皇家华人

Please join us for a conversation with John MacKay (Yale University) about his recent book (Academic Studies Press, 2018).

Dziga Vertov (1896-1954), one of the most influential Soviet filmmakers of his generation, is best known as the director of Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kinoapparatom, 1929), arguably the greatest documentary film ever made. He was also a vociferous theorist, who rejected fiction cinema and advocated nonfiction filmmaking as the best vehicle for representing the revolutionary new Soviet world. Much has been written about Vertov, but John MacKay鈥檚 (Academic Studies Press, 2018) 鈥� volume one of his much anticipated three-volume study 鈥撎齣s the first English-language biography devoted to him. MacKay describes it as a 鈥榗ritical-biographical study鈥� (p. xxxiii), but this unassuming designation does not do justice to his work鈥檚 extraordinary scope and range of reference.

The book covers the first twenty-five years of the filmmaker鈥檚 life, from his birth, as David Abelevich Kaufman, on 15 January 1896, to the end of 1921, by which time he had changed his name twice (first to Denis Arkad麓evich Kaufman, then to Dziga Vertov) and embarked on a career in the nascent Soviet cinema industry. He had not yet made any of his major films, however, or written any of his most significant theoretical texts.

MacKay鈥檚 purposes in focusing on the early period of the filmmaker鈥檚 life are to uncover 鈥榯he 鈥渂eginnings of the historical object鈥� called Vertov鈥� (p. 2), to trace the trajectory of his cinematic and theoretical practice, and to assess the influence on his filmmaking of the various contexts 鈥� familial, social, cultural, ideological and historical 鈥� in which he lived and worked. The result is 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. Join us to learn more.

Image: Elizaveta Svilova, as featured in Kino-Pravda, 19, 1924

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