On the Wings of Hypothesis Collected Writings on Soviet Cinema

"This posthumous volume, the second of Annette Michelson's long anticipated Collected Writings, gathers her erudite and incisive readings of the revolutionary films of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov and gives readers the opportunity to track her sustained investigations into their work over four decades. Michelson introduced American audiences to Soviet cinema in the early 1970s, extending the interpretative paradigm she had used for American filmmakers of the mid-twentieth century, which stressed phenomenological readings of the work of artists from Stan Brakhage to Michael Snow, to films and writings by Eisenstein and Vertov. She returned again and again to what she calls, following Eisenstein, "intellectual cinema"-the deliberate attempt to create philosophically informed analogues for consciousness. The volume includes Michelson's major essays on Eisenstein's unrealized attempts to make a movie of both Marx's Capital and James Joyce's Ulysses, as well as her key text on Vertov's 1929 masterpiece The Man with a Movie Camera. Together, the texts demonstrate Michelson's pervasive influence as a writer and thinker, and her key role in the establishment of cinema studies as an academic field. The book aims to make these canonical texts available for the next generation of film scholars. As Malcolm Turvey notes in his foreword, "the writings in this volume are indispensable in understanding this quintessentially modernist episode in (Soviet) film history.""--