Dziga Vertov: Life and Work (Volume 1: 1896-1921)

by John MacKay

Overview

Largely forgotten during the last 20 years of his life, the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov (1896-1954) has occupied a singular and often controversial position over the past sixty years as a founding figure of documentary, avant-garde, and political-propaganda film practice. Creator of "Man with a Movie Camera" (1929), perhaps the most celebrated non-fiction film ever made, Vertov is equally renowned as the most militant opponent of the canons of mainstream filmmaking in the history of cinema. This book, the first in a three-volume study, addresses Vertov's youth in the largely Jewish city of Bialystok, his education in Petrograd, his formative years of involvement in filmmaking, his experiences during the Russian Civil War, and his interests in music, poetry and technology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781618117342
Publisher:	Academic Studies Press
Publication date:	11/21/2018
Series:	Film and Media Studies
Pages:	470
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

John MacKay is Professor of Film and Media Studies and Professor and Chair of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. He received a PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale in 1998 and a BA in English from the University of British Columbia in 1987.

Table of Contents

Note on Abbreviations, Transliteration, and Translations
Introduction. How Did It Begin?
Chapter 1. Province of Universality: David Kaufman before the War (1896–1914)
Chapter 2. Social Immortality: David Kaufman at the Psychoneurological Institute (1914–16)
Chapter 3. The Beating Pulse of Living Life: Musical, Futurist, Nonfiction, and Marxist Matrices (1916–18)
Chapter 4. Christ among the Herdsmen: From Refugee to Propagandist (1918–22)
Acknowledgments
Film Archives Consulted
Filmography
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“John MacKay’s book is a bold project. It treats a filmmaker—a mere person, after all, as one would a phenomenon, a world. One rarely sees a study so densely packed with so many unknown facts about someone as well-known
(or so we thought) as Dziga Vertov. Th e book presents a chronological rainbow of Vertov’s life—a personal, intellectual and political biography all in one. A
great book, a monumental project, and it must be as big a book as Mackay wishes it to be. You cannot downsize Everest whose very size is its asset.” —Yuri
Tsivian, William Colvin Professor, University of Chicago, Departments of Cinema and Media Studies and Art History

Editorial Reviews

Major gaps in [Dziga Vertov’s] biography impede our understanding of how this charismatic cinematic visionary managed, despite the complicated, treacherous, and too often ghastly conditions he lived through, to create important works that continue to fascinate and provoke viewers to this day. What has been lacking is a well-researched, large-scale biography as the basis for a comprehensive assessment of Vertov’s career. John MacKay, one of the most sophisticated contemporary students of Russian cinema, proves himself to be an ideal scholar to have taken on such an ambitious project. … With the possible exception of Simon Callow’s multi-volume biography of Orson Welles, I can recall nothing comparable in the field of cinema studies. If the other two parts of MacKay's trilogy equal the intellectual standard he has established in this first book, then only some of the great, multivolume literary biographies such as Joseph Frank’s Dostoyevsky or, more recently, Rainer Stach’s lauded account of Franz Kafka's life might arguably count as its peers.” —Stuart Liebman, Cineaste

“What would [Dziga Vertov] have made of today’s instantaneous media and the so-called post-truth era? Do these media divide or unite? Mackay alerts us to these questions. He is deeply invested in the ideological contours of Vertov’s project, in the fate of left-wing thought in the twentieth century, and its relevance for the future. His forensic gaze on the heterogeneous and complex era that shaped Vertov reveals its ‘wrenching confrontations of utopian possibility with violent closure, radical hope with radical fear’.” —Emma Widdis, University of Cambridge, The Times Literary Supplement

“The sheer hard work that has gone into researching and writing this exceptional volume is evident, but so too is MacKay’s enjoyment of this task. His enthusiasm for his subject is both palpable and infectious, as is his curiosity. There is something for every reader in this treasure trove of a book, and we should be grateful that its publisher allowed MacKay the space to include everything that he wanted to include. It has enabled him to write a definitive account of the origins of the extraordinary filmmaker Dziga Vertov, which also makes a major contribution to our understanding of Russian and Soviet cinema, history and culture more broadly.”

—Rachel Morley, UCL SSEES, Slavonic and East European Review

From the Publisher