Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry
Robert Bird is a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at The University of Chicago. His primary area of interest is the aesthetic practice and theory of Russian/Soviet modernism. He has published two books on the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky—Andrei Rublev (2004) and Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema (2008)—as well as numerous essays on the art and theory of the moving image, mostly in Russia, from the 1920s to the present day. He is presently at work on a book manuscript "Soul Machine: How Soviet Film Modeled Socialism," which analyzes the diverse uses of scale models in Soviet film of the 1930s and argues that socialist realism was a modeling aesthetic. Concurrently, he is collaborating on Revolution Every Day, an exhibition that will juxtapose Soviet graphic art of the 1920s and 1930s with work on film by Dziga Vertov, Olga Chernysheva, and Cauleen Smith, which will open at the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago in September 2017. His next project “Revolutionology” will examine the phenomenon of intellectual revolution across a variety of media, spaces, and historical moments, from 1848 to the present day.
