Dziga Vertov

Life and Work (Volume 1: 18961921)

By: John MacKay

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Paperback | 8 August 2019

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470 Pages

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23.8 x 15.9 x 2.54

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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.

Industry Reviews

Reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement:

"What do the revolutionary ambitions of the early twentieth century - the first "media age" - have in common with the present? This questions runs through the first volume of John Mackay's magisterial Dziga Vertov: Life and Work."

"Mackay's long-anticipated book is the first in what will be a definitive three-volume Life and Works [...] The uniqueness of Mackay's project is twofold."

"Mackay and his publisher should be congratulated for the rare luxury of scale that allows this exploration of the context of "revolution" and the particular conditions that formed the revolutionary self in early twentieth-century Europe. Mackay reveals Vertov as both particular and emblematic. This biography of an individual becomes a history of a generation, as the writing zooms in and out, seeking to "understand the historical milieux that acted upon" Vertov."

"The depth of research that lies behind each of these stories is remarkable, and - for the relaxed reader - the book offers a fascinating journey through the turbulent spaces and communities of early twentieth-century Russia."

"He [Mackay] is deeply invested in the ideological contours of Vertov's project, in the fate of left-wing though 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"."

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