This book illuminates and explores the representation of women in Soviet cinema from the late 1950s, through the 1960s, and into the 1970s, a period when Soviet culture shifted away, to varying degrees, from the well-established conventions of socialist realism. Covering films about working class women, rural and urban women, and women from the intelligentsia, it probes various cinematic genres and approaches to film aesthetics, while it also highlights how Soviet cinema depicted the ambiguity of emerging gender roles, pressing social issues, and evolving relationships between men and women. It thereby casts a penetrating light on society and culture in this crucial period of the Soviet Union’s development.
The Soviet Union was the first country in the world to declare women equal to men. At the same time, cinema was emerging as the newest and most accessible form of popular entertainment, and as a powerful tool in propagandizing the Party line. This book looks at the interaction between these two phenomena: at the extent to which women's new status and roles were reflected and promoted on Soviet screens throughout the country's history. Part I, written by Lynne Attwood, provides an essential framework for readers unfamiliar with Soviet studies. It offers a lucid and lively account of the milestones in Soviet history, the importance of film within this history and the changing images and experiences of Soviet women within both cinema and society. In Parts II and III, women from the former Soviet Union - film critics, directors, camera-operators and script-writers - relate their own experiences in the film industry, and their responses to the images of women portrayed on screen. This crisply-written book, illustrated with evocative photographs from Soviet films, will provide readers with a real insight into the relationship between women and film in the Soviet Union.
During the course of three decades, Joseph Stalin’s Gulag, a vast network of forced labor camps and settlements, held many millions of prisoners. People in every corner of the Soviet Union lived in daily terror of imprisonment and execution. In researching the surviving threads of memoirs and oral reminiscences of five women victimized by the Gulag, author Paul R. Gregory has stitched together a collection of stories from the female perspective, a view in short supply. Capturing the fear, paranoia, and unbearable hardship that were hallmarks of Stalin’s Great Terror, Gregory relates the stories of five women from different social strata and regions in vivid prose, from their pre-Gulag lives, through their struggles to survive in the repressive atmosphere of the late 1930s and early 1940s, to the difficulties facing the four who survived as they adjusted to life after the Gulag. These firsthand accounts illustrate how even the wrong word could become a crime against the state. The book begins with a synopsis of Stalin’s rise to power, the roots of the Gulag, and the scheming and plotting that led to and persisted in one of the bloodiest, most egregious dictatorships of the 20th century.
She Animates examines the work of twelve female animation directors in the Soviet Union and Russia, who have long been overlooked by film scholars and historians. Our approach examines these directors within history, culture, and industrial practice in animation. In addition to making a case for including these women and their work in the annals of film and animation history, this volume also makes an argument for why their work should be considered part of the tradition of women’s cinema. We offer textual analysis that focuses on the changing attitudes towards both the woman question and feminism by examining the films in light of the emergence and evolution of a Soviet female subjectivity that still informs women’s cinema in Russia today.
Marina Goldovskaya is one of Russia's best-known documentary filmmakers. The first woman in Russia (and possibly the world) to combine being a director, writer, cinematographer, and producer, Goldovskaya has made over thirty documentary films and more than one hundred programs for Russian, European, Japanese, and American television. Her work, which includes the award-winning films The House on Arbat Street, The Shattered Mirror, and Solovky Power, has garnered international acclaim and won virtually every prize given for documentary filmmaking. In Woman with a Movie Camera, Goldovskaya turns her lens on her own life and work, telling an adventurous, occasionally harrowing story of growing up in the Stalinist era and subsequently documenting Russian society from the 1960s, through the Thaw and Perestroika, to post-Soviet Russia. She recalls her childhood in a Moscow apartment building that housed famous filmmakers, being one of only three women students at the State Film School, and working as an assistant cameraperson on the first film of Andrei Tarkovsky, Russia's most celebrated director. Reviewing her professional filmmaking career, which began in the 1960s, Goldovskaya reveals her passion for creating films that presented a truthful picture of Soviet life, as well as the challenges of working within (and sometimes subverting) the bureaucracies that controlled Russian film and television production and distribution. Along the way, she describes a host of notable figures in Russian film, theater, art, and politics, as well as the technological evolution of filmmaking from film to video to digital media. A compelling portrait of a woman who broke gender and political barriers, as well as the eventful four decades of Russian history she has documented, Woman with a Movie Camera will be fascinating reading for a wide audience.
Russian Cinema provides a lively and informative exploration of the film genres that developed during Russia's tumultuous history, with discussion of the work of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Mikhalkov, Paradzhanov, Sokurov and others. The background section assesses the contribution of visual art and music, especially the work of the composers Shostakovich and Prokofev, to Russian cinema. Subsequent chapters explore a variety of topics: The literary space - the cinematic rendering of the literary text, from 'Sovietized' versions to bolder and more innovative interpretations, as well as adaptations of foreign classics The Russian film comedy looks at this perennially popular genre over the decades, from the 'domestication' of laughter under Stalin to the emergence of satire The historical film - how history has been used in film to affirm prevailing ideological norms, from October to Taurus Women and Russian film discusses some of the female stars of the Soviet screen (Liubov Orlova, Vera Alentova, Liudmila Gurchenko), as well as films made by male and female directors, such as Askoldov and Kira Muratova Film and ideology shows why ideology was an essential component of Soviet films such as The Maxim Trilogy, and how it was later definitively rejected The Russian war film looks at Civil War and Second World War films, and the post-Soviet treatment of recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Chechnya Private life and public morality explores the evolution of melodramas about youth angst, town and village life, personal relationships, and the emergence of the dominant sub-genre of the 1990s, the gangster thriller Autobiography, memory and identity offers a close reading of the work of Andrei Tarkovskii, Russia's greatest post-war director, whose films, including Andrei Rublev and Mirror, place him among the foremost European auteur film-makers Russian Cinema offers a close analysis of over 300 films illustrated with representative stills throughout. As with other titles in the Inside Film series it includes comprehensive filmographies, a thorough bibliography and an annotated further reading list. The book is a jargon-free, accessible study that will be of interest to undergraduates of film studies, modern languages, Russian language and literature, as well as cineastes, film teachers and researchers.
Cinema has long been recognised as the privileged bridge between Soviet ideologies and their mass public. Recent feminist-oriented work has drawn out the symbolic role of women in Soviet culture, but, not surprisingly, men too were expected to play their part. In this first full-length study of masculinity in Stalinist Soviet cinema, John Haynes examines the ‘New Soviet Man’ not only as an ideal of masculinity presented to Soviet cinemagoers, but also, precisely, as a man in his specific, and hotly debated social, cultural and political context. A detailed analysis of Stalinist discourse sets the stage for an examination of the imagined relationship between the patriarch Stalin and his ‘model sons’ in the key genre cycles of the era: from the capital to the collective farms, and ultimately to the very borders of the Soviet state. Informed by contemporary and present day debates over the social and cultural significance of cinema and masculinity, New Soviet Man draws on a range of theoretical and comparative material to produce engaging and accessible readings accounting for both the appeal of, and the inherent potential for subversion within, films produced by the Stalinist culture industry. New Soviet Man will be widely read by students and specialists in the fields of film studies, Russian and Soviet studies, gender and modern European history.
“Widdis’s rich and fascinating book has opened a new perspective from which to think about the Soviet cinema.” —Kritika This major reimagining of the history of Soviet film and its cultural impact explores the fundamental transformations in how film, through the senses, remade the Soviet self in the 1920s and 1930s. Following the Russian Revolution, there was a shared ambition for a ‘sensory revolution’ to accompany political and social change: Soviet men and women were to be reborn into a revitalized relationship with the material world. Cinema was seen as a privileged site for the creation of this sensory revolution: Film could both discover the world anew, and model a way of inhabiting it. Drawing upon an extraordinary array of films, noted scholar Emma Widdis shows how Soviet cinema, as it evolved from the revolutionary avant-garde to Socialist Realism, gradually shifted its materialist agenda from emphasizing the external senses to instilling the appropriate internal senses (consciousness, emotions) in the new Soviet subject.
The Soviet Union was the first nation to allow women pilots to fly combat missions. During World War II the Red Air Force formed three all-female units-grouped into separate fighter, dive bomber, and night bomber regiments-while also recruiting other women to fly with mostly male units. Their amazing story, fully recounted for the first time by Reina Pennington, honors a group of fearless and determined women whose exploits have not yet received the recognition they deserve. Pennington chronicles the creation, organization, and leadership of these regiments, as well as the experiences of the pilots, navigators, bomb loaders, mechanics, and others who made up their ranks, all within the context of the Soviet air war on the Eastern Front. These regiments flew a combined total of more than 30,000 combat sorties, produced at least thirty Heroes of the Soviet Union, and included at least two fighter aces. Among their ranks were women like Marina Raskova ("the Soviet Amelia Earhart"), a renowned aviator who persuaded Stalin in 1941 to establish the all-women regiments; the daredevil "night witches" who flew ramshackle biplanes on nocturnal bombing missions over German frontlines; and fighter aces like Liliia Litviak, whose twelve "kills" are largely unknown in the West. She also tells the story of Alexander Gridnev, a fighter pilot twice arrested by the Soviet secret police before he was chosen to command the women's fighter regiment. Pennington draws upon personal interviews and the Soviet archives to detail the recruitment, training, and combat lives of these women. Deftly mixing anecdote with analysis, her work should find a wide readership among scholars and buffs interested in the history of aviation, World War II, or the Russian military, as well as anyone concerned with the contentious debates surrounding military and combat service for women.
Men Out of Focus charts conversations and polemics about masculinity in Soviet cinema and popular media during the liberal period – often described as "The Thaw" – between the death of Stalin in 1953 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The book shows how the filmmakers of the long 1960s built stories around male protagonists who felt disoriented by a world that was becoming increasingly suburbanized, rebellious, consumerist, household-oriented, and scientifically complex. The dramatic tension of 1960s cinema revolved around the male protagonists’ inability to navigate the challenges of postwar life. Selling over three billion tickets annually, the Soviet film industry became a fault line of postwar cultural contestation. By examining both the discussions surrounding the period’s most controversial movies as well as the cultural context in which these debates happened, the book captures the official and popular reactions to the dizzying transformations of Soviet society after Stalin.
