Dziga Vertov

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.

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”.”

• Note on Abbreviations, Transliteration, and TranslationsIntroduction. 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)AcknowledgmentsFilm Archives ConsultedFilmographyBibliographyIndex