Dziga Vertov

Born	January 2, 1896(1896-01-02) Białystok, Russian Empire (now Poland)
Died	February 12, 1954(1954-02-12) (aged 58) Moscow, Soviet Union (now Russia)

David Abelevich Kaufman (Дави́д А́белевич Ка́уфман; Denis Kaufman; pseudonym Dziga Vertov; Дзи́га Ве́ртов) was a Soviet pioneer documentary film, newsreel director and cinema theorist. His filming practices and theories influenced the cinéma vérité style of documentary moviemaking and the Dziga Vertov Group, a radical filmmaking cooperative which was active in the 1960s.

Vertov's brothers Boris Kaufman and Mikhail Kaufman were also noted filmmakers, as was his wife, Elizaveta Svilova.

Literature

Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 1984. Download.

By Vertov

• "We: A Version of a Manifesto", 1922. Repr. in The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896-1939, eds. Ian Christie and Richard Taylor, Routledge, 1994.
  • "NoS: Variante de manifesto". (in Portuguese)
• "On Kinopravda", 1924. Repr. in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O'Brien, University of California Press, 1995.
• "The Man with the Movie Camera", 1928. Repr. in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O'Brien, University of California Press, 1995.
• El cine-ojo, trans. Francisco Llinas, Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos, 1974, 215 pp. (in Spanish)
• Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien, University of California Press, 1984, 408 pp.
• Memorias de un cineasta bolchevique, trans. Joaquim Jordà‎, Madrid: Capitan Swing Libros, 2011. (in Spanish)

On Vertov

Books

• Seth Feldman, Evolution of style in the early work of Dziga Vertov, New York: Arno Press, 1977.
• Vasco Granja, Dziga Vertov, Livros Horizonte, 1981, 96 pp. (in Portuguese) [1]
• Graham Roberts, The Man with the Movie Camera, I. B. Tauris, 2001.
• Yuri Tsivian (ed.), Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties, trans. Julian Graffy, Gemona: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2004, 422 pp. [2]
• Austrian Film Museum, Thomas Tode, Barbara Wurm (eds.), Dziga Vertov. The Vertov Collection at the Austrian Film Museum, Vienna: Austrian Film Museum, 2006, 288 pp. (in German/English). Contents, [3], Online version.
• Jeremy Hicks, Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film, London & New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007.

Journal issues

• Annette Michelson, Malcolm Turvey (eds.), October 121, Special Issue: New Vertov Studies (Summer 2007). Contents.
  • Simon Cook, "Our Eyes, Spinning Like Propellers: Wheel of Life, Curve of Velocities, and Dziga Vertov's Theory of the Interval", pp 79–91.

Book chapters, Papers, Articles

• Erik Barnouw, Documentary: a History of the Non-fiction Film, Oxford University Press, 1974.
• Malcolm Le Grice, Abstract Film and Beyond, MIT Press, 1977.
• Peter Weibel, "Eisenstein, Vertov and the Formal Film", trans. Phillip Drummond, in Film as Film: Formal Experiment in Film, 1910-1975, London: The Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979, pp 46-51.
• Gilles Deleuze, "Towards a gaseous perception", in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, University of Minnesota Press, 1986, pp 80-86, n229-230.
• Ben Singer. "Connoisseurs of Chaos: Whitman, Vertov and the 'Poetic Survey'", Literature/Film Quarterly 15:4 (Fall 1987), pp 247-258.
• Patricia R. Zimmermann, "Reconstructing Vertov: Soviet Film Theory and American Radical Documentary", Journal of Film and Video 44:1-2 (Spring-Summer 1992).
• William C. Wees, "The Camera-Eye: Dialectics of a Metaphor", in Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film, University of California Press, 1992, pp 11-30. [4]
• Philip Vilas Bohlman, Music, Modernity, and the Foreign in the New Germany, 1994, pp 121-152.
• Vlada Petric, "Vertov's Cinematic Transposition of Reality", in Beyond Document: Essays on Nonfiction Film, ed. Charles Warren, Wesleyan University Press, 1996, pp 271-.
• Seth Feldman. "'Peace between Man and Machine': Dziga Vertov's The Man with a Movie Camera.", in Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, eds. Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski, Wayne State University Press, 1998, pp 40-53.
• Douglas Kahn, "Russian Revolutionary Film", in Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, MIT Press, 1999, pp 139-156.
• Jane de Almeida (ed.), Grupo Dziga Vertov, Sao Paulo: Witz, 2005. (in Portuguese)
• John MacKay. "Disorganized Noise: Enthusiasm and the Ear of the Collective", KinoKultura 7 (January 2005).
• John MacKay. "The 'Spinning Top' Takes Another Turn: Vertov Today", KinoKultura 8 (April 2005).
• John MacKay, "Allegory and Accommodation: Vertov's «Three Songs of Lenin» (1934) as a Stalinist Film", Film History: An International Journal 18:4 (2006), pp 376-391.
• Malcolm Turvey, "The Revelationist Tradition: Exegesis: II", in Doubting Vision Film and the Revelationist Tradition, Oxford University Press, 2008, pp 31-37.
• Irina Sandomirskaia, "One Sixth of the World: Avant-garde Film, the Revolution of Vision, and the Colonization of the USSR Periphery during the 1920s (Towards a Postcolonial Deconstruction of the Soviet Hegemony)", in From Orientalism to Postcoloniality, ed. Kerstin Olofsson, Huddinge: Södertörns högskola, 2008, pp 8-31.
• Yates McKee, "Post-Communist Notes on Some Vertov Stills", in Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, eds. Beth Hinderliter, et al., Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2009, pp 267-293.
• Christian Quendle, "Rethinking the camera eye: dispositif and subjectivity", New Review of Film and Television Studies 9:4 (December 2011), pp 395-414.
• Joshua Malitsky, "The Dialectics of Thought and Vision in the Films of Dziga Vertov, 1922-1927", in Post-Revolution Nonfiction Film: Building the Soviet and Cuban Nations, Indiana University Press, 2013. [5]
• Lev Manovich, "Visualizing Vertov", 2013, 38 pp.
• Articles on Vertov at Seance.ru. (in Russian)

Documentary films

• Мир без игры, dir. Sergei Drobashenko, 54 min, 1966. Documentary on Vertov.
• Дзига и его братья, dir. Evgeny Tsymbal, 2002.
• Все Вертовы, dir. Vladimir Nepevny, 2002.

External links

• Vertov at Sense of Cinema
• Dziga Vertov Collection at the Austrian Film Museum
• Vertov.ru
• Dziga Vertov in UbuWeb Sound: Enthusiasm! (1930), Laboratory Of Hearing (1916), Radio-Ear / Radio-Pravda (1916).