The Cinema of Russia and the Former Soviet Union

The Cinema of Russia and the Former Soviet Union

Author: Birgit Beumers

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9781904764984

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This volume explores the cinema of the former Soviet Union and contemporary Russia, ranging from the pre-Revolutionary period to the present day. It offers an insight into the development of Soviet film, from 'the most important of all arts' as a propaganda tool to a means of entertainment in the Stalin era, from the rise of its 'dissident' art-house cinema in the 1960s through the glasnost era with its broken taboos to recent Russian blockbusters. Films have been chosen to represent both the classics of Russian and Soviet cinema as well as those films that had a more localised success and remain to date part of Russia's cultural reference system. The volume also covers a range of national film industries of the former Soviet Union in chapters on the greatest films and directors of Ukrainian, Kazakh, Georgian and Armenian cinematography. Films discussed include Strike (1925), Earth (1930), Ivan's Childhood (1962), Mother and Son (1997) and Brother (1997).


Early Soviet Cinema

Early Soviet Cinema

Author: David Gillespie

Publisher: Wallflower Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 126

ISBN-13: 9781903364048

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This text examines the aesthetics of Soviet cinema during its golden age of the 1920s, against a background of cultural ferment and the construction of a new socialist society.


The A to Z of Russian and Soviet Cinema

The A to Z of Russian and Soviet Cinema

Author: Peter Rollberg

Publisher: A to Z Guide Series

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780810876194

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Film lovers all over the world are familiar with the masterpieces of Eisenstein and Tarkovsky. These directors' unique achievements were embedded in a powerful process that began under Russia's last tsar and underwent several periods of blossoming: the bourgeois cinema in the 1910s, the revolutionary avant-garde in the 1920s, the Thaw in the 1950s, and the awakening of national cinemas in the 1960s and 1970s. The A to Z of Russian and Soviet Cinema is the first reference work of its kind in the English language devoted entirely to the cinema of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the post-Soviet period, including both the cinematic highlights and the mainstream. The cinemas of the former Soviet republics, including Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia, Georgia, Lithuania, and Latvia, are also represented with their most influential artists. Through a chronology, an introduction essay, a bibliography, and over 500 cross-referenced dictionary entries on filmmakers, performers, cinematographers, composers, producers, studios, genres, and outstanding films, this reference work covers the history of Russian and Soviet filmmaking from 1896 to 2007.


The Cinema of the Soviet Thaw

The Cinema of the Soviet Thaw

Author: Lida Oukaderova

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2017-05-15

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 025302708X

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Following Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviet Union experienced a dramatic resurgence in cinematic production. The period of the Soviet Thaw became known for its relative political and cultural liberalization; its films, formally innovative and socially engaged, were swept to the center of international cinematic discourse. In The Cinema of the Soviet Thaw, Lida Oukaderova provides an in-depth analysis of several Soviet films made between 1958 and 1967 to argue for the centrality of space—as both filmic trope and social concern—to Thaw-era cinema. Opening with a discussion of the USSR's little-examined late-fifties embrace of panoramic cinema, the book pursues close readings of films by Mikhail Kalatozov, Georgii Danelia, Larisa Shepitko and Kira Muratova, among others. It demonstrates that these directors' works were motivated by an urge to interrogate and reanimate spatial experience, and through this project to probe critical issues of ideology, social progress, and subjectivity within post–Stalinist culture.


On the Wings of Hypothesis

On the Wings of Hypothesis

Author: Annette Michelson

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2020-10-13

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0262044498

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Annette Michelson's erudite and incisive readings of the revolutionary films of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, collected for the first time. This posthumous volume gathers Annette Michelson's erudite and incisive readings of the revolutionary films of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, giving readers the opportunity to track her sustained investigations into their work. Michelson introduced American audiences to Soviet cinema in the early 1970s, extending the interpretive paradigm she had used for American filmmakers of the mid-twentieth century—in which she emphasized phenomenological readings of their work—to films and writings by Eisenstein and Vertov. Over four decades, Michelson returned again and again to what she calls, following Eisenstein, “intellectual cinema”—the deliberate attempt to create philosophically informed analogues for consciousness. The volume includes Michelson's major essays on Eisenstein's unrealized attempts to make movies of both Marx's Capital and Joyce's Ulysses, as well as her authoritative discussion of Vertov's 1929 masterpiece The Man with a Movie Camera. Together, the texts demonstrate Michelson's pervasive influence as a writer and thinker, and her role in the establishment of cinema studies as an academic field. This collection makes these canonical texts available for a new generation of film scholars.


The Film Factory

The Film Factory

Author: Ian Christie

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-10-12

Total Pages: 486

ISBN-13: 1135082510

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The Film Factory provides a comprehensive documentary history of Russian and Soviet cinema. It provokes a major reassessment of conventional Western understanding of Soviet cinema. Based on extensive research and in original translation, the documents selected illustrate both the aesthetic and political development of Russian and Soviet cinema, from its beginnings as a fairground novelty in 1896 to its emergence as a mass medium of entertainment and propaganda on the eve of World War II.


Socialist Senses

Socialist Senses

Author: Emma Widdis

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2017-09-11

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 0253027071

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“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.


A History of Russian Cinema

A History of Russian Cinema

Author: Birgit Beumers

Publisher: Berg Publishers

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13:

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Film emerged in pre-Revolutionary Russia to become the 'most important of all arts' for the new Bolshevik regime and its propaganda machine. This text is a complete history from the beginning of film onwards and presents an engaging narrative of both the industry and its key films in the context of Russia's social and political history.


Ruptures and Continuities in Soviet/Russian Cinema

Ruptures and Continuities in Soviet/Russian Cinema

Author: Birgit Beumers

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-11-22

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1317194705

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This book, based on extensive original research, examines how far the collapse of the Soviet Union represented a threshold that initiated change or whether there are continuities which gradually reshaped cinema in the new Russia. The book considers a wide range of films and film-makers and explores their attitudes to genre, character and aesthetic style. The individual chapters demonstrate that, whereas genres shifted and characters developed, stylistic choices remained largely unaffected.