John MacKay
Yale University, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Faculty Member
- Russian Studies, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Film and Media Studies, Marxism, Cultural Theory, Sound studies, and 48 more20th century Avant-Garde, Lauren Berlant, Fredric Jameson, Jazz Studies, Jazz, Jazz History, Jazz Theory, Film, Russia, Documentary Film, Experimental Film, Gender Theory, Poetry, Photography, Hans Blumenberg, Tom Gunning, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Slavery, Abolition of Slavery, History of Serfdom, Russian serfdom, Etienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière, Critical Theory, Philosophy, Louis Althusser, Structuralism/Post-Structuralism, Gilles Deleuze, Dziga Vertov, Film History, Russian Film, Soviet Film, Sergei Eisenstein, Romanticism, Film Theory, Art and Science, Propaganda, Soviet History, Avant-Garde Cinema, Culture in the Soviet Union, Allegory, Lenin, Soviet Visual Culture, Hydroelectric dams, Russian Cinema, Stalinism, Melodrama, and Simon Goldhilledit
- BA (English), University of British Columbia (1987) PhD (Comparative Literature), Yale University (1998) Professor,... moreBA (English), University of British Columbia (1987)
PhD (Comparative Literature), Yale University (1998)
Professor, Slavic Languages and Literatures and Film Studies, Yale Universityedit
An inquiry into the historical association between Dziga Vertov's "kino-pravda" (film-truth) and "cinéma-vérité."
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Introduction (in draft) to this rarely seen film.
Research Interests: Russian Studies, Gender Studies, Women's Studies, Film Studies, Soviet History, and 16 moreMarxism, Women's History, Film Music And Sound, Film Analysis, Documentary (Film Studies), Sound studies, Communism, Sound, Aviation, Film History, Russian History, Documentary Film, Culture in the Soviet Union, Stalin and Stalinism, Women and Gender Studies, and Dziga Vertov
A brief comment on Aleksandr Sokurov's SECOND CIRCLE (1990), relating its anti-naturalistic style to the spectator's longing for an aesthetic or ritual solution to the problem of death.
Research Interests: Russian Studies, Film Studies, Soviet History, Film Theory, Death, and 17 moreDeath Studies, Film Analysis, Ritual, Death & Dying (Thanatology), Post-Soviet Studies, Russian Film, Russian History, Death and Burial (Archaeology), Art and Independent Cinema, Film Aesthetics, Russian culture, Russia, Film and Media Studies, Alexander Sokurov, Archaeology of death and burial, Film Style, and Culture and death
A discussion of Aleksei Balabanov's feature debut, the Beckett-inspired HAPPY DAYS (1991), that analyzes the film's departures from Beckett's monologue approach in terms of the larger of arc of the reception of Beckett in the USSR/Russia.
Research Interests: History, Russian Studies, Russian Literature, Avant-Garde Cinema, Film Studies, and 17 moreSoviet History, Contemporary Art, Film Analysis, Avant-Garde Theater, Film Adaptation, Samuel Beckett, Modernist Literature (Literary Modernism), Post-Soviet Studies, Russian Film, Culture in the Soviet Union, Modernist Literature, 20th century Avant-Garde, Samuel Beckett (Literature), Knut Hamsun, Realism, Samuel Beckett and the problem of the isolated self, and Beckett and Monologue
Clint Eastwood's film read as an attempt to give civic-participatory heft to war-themed video gaming.
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Balabanov's film read as a proposal about how to make films and conceptualize audiences in the impoverished circumstances of post-Soviet Russia.
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A reading of Alejandro Iñárritu's BIRDMAN (2014) as a meditation on strategies for indie success.
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Christopher Nolan's film read as an allegory about the transition to digital.
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A note on Dziga Vertov's 1926 film, written for the catalog of the 2004 Giornate del Cinema Muto. In English and Italian.
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Research Interests: Avant-Garde Cinema, Soviet History, Marxism, Rhythm, Russian Film, and 12 moreSoviet Film, Montage, Collage, Documentary Film, Culture in the Soviet Union, 20th century Avant-Garde, Experimental Film, Cinema of the Soviet Union, Collage, Montage, & Assemblage, Dziga Vertov, Meter and Rhythm, and Non-Fiction Film
Research Interests: Religion, Atheism, Film Studies, Film Theory, Marxism, and 15 moreVisual Culture, Film Analysis, Propaganda, Ideology, History of Atheism, Cinema of Attractions, Ideology and Discourse Analysis, Culture in the Soviet Union, Russian culture, Russia, Cinema of the Soviet Union, Russia and the Soviet Union, Dziga Vertov, Lev Kuleshov, and Kuleshov Effect
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Largely forgotten during the last 20 years of his life, the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov (1896-1954) has occupied a singular and often controversial position over the past sixty years as a founding figure of documentary, avant-garde, and... more
Largely forgotten during the last 20 years of his life, the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov (1896-1954) has occupied a singular and often controversial position over the past sixty years as a founding figure of documentary, avant-garde, and political-propaganda film practice. Creator of Man with a Movie Camera (1929), perhaps the most celebrated non-fiction film ever made, Vertov is equally renowned as the most militant opponent of the canons of mainstream filmmaking in the history of cinema. This book, the first in a three-volume study, addresses Vertov's youth in the largely Jewish city of Bialystok, his education in Petrograd, his formative years of involvement in filmmaking, his experiences during the Russian Civil War, and his interests in music, poetry and technology. Learn more & purchase here: https://www.academicstudiespress.com/browse-catalog/dziga-vertov-vol-1
Research Interests: Russian Studies, Film Studies, Soviet History, Film Theory, Film Analysis, and 13 moreDocumentary (Film Studies), Film History, Russian History, Cinema, Russian & Soviet Art, Documentary Film, Soviet Visual Culture, Film Aesthetics, Film and Media Studies, Russian Cinema, Cinema Studies, Russian Civil War, and Dziga Vertov
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Research Interests: Romanticism, Marxism, Poetry, Ideology, Poetics, and 25 moreLiterary Theory, Futurism, Jacques Rancière, Modernity, William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Bishop, Lyric poetry, Samuel Johnson, Baudelaire, Ben Jonson, Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Schiller, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Clare, Lamartine, OZYMANDIAS di P.B. Shelley - Traduzione di Antonio Taglialatela, 20th and 21st Century Russian Literature; Nikolai Klyuev; contemporary Russian culture, Osip Mandelstam, Schiller, Aleksandar Blok, Velimir Khlebnikov, M Lomonosov, XVIII century Russian Poetry, Aleksandr Blok, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, and Charles Poncy
Best online Vertov resource.
Research Interests: Russian Studies, Avant-Garde Cinema, Film Studies, Soviet History, Film Theory, and 25 moreFilm Music And Sound, Constructivism, Film Analysis, Revolutions, Eastern European and Russian Jewish History, Sound studies, Sound, Film History, Russian History, Russian Revolution, Russian & Soviet Art, Documentary Film, Culture in the Soviet Union, Film Aesthetics, 20th century Avant-Garde, Sound Art, Experimental Film, Film, Russia, Film and Media Studies, Cinema of the Soviet Union, Russian Revolution 1905, Dziga Vertov, Soviet and Post Soviet Cinema, and Russian Constructivism
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Crime and Transcendence: The Films of Aleksei Balabanov Aleksei Balabanov (1959-2013) was arguably the most original, and certainly the most controversial director to have emerged in post-Soviet Russia. The films he created during his... more
Crime and Transcendence: The Films of Aleksei Balabanov
Aleksei Balabanov (1959-2013) was arguably the most original, and certainly the most controversial director to have emerged in post-Soviet Russia. The films he created during his brief career mingle shocking violence, astonishing beauty, unforgettably enigmatic characters, a pop sensibility and gritty naturalism into gripping, complex reflections on contemporary Russia and on 20th-century Russian history. This near-complete retrospective during Spring 2015 at Yale, one of the largest ever held in the United States, will offer audiences a rare look at the full range of Balabanov’s work. Each film will be introduced by a different scholar of Russian film or guest speaker, and will be followed by a post-screening discussion in which audience members are invited to participate.
All films presented with English subtitles, and all features except ME TOO (2012; DCP) will be shown on 35mm film.
Screenings will take place in the Whitney Humanities Center Auditorium (53 Wall St., New Haven, CT) and are free and open to the public. All but the April 29 screening will begin at 7 pm.
January 21, 7 pm: BROTHER (1997, 96 min.).
The legend of Danila Bagrov, hired killer, music fan and defender of the weak. Balabanov’s breakthrough, and perhaps the signal film of the Russian 1990s.
Introduction by John MacKay, Yale Slavic Languages and Literatures and Film and Media Studies.
February 4, 7 pm: TROFIM (1995, 25 min.); OF FREAKS AND MEN (1998, 93 min.).
Peasants and pornography: Balabanov’s stylish, perverse reflections on the early years of cinema in Russia.
Introduction by Marijeta Bozovic, Yale Slavic Languages and Literatures.
February 18, 7 pm: HAPPY DAYS (1991, 86 min.).
Balabanov’s surreal feature debut sets Samuel Beckett’s absurdist drama in a crumbling St. Petersburg.
Introduction by Dominika Laster, Lecture, Yale Theater Studies Program.
March 1, 7 pm: THE CASTLE (1994, 120 min.).
Brueghel meets Buñuel in Balabanov’s “intellectual thriller” based on Kafka’s unfinished novel.
Introduction by Henry Sussman, Visiting Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale and author of Franz Kafka: Geometrician of Metaphor.
April 1, 7 pm: CARGO 200 (2007, 89 min.).
Balabanov’s most shocking and controversial film, this horror-comedy set in the pre-perestroika USSR administers a harsh antidote to Soviet nostalgia.
Introduction by Dasha Ezerova, Yale Slavic Languages and Literatures.
April 15, 7 pm: RIVER (2002, 50 min.); THE STOKER (2010; 87 min.).
Two tales of outcasts, by turns blackly humorous and lyrical, bound by common Siberian motifs.
Introduction by Oksana Chefranova, Visiting Fellow in Yale’s Film and Media Studies Program.
April 29, 5:30 pm: Double Feature!
MORPHINE (2008, 110 min.).
A young doctor in the provinces succumbs to morphine addiction during the revolutionary year of 1917 in this Bulgakov adaptation.
Introduction by Dasha Ezerova, Yale Slavic Languages and Literatures.
ME TOO (2012, 83 min.).
Balabanov’s hilarious and moving final film sets a group of outsiders on a quest for transcendence.
Introduction by Mihaela Mihailova, Yale Slavic Languages and Literatures and Film and Media Studies.
Attendees are invited to a free public reception between the screenings of MORPHINE and ME TOO on April 29 in Room 108 of the Whitney Humanities Center.
Sponsored by Renova, the MacMillan Center, the Whitney Humanities Center, the Yale Film and Media Studies Program, and the Yale Slavic Film Colloquium.
Aleksei Balabanov (1959-2013) was arguably the most original, and certainly the most controversial director to have emerged in post-Soviet Russia. The films he created during his brief career mingle shocking violence, astonishing beauty, unforgettably enigmatic characters, a pop sensibility and gritty naturalism into gripping, complex reflections on contemporary Russia and on 20th-century Russian history. This near-complete retrospective during Spring 2015 at Yale, one of the largest ever held in the United States, will offer audiences a rare look at the full range of Balabanov’s work. Each film will be introduced by a different scholar of Russian film or guest speaker, and will be followed by a post-screening discussion in which audience members are invited to participate.
All films presented with English subtitles, and all features except ME TOO (2012; DCP) will be shown on 35mm film.
Screenings will take place in the Whitney Humanities Center Auditorium (53 Wall St., New Haven, CT) and are free and open to the public. All but the April 29 screening will begin at 7 pm.
January 21, 7 pm: BROTHER (1997, 96 min.).
The legend of Danila Bagrov, hired killer, music fan and defender of the weak. Balabanov’s breakthrough, and perhaps the signal film of the Russian 1990s.
Introduction by John MacKay, Yale Slavic Languages and Literatures and Film and Media Studies.
February 4, 7 pm: TROFIM (1995, 25 min.); OF FREAKS AND MEN (1998, 93 min.).
Peasants and pornography: Balabanov’s stylish, perverse reflections on the early years of cinema in Russia.
Introduction by Marijeta Bozovic, Yale Slavic Languages and Literatures.
February 18, 7 pm: HAPPY DAYS (1991, 86 min.).
Balabanov’s surreal feature debut sets Samuel Beckett’s absurdist drama in a crumbling St. Petersburg.
Introduction by Dominika Laster, Lecture, Yale Theater Studies Program.
March 1, 7 pm: THE CASTLE (1994, 120 min.).
Brueghel meets Buñuel in Balabanov’s “intellectual thriller” based on Kafka’s unfinished novel.
Introduction by Henry Sussman, Visiting Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale and author of Franz Kafka: Geometrician of Metaphor.
April 1, 7 pm: CARGO 200 (2007, 89 min.).
Balabanov’s most shocking and controversial film, this horror-comedy set in the pre-perestroika USSR administers a harsh antidote to Soviet nostalgia.
Introduction by Dasha Ezerova, Yale Slavic Languages and Literatures.
April 15, 7 pm: RIVER (2002, 50 min.); THE STOKER (2010; 87 min.).
Two tales of outcasts, by turns blackly humorous and lyrical, bound by common Siberian motifs.
Introduction by Oksana Chefranova, Visiting Fellow in Yale’s Film and Media Studies Program.
April 29, 5:30 pm: Double Feature!
MORPHINE (2008, 110 min.).
A young doctor in the provinces succumbs to morphine addiction during the revolutionary year of 1917 in this Bulgakov adaptation.
Introduction by Dasha Ezerova, Yale Slavic Languages and Literatures.
ME TOO (2012, 83 min.).
Balabanov’s hilarious and moving final film sets a group of outsiders on a quest for transcendence.
Introduction by Mihaela Mihailova, Yale Slavic Languages and Literatures and Film and Media Studies.
Attendees are invited to a free public reception between the screenings of MORPHINE and ME TOO on April 29 in Room 108 of the Whitney Humanities Center.
Sponsored by Renova, the MacMillan Center, the Whitney Humanities Center, the Yale Film and Media Studies Program, and the Yale Slavic Film Colloquium.
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Introduction to volume 2 of DZIGA VERTOV: LIFE AND WORK, focused on what differentiates Vertov's position on cinema from that of his contemporaries.