BIBLIOGRAPHY & SOURCES

NOTE: The excellent Monoskop bio of Vertov (see below) has a very comprehensive bibliography and filmography. There are also countless on-line articles and papers on Vertov and his films. The sources below are those (in English) that I consider to be the most important and/or interesting. Russian and Ukrainian sources are included in works by Seth Feldman and John MacKay below.

GENERAL

‘Dziga Vertov: A guide to references and resources (A reference publication in film)’, by Seth Feldman, G.K. Hall 1979

THE MOVIE

‘Man with a Movie Camera: an Introduction’, John MacKay, Academia, 2013

‘The man with the movie camera. Speed of vision, speed of truth?’ An essay by Marko Daniel, 2002.

‘Five wonderful effects in Man with a Movie Camera and how they’re still inspiring film-makers today’, Ben Nicholson, British Film Institute.

‘Man with a Movie Camera: the greatest documentary of all time?‘ Silent London Blog

‘The most important of the arts’: film after the Russian Revolution,  John Green, 26/6/2017 Culture Matters

‘Constructivism in Film, The Man with the Movie Camera, a Cinematic Analysis’, Vlada Petrić, Cambridge University Press, 1987.

‘The Man with the Movie Camera, The Film Companion’, by Graham Roberts, IB Tauris, 2000

THE MOVIE MAKERS

‘Dziga Vertov: Life and Work (Volume 1: 1896–1921)’, by John MacKay, Film and Media Studies series, Academic Studies Press, 2018. The definitive biography.

Dziga Vertov Monoskop biography

‘Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov’, by Annette Michelson and Kevin O’Brien, Pluto Press, 1984.

‘Dziga Vertov: The Vertov Collection at the Austrian Film Museum’, by Thomas Tode and Barbara Wurm, SYNEMA, 2006 (Elizaveta Svilova donated a large part of her husband’s archive to the museum in the 1970s).

‘False Cinema: Dziga Vertov and early Soviet film’, Jeremy Murray-Brown, an article published in November 1989 in The New Criterion magazine (Volume 8, Number 3). Current commentary on Dziga Vertov is generally uncritical, but this article written on the eve of the Soviet Union’s demise compares him to Nazi propagandists.

Mikhail Kaufman profile on IMDb

Elizaveta Svilova, Monoskop biography

‘Film Editing as Women’s Work: Ėsfir’ Shub, Elizaveta Svilova, and the Culture of Soviet Montage’, by Lilya Kaganovsky, Apparatus Journal #6 (2018)

THE MOVIE CAMERAS

‘The Movie Cameras in Man with a Movie Camera’, Richard Bossons, 2018 (on application to the author). The definitive survey of the equipment used on and in the movie.

‘An interview with Mikhail Kaufman’, Annette Michelson, MIT Press, 1979 JSTOR (registration required).

‘The Kinamo Movie Camera, Emanuel Goldberg and Joris Ivens’ – a draft paper by Michael J Buckland, University of Berkeley, California, 2008.

‘The Woman with the Kinamo – Ella Bergmann-Michel’, Il Cinema Ritrovato, Italy

‘The delirious vision: the vogue for the hand-held camera in Soviet cinema of the 1920s’
Dr. Phil Cavendish, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 5-24. An invaluable study of a neglected aspect of early Soviet film-making – the cameras that were used to make the films!

‘The Men with the Movie Camera, The Poetics of Visual Style in Soviet Avant-Garde Cinema of the 1920s’, Dr. Philip Cavendish, Berghahn Books, 2013.

‘The Hand that Turns the Handle: Camera Operators and the Poetics of the Camera in Pre-Revolutionary Russian Film’, Dr. Philip Cavendish, The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol 82 #2, April 2004.

THE SOVIET UNION IN THE 1920s

http://www.orlandofiges.info/index.php  – An excellent series of essays for A Level and IB students and one of the best sources of information on the Russian Revolution.

http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/culture-and-revolution/

James Snell ‘Continuity and Change after the Bolshevik Revolution’ WordPress blog post

‘All the Russias, the End of an Empire’, pp 139-146, by Fitzroy Maclean, Flint River Press. 1992

Wikipedia

Encyclopedia Britannica

‘Russia’s Great War Project’ – http://russiasgreatwar.org/media/culture/avantgarde.shtml

‘New Worlds, Russian Art & Society 1900-1937’, David Elliott, Thames and Hudson, 1986 (an excellent concise account of this era)

‘Art into Life: Russian Constructivism 1914-1932’, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, USA, (multiple authors), 1990

‘The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932’, multiple contributors, Guggenheim Gallery, New York, 1992 (the definitive account of the culture of this era, the catalogue of the blockbuster exhibition)

‘A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde’, MoMA Exhibition December 3, 2016 to March 12, 2017  https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1668

Kasimir Malevich – MoMA Artists

Wassily Kandinsky – 100 Years of Bauhaus

Vladimir Tatlin – MoMA Artists

El Lissitzky – https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/el-lissitzky-1519

El Lissitzky, writing in 1922, stated, “The (painted) picture
fell apart together with the old world which it had created for
itself. The new world will not need little pictures. If it needs a
mirror, it has the photograph and the cinema.”

Alexander Rodchenko – MoMA Artists

https://www.foxtrotfilms.com/films/revolution-new-art-for-a-new-world/

http://www.designhistory.org/Avant_Garde_pages/Russia.html

Russian and Soviet Cinema in the Age of Revolution (1917-1932), David Gariff (Notes to accompany the film series Revolutionary Rising: Soviet Film Vanguard presented at the National Gallery of Art and American Film Institute Silver Theatre, October 13 through November 20, 2017

For notable film directors of this period refer to David Gariff’s essay below and the excellent MUBI website that covers most of them and their most important films. The film historian Denis Grunes has a comprehensive overview of Soviet Cinema (and the rest of Eastern Europe) in his blog. 

Lev Kuleshov – ‘Introduction to: Lev Kuleshov and the Kuleshov Collective’, University College London

Sergei Eisenstein – Where to begin with Sergei Eisenstein? (BFI)

Vsevolod Pudovkin – Kinoglaz online

Alexander Dovzhenko – Senses of Cinema

Esfir Shub – Women Film Pioneers Project

Esfir Shub – Selected Writings

‘Film Editing as Women’s Work: Ėsfir’ Shub, Elizaveta Svilova, and the Culture of Soviet Montage’, by Lilya Kaganovsky, Apparatus Journal #6 (2018)

Boris Barnet – Revolutionary Road (BFI)

Mikhail Kalatozov – Russiapedia

Viktor Turin – Riding the Soviet Iron Horse

‘Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918-1935’, Denise J Youngblood, University of Texas Press, 1991 (the definitive account of this era)

‘Russian and Soviet Cinema in the Age of Revolution (1917-1932)’, David Gariff (Notes to accompany the film series Revolutionary Rising: Soviet Film Vanguard presented at the National Gallery of Art and American Film Institute Silver Theatre, October 13 through November 20, 2017

Soviet Cinema – Encyclopedia Britannica

‘Landmarks of Early Soviet Cinema’, DVD boxed set of eight silent films reviewed by Harlow Robinson, Cineaste magazine, Vol. XXXVII, No.2