Annette Michelson's erudite and incisive readings of the revolutionary
films of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, collected for the first
time.
This posthumous volume gathers Annette Michelson's erudite and incisive
readings of the revolutionary films of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga
Vertov, giving readers the opportunity to track her sustained
investigations into their work. Michelson introduced American audiences
to Soviet cinema in the early 1970s, extending the interpretive paradigm
she had used for American filmmakers of the mid-twentieth century--in
which she emphasized phenomenological readings of their work--to films
and writings by Eisenstein and Vertov. Over four decades, Michelson
returned again and again to what she calls, following Eisenstein,
"intellectual cinema"--the deliberate attempt to create philosophically
informed analogues for consciousness.
The volume includes Michelson's major essays on Eisenstein's unrealized
attempts to make movies of both Marx's Capital and Joyce's Ulysses,
as well as her authoritative discussion of Vertov's 1929 masterpiece
The Man with a Movie Camera. Together, the texts demonstrate
Michelson's pervasive influence as a writer and thinker, and her role in
the establishment of cinema studies as an academic field. This
collection makes these canonical texts available for a new generation of
film scholars.
