How were Vertov’s films and writings revolutionary, and does their revolutionary character remain legible for us today?
Continue reading...Re-Mediating the Archive: Scholars discuss archival revolutions
Anastassia KostrioukovaOn April 24th, 2015, the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, together with the university’s Department of Comparative Literature, the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, the Office of the Dean for Humanities, as well as the Romanian Cultural Institute inNew York, held an all-day symposium entitled “Re-Mediating the Archive: Image, Word, Performance” organized by NYU’s PhD candidate in Comparative Literature Emma Hamilton and Professor of Comparative Literature Cristina Vatulescu. The symposium welcomed seven participants from various fields who, as Vatulescu pointed out in her introduction, were there to address “the coming together of texts, images, and bodies in the archive.” She also added that currently “archival re-mediation is in full swing,” with new scholarship posing the question of the role of media and images in the long textually-dominated archive and attempting to bring other media out of persistent blind spots. She referred to this recent development as a new archival revolution, and invited dialogue with other archival revolutions, such as that prompted by the emergence of film as a medium at the turn of the 20th century and the one following the fall of the Iron Curtain 25 years ago.
Making the Contingent Visible: Vertov and Kino-Pravda
Ingrid NordgaardOn Friday, May 3, the Jordan Center had the honor of hosting Professor John MacKay (Yale University) for a presentation on his forthcoming book Dziga Vertov: Life and Work. MacKay presented many interesting perspectives on Vertov and Kino-Pravda, to an audience consisting of both Vertov specialist and those more uninitiated to Vertov’s cinematic universe.
Continue reading...