Introduction To Fevralsky, ‘Currents In Art And The Radio-Eye’ (1925)

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Yuri Tsivian for bringing the document to our attention, for his constant encouragement and invaluable advice. Special thanks also to Alyson Hrynyk, Andrew Johnston and Scott Richmond for their careful reading and helpful comments on earlier versions of this text.

Notes

Notes

1 Robert Leach, Makers of Modern Theatre: an introduction (London, Routledge, 2004), 93.

2 See, for instance, Fevralsky's reviews of Stride, Soviet ! in Pravda, 12 March 1926, and of A Sixth Part of the World in Pravda, 12 October 1926, translated and reprinted in Yuri Tsivian (ed.) Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the 1920s (Pordenone, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2004), 161–162 and 196.

3 The letter is translated and reprinted in Tsivian (ed.), Lines of Resistance, 252–254.

4 See for instance the 1929 texts: From Kino Eye to Radio Eye and From the history of the Kinoks, in Annette Michelson (ed.) Kino Eye: the writings of Dziga Vertov (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1984), 85–92 and 92–101, respectively.

5 Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera (a visual symphony), in Michelson (ed.) Kino Eye, 283.

6 Vertov, Kino Glaz, a speech given at a meeting of Kinoks (1926). Translated and reprinted in Tsivian (ed.), Lines of Resistance, 259.

7 Vertov, Man with the Movie Camera, absolute kinography and Radio-Eye, in Tsivian (ed.) Lines of Resistance, 319.

8 Vertov, Dziga Vertov on Kino-Eye: excerpts from a lecture given in Paris in 1929, in Tsivian (ed.) Lines of Resistance, 354–355 (emphasis in the original).

9 Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera, absolute kinography and Radio-Eye, in Tsivian (ed.) Lines of Resistance, 319.

10 See Vertov, Dziga Vertov on Kino-Eye: excerpts from a lecture given in Paris in 1929, in Tsivian (ed.) Lines of Resistance, 354.

11 Vertov, Kinopravda and Radiopravda, in Michelson (ed.) Kino Eye, 56 (the original Pravda publication dates 12 July 1925). An essay by Vertov, titled ‘Radio-Eye,’ eventually appeared a month later in the single volume publication Ukrepim sovetskoe radio (Strengthen Soviet Radio) (August 1925).

12 See for instance Vertov's letters to Fevralsky from 28 April 1928 and 8 November 1928, regarding the releases of, respectively, The Eleventh Year and Man with a Movie Camera, in Tsivian (ed.) Lines of Resistance, 314–315 and 318.

13 See, for example, Vertov, artistic drama and Kino-Eye, in Michelson (ed.) Kino Eye, 47–49.

14 Alexander Fevralsky, The theory and practice of Comrade Vertov, in Tsivian (ed.) Lines of Resistance, 89–90. (Originally published in Pravda 19 July 1924).

15 On the Proletkult movement's various views on the arts see Lynn Mally, Culture of the Future: the Proletkuelt movement in Revolutionary Russia (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1990), especially 122–159.

16 For a recent English translation of Balázs’ text, see Visible man, Screen, 48(1) (Spring 2007), 96–108.

17 Walter Benjamin, The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, in: Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds) Selected Writings, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2002), 101–133.

18 See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (New York, Zone Books, 1994); Raymond Williams, Television: technology and cultural form (London, Fontana, 1974); Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectics of Enlightenment (Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2002). Jonathan Crary discusses the themes of separation and isolation in relation to optical technologies and spectacles in his Suspensions of Perception: attention, spectacle, and modern culture (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1999), 73–75.

19 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The extensions of man (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1994).