Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film

by Jeremy Hicks, Birgit Beumers, Lilya Kaganovsky

Overview

Pioneer of political documentary and inventor of cinema verite, 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".

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781845113773
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	03/15/2007
Series:	KINO - The Russian and Soviet Cinema
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.44(d)

About the Author

Lecturer in Russian at Queen Mary, University of London. His publications include 'Mikhail Zoshchenko and the Poetics of Skaz', a translation of Zoshchenko's short stories, and articles about Russian film.

Table of Contents

Preface Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Introduction: Dziga Vertov- Defining Documentary Film 1. The Birth of Documentary from the Spirit of Jourbanalism. Cine-Pravda. Cine-Eye 2. Vertov and Documentary Theory: 'The Goal Was Truth, the Means Cine-Eye.' 3. 'A Card Catalogue in the Gutter.' Stride, Soviet! A Sixth Part of the World Contents 4. New Paths: The Eleventh Year. Man with a Movie Camera 5. Sound and the Defence of Documentary: Enthusiasm 6. Documentary or Hagiography? Three Songs of Lenin 7. Years of Sound and Silence: Lullaby 8. Forward Dziga! Foreign and Posthumous Reception Bibliography Filmography Index

Editorial Reviews

''...the first English-language monograph devoted entirely to the career of Russia's greatest documentary filmmaker...a valuable contribution to English-language scholarship on early Soviet cinema and an important resource to all those of us who teach the history of Russian or documentary cinema...'' Anthony Anemone, Slavic and East European Journal

From the Publisher