Background
Vertov was born David Abelevich Kaufman into a family of Jewish lineage in Białystok, Poland, then a part of the Russian Empire. He Russified his Jewish name David and patronymic Abelevich to Denis Arkadievich at some point after 1918.
(Dziga Vertov was one of the greatest innovators of Soviet...)
Dziga Vertov was one of the greatest innovators of Soviet cinema. The radical complexity of his workin both sound and silent formshas given it a central place within contemporary theoretical inquiry. Vertov's writings, collected here, range from calculated manifestos setting forth his heroic vision of film's potential to dark ruminations on the inactivity forced upon him by the bureaucratization of the Soviet state. Dziga Vertov was one of the greatest innovators of Soviet cinema. The radical complexity of his workin both sound and silent formshas given it a central place within contemporary theoretical inquiry. Vertov's writings, collected here, range from calculated manifestos setting forth his heroic vision of film's potential to dark ruminations on the inactivity forced upon him by the bureaucratization of the Soviet state.
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(Pioneer of political documentary and inventor of cinéma v...)
Pioneer of political documentary and inventor of cinéma vérite, Dziga Vertov has exerted a decisive influence on directors from Eisenstein to Godard. Yet his reputation long rested upon a lone masterpiece, Man with a Movie Camera. Recently, however Vertov has begun to be recognised as the creator of a body of innovative and distinct films and, as Jeremy Hicks argues, documentary as we know it today is unthinkable without the rediscovery of Vertov. This, the first book in English to cover the whole of Vertov's career, reveals him to be an auteur, allowing readers to combine the familiar and less familiar aspects of his filmmaking and thinking in a cohesive narrative. Jeremy Hicks demonstrates how Vertov draws on Soviet journalistic models for his transformation of newsreel into the new form of documentary film. Through analyses of Cine-Pravda No 21 (Leninist Cine-Pravda), Cine-Eye, Forward Soviet!, A Sixth Part of the Earth, The Eleventh Year, Man with a Movie Camera, Enthusiasm, Three Songs of Lenin, and Lullaby, he shows how Vertov's greatest works combine authentic documentary footage ingeniously for tremendous rhetorical effect. Today, with the energetic revival of interest in documentary film, Vertov's reflexive and overtly partisan films are of great relevance; but they need to be better known and understood. This is the purpose of Dziga Vertov - Defining Documentary Film. Pioneer of political documentary and inventor of cinéma vérite, Dziga Vertov has exerted a decisive influence on directors from Eisenstein to Godard. Yet his reputation long rested upon a lone masterpiece, Man with a Movie Camera. Recently, however Vertov has begun to be recognised as the creator of a body of innovative and distinct films and, as Jeremy Hicks argues, documentary as we know it today is unthinkable without the rediscovery of Vertov. This, the first book in English to cover the whole of Vertov's career, reveals him to be an auteur, allowing readers to combine the familiar and less familiar aspects of his filmmaking and thinking in a cohesive narrative. Jeremy Hicks demonstrates how Vertov draws on Soviet journalistic models for his transformation of newsreel into the new form of documentary film. Through analyses of Cine-Pravda No 21 (Leninist Cine-Pravda), Cine-Eye, Forward Soviet!, A Sixth Part of the Earth, The Eleventh Year, Man with a Movie Camera, Enthusiasm, Three Songs of Lenin, and Lullaby, he shows how Vertov's greatest works combine authentic documentary footage ingeniously for tremendous rhetorical effect. Today, with the energetic revival of interest in documentary film, Vertov's reflexive and overtly partisan films are of great relevance; but they need to be better known and understood. This is the purpose of Dziga Vertov - Defining Documentary Film. Pioneer of political documentary and inventor of cinéma vérite, Dziga Vertov has exerted a decisive influence on directors from Eisenstein to Godard. Yet his reputation long rested upon a lone masterpiece, Man with a Movie Camera. Recently, however Vertov has begun to be recognised as the creator of a body of innovative and distinct films and, as Jeremy Hicks argues, documentary as we know it today is unthinkable without the rediscovery of Vertov. This, the first book in English to cover the whole of Vertov's career, reveals him to be an auteur, allowing readers to combine the familiar and less familiar aspects of his filmmaking and thinking in a cohesive narrative. Jeremy Hicks demonstrates how Vertov draws on Soviet journalistic models for his transformation of newsreel into the new form of documentary film. Through analyses of Cine-Pravda No 21 (Leninist Cine-Pravda), Cine-Eye, Forward Soviet!, A Sixth Part of the Earth, The Eleventh Year, Man with a Movie Camera, Enthusiasm, Three Songs of Lenin, and Lullaby, he shows how Vertov's greatest works combine authentic documentary footage ingeniously for tremendous rhetorical effect. Today, with the energetic revival of interest in documentary film, Vertov's reflexive and overtly partisan films are of great relevance; but they need to be better known and understood. This is the purpose of Dziga Vertov - Defining Documentary Film.
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(For the Russian filmmaker and film theorist Dziga Vertov ...)
For the Russian filmmaker and film theorist Dziga Vertov (1896-1954), cinema was both a bold aesthetic experiment and a document of contemporary life. This English/German bilingual catalogue includes films, photographs, posters, letters and a large number of previously unpublished sketches, drawings, and writings.
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(Lines of Resistance is a major collection of little-known...)
Lines of Resistance is a major collection of little-known writings by and about Dziga Vertov, available here in English for the first time. While Vertov’s uncompromising writings and his experimental features, such as Man with a Movie Camera, are known and discussed in the West, less is known about the other films he made in the 1920s, and still less about the response they provoked in the Soviet Union and abroad. Vertov liked to call his films and his essays "bombs"—and indeed the public reaction to them was nothing short of explosive. This book follows the development of his work and opinions from 1917 to 1930, and chronicles contemporary reactions to them, including such prominent personalities as fellow directors Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein, artists Aleksandr Rodchenko and Kazimir Malevich, and theorists Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. Distributed for Le Giornate del Cinema Muto
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(Dziga Vertov: The Man with the Movie Camera and Other New...)
Dziga Vertov: The Man with the Movie Camera and Other Newly-Restored Works [Blu-ray]: Mikhail Kaufman, Dziga Vertov: Entertainment Collectibles
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filmmaker scriptwriter theorist
Vertov was born David Abelevich Kaufman into a family of Jewish lineage in Białystok, Poland, then a part of the Russian Empire. He Russified his Jewish name David and patronymic Abelevich to Denis Arkadievich at some point after 1918.
Vertov studied music at Białystok Conservatory until his family fled from the invading German Army to Moscow in 1915. The Kaufmans soon settled in Petrograd, where Vertov began writing poetry, science fiction and satire. In 1916-1917 Vertov was studying medicine at the Psychoneurological Institute in Saint Petersburg and experimenting with "sound collages" in his free time. He eventually adopted the name "Dziga Vertov", which translates loosely from Ukrainian as 'spinning top'.
As a newsreel cameraman during the Russian Civil War, Vertov filmed events that were the basis for such factual films as Godovshchina revolyutsii (1919; The Anniversary of the October Revolution) and Boi pod Tsaritsynom (1920; Battle of Tsaritsyn). At age 22 he was the director of a government cinema department. The following year he formed the Kinoki (the Film-Eye Group), which subsequently issued a series of manifestos against theatricalism in films and in support of Vertov’s film-eye theory. In 1922 the group, led by Vertov, initiated a weekly newsreel called Kino-pravda (“Film Truth”) that creatively integrated newly filmed factual material and older news footage.
The subject matter of Vertov’s later feature films is life itself; form and technique are preeminent. Vertov experimented with slow motion, camera angles, enlarged close-ups, and crosscutting for comparisons; he attached the camera to locomotives, motorcycles, and other moving objects; and he held shots on the screen for varying lengths of time, a technique that contributes to the rhythmic flow of his films. Outstanding among Vertov’s pictures are Shagay, Sovyet! (1925; Stride, Soviet!), Shestaya chast mira (1926; A Sixth of the World), Odinnadtsatyi (1928; The Eleventh), Chelovek s kinoapparatom (1928; The Man with a Movie Camera), Simfoniya Donbassa (1930; Symphony of the Donbass), and Tri pesni o Lenine (1934; Three Songs of Lenin). Vertov later became a director in the Soviet Union’s Central Documentary Film Studio. His work and his theories became basic to the rediscovery of cinéma vérité, or documentary realism, in the 1960s.
(For the Russian filmmaker and film theorist Dziga Vertov ...)
(Pioneer of political documentary and inventor of cinéma v...)
(Lines of Resistance is a major collection of little-known...)
(Dziga Vertov was one of the greatest innovators of Soviet...)
(Dziga Vertov: The Man with the Movie Camera and Other New...)
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Vertov's legacy still lives on today. His ideas are echoed in cinéma vérité, the movement of the 1960s named after Vertov's Kino-Pravda. The 1960s and 1970s saw an international revival of interest in Vertov.
The independent, exploratory style of Vertov influenced and inspired many filmmakers and directors like the Situationist Guy Debord and independent companies such as "Vertov Industries," in Hawaii. The Dziga Vertov Group borrowed his name. In 1960, Jean Rouch used Vertov's filming theory when making Chronicle of a Summer. His partner Edgar Morin coined Cinéma vérité term when describing the style, using direct translation of Vertov’s KinoPravda.
The Free Cinema movement in the United Kingdom during the 1950s, the Direct Cinema in North America in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the Candid Eye series in Canada in the 1950s, all essentially owed a debt to Vertov.
Vertov's brother Boris Kaufman was a noted cinematographer who worked much later for directors such as Elia Kazan and Sidney Lumet in the United States. (He won an Oscar for his work on On the Waterfront.) His other brother, Mikhail Kaufman, worked as Vertov's cinematographer until he became a documentarian in his own right. Mikhail Kaufman's directorial debut was the film In Spring made in 1929. In September 1929, Vertov married his long-time collaborator Elizaveta Svilova.