Dziga Vertov was one of the greatest innovators of Soviet cinema. The radical complexity of his work—in both sound and silent forms—has 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 work—in both sound and silent forms—has 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.

"This book is a collection of little-known writings by and about Dziga Vertov. It follows the development of his work and opinions from 1917 to 1930, and chronicles contemporary reactions to them - from critics whose names are now forgotten, as well as such prominent personalities as fellow directors Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein, artists Aleksandr Rodchenko and Kazimir Malevich, and theorists Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer." --Book Jacket.

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".

Documents the evolutionary development of the nation's cinema and its film artists, focusing on the period between 1896 and the death of Eisenstein in 1948.

Lev Kuleshov (1899–1970) was the first aesthetic theorist of the cinema. An outstanding figure in the “montage” school, he was a key influence on Eisenstein and Pudovkin. Kuleshov was the first to see clearly that montage—the assemblage and alternation of shots—was the very essence and structure of cinematic expression, often overriding the significance of the content of the shots themselves. Deriving his insights from close study of American films (particularly D. W. Griffith’s), Kuleshov used his experience in prerevolutionary Russian films and his wartime efforts in Soviet documentaries to conduct experiments in film acting and montage. He developed an editing method later referred to as the “Kuleshov effect” that juxtaposed shots to evoke new meanings from the combinations. In one experiment, he intercut identical shots of an actor’s neutral face with shots of a bowl of soup, a child in a coffin, and a sunny landscape to evoke different emotional responses from the audience. Kuleshov also “synthesized” a nonexistent woman from close-ups of different parts of several women and created artificial landscapes by intercutting shots of locations separated by great distances. Kuleshov taught at the Soviet film school and was a well-known director of features, and Kuleshov on Film contains essays on both the theoretical and practical sides of filmmaking. Influenced by Futurism, Russian Formalism, and structural linguistics, Kuleshov’s analysis can now be seen as semiotic, presaging studies of film as a system of signs. As a Marxist and structuralist, Kuleshov examined form and content with a materialist approach. The translator’s extensive introduction discusses Kuleshov’s use of signs, typage, and other structuralist concepts and places him in the development of semiotic thought. It also provides intriguing biographical detail on Kuleshov’s conflicts with advocates of “socialist realism,” who attempted to stamp out the artistic and theoretical innovations of the early revolutionary years, and establishes Kuleshov’s position as one of the great figures in the evolution of film. Kuleshov on Film is essential reading for everyone seriously concerned with the cinema. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.

Since the mid-1980s, US audiences have watched the majority of movies they see on a video platform, be it VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, Video On Demand, or streaming media. Annual video revenues have exceeded box office returns for over twenty-five years. In short, video has become the structuring discourse of US movie culture. Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens examines how prerecorded video reframes the premises and promises of motion picture spectatorship. But instead of offering a history of video technology or reception, Caetlin Benson-Allott analyzes how the movies themselves understand and represent the symbiosis of platform and spectator. Through case studies and close readings that blend industry history with apparatus theory, psychoanalysis with platform studies, and production history with postmodern philosophy, Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens unearths a genealogy of post-cinematic spectatorship in horror movies, thrillers, and other exploitation genres. From Night of the Living Dead (1968) through Paranormal Activity (2009), these movies pursue their spectator from one platform to another, adapting to suit new exhibition norms and cultural concerns in the evolution of the video subject.

Visualizing Theory is a lavishly illustrated collection of provocative essays, occasional pieces, and dialogues that first appeared in Visual Anthropology Review between 1990 and 1994. It contains contributions from anthropologists, from cultural, literary and film critics and from image makers themselves. Reclaiming visual anthropology as a space for the critical representation of visual culture from the naive realist and exoticist inclinations that have beleaguered practitioners' efforts to date, Visualizing Theory is a major intervention into this growing field.

Over the last few decades, film has increasingly become an issue of philosophical reflection from an ontological and epistemological perspective, and the claim “doing philosophy through film” has raised extensive discussion about its meaning. The mechanical reproduction of reality is one of the most prominent philosophical questions raised by the emergence of film at the end of the nineteenth century, inquiring into the ontological nature of both reality and film. Yet the nature of this audio-photographic and moving reproduction of reality constitutes an ontological puzzle, which has widely been disregarded as a main line of enquiry with direct consequences for philosophy. Regarding this background, this volume brings together the best papers from the Lisbon Conference on Philosophy and Film: Thinking Reality and Time through Film, held in 2014. What they all have in common is the discussion of new aspects and approaches of how philosophy relates to film. Whether by philosophizing through concrete examples of films or whether looking at film’s ontological reliance on time and image, or its intra-active entanglement with reality or truth, this book explores grasp film’s nature philosophically, and provides new insights for the film philosopher and the filmmaker, as well as for the freshman fascinated by film for philosophical reasons.

Bringin together key theoretical texts from respected names in the field including Andre Bevin, Walter Benjamin and Vivian Sobchack, this book examines more than a century of writing on film and technology.