UCL SSEES: Russian Cinema Research Group Seminar

You can join UCL SSEES for a Russian Cinema Research Group Seminar with John MacKay from Yale University about his recent book Dziga Vertov: Life and Work (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 (1929), arguably the greatest documentary film ever made. The book covers the first twenty-five years of the filmmaker’s 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´evich Kaufman, then to Dziga Vertov) and embarked on a career in the nascent Soviet cinema industry.

MacKay’s purposes in focusing on the early period of the filmmaker’s life are to uncover ‘the “beginnings of the historical object” called Vertov’ (p. 2), to trace the trajectory of his cinematic and theoretical practice, and to assess the influence on his filmmaking of the various contexts – familial, social, cultural, ideological and historical – 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.

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