[Committee Members][Cinema Media Studies][Resource Faculty]






Yuri Tsivian

William Colvin Professor, Departments of Art History, Slavic Languages & Literatures (acting chair), and Comparative Literature, the Committee on Cinema & Media Studies, and the College











Ph.D. in film studies from Institute of Theater, Music and Cinema, Leningrad, 1984.

Yuri Tsivian is William Colvin Professor in the Humanities.

I am currently a professor in the Humanities (Departments of Art History, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Comparative Literatures and the Committee on Cinema and Media Studies). I was born in Riga, studied film at the Institute for the History of Arts in Moscow and received a Ph.D. degree in film studies from the Institute of Theater, Music and Cinema in Leningrad in 1984. Before joining the University of Chicago in 1996, I worked as a Senior Research Fellow at the Latvian Academy of Sciences in Riga and taught at USC in LA.

When I started studying cinema my interest in it was one of a semiotician. Gradually, I got interested in early film history per se. Currently my interest is divided between two fields: carpalistics (the study of gesture in theater, visual arts, literature and film) and a new method of film studies, cinemetrics (http://www.cinemetrics.lv).

My books include: Silent Witnesses: Russian Films, 1908-1919 (Pordenone/London, 1989), Istoricheskaja Recepcija Kino (Riga, Zinatne, 1991), translated as Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception (New York, London: Routledge 1994) and, in collaboration with Yuri Lotman, Dialogues with the Screen (Tallinn,1994). My most recent books are Ivan the Terrible (London: British Film Institute Publishing, 2002) and Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties (Pordenone, 2004).

I am also involved in the restoration and video mastering of silent films; you can hear my voice on the audio essay for the DVD version of Dziga Vertov's Man with the Movie Camera (Image Entertainment, 1995), on the audio-visual essay on Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, recorded on: Eisenstein: the Sound Years (DVD by Criterion Collection, 2001), and, both in English and Russian, on my CD-ROM Immaterial Bodies: Cultural Anatomy of Early Russian Films (USC 2000) for which I received the 2001 award for the best interactive learning project from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

Field Specialities:
History of film styles; film and Russian/Soviet art; Dziga Vertov; Sergei Eisenstein; old versus new media; gesture and performance

Selected Publications:
  • Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties. Pordenone. 2004.

  • Ivan the Terrible. British Film Institute. 2002.

  • "Man with a Movie Camera, Reel One: a Selective Glossary,"Film Studies: An International Review, Issue 2, Spring 2000: 51-76.

  • "Sergei Eisenstein," in Encyclopaedia of Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 1998), vol. 2, pp. 96-98.

  • "Homeless Images: D.W.Griffith in the Eye of Soviet Filmmakers", Griffithiana, 60/61, (October, 1997), pp. 51-76.

  • "The Tango in Russia," Experiment: A Journal of Russian Culture, 1996, vol. 2, p. 307-34.

  • "Between the Old and the New: Soviet Film Culture in 1918-24," Griffithiana, 55/56, 1996, pp. 15-64.

  • "Two 'Stylists' of the Teens: Franz Hofer and Evgenii Bauer, in Thomas Elsaesser (ed.) A Second Life: German Cinema's First Decades (Amsterdam University Press, 1996), pp. 264-276.

  • "Media Fantasies and Penetrating Vision: Some Links Between X-Rays, the Microscope, and Film," in: John E. Bowlt, Olga Matich (eds.), Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant-Garde and Cultural Experiment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp 81-99.

  • "The Wise and Wicked Game: Re-editing and Soviet Film Culture of the 1920s," Film History: An International Journal, 1996, Vol. 8, # 3, pp. 327-343.

  • "Russia, 1913: Cinema in the Cultural Landscape," Griffithiana, 1994, vol. 50, pp. 125-148. Reprinted in: Richard Abel, Silent Cinema, (Rutgers UP, 1996), pp. 194-216.

  • "Eisenstein and Russian Symbolist Culture: An unknown script of October", in: Ian Christie, Richard Taylor, (eds) Eisenstein Rediscovered, (Routledge: London, New York, 1993), pp. 79-109.

  • "Caligari in Russia: German Expressionism and Soviet Film Culture", in: Thomas W. Gaethens, (ed.) Kuenstlerischer Austauch / Artistic Exchage: Akten des XXVIII. Internationalen Kongresses fuer Kunstgeschichte, Berlin, 15.-20. Juli 1992 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1992/4), pp. 153-64.


    • Contact Information:

    Department of Art History
    The University of Chicago
    5540 South Greenwood Avenue
    Chicago, IL 60637
    Office: (773) 702-0254
    Fax: (773) 702-5901
    ytsivian at uchicago dot edu


     
    [Committee Members][Cinema Media Studies][Resource Faculty]
    August 11, 2006