Attending closely to the implicit kineticism of Picabia's 1924 “Instantaneist Manifesto” and the musicalist aesthetic of his art, Annette Michelson considers the artist's interest in time and moving images, arguing that temporalization is the key impulse in his practice regardless of medium. This dedication to temporalization, the author claims, manifests not only as a fetishization of mobility and travel but more critically as the stimulus for interrelations between dance, cinema, painting, and poetry.

Introducing Structuralism and theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss to American audiences in a 1970 lecture at the Guggenheim Museum, Annette Michelson stresses the importance of the linguistic mode for structuralist analysis and examines the nature and limits of its consequences for art and aesthetics. Structuralist anthropology, the author argues, is fundamentally rationalist in approach, proposing an intelligibility of the universe through the organization of differences into overarching schema; it is the relationship between signs, rather than the nature of the individual signs themselves, that determines meaning. Michelson concludes that while such a method may seem applicable to contemporary art, the radically rational stance of Structuralism inhibits our understanding of it. Rather than serving a semantic function, one that could be elucidated through structural analysis, art informs us of the nature of consciousness itself.

Among Dziga Vertov's films, Three Songs of Lenin is unique in its immediate and enduring approval within the Soviet Union. The film was commissioned for the tenth anniversary of Lenin's death and made extensive use of archival material documenting Lenin's political trajectory and his funeral. Annette Michelson offers a reading of the film's political function within the historical situation of the USSR in the 1930s, claiming that the register and scale of Three Songs of Lenin make the film a “kinetic icon” for the deceased leader. Michelson discusses similarities between religious icons and films, particularly the way in which death haunts both, and she examines the way in which the film's emphasis on the role of the female mourner enables it to transform document into monument.

In this essay from 1972, first published in Artforum, Annette Michelson explores Dziga Vertov's masterpiece The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) at a moment when the name of the master of Soviet documentary style was gaining traction but his work was under-analyzed. Rigorously inventorying the many techniques Vertov uses to disrupt cinematic illusionism, Michelson argues that the film marks a significant transition in Vertov's practice—from the “world of naked truth” of the Kino-Eye to the more complex “exploration of the terrain of consciousness itself” that structures The Man with a Movie Camera.

Stuart Liebman : I want to take up several issues in Malcolm's introduction in order to amplify, and perhaps to qualify, some of his remarks. He rightly notes that we are presently living through a period of scholarly engagement with early film theory. Malcolm implies that the current interest is somehow larger and more extensive than it used to be, and there is some truth in that. In addition to those texts he mentions, one must cite Richard Taylor's massive efforts to reclaim through retranslation vast amounts of Eisenstein's writings, including a great deal of new material. He has also done the same for many of Pudovkin's texts. Taylor's efforts built on his joint project with Ian Christie to substantially expand the texts available by lesser-known Soviet figures in their excellent anthology The Film Factory , published in 1988, the same year that Abel's anthology on French cinema was released.

Long-awaited, too long delayed, the writings of Jean Epstein (1897–1953) are now available to English-language readers in a generous selection of excerpts from his theoretical work. Well chosen by the co-editors, Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul, and decently if somewhat unevenly translated, they are complemented by a series of lively essays on Epstein's various interests, which ranged widely.