Review of Road to... (Doroga na..., 2011), dir. Taisia Igumentseva. KinoKultura 40 (2013). (original) (raw)
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Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 2014
This article examines two contrasting phenomena in the portrayal of Russian nationhood in recent independent cinema: "neo-chernukha" and "neo-populist" films. While films of the former continue to deconstruct and debunk myths of Russian nationhood prevalent in blockbuster cinema and the media, the latter group reveals a new tendency among indie filmmakers to construct affirmative, albeit fraught, notions of social identification, often by recycling cultural myths and traditions such as Christian collectivism and kenosis. The article gives close analysis of a representative film from each group, My Joy and Iur'ev Day, as well as a number of other examples, and attempts to situate them in the broader discourse of nationhood, both historically and in contemporary society.
Russian Cinema: A Very Short Story
2018
The article about main lines of russian feature film history: from 1898 to modern times. The history of Russian cinema goes back more than a century, it knew the stages of rise and fall, ideological repression and complete creative freedom. This controversial history was studied by both Russian and foreign scientists. Of course, Soviet and Western scientists studied Soviet cinema from different ideological positions. Soviet filmmakers were generally active in supporting socialist realism in cinema, while Western scholars, on the contrary, rejected this method and paid great attention to the Soviet film avant-garde of the 1920s. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the situation changed: russian and foreign film historians began to study cinema in a similar methodological manner, focusing on both ideological and socio-cultural aspects of the cinematographic process. Keywords: history, film, movie, cinema, USSR, Russia, film historians, film studies.
The Russian Review , 2010
Through an analysis of two important visual projects of the late 1990s—Manskii’s Chronicles and Dzhanik Faiziev and Leonid Parfenov’s forty-three-episode series Lately (1997–2004)—I intend to show how these filmmakers decompose the visual legacy of monolithic and totalizing late socialism. In these documentaries, the last three decades of the USSR emerge as a “tangible time”, to use Shklovskii’s term. Each project achieves a certain degree of temporal and spatial granularity of the period by breaking late Soviet history into material units of meaningful analytic and everyday experience. Autonomous and usually disconnected, these kino-things of sorts bring with them no coherent story. In fact, through their concreteness, they decontextualize identities and destabilize dominant narratives of socialism while simultaneously producing a grounding effect of mnemonic and historical palpability.
Among the recurrent railway and the metro motifs in Russian and Ukrainian fantastic fictions alike are journeys to the world of the dead, or beside the world of the dead, with the critical decision to leave the train or stay on it. The world of the dead may be situated inside the moving train, in the abandoned railway stations, on the other side of the track, or may be the final destination. Ukrainian railway myth is strongly European oriented. The metro literary mythology is closely linked to the folklore of caves and urban legends, although some influence of the fairytale is also felt. The way to the other world everywhere passes through almost invisible doors, ventilation shafts or via non-existent stations and lines, among them some frozen and renamed. The metro maps are generally deemed useless, and should be included in research on fantastic maps in general. Although Moscow metro's image is always sinister, in the case of Kyiv it can be negative, ambivalent or positive. Decapitating tram in contemporary Russian fantastic fiction continues tradition, which was actualized by N. Gumilev and M. Bulgakov. However by now contemporary Ukrainian fantastic representations of the tram were not found.
European Review of History / Revue europeenne d'histoire. Special Issue: The politics of contested narratives: biographical approaches to modern European history , 2012
The purpose of this essay is to illustrate the political application of the biography of a person who has canonical status in Russian culture, such as a national poet. Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), generally regarded as the founder of the Russian literary language, obtained supreme status in the Russian cultural space. Over a period of two centuries, the perception of his person and literary legacy experienced several waves of reappraisal in order to be adjusted to the ideological needs of the state regime. Pushkin's biography became one of the crucial components for strengthening the ‘proper’ image of the poet as it was manipulated through a careful selection of facts from his life story. The surge of interest in and the growth of public attention to Pushkin's figure took place in the context of anniversaries, which entailed propagandising a simplified version of the poet's image ‘for the mass use’. Two anniversary celebrations, which took place under different political regimes, are the focus of this essay: 1899 and 1937. The author analyses a number of texts published on the occasion of both jubilee events that expressed the ‘official’ interpretation of the poet's biography in order to illustrate how the plausible features of social behaviour were communicated with the help of the ‘proper’ image of the national poet.