Masha Shpolberg | Bard College (original) (raw)

Edited Volumes by Masha Shpolberg

Berghahn Books, 2023

The annexation of Eastern Europe to the Soviet sphere of influence after World War II dramaticall... more The annexation of Eastern Europe to the Soviet sphere of influence after World War II dramatically reshaped popular understandings of the natural environment. With an eco-critical approach, Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe breaks new ground in documenting how filmmakers increasingly saw cinema as a tool to critique the social and environmental damage of large-scale projects from socialist regimes and newly forming capitalist presences. New and established scholars with backgrounds across Europe, the United States, and Australia come together to reflect on how the cultural sphere has, and can still, play a role in redefining our relationship to nature.

In: "Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe", 2023

Book Chapters by Masha Shpolberg

In: "Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe", 2023

Through the Prism of Gender and Work: Women’s Labour Struggles in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond, 19th and 20th Centuries, 2023

One of the great promises of state socialism was gender equality. Socialist realist lms across th... more One of the great promises of state socialism was gender equality. Socialist realist lms across the bloc promised women that personal and professional ful llment would go hand-in-hand-that romance was to be found on the construction site. In the 1970s, lmmakers began to openly question this and many other myths of the socialist realist period. In Poland in particular, a series of workers' strikes drew attention to the discrepancy between o cial discourse and actual labour conditions, particularly the "double burden" placed on women, who were expected to put in a full shift at work and at home. Filmmakers were instrumental in making the di cult material conditions of these women's lives palpable. Unsurprisingly, many of these lms were produced by a new generation of women documentarians. This chapter homes in on several short documentaries by Krystyna Gryczełowska and Irena Kamieńska, analyzing the strategies they used to illustrate the "double burden" and, ultimately, advance a critique of the socialist state predicated speci cally on the way it failed its women citizens.

Irina Anisimova, Alyssa DeBlasio, and Maria Hristova (eds.), Energy/Waste: Approaches to the Environment in Post-Soviet Cultures, University of Bergen Press, 2023

This chapter uses documentary and fiction film to examine the late- and post-Soviet preoccupation... more This chapter uses documentary and fiction film to examine the late- and post-Soviet preoccupation with landfills and garbage. It argues that filmmakers were drawn to the garbage dump during transitional moments, as a peripheral space from which to reframe the major political and economic shifts at the center. Films examined include El’dar Riazanov’s "The Promised Heavens" (Nebesa obetovannye, 1991), Roman Prygunov’s "Soulless" (Dukhless, 2014) and Hanna Polak’s "Something Better to Come" (Nadejda lepsze czasy, 2014). Drawing on the work of Julia Kristeva, Martha Nussbaum, and Zygmunt Bauman, it examines how the definition of waste was extended to all those left behind by these changes, and how so-called social progress is predicated on social exclusion. The chapter concludes by considering the unique tools cinema possesses for countering this politics of suppression and disgust, particularly through sustained attention, careful framing, and sound design. The vision of the dump that emerges out of these films is that of an ambivalent space, at once a kind of ‘zone’ outside of history and a flatter, more open and democratic foil to the increasing verticality and hierarchies of the new, capitalist Russia.

Ksenya Gurshtein and Sonja Simonyi (eds.), Postwar Experimental Cinemas in Eastern Europe, Amsterdam University Press, 2021

This chapter analyzes a number of key works by Wojciech Wiszniewski (1946-1981), a visionary film... more This chapter analyzes a number of key works by Wojciech Wiszniewski (1946-1981), a visionary filmmaker, in light of his long association with the Educational Film Studio (Wytwórnia Filmów Oświatowych or WFO) in Łódź. Using Wiszniewski as a guide, the essay explores the conditions that made it possible for the WFO to serve as an incubator for highly experimental film practices in the late socialist period.

Peer-Reviewed Articles by Masha Shpolberg

The Polish Review, 2021

This article explores the use of painting in Stanisław Wyspiański's canonical play and Andrzej Wa... more This article explores the use of painting in Stanisław Wyspiański's canonical play and Andrzej Wajda's film adaptation. Both playwright and film director were originally trained as painters, and include painting prominently in their works. Although both appear deeply suspicious of monumentalizing art forms intended to commemorate and inspire mass political action, they ultimately use painting to advance two distinct conceptions of history and human agency.

Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 2019

This article examines a wave of documentary films about former shock workers (Stakhanovites) and ... more This article examines a wave of documentary films about former shock workers (Stakhanovites) and model workers that were produced in Poland in the 1970s. These short works by Krzysztof Kieślowski, Bohdan Kosiński, Marcel Łoziński, Irena Kamieńska and Wojciech Wiszniewski were esthetically innovative and politically daring attempts to present a more truthful vision of workers’ experience in the Stalinist period. Focusing on the iconic figure of the shock or model worker also allowed these filmmakers to begin identifying and dismantling the ossified forms of socialist realist discourse. The article analyzes the different aesthetic strategies they adopted, as well as the way in which their films were representative of a broader shift away from cinéma vérité and the archival compilation film in the direction of what Polish film scholar Mirosław Przylipiak has termed ‘creative documentary’ (dokument kreacyjny). Finally, through an analysis of the differences between original script and finished film, it argues that these documentaries played a crucial role in both the formal and thematic evolution of Andrzej Wajda’s film "Man of Marble" (1977).

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published in Studies in Eastern European Cinema in January 2019 and is available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/2040350X.2018.1520587

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2019

This article examines the history of the aviation film in light of the genre’s contributions to t... more This article examines the history of the aviation film in light of the genre’s contributions to the evolution of ‘the talkie.’ Starting with the first sound newsreel of Charles Lindbergh’s take-off, the aviation film became a crucial but understudied site for the testing and development of sound technologies, as well as for the teaching of sound film literacy. Through readings of three classic aviation films— Wings (1927), Hell’s Angels (1930) and Dawn Patrol (1930 and 1938), as well as one outlier—Dorothy Arzner’s Christopher Strong (1933)—this article examines how the sound of flight was codified and argues that these films participated in what Miriam Hansen has termed Hollywood’s ‘vernacular modernism’ by popularising previously elite listening practices.

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published in The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television in April 2019 and is available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01439685.2019.1600917

Revue Sciences/Lettres, 2016

De facto banni de l’URSS dès sa création, le conte réapparaît à la fin des années trente avec le ... more De facto banni de l’URSS dès sa création, le conte réapparaît à la fin des années trente avec le resurgissement du nationalisme russe face à la menace nazie. C’est dans ce cadre politique que le jeune réalisateur Alexandre Ro’ou fait de Baba Yaga un personnage cinématographique dans Vassilissa la très belle (1939). Cet article analyse l’évolution de ce personnage en fonction des changements sociaux et politiques à travers quatre films de Ro’ou : Vassilissa (1939), Morozko (1964), Par feu et par flammes (1968) et Cornes d’or (1972). Prenant en compte les différents contextes de production, l’article vise à cerner le contenu allégorique de chaque film et à le mettre en rapport avec les dynamiques historiques.

NECSUS - European Journal of Media Studies, Sep 2014

Short Essays by Masha Shpolberg

The Edge, 2022

The continuing Russia-Ukraine War demands new ways of thinking both about media coverage that see... more The continuing Russia-Ukraine War demands new ways of thinking both about media coverage that seeks to inform in real time and new strategies about how to document it in order to build alternative archives.

Docalogue, 2022

An introduction to the work of the Babylon'13 collective, which was formed during the time of the... more An introduction to the work of the Babylon'13 collective, which was formed during the time of the 2013-2014 Maidan protests in Ukraine and has been actively covering the present war.

Media Fields Journal, 2021

Can a media form aimed at distraction be re-appropriated for spiritual purposes?

Frames Cinema Journal, 2021

An examination of socialist tropes and iconography in the early work of Kira Muratova

East European Film Bulletin, 2019

Kira Muratova has been described as a filmmaker preoccupied with the human need for connection. A... more Kira Muratova has been described as a filmmaker preoccupied with the human need for connection. According to film scholar Jane Taubman, Muratova’s first three films explore this theme as it pertains to love, the next three as it pertains to death, and the films produced in the post-Soviet period alternately to both. Muratova’s frequent use of love triangles even led some Soviet critics to accuse her of “non-socialist, petit bourgeois realism.” This paper attempts to read Muratova’s early oeuvre against the grain of existing film scholarship, tracing the ways in which her films engage with the broader socio-political context. It focuses in particular on the built environment—namely, the recurrence of faulty construction sites in Brief Encounters (1967) and Getting to Know the Big Wide World (1980), reading them as an allegory for the suspended state of the socialist project. Valentina, the protagonist of Brief Encounters refuses to approve a shoddy new apartment building for habitation, despite the will of its would-be inhabitants. Getting to Know the Big Wide World, in turn, is explicitly set at a construction site—a factory which we never see completed (possibly a reference to the first subversive Soviet novel, Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit (1930)). Drawing on reflections by Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin, this paper works to situate these settings somewhere between “the fragment”—a part of a whole that might yet be achieved, and “the ruin”—an element condemned to existing in an incomplete or deteriorated state. The paper concludes by interrogating what the ambivalent nature of these settings, and the ensuing mise-en-scène, contributes to broader conjunction of the private and the public in Muratova’s oeuvre.

Tablet Magazine, 2018

How Polish filmakers documented and interpreted the ‘March Emigration,’ an ‘anti-Zionist’ purge i... more How Polish filmakers documented and interpreted the ‘March Emigration,’ an ‘anti-Zionist’ purge in communist Warsaw 50 years ago.

Senses of Cinema, 2016

The storied tradition of Polish documentary filmmaking continues to grow and evolve.

Filmmaker Interviews by Masha Shpolberg

Film Quarterly, 2024

Interview with Ukrainian filmmaker Iryna Tsilyk about her career and first feature film.

Apparatus: Film, Media, and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe, 2022

Five Ukrainian filmmakers discuss how the war has impacted their work, how they see the role of c... more Five Ukrainian filmmakers discuss how the war has impacted their work, how they see the role of cinema in wartime, and what the institutional landscape of Ukrainian cinema looks like today. The header image: A still from Sashko Danylenko's Istoriya Ukrainy za 5 Khvilyn / The History of Ukraine in 5 Minutes (2019 Ukraine). Courtesy of the author.

Berghahn Books, 2023

The annexation of Eastern Europe to the Soviet sphere of influence after World War II dramaticall... more The annexation of Eastern Europe to the Soviet sphere of influence after World War II dramatically reshaped popular understandings of the natural environment. With an eco-critical approach, Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe breaks new ground in documenting how filmmakers increasingly saw cinema as a tool to critique the social and environmental damage of large-scale projects from socialist regimes and newly forming capitalist presences. New and established scholars with backgrounds across Europe, the United States, and Australia come together to reflect on how the cultural sphere has, and can still, play a role in redefining our relationship to nature.

In: "Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe", 2023

In: "Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe", 2023

Through the Prism of Gender and Work: Women’s Labour Struggles in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond, 19th and 20th Centuries, 2023

One of the great promises of state socialism was gender equality. Socialist realist lms across th... more One of the great promises of state socialism was gender equality. Socialist realist lms across the bloc promised women that personal and professional ful llment would go hand-in-hand-that romance was to be found on the construction site. In the 1970s, lmmakers began to openly question this and many other myths of the socialist realist period. In Poland in particular, a series of workers' strikes drew attention to the discrepancy between o cial discourse and actual labour conditions, particularly the "double burden" placed on women, who were expected to put in a full shift at work and at home. Filmmakers were instrumental in making the di cult material conditions of these women's lives palpable. Unsurprisingly, many of these lms were produced by a new generation of women documentarians. This chapter homes in on several short documentaries by Krystyna Gryczełowska and Irena Kamieńska, analyzing the strategies they used to illustrate the "double burden" and, ultimately, advance a critique of the socialist state predicated speci cally on the way it failed its women citizens.

Irina Anisimova, Alyssa DeBlasio, and Maria Hristova (eds.), Energy/Waste: Approaches to the Environment in Post-Soviet Cultures, University of Bergen Press, 2023

This chapter uses documentary and fiction film to examine the late- and post-Soviet preoccupation... more This chapter uses documentary and fiction film to examine the late- and post-Soviet preoccupation with landfills and garbage. It argues that filmmakers were drawn to the garbage dump during transitional moments, as a peripheral space from which to reframe the major political and economic shifts at the center. Films examined include El’dar Riazanov’s "The Promised Heavens" (Nebesa obetovannye, 1991), Roman Prygunov’s "Soulless" (Dukhless, 2014) and Hanna Polak’s "Something Better to Come" (Nadejda lepsze czasy, 2014). Drawing on the work of Julia Kristeva, Martha Nussbaum, and Zygmunt Bauman, it examines how the definition of waste was extended to all those left behind by these changes, and how so-called social progress is predicated on social exclusion. The chapter concludes by considering the unique tools cinema possesses for countering this politics of suppression and disgust, particularly through sustained attention, careful framing, and sound design. The vision of the dump that emerges out of these films is that of an ambivalent space, at once a kind of ‘zone’ outside of history and a flatter, more open and democratic foil to the increasing verticality and hierarchies of the new, capitalist Russia.

Ksenya Gurshtein and Sonja Simonyi (eds.), Postwar Experimental Cinemas in Eastern Europe, Amsterdam University Press, 2021

This chapter analyzes a number of key works by Wojciech Wiszniewski (1946-1981), a visionary film... more This chapter analyzes a number of key works by Wojciech Wiszniewski (1946-1981), a visionary filmmaker, in light of his long association with the Educational Film Studio (Wytwórnia Filmów Oświatowych or WFO) in Łódź. Using Wiszniewski as a guide, the essay explores the conditions that made it possible for the WFO to serve as an incubator for highly experimental film practices in the late socialist period.

The Polish Review, 2021

This article explores the use of painting in Stanisław Wyspiański's canonical play and Andrzej Wa... more This article explores the use of painting in Stanisław Wyspiański's canonical play and Andrzej Wajda's film adaptation. Both playwright and film director were originally trained as painters, and include painting prominently in their works. Although both appear deeply suspicious of monumentalizing art forms intended to commemorate and inspire mass political action, they ultimately use painting to advance two distinct conceptions of history and human agency.

Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 2019

This article examines a wave of documentary films about former shock workers (Stakhanovites) and ... more This article examines a wave of documentary films about former shock workers (Stakhanovites) and model workers that were produced in Poland in the 1970s. These short works by Krzysztof Kieślowski, Bohdan Kosiński, Marcel Łoziński, Irena Kamieńska and Wojciech Wiszniewski were esthetically innovative and politically daring attempts to present a more truthful vision of workers’ experience in the Stalinist period. Focusing on the iconic figure of the shock or model worker also allowed these filmmakers to begin identifying and dismantling the ossified forms of socialist realist discourse. The article analyzes the different aesthetic strategies they adopted, as well as the way in which their films were representative of a broader shift away from cinéma vérité and the archival compilation film in the direction of what Polish film scholar Mirosław Przylipiak has termed ‘creative documentary’ (dokument kreacyjny). Finally, through an analysis of the differences between original script and finished film, it argues that these documentaries played a crucial role in both the formal and thematic evolution of Andrzej Wajda’s film "Man of Marble" (1977).

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published in Studies in Eastern European Cinema in January 2019 and is available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/2040350X.2018.1520587

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2019

This article examines the history of the aviation film in light of the genre’s contributions to t... more This article examines the history of the aviation film in light of the genre’s contributions to the evolution of ‘the talkie.’ Starting with the first sound newsreel of Charles Lindbergh’s take-off, the aviation film became a crucial but understudied site for the testing and development of sound technologies, as well as for the teaching of sound film literacy. Through readings of three classic aviation films— Wings (1927), Hell’s Angels (1930) and Dawn Patrol (1930 and 1938), as well as one outlier—Dorothy Arzner’s Christopher Strong (1933)—this article examines how the sound of flight was codified and argues that these films participated in what Miriam Hansen has termed Hollywood’s ‘vernacular modernism’ by popularising previously elite listening practices.

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published in The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television in April 2019 and is available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01439685.2019.1600917

Revue Sciences/Lettres, 2016

De facto banni de l’URSS dès sa création, le conte réapparaît à la fin des années trente avec le ... more De facto banni de l’URSS dès sa création, le conte réapparaît à la fin des années trente avec le resurgissement du nationalisme russe face à la menace nazie. C’est dans ce cadre politique que le jeune réalisateur Alexandre Ro’ou fait de Baba Yaga un personnage cinématographique dans Vassilissa la très belle (1939). Cet article analyse l’évolution de ce personnage en fonction des changements sociaux et politiques à travers quatre films de Ro’ou : Vassilissa (1939), Morozko (1964), Par feu et par flammes (1968) et Cornes d’or (1972). Prenant en compte les différents contextes de production, l’article vise à cerner le contenu allégorique de chaque film et à le mettre en rapport avec les dynamiques historiques.

NECSUS - European Journal of Media Studies, Sep 2014

The Edge, 2022

The continuing Russia-Ukraine War demands new ways of thinking both about media coverage that see... more The continuing Russia-Ukraine War demands new ways of thinking both about media coverage that seeks to inform in real time and new strategies about how to document it in order to build alternative archives.

Docalogue, 2022

An introduction to the work of the Babylon'13 collective, which was formed during the time of the... more An introduction to the work of the Babylon'13 collective, which was formed during the time of the 2013-2014 Maidan protests in Ukraine and has been actively covering the present war.

Media Fields Journal, 2021

Can a media form aimed at distraction be re-appropriated for spiritual purposes?

Frames Cinema Journal, 2021

An examination of socialist tropes and iconography in the early work of Kira Muratova

East European Film Bulletin, 2019

Kira Muratova has been described as a filmmaker preoccupied with the human need for connection. A... more Kira Muratova has been described as a filmmaker preoccupied with the human need for connection. According to film scholar Jane Taubman, Muratova’s first three films explore this theme as it pertains to love, the next three as it pertains to death, and the films produced in the post-Soviet period alternately to both. Muratova’s frequent use of love triangles even led some Soviet critics to accuse her of “non-socialist, petit bourgeois realism.” This paper attempts to read Muratova’s early oeuvre against the grain of existing film scholarship, tracing the ways in which her films engage with the broader socio-political context. It focuses in particular on the built environment—namely, the recurrence of faulty construction sites in Brief Encounters (1967) and Getting to Know the Big Wide World (1980), reading them as an allegory for the suspended state of the socialist project. Valentina, the protagonist of Brief Encounters refuses to approve a shoddy new apartment building for habitation, despite the will of its would-be inhabitants. Getting to Know the Big Wide World, in turn, is explicitly set at a construction site—a factory which we never see completed (possibly a reference to the first subversive Soviet novel, Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit (1930)). Drawing on reflections by Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin, this paper works to situate these settings somewhere between “the fragment”—a part of a whole that might yet be achieved, and “the ruin”—an element condemned to existing in an incomplete or deteriorated state. The paper concludes by interrogating what the ambivalent nature of these settings, and the ensuing mise-en-scène, contributes to broader conjunction of the private and the public in Muratova’s oeuvre.

Tablet Magazine, 2018

How Polish filmakers documented and interpreted the ‘March Emigration,’ an ‘anti-Zionist’ purge i... more How Polish filmakers documented and interpreted the ‘March Emigration,’ an ‘anti-Zionist’ purge in communist Warsaw 50 years ago.

Senses of Cinema, 2016

The storied tradition of Polish documentary filmmaking continues to grow and evolve.

Film Quarterly, 2024

Interview with Ukrainian filmmaker Iryna Tsilyk about her career and first feature film.

Apparatus: Film, Media, and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe, 2022

Five Ukrainian filmmakers discuss how the war has impacted their work, how they see the role of c... more Five Ukrainian filmmakers discuss how the war has impacted their work, how they see the role of cinema in wartime, and what the institutional landscape of Ukrainian cinema looks like today. The header image: A still from Sashko Danylenko's Istoriya Ukrainy za 5 Khvilyn / The History of Ukraine in 5 Minutes (2019 Ukraine). Courtesy of the author.

Film Quarterly Quorum, 2022

Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe, 2020

Lukas Brasiskis and Masha Shpolberg interview three emerging filmmakers/video artists about the c... more Lukas Brasiskis and Masha Shpolberg interview three emerging filmmakers/video artists about the climate crisis, the power of the moving image, and the rich but still unmined environmental history of East-Central Europe.

Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 2021

Senses of Cinema, 2017

Analysis of the great Soviet cinema classic

Senses of Cinema, 2017

Overview of the great Soviet cinema classic

Los Angeles Review of Books, 2017

Review of Cristian Mungiu’s "Graduation" (2016), Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s "Mustang" (2015) and Kiril... more Review of Cristian Mungiu’s "Graduation" (2016), Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s "Mustang" (2015) and Kirill Serebrennikov’s "The Student" (2016)

Los Angeles Review of Books, Nov 25, 2015

Review of David Ayer's film "Fury" (2014), starring Brad Pitt

Symposium organized under the leadership of Marijeta Bożović, with Carlotta Chenoweth, Nick Kupen... more Symposium organized under the leadership of Marijeta Bożović, with Carlotta Chenoweth, Nick Kupensky, Jacob Lassin and Ingrid Nordgaard. Yale University. 12 November 2016.

Film Festival and Symposium, organized under the leadership of Marijeta Bożović and Marta Figlero... more Film Festival and Symposium, organized under the leadership of Marijeta Bożović and Marta Figlerowicz, with Ingrid Nordgaard and Mihaela Mihailova. Yale University. 31 March - 1 April, 2017.

Yale University. 4-5 December 2015. Co-organized with Prof. Krystyna Iłłakowicz.

Yale University. 4-6 December 2015. Co-organized with Prof. Krystyna Iłłakowicz.

Yale University. 17-18 October 2015. Co-organized with Yahel Matalon and Zelda Roland.

Yale University Graduate Student Conference. 13-15 February 2015. Co-organized with Regina Karl, ... more Yale University Graduate Student Conference. 13-15 February 2015. Co-organized with Regina Karl, Noriko Morisue, Ila Tyagi, and Swagato Chakravorty.