Robert Bird Read Bio Collapse
Robert Bird is a Professor in the Departments of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Bird’s primary area of interest is the aesthetic practice and theory of Russian/Soviet modernism. He has published books on Viacheslav Ivanov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Andrei Tarkovsky, and essays on a variety of topics in Russian literature, intellectual history, film, and video art. Most recently he was coeditor (with Christina Kiaer and Zachary Cahill) of Revolution Every Day: A Calendar (Mousse Publishing, 2017), the catalogue to the exhibition “Revolution Every Day” at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago. He is currently completing a book, Soul Machine: How Soviet Film Modeled Socialism, which analyzes the rise of socialist realism as a modeling aesthetic.
# 91
# 88
Set in the “immediate future” of 1946, The Cosmic Voyage narrates the first manned mission to the moon by a venerable academic with similarities to rocket scientist and cosmist theorist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who in fact consulted on the film’s design and who approved its screenplay before his death in the year of the film’s release. Though The Cosmic Voyage was billed as a sound film, the soundtrack is wholly musical, and the actors follow conventions of silent cinema. And yet, despite its stylistic archaism, the film exhibits several features that make it into a powerful model not only for the “immediate future,” but also for a future cinema.
Cosmism, a Superhumanity symposium at Princeton University School of Architecture
