About
Kino Klassika is proud to present a collaboration with the Centre Pompidou to celebrate the publication of a new French-language study of Dziga Vertov with a day of lectures by a panel of Vertov specialists.
Dziga Vertov, Le Ciné-Œil de la Révolution. Écrits sur le Cinéma [The Kino-Eye of the Revolution. Writings on Cinema], is edited by Antonio Somaini, François Albera (University of Lausanne), and Irina Tcherneva (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociale), and published by the publishing house Les Presses du Réel. In collaboration with the Austrian Film Museum, which houses the most important Vertov collection in the world (including texts, photos, diagrams and films), the publication covers the entire span of Vertov’s career, from 1917-18, all the way to the very last texts.
The guiding idea of this new edition of Vertov’s writings is to present his work not only from the perspective of a history of Russian and Soviet cinema, but also from the perspective of a theory of media. Besides providing all the fundamental biographical and bibliographical information about Vertov, new emphasis will focus on how Vertov used cinema as a materialist medium capable of visualising the technical infrastructure of the new social system produced by the 1917 Revolution, a medium with innovative ways of seeing, hearing, and understanding the new Soviet society. In order to do this, Vertov is discussed in relation to a series of figures who wrote about film, photography, and media theory during the 1920s and 1930s outside of Russia, such as Walter Benjamin, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Jean Epstein and Luigi Russolo.
These issues will be discussed on Wednesday, December 20th, from 11am to 6pm, by a panel of Vertov specialists. Speakers will include Francois Albera, Oksana Bulgakowa, Julien Gourbeix, Maria Korolkova, Valerie Pozner, Andrei Smirnov, Antonio Somaini and Irina Tcherneva. Entrance to the conference is free and there is no need to book. More information can be found here. For queries about the conference, please email us at info@kinoklassikafoundation.org.
There will be screening following on from this event. Click here for more information.
François Albera
François Albera is a film historian, cinema critic and professor of film history and aesthetics at the University of Lausanne, where he founded the Film department. He has published numerous books and articles, notably on avant-garde and Soviet cinema (1920-1930), including Eisenstein et le Constructivisme russe, and in 2005 he received the Literary Award from the Union of Film Critics for L’Avant-garde au cinéma.
Oksana Bulgakowa
Oksana Bulgakowa is a professor of film history and film analysis at the University of Mainz. At the centre of Bulgakowa’s work is the life and work of Sergei Eisenstein. She has written and edited books on the director and theoretician, also exploring specific aspects of Russian-Soviet film history. She also acted as curator of several exhibitions, including “Moscow – Berlin, Berlin – Moscow” and “Sergei Eisenstein: The Mexican Drawings”.
Maria Korolkova
Maria is a Senior Lecturer in Media & Communications at the University of Greenwich. Before that she taught Cultural Theory at Richmond, and European Cinema at the University of Oxford, where she also completed a Doctorate on Representations of Space in Russian Cinema of 1910s and 1920s. Maria is an independent film critic, with articles featuring in the BBC World Service, Calvert Journal, Forbes and Times Literary Supplement.
Valerie Pozner
Historian of Russian and Soviet cinema, Valérie Pozner has been the president of the French Association for Research on the History of Cinema since 2011. Curator of the exhibition “Filming the war: the Soviets facing the Shoah”, she is also the director of research at the CNRS and the coordinator of CINESOV.
Andrey Smirnov
Andrey Smirnov is an interdisciplinary artist, independent curator, collector and author of numerous publications including Sound in Z. Experiments in Sound and Electronic Music in Early 20th-century Russia. He is founding director of the Theremin Center in Moscow, researcher and lecturer at the Centre for Electroacoustic Music at Moscow State Conservatory and at the Rodchenko School for Modern Photography and Multimedia. Since 1976, he has been researching the development of electronic music techniques and gestural interfaces.
Antonio Somaini
Antonio Somaini is Professor in Film, Media, and Visual Culture Theory at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3. Amonst his publications, the book Ejzenštejn. Il cinema, le arti, il montaggio (Turin: Einaudi, 2011; English translation Eisenstein. Cinema, Art History, Montage forthcoming with The Illinois University Press) and, together with Naum Kleiman, the English edition of Eisenstein’s Notes for a General History of Cinema. He has edited works by Benjamin, Moholy-Nagy, and Vertov, and anthologies on media and visual culture theory, both in Italian and French.
