the dominance of material things over plot. Eisenstein, in his unfinished text ‘Play of Objects' (‘Ob igre predmetov’), offers another understanding of things in film. A film-thing (kinoveshch’), in his reading, is first an image and therefore an attraction, a conglomeration of heterogeneous circuits, awakening different areas of association and triggering social emotions. Eisenstein’s ideas may have influenced Tret’iakov’s concept of the “biography of things”. At the same time, as this analysis demonstrates, theoretical discussion about things in film had no lasting impact on the material world depicted on the Soviet screen. Films and historical documents (diaries and memoirs, customs declarations or detention inventories) tell different stories about the life of objects in Soviet Russia.