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).


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: 0

ISBN-13: 9781904764984

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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).


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.


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.


One Hundred Years of Soviet Cinema

One Hundred Years of Soviet Cinema

Author: Daniel Fairfax

Publisher:

Published: 2019-07-09

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 9780994411259

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One hundred years of Soviet cinema? How is this possible, if the USSR itself lasted barely seven decades before its spectacular demise in 1991? How can we speak of the continued existence of Soviet cinema in the quarter-century since this apocalyptic event? But from Battleship Potemkin to The Colour of Pomegranates, from Man with a Movie Camera to Stalker, from The Cranes Are Flying to Hard to be a God, cinema from the "sixth of the world" covered by the Soviet Union continues, indefatigably, to exist. Firstly, because films made during the era of Communist rule are still with us, even well after the social and political framework in which they were realised has perished. And secondly, because, even to this day, the history of the USSR looms large in the cinema of Russia and the other former Soviet republics, as contemporary filmmakers engage in the vast project of digesting the tragic history of the Soviet experiment. The centenary of the October 1917 Russian revolution, when under Lenin's leadership the Bolsheviks established the world's first proletarian state, was marked by a major dossier on Soviet cinema in the Australian online film journal Senses of Cinema. This book is an augmented version of that dossier, collecting more than sixty articles on Soviet and post-Soviet films arranged in chronological order, and represents the first collaboration between Senses of Cinema and The Leda Tape Organisation.


Soviet Science Fiction Cinema and the Space Age

Soviet Science Fiction Cinema and the Space Age

Author: Natalija Majsova

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-04-28

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1793609322

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This book interrogates the relations between nostalgias of today and past utopias in the context of the space age of the 20th century and its cinematic representations in the USSR and in post-Soviet Russia. Once an enthusiastic projection, then a promising and uncanny present, and eventually an assemblage of nostalgic signifiers, in the history of world cinema, this space age has been linked primarily to the genre of science fiction. Here, aspects of the space age such as humanity’s imminent expansion to space, interplanetary travel, contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, and intergalactic governance and economy were both celebrated and critically interrogated as cosmopolitan ideals and nation-branding strategies. This book presents the contemporary relevance of this genre as heritage and legacy, archive and canon, and a nest of forgotten ideals and warnings, as well as nostalgic anchoring points. The author analyzes over 30 Soviet science fiction films, foregrounding their structures of utopia and their evolution over time, in order to trace both their transnational positionalities, transmedial resonance, and impact on post-Soviet Russian films about the space age. Concepts, crucial to the understanding of space futures of the past, such as utopianism, otherness, liminality, and no(w)stalgia are activated to draw out the fictional tenants of the memory of the Soviet space age, and to establish the limits and potentialities of Soviet (exra)terraformative ambitions.


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.


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.