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Unlike previous studies of the Soviet avant-garde during the silent era, which have regarded the works of the period as manifestations of directorial vision, this study emphasizes the collaborative principle at the heart of avant-garde filmmaking units and draws attention to the crucial role of camera operators in creating the visual style of the films, especially on the poetics of composition and lighting. In the Soviet Union of the 1920s and early 1930s, owing to the fetishization of the camera as an embodiment of modern technology, the cameraman was an iconic figure whose creative contribution was encouraged and respected. Drawing upon the film literature of the period, Philip Cavendish describes the culture of the camera operator, charts developments in the art of camera operation, and studies the mechanics of key director-cameraman partnerships. He offers detailed analysis of Soviet avant-garde films and draws comparisons between the visual aesthetics of these works and the modernist experiments taking place in the other spheres of the visual arts.
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.
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.
"This book has been published in conjunction with the exhibition The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet FIlm, organized by the Jewish Museum, New York, and curated by Susan Tumarkin Goodman and Jens Hoffmann, September 18, 2015-February 2, 2016"--Title page verso.
Annette Michelson's erudite and incisive readings of the revolutionary films of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, collected for the first time. This posthumous volume gathers Annette Michelson's erudite and incisive readings of the revolutionary films of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, giving readers the opportunity to track her sustained investigations into their work. Michelson introduced American audiences to Soviet cinema in the early 1970s, extending the interpretive paradigm she had used for American filmmakers of the mid-twentieth century—in which she emphasized phenomenological readings of their work—to films and writings by Eisenstein and Vertov. Over four decades, Michelson returned again and again to what she calls, following Eisenstein, “intellectual cinema”—the deliberate attempt to create philosophically informed analogues for consciousness. The volume includes Michelson's major essays on Eisenstein's unrealized attempts to make movies of both Marx's Capital and Joyce's Ulysses, as well as her authoritative discussion of Vertov's 1929 masterpiece The Man with a Movie Camera. Together, the texts demonstrate Michelson's pervasive influence as a writer and thinker, and her role in the establishment of cinema studies as an academic field. This collection makes these canonical texts available for a new generation of film scholars.
Even people familiar with cinema believe there is no such thing as a Soviet Holocaust film. The Phantom Holocaust tells a different story. The Soviets were actually among the first to portray these events on screens. In 1938, several films exposed Nazi anti-Semitism, and a 1945 movie depicted the mass execution of Jews in Babi Yar. Other significant pictures followed in the 1960s. But the more directly filmmakers engaged with the Holocaust, the more likely their work was to be banned by state censors. Some films were never made while others came out in such limited release that the Holocaust remained a phantom on Soviet screens. Focusing on work by both celebrated and unknown Soviet directors and screenwriters, Olga Gershenson has written the first book about all Soviet narrative films dealing with the Holocaust from 1938 to 1991. In addition to studying the completed films, Gershenson analyzes the projects that were banned at various stages of production. The book draws on archival research and in-depth interviews to tell the sometimes tragic and sometimes triumphant stories of filmmakers who found authentic ways to represent the Holocaust in the face of official silencing. By uncovering little known works, Gershenson makes a significant contribution to the international Holocaust filmography.
This monograph traces the history of Kazakh filmmaking from its conception as a Soviet cultural construction project to its peak as fully-fledged national cinema to its eventual re-imagining as an art-house phenomenon. The author’s analysis places leading directors—Shaken Aimanov, Abdulla Karsakbaev, Sultan-Akhmet Khodzhikov, Mazhit Begalin—in their sociopolitical and cultural context.
Dziga Vertov was one of the greatest innovators of Soviet cinema. The radical complexity of his work—in both sound and silent forms—has given it a central place within contemporary theoretical inquiry. Vertov's writings, collected here, range from calculated manifestos setting forth his heroic vision of film's potential to dark ruminations on the inactivity forced upon him by the bureaucratization of the Soviet state.
Most early Western perceptions of the Holocaust were based on newsreels filmed during the Allied liberation of Germany in 1945. Little, however, was reported of the initial wave of material from Soviet filmmakers, who were in fact the first to document these horrors. In First Films of the Holocaust, Jeremy Hicks presents a pioneering study of Soviet contributions to the growing public awareness of the horrors of Nazi rule. Even before the war, the Soviet film Professor Mamlock, which premiered in the United States in 1938 and coincided with the Kristallnacht pogrom, helped reinforce anti-Nazi sentiment. Yet, Soviet films were often dismissed or even banned in the West as Communist propaganda. Ironically, in the brief 1939-1941 period of Nazi and Soviet alliance, such films were also banned in the Soviet Union, only to be reclaimed after the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, and suppressed yet again during the Cold War. Jeremy Hicks recovers much of the major film work in Soviet depictions of the Holocaust and views them within their political context, both locally and internationally. Overwhelmingly, wartime films were skewed to depict Soviet resistance, "Red funerals," and calls for vengeance, rather than the singling out of Jewish victims by the Nazis. Almost no personal testimony of victims or synchronous sound was recorded, furthering the disconnection of the viewer to the victims. Hicks examines correspondence, scripts, reviews, and compares edited with unedited film to unearth the deliberately hidden Jewish aspects of Soviet depictions of the German invasion and occupation. To Hicks, it's in the silences, gaps, and ellipses that the films speak most clearly. Additionally, he details the reasons why Soviet Holocaust films have been subsequently erased from collective memory in the West and the Soviet Union: their graphic horror, their use as propaganda tools, and the postwar rise of the Red Scare in the United States and anti-Semitic campaigns in the Soviet Union.