- Vartanov refers to his method as "direction of undirected action".
- Oscar winner and Pulitzer Prize recipient William Saroyan nicknamed him the "eyemo-man" (after the early 20th century 35mm movie camera Eyemo)
- Graduate of the world's oldest film school VGIK in Moscow, Russia, where his teachers were Anatoli Golovnya (cinematographer of Vsevolod Pudovkin's 1926 classic "Mother") and Boris Volchek (cinematographer of Mikhail Romm's 1937 classic "Lenin in October").
- Grew his beard after the death of his mother. Neither his wife nor his children have seen him without it.
- Has a big nose and wears intentionally deformed hats and berets.
- Best friend of the legendary Sergei Parajanov who considered Mikhail Vartanov to be the only authentic expert of his art and who was one of only a handful of Paradjanov's (many) friends to passionately campaign for his release from the Soviet prisons - their brave prison correspondence later became a chapter of Parajanov: The Last Spring (1992).
- Cinematographer of the Year at the Sixth Annual USSR Film Festival (1973); Vartanov received the award for "Song of Eternity" a film he disliked. USSR Film Festival was inaugurated in 1968 and each year was held in a different Soviet capital.
- Diploma film "The Monologue of the Mask" won Dakar's Golden Antelope Award and was continually screened for new generations of cinematography students in Moscow for over 15 years until the print was damaged.
- King of Norway, Harald the Fifth, and Vartanov were born on the same day, February 21, 1937; King had a son and a daughter and Vartanov had a son and a daughter.
- XVI century Condestable Palace in Pamplona, Spain, held a photography exhibition, I Will Wear Your Beret Papa, in his memory a month after his death.
- Attended the ceremony of the unveiling of the monument on the shooting site of D.W. Griffith's silent film "In Old California" (1910) - the first movie made in Hollywood. (May 2004)
- Member of the jury at the Navarra International Documentary Film Festival responsible for presenting Spain's first annual Jean Vigo Award. (February 2007)
- Member of the jury at the Beverly Hills Film Festival (2007)
- 1st public appearance in almost a decade at the American Film Institute's Exhibition of Russian Cinema in Hollywood; Mikhail Vartanov, Martin Vartanov, William Friedkin, Leonardo DiCaprio, Peter Bogdanovich presented "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors," "Ivan The Terrible," "Battleship Potemkin" and "The Ballad of a Soldier" respectively. (April 2003)
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