For 60 years, the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, creator of the famed Man with a Movie Camera (1929), has been recognized as a founding figure of documentary, avant-garde, and political-propaganda film. This book addresses Vertov's formative years in prerevolutionary and Soviet Russia, alongside his interests in music, poetry and technology.

“The sheer hard work that has gone into researching and writing this exceptional volume is evident, but so too is MacKay’s enjoyment of this task. His enthusiasm for his subject is both palpable and infectious, as is his curiosity. There is something for every reader in this treasure trove of a book, and we should be grateful that its publisher allowed MacKay the space to include everything that he wanted to include. It has enabled him to write a definitive account of the origins of the extraordinary filmmaker Dziga Vertov, which also makes a major contribution to our understanding of Russian and Soviet cinema, history and culture more broadly.”

—Rachel Morley, UCL SSEES, Slavonic and East European Review

“What would [Dziga Vertov] have made of today’s instantaneous media and the so-called post-truth era? Do these media divide or unite? Mackay alerts us to these questions. He is deeply invested in the ideological contours of Vertov’s project, in the fate of left-wing thought in the twentieth century, and its relevance for the future. His forensic gaze on the heterogeneous and complex era that shaped Vertov reveals its ‘wrenching confrontations of utopian possibility with violent closure, radical hope with radical fear’.” —Emma Widdis, University of Cambridge, The Times Literary Supplement

“Major gaps in [Dziga Vertov’s] biography impede our understanding of how this charismatic cinematic visionary managed, despite the complicated, treacherous, and too often ghastly conditions he lived through, to create important works that continue to fascinate and provoke viewers to this day. What has been lacking is a well-researched, large-scale biography as the basis for a comprehensive assessment of Vertov’s career. John MacKay, one of the most sophisticated contemporary students of Russian cinema, proves himself to be an ideal scholar to have taken on such an ambitious project. … With the possible exception of Simon Callow’s multi-volume biography of Orson Welles, I can recall nothing comparable in the field of cinema studies. If the other two parts of MacKay's trilogy equal the intellectual standard he has established in this first book, then only some of the great, multivolume literary biographies such as Joseph Frank’s Dostoyevsky or, more recently, Rainer Stach’s lauded account of Franz Kafka's life might arguably count as its peers.” —Stuart Liebman, Cineaste

“In 2002 when I wrote my soundtrack to Man with a Movie Camera, I knew almost nothing about Vertov. Since then I have begun to kill the gaps in my knowledge largely through the brilliance and persistence of John MacKay.” —Michael Nyman, CBE, composer

“This volume—the first of three on the life and work of Dziga Vertov—is an extraordinary accomplishment. MacKay combines unprecedentedly detailed archival research and contextual analysis with historical synthesis and perspective; theoretical sophistication at the highest levels with close critical analysis; comprehensive scholarship with intellectual generosity. Th e three volumes taken together will be the definitive account of Vertov, but not only that. They will constitute a major contribution to the history of documentary cinema, to the political, ideological and aesthetic history of Russian film, and to the history of film and media theory.” —Philip Rosen, Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Professor of English, Brown University

“John MacKay’s book is a bold project. It treats a filmmaker—a mere person, after all, as one would a phenomenon, a world. One rarely sees a study so densely packed with so many unknown facts about someone as well-known (or so we thought) as Dziga Vertov. Th e book presents a chronological rainbow of Vertov’s life—a personal, intellectual and political biography all in one. A great book, a monumental project, and it must be as big a book as Mackay wishes it to be. You cannot downsize Everest whose very size is its asset.” —Yuri Tsivian, William Colvin Professor, University of Chicago, Departments of Cinema and Media Studies and Art History