Dziga Vertov

Life and Work (Volume 1: 1896–1921)

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by John MacKay

Type: Biographies
Subject: Director > Dziga Vertov
Keywords: Dziga Vertov, director, Soviet cinema
Publishing date: 2018
Publisher: Academic Studies Press
Collection: Film and Media Studies
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 470 pages
6 x 9 inches (15 x 23 cm)

ISBN

978-1-61811-734-2

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Book Presentation:
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.

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.

Press 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

See the publisher website: Academic Studies Press

See the complete filmography of Dziga Vertov on the website: IMDB ...

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