A Companion to Russian Cinema

Birgit Beumers is Professor of Film Studies at Aberystwyth University (UK). She specialises in Russian culture, especially cinema and theatre. Her most recent publications include A History of Russian Cinema (2009) and Performing Violence (with Mark Lipovetsky, 2009); she has edited Directory of World Cinema: Russia (2010; 2014), The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov (with N. Condee, 2011), Russia’s New Fin de Siècle (2013), and Cinema in Central Asia: Rewriting Cultural Histories (with M. Rouland and G. Abikeyeva, 2013). She is editor of KinoKultura and of Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema.

Notes on Contributors viii

Acknowledgments xv

Notes on Transliteration and References xvi

Introduction 1

Birgit Beumers

Part I Structures of Production, Formation, and Exhibition 21

1 The Film Palaces of Nevsky Prospect: A History of St Petersburg’s Cinemas, 1900–1910 23
Anna Kovalova

2 (V)GIK and the History of Film Education in the Soviet Union, 1920s–1930s 45
Masha Salazkina

3 Lenfilm: The Birth and Death of an Institutional Aesthetic 66
Robert Bird

4 The Adventures of the Kulturfilm in Soviet Russia 92
Oksana Sarkisova

5 Soiuzdetfilm: The Birth of Soviet Children’s Film and the Child Actor 117
Jeremy Hicks

Part II For the State or For the Audience? Auteurism, Genre, and Global Markets 137

6 The Stalinist Musical: Socialist Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism 139
Richard Taylor

7 Soviet Film Comedy of the 1950s and 1960s: Innovation and Restoration 158
Seth Graham

8 Auteur Cinema during the Thaw and Stagnation 178
Eugénie Zvonkine

9 The Blokbaster: How Russian Cinema Learned to Love Hollywood 202
Dawn Seckler and Stephen M. Norris

10 The Global and the National in Post]Soviet Russian Cinema (2004–2012) 224
Maria Bezenkova and Xenia Leontyeva

Part III Sound – Image – Text 249

11 The Literary Scenario and the Soviet Screenwriting Tradition 251
Maria Belodubrovskaya

12 Ideology, Technology, Aesthetics: Early Experiments in Soviet Color Film, 1931–1945 270
Phil Cavendish

13 Learning to Speak Soviet: Soviet Cinema and the Coming of Sound 292
Lilya Kaganovsky

14 Cinema and the Art of Being: Towards a History of Early Soviet Set Design 314
Emma Widdis

15 Stars on Screen and Red Carpet 337
Djurdja Bartlett

16 Revenge of the Cameramen: Soviet Cinematographers in the Director’s Chair 364
Peter Rollberg

Part IV Time and Space, History and Place 389

17 Soldiers, Sailors, and Commissars: The Revolutionary Hero in Soviet Cinema of the 1930s 391
Denise J. Youngblood

18 Defending the Motherland: The Soviet and Russian War Film 409
Stephen M. Norris

19 Shooting Location: Riga 427
Kevin M. F. Platt

20 Capital Images: Moscow on Screen 452
Birgit Beumers

Part V Directors’ Portraits 475

21 Boris Barnet: “This doubly accursed cinema” 477
Julian Graffy

22 Iulii Raizman: Private Lives and Intimacy under Communism 500
Jamie Miller

23 The Man Who Made Them Laugh: Leonid Gaidai, the King of Soviet Comedy 519
Elena Prokhorova

24 Aleksei Gherman: The Last Soviet Auteur 543
Anthony Anemone

25 Knowledge (Imperfective): Andrei Zviagintsev and Contemporary Cinema 565
Nancy Condee

Appendix Chronology of Events in Russian Cinema and History 585

Bibliography 614

Index 631