While at the IFK, John MacKay plans to examine the relationships between avant-garde and documentary filmmaking in the USSR-Russia and Western Europe, with a particular focus on the response of Austrian avant-garde and documentary filmmakers to early Soviet film. The reception of Vertov in Austria has been of unusual duration and importance, involving major film restorations and digitization, exhibition, scholarship, conferences, translations and (not least) archiving. He will consider the impact of Soviet film on actual filmmaking practice in Austria. To this end, he will not only watch a great many hard-to-see films, but will also conduct interviews with filmmakers and critics, focusing on figures such as Peter Kubelka, VALIE EXPORT, the late Kurt Kren, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Angela Summereder, and the late Michael Glawogger. He wants to hear directly from filmmakers and their collaborators about their own work, and about how their own encounter with Soviet filmmaking helped to shape it.

John MacKay received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Yale University in 1998. His teaching interests include Russian, German, French, and English language and literature; comparative studies of poetry; literary theory; film history, theory, and aesthetics; documentary film; intellectual history (particularly comparative studies in modernity); Marxism; history of hermeneutics; literature and slavery; utopias; world cinema; and collage across the arts.