Editorial

Abstract

The third issue of Studies in Russian & Soviet Cinema for 2022 presents three articles and a discovery. Let us turn to the contributions: first, we have an article by Olga Davydenko, who was one of the winners of the 2021 competition of best student articles at St Petersburg State University for Film and Television, which – in the hibernation period of the pandemic, we organised for the second time with the wonderful Polina Stepanova, because we wanted our students to have a little bit of a challenge in these dull days of lockdowns. The article offers a fine investigation of the acting ‘mask’ of the actor Igor’ Il’inski, whose work is here explored in the films of the silent era. Second, there is an article on the scenarios of Aleksandr Rzheshevskii, who scripted, among other films, Sergei Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow. Sergei Ogudev brilliantly analyses Rzheshevskii’s scripts within the context of narrative theories. The third article in this issue comes with a discovery, of Andrei Tarkovsky’s and Andrei Konchalovsky’s script for their unrealised project Antarctica, Faraway Country, finalised in 1966. Parts of an earlier version of the script (from the late 1950s) are known, but the scholars Nina Sputnitskaia and Maksim Kazyutchis have accomplished something else here, namely the reconstruction of the working process from the first version to the final script, which is published as an appendix to their article. In their discussion, they draw out the origins in this script of later characteristic features of Tarkovsky’s oeuvre. As usual, we have a selection of book reviews, prepared and presented by Stephen M. Norris, to whom I express my gratitude. And – as always, Studies in Russian & Soviet Cinema encourages submissions on any aspect of pre-Revolutionary, Soviet-era and post-Soviet cinema and visual culture, including the former Soviet territories. We operate a system of double-blind peer-review; submissions should be original (i.e. previously unpublished, including publications in another language) and will be considered at any time throughout the year. They should be sent to the editor at birgit.beumers@gmail.com.