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).
“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 Soviets have long struggled with the knotty problem of assimilating Dostoevsky into a revolutionary culture. Yet to filmmakers, he has been a continuing inspiration, a novelist of ideas with an unparalleled gift for visualization. The sensitive medium of film, with its popularity and high official status in the Soviet Union, provides a unique opportunity to study the interplay between art and ideology. Offering a vivid picture of Soviet culture, and comparing and contrasting the aesthetics of Socialist Realism and modernism, this book shrewdly demonstrates that film and Dostoevsky have served each other well. Dostoevsky and Soviet Film blends three major motifs with ease and elegance: an analysis of all films produced in the Soviet Union which used Dostoevsky's fiction, as well as those planned but never realized; a history of the Soviet film industry spanning prerevolutionary days to the present; and an exploration of the dual challenge of art and politics which Soviet film has consistently had to face. N. M. Lary demonstrates the ways in which a number of film artists—Eisenstein, Grigori Kozintsev, Viktor Shklovsky, and Fridrikh Ermler among them—altered and extended the language of film under Dostoevsky's influence. He has included substantial excerpts from Eisenstein's notes from his "Chapter on Dostoevsky," which appear here for the first time in any language, and he also draws upon other theoretical and critical writings, film scripts, project notes, interviews, contemporary reviews, and many autobiographical reminiscences. Besides discussing such Dostoevsky adaptations as Ivan Pyriev's The Brothers Karamazav, Alov and Naumov's suppressed Nasty Story, Kulidzhanov's Crime and Punishment, and Ermler's Great Citizen, Lary offers suggestive critical analyses of Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible and Kozintsev's King Lear. He provides as well his own provocative readings of Dostoevsky, uncovering new layers of meaning in the texts through his close study of their filmic treatment. Lary's book tells the fascinating story of Dostoevsky and Soviet film as it unfolds both onscreen and off. It not only reveals some hidden sides of Soviet resistance to Dostoevsky's work, but through its insights contributes toward a new understanding of the uses of literature in film.
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.
This is the first collection to be inspired and informed by the new films and archival material that glasnost and perestroika have revealed, and the new methodological approaches that are developing in tandem. Film critics and historians from Britain, America, France and the USSR attempt the vital task of scrutinising Soviet film, and re-examining the Cold War assumptions of traditional historiography. Whereas most books on Soviet giants have glorified the directorial giants of the `golden age' of the 1920s, Inside the Film Factory also recognises the achievements of popular cinema from the pre-Revolutionary period through to the 1930s and beyond. It also evaluates the impact of Western cinema on the early experimenters of montage, Russian science fiction's influence on film-making, and the long-suppressed history of Soviet Yiddish productions. Alongside the new perspectives and source material on the much-mythologised figures of Kuleshov and Medvedkin, the book provides the first extended accounts in English of the important but neglected careers of directors Yakov Protazanov and Boris Barnet.
Certain aspects of American popular culture had a formative influence on early Soviet identity and aspirations. Traditionally, Soviet Russia and the United States between the 1920s and the 1940s are regarded as polar opposites on nearly every front. Yet American films and translated adventure fiction were warmly received in 1920s Russia and partly shaped ideals of the New Soviet Person into the 1940s. Cinema was crucial in propagating this new social hero. While open admiration of American film stars and heroes of literary fiction in the Soviet press was restricted from the late 1920s onwards, many positive heroes of Soviet Socialist Realist films in the 1930s and 1940s were partially a product of Soviet Americanism of the previous decade. Some of the new Soviet heroes in films of the 1930s and 1940s possessed traits noticeably evocative of the previously popular American film stars such as Douglas Fairbanks, Pearl White and Mary Pickford. Others cinematically represented the contemporary trope of the 'Russian American,' an ideal worker exemplifying the Stalinist marriage of 'Russian revolutionary sweep' with 'American efficiency. 'Russian Americans' in Soviet Film analyses the content, reception and underlying influences of over 60 Soviet and American films, the book explores new territory in Soviet cinema and Soviet-American cultural relations. It presents groundbreaking archival research encompassing Soviet audience surveys, Soviet film journals and reviews, memoirs and articles by Soviet filmmakers, and scripts, among other sources. The book reveals that values of optimism, technological skill, efficiency and self-reliance - perceived as quintessentially American - were incorporated into new Soviet ideals through channels of cross-cultural dissemination, resulting in cultural synthesis.
In 1917 the Bolsheviks proclaimed a world remade. This book shows how Soviet cinema encouraged popular support of state initiatives in the years up to the Second World War, helping to create a new Russian identity & territory, an 'imaginary geography' of Sovietness.
