Vertov After Progress

Vertov After Progress
Date
-
Event Sponsor
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Department of Art & Art History, CREEES Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies
Location
Oshman Auditorium, McMurtry Building

It is impossible to grasp Dziga Vertov's film and theoretical work independently of the ideology of progress that informed it. If we accept that this ideology no longer carries the same force for the left, how are we to rethink Vertov's work today, more than 100 years after the October Revolution? Is a Communist film practice possible without some ideology of progress? 

John MacKay was born and raised in Northern Alberta, Canada, and attended high school in Fairview, Alberta and college at the University of British Columbia, where he received a BA in English. After studying Russian in the Soviet Union and teaching at a community college, he came to Yale in 1991 to pursue studies in Comparative Literature. He completed his PhD dissertation on Romantic and post-Romantic lyric inscriptions in 1998, under the direction of Geoffrey Hartman and Tomas Venclova. He began as an assistant professor in Yale’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures the same year, and has over the years taught courses on film and media theory, Soviet cinema, Chinese cinema, Russian culture, slavery and serfdom in US and Russian literature, Marxist theory, Chekhov, and other topics. He has a particular interest in exploring historicizing modes of interpretation, primarily but not exclusively emerging from the Marxist and psychoanalytic traditions, in their application to a variety of different kinds of 19th and 20th century cultural production.

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