André Bazin
Born: April 18, 1918
Died: November 11, 1958
Notable work: What is Cinema? (1967-71)
André Bazin was a renowned French film critic and theorist. Co-founder of the influential Cahiers du cinéma, Bazin is credited with the popularization of auteur theory and a strong influence in the French New Wave Cinema. His theories pulled heavily (both favorably or otherwise) from Soviet cinema, art and politics. In Bazin’s view, for example, Soviet montage served to manipulate the audience and thus provided a disservice to the spectator.
Died: November 11, 1958
Notable work: What is Cinema? (1967-71)
André Bazin was a renowned French film critic and theorist. Co-founder of the influential Cahiers du cinéma, Bazin is credited with the popularization of auteur theory and a strong influence in the French New Wave Cinema. His theories pulled heavily (both favorably or otherwise) from Soviet cinema, art and politics. In Bazin’s view, for example, Soviet montage served to manipulate the audience and thus provided a disservice to the spectator.
David Bordwell
Born: July 23, 1947
Notable works: Narration in the Fiction Film (1985); The Cinema of Eisenstein (1993); Film History: An Introduction (1994); Poetics of Cinema (2007)
David Bordwell is arguably one of the most prolific film scholars today. A Professor Emeritus of film at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Bordwell and his wife Kristin Thompson have been associated with the neoformalist method, an evolution from the Russian Formalist movement that maintains that there is a distinction between a film’s semiotic and perceptual properties, as well as between plot and story.
Notable works: Narration in the Fiction Film (1985); The Cinema of Eisenstein (1993); Film History: An Introduction (1994); Poetics of Cinema (2007)
David Bordwell is arguably one of the most prolific film scholars today. A Professor Emeritus of film at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Bordwell and his wife Kristin Thompson have been associated with the neoformalist method, an evolution from the Russian Formalist movement that maintains that there is a distinction between a film’s semiotic and perceptual properties, as well as between plot and story.
Ian Christie
Notable work: The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet cinema in documents (1994)
Ian Christie is a professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck College, University of London. He also contributes regularly to Sight & Sound magazine and radio broadcasts. His collaborative work with Richard Taylor provides an updated Western understanding of Russian and Soviet cinema.
Boris Eichenbaum
Born: October 4/16 (?) 1886
Died: November 2, 1959
Notable work: The Theory of the ‘Formal Method' (1926)
Boris Eichenbaum was a Russian formalist and a historian of Russian literature. He is credited as one of the founders of the Formal Method, a literary theory that paved the way for formalism in Soviet cinema.
Sergei Eisenstein
Born: January 23, 1898
Died: February 11, 1948
Notable work: Film Form: Essays in a Film Theory (1949)
Although Sergei Eisenstein is famous for his films, his work as a film theorist, writing for the Left Front of the Arts (LEF) the now legendary essay, The Montage of Attractions (1923). He is credited as the father of Soviet montage and his writings on editing technique are studied by film scholars and filmmakers alike today.
Jean-Luc Godard
Born: December 3, 1930
Notable work: La Chinoise (1967)
This iconic filmmaker is strongly identified with the French New Wave cinema that challenged traditional Hollywood narrative cinema. He was a staunch Marxist in his early career as a filmmaker and was a member of the Dziga Vertov Group, whose films were politically motivated and Brechtian in form. His career began as a film critic for Bazin’s Cahiers du cinema.
Tom Gunning
Notable work: The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde (1989)
Tom Gunning is the Chair for the Department of Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Chicago. His extensive body of work includes over one hundred publications and is constituted largely of an analysis of early cinema. Gunning outlined the concept of the “cinema of attractions,” which attempts to relate the development of cinema to new spatiotemporal concepts and the evolving visual culture.
Miriam Hansen
Born: April 28, 1949
Died: February 5, 2011
Notable work: Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (1991)
After working at Yale University and Rutgers, Miriam Hansen founded the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Hansen was a scholar of the Frankfurt school and a strong proponent of historically defined spectatorship. She coined the term “vernacular modernism” to explain how various cultural cinemas (including early Soviet cinema) was used to provide viewers with an understanding of modernity.
Vance Kepley
Notable work: Pudovkin and the Continuity Style: Problems of Space and Narration (1995)
Vance Keply is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. His historical analysis of cinema has a particular focus on the political dimensions of early Soviet cinema. His research has translated into a socio-cultural analysis of contemporary Russia and documentary modes of representation.
Jay Leyda
Born: February 12, 1910
Died: February 15, 1988
Notable work: Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (1960)
Jay Leyda was an American avant-garde filmmaker and film historian. His historiography on Soviet cinema is considered definitive by many scholars. He also translated much of Eisenstein’s writings into English. Chris Marker attributes him to be the only film historian to mention Alexander Medvedkin prior to the filmmaker’s revival in the 1967.
John MacKay
Notable work: A Revolution in Film: The Cinema of Dziga Vertov (2010)
John MacKay is a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures & Film Studies at Yale University. His courses include a cross-curricular list of Russian topics, including history, culture, literature and film theory. MacKay has written extensively on Vertov especially, and his upcoming projects include in-depth analyses of Dziga Vertov’s The Eleventh Year (1928) and Three Songs of Lenin (1934).
Joshua Malitsky
Notable work: The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (2005)
Joshua Malitsky is a professor at Indiana University affiliated with the Russian and Eastern European Institute. His research includes extensive work on early Soviet cinema from an historical and ethnographic perspective and he is currently working on a book entitled Post-Revolution Non-Fiction Film: Building the Soviet, Yugoslav, and Cuban Nations.
Judith Mayne
Notable Work: Kino and the Woman Question: Feminism and Soviet Silent Film (1989)
Judith Mayne is a Distinguished Professor at Ohio State University. She is considered one of the contemporary expert scholars on feminist film studies with regards to early Soviet cinema. Mayne argues that the representation of women have complicated and subverted the ideological goals found in early Soviet films.
Annette Michelson
Notable work: Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov (1984)
Annette Michelson is a Professor Emeritus of Cinema Studies at New York University. Her emphases on critical theory and psychoanalysis have led much of the discourse regarding early Soviet cinema. Michelson teamed up with Rosalind Krauss to establish the journal October in 1976, referencing Eisenstein’s film for its intellectual and politically engaged content.
Paula Quigley
Notable work: The Montage Principle: Eisenstein in New Cultural and Critical Contexts (2004)
Paula Quigley is the head of the Film Studies School of Drama, Film and Music at Trinity College Dublin. Her work on film and gender studies is relatively thin, though in 2004 Quigley teamed up with Jean Antoine to write the seminal work The Montage Principle, and has recently published on film theory and psychoanalysis.
Georges Sadoul
Born: 1904
Died: 1967
Notable work: Histoire generale du cinema, Volume 1-6 (various)
Georges Sadoul was a French communist and journalist. His comprehensive body of work is still considered a benchmark for world cinema today. Sadoul once famously engaged in a literary argument with André Bazin for Bazin’s apparent alignment with Hollywood bourgeois entertainment values and thus perpetuating a misreading of Soviet cinema.
Masha Salazkina
Notable work: In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein's Mexico (2009)
According to the Concordia website, "Masha Salazkina's work incorporates transnational approaches to film theory and cultural history with a focus on early Soviet Union, Latin America, and Italy... Her new book project traces a trajectory of materialist film theory through the discourses of early Soviet cinema, institutional film cultures of the 1930s-1950s Italy, and critical debates surrounding the emergence of New Cinemas in Brazil, Argentina and Cuba. Her essay on this topic is forthcoming in the journal October. She is currently co-editing a collection on Sound in Soviet and Russian Cinema."
Martin Stollery
Notable work: Eisenstein, Shub, and the Gender of the Author as Producer (2002)
Martin Stollery is a professor at Southampton Solent University. His historical-cultural approach to Eisenstein’s work continues to offer new insight in the seminal director. He is credited as one of the first scholars to study representations of Soviet culture in European modernist cinema.
Richard Taylor
Notable work: The Politics of the Soviet Cinema 1917-1929 (2008)
Richard Taylor is a professor at Swansea University and his work on the study of cinema in politics and history has been extensive. His recent publications include textual and historical research on the collections of Eisenstein and Pudovkin. His collaborative work with Ian Christie provides an updated Western understanding of Russian and Soviet cinema.
Yuri Tsivian
Notable work: The Wise and Wicked Game: Re-Editing and Soviet Film Culture of the 1920s (1996)
Yuri Tsivian received his Ph.D. in film studies from the Institute of Theater, Music and Cinema in Leningrad. He is currently a professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. His area of expertise lies in semiotics, film history, carpalistics and cinemetrics. He has written extensively on the films of Eisenstein and Vertov, providing much textual analyses and biographic information on both.
Peter Wollen
Born: June 29, 1938
Notable work: Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1969)
Peter Wollen is a film theorist and Professor Emeritus at the University of California whose work on semiotics and structuralism has contributed to the transformation of film studies. He also participated in film production, working with Michelangelo Antonioni and his former wife, Laura Mulvey.