John MacKay 
Dziga Vertov [PDF ebook] 
Life and Work (Volume 1: 1896–1921)

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.

Table of Content

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

About the author

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