Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema最新文献

{"title":"The silent Il’inskii: mask and its affects","authors":"O. Davydenko","doi":"10.1080/17503132.2022.2111859","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503132.2022.2111859","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Igor’ Il’inskii (1901–1987) was a celebrated Soviet comic actor, whose work in silent-era cinema has often been underestimated. Even in defining the specific features of his character acting and his screen mask/s, no single view has been formulated among film scholars. This article aims to reveal the main principles of Il’inskii’s acting in Soviet films of the silent period in order to define the relationship between his screen image and masks. To this end, I first explore the perspective of scholars who have written about Il’inskii as well as biographical details of his creative life; moreover, I analyse the character design in the films in which he appeared from 1924 to 1930. The article reveals the particularities of his screen existence and formulates them in the style of an actor’s portrait; the features of Il’inskii’s acting and the affect that it generated emerge in this process. In addition, the article proposes an explanation for the missing consensus in defining Il’inskii’s character acting and screen image through a study of the complexity and inconsistency of character acting and ‘naturalness’ in Il’inskii’s anthropology. Finally, the concept of a childlike playfulness is suggested to describe his mask.","PeriodicalId":41168,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema","volume":"16 1","pages":"164 - 182"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46965839","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Feeling Revolution: Cinema, Genre, and the Politics of Affect Under Stalin","authors":"Claire J. Knight","doi":"10.1080/17503132.2022.2110737","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503132.2022.2110737","url":null,"abstract":"cognitive aesthetics’ (xiii). This shift has probably gone too far; as a result, the book is based on secondary sources. In the bibliography, one finds very few books and articles published in the 1890s to 1910s – and not a single reference to an archival paper collection. Lack of interest in the history of the texts analysed here inevitably leads to certain inaccuracies. When discussing The Twilight of a Woman’s Soul, Kostetskaya points out: ‘It is not by chance that the BFI (British Film Institute) distribution department which converted Bauer’s print into a video master in the 1990s decided to add, electronically, a blue filter to the dream scenes. This change of colour reinforces the heroes’ fluid transition, or immersion, into the world of dreams, hence, into the ocean of unrestricted emotionality’ (98). In silent cinema, blue tinting was widely used for night scenes regardless of their emotional mood. If colleagues from the BFI wished to accent the mysterious or transcendental contents of the scene, as Kostetskaya suggests, they would most likely imitate green tinting. The detailed analysis of the three Symbolist films leaves an ambiguous impression. On the one hand, the idea to use ‘liquescence’ as a magic key that easily opens every film by Bauer does not seem justified. When Kostetskaya argues that Zoya Kadmina in After Death looks like a pearl from the shell while ‘the drapes cover deeper, hence mysterious space, which also could be equated to underwater regions due to the mystery it signifies’ (104), many readers might doubt this interpretation. On the other hand, some of her observations are accurate and engaging. For instance, Kostetskaya gives an interesting overview of Elena, the heroine of Daydreams: she compares her with Ophelia and the image of a mermaid (Rusalka). Regardless of whether one agrees with Kostetskaya’s approach or not, her book will interest scholars who work on Symbolist literature, cinema and art.","PeriodicalId":41168,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema","volume":"16 1","pages":"258 - 259"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44688402","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Russian Symbolism in Search of Transcendental Liquescence: Iconizing Emotion by Blending Time, Media, and the Senses","authors":"A. Kovalová","doi":"10.1080/17503132.2022.2110736","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503132.2022.2110736","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41168,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema","volume":"16 1","pages":"257 - 258"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-08-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41462017","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editorial","authors":"B. Beumers","doi":"10.1080/17503132.2022.2072998","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503132.2022.2072998","url":null,"abstract":"At Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, we condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the suffering it brings to the people of Ukraine. As an academic journal, we consider scholarship an important domain for critical reflection and intellectual exchange. We wish to distinguish between the regime and individual scholars, who often vociferously and at significant risk continue to articulate their dissent from the system. As a scholarly journal devoted to cinema of the former post-Soviet space, we publish scholarship independent of authors’ citizenship and cover the cinematic histories and cultures of the entire postSoviet space: a clear and lucid analysis is the best way to understand cultural strategies, including the use of cinema as a form of soft power. In the second issue for 2022, Studies in Russian & Soviet Cinema presents four articles, which cover a range of aspects of Soviet cinema and its history. In chronological order, we start with an article by Patrícia Silveirinha Castello Branco, who considers the haptic visuality in Eisenstein’s film theory between revolutionary and bourgeois thought, between tradition and the avant-garde, between mechanical and artisanal. Her contribution is followed by two articles about Thaw-era cinema: Olia Kim studies the concept of ‘poetic cinema’ in Soviet and post-Soviet critical discourse; and Maria Mayofis traces the genealogy of the intelligentsia through two Thaw-era films. Finally, Aleksandra Shubina’s quirky analysis of the science-fiction character Alisa Seleznёva concludes the article section. We have a small number of book reviews (which now feature in each issue rather than being clustered in the final issue each year), prepared by Stephen M. Norris, to whom I express my gratitude. As always, Studies in Russian & Soviet Cinema encourages submissions on any aspect of Soviet, post-Soviet and Russian cinema and visual culture, including the post-Soviet space. 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.","PeriodicalId":41168,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema","volume":"16 1","pages":"87 - 87"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48652686","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Sergueï Loznitsa. Un cinéma à l’épreuve du monde","authors":"B. Beumers","doi":"10.1080/17503132.2022.2072991","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503132.2022.2072991","url":null,"abstract":"and temporal relationship between China and revolutionary Russia’ (143) that Soviet filmmakers wanted to create and their desire to make both films about China and films to exhibit in China (in order to radicalise Chinese audiences). This chapter ranges widely, from the animated film China in Flames (Kitai v ogne) to Vladimir Shneiderov’s 1925 expedition film The Great Flight (Velikii perelet), to Tret’iakov’s own, unmade project with Sergei Eisenstein and Eduard Tisse, Dzhungo, to the 1928 documentary Shanghai Document (Shangkhaiskii dokument) and Isaak Babel”s script for the now lost film The Chinese Mill (Kitaiskaia mel’nitsa), in which humour undermines international solidarity. Chapter 4 considers Den Shi-khua, Tret’iakov’s extensive ‘bio-interview’ of one of his Chinese students, a work that evolved over a decade of new editions in the late 1920s and early 1930s, entailing the articulation and elaboration of a new theory of both writing and reading. This complex text requires a complex analysis, a task for which Tyerman is supremely well equipped. The book’s epilogue takes the story further into the 1930s, through the work of the Chinese returnees from Moscow and, in Russia, through the journal International literature and the contribution of two Chinese intermediaries, the poet and translator Xiao San (Emi Siao) and the Peking opera actor Mei Lanfang. It concludes with numbing details on the way in which the arrests and executions of the 1930s decimated the ranks of those involved in the political and cultural reception of the Chinese revolutionary movement. Internationalist aesthetics is a staggeringly erudite, formidably argued and fundamentally important book about which a great deal more could be written than I have space for here. Its case study of political and cultural exchange between nations provides a model for approaching such issues in other areas and epochs and is particularly relevant at the present time of political and cultural competition and the battles for influence.","PeriodicalId":41168,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema","volume":"16 1","pages":"161 - 162"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41792209","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Internationalist aesthetics: China and early Soviet culture","authors":"J. Graffy","doi":"10.1080/17503132.2022.2066314","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503132.2022.2066314","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41168,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema","volume":"16 1","pages":"159 - 160"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43683783","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Poetic cinema: a genealogy of the ‘poetic’ in Soviet and post-Soviet critical discourse","authors":"Olga Kim","doi":"10.1080/17503132.2022.2064578","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503132.2022.2064578","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The term ‘poetic cinema’ is common in Russo-Soviet critical discourse, but has meant different things at different times. This article demonstrates how ‘poetic cinema’ has two overlapping, but nonetheless distinct meanings: on the one hand, according to Russian Formalism, the term ‘poetic’ connotes a defining feature specific to art; on the other hand, it implies an expressive mode characterised by elevation from a concrete reality and commonly ascribed to poetry. The meaning of ‘poetic’ oscillated between the ‘formalist’ and ‘elevated’ senses over the course of Soviet history, whilst the latter meaning has been adapted in varying historical conditions. The article explores these changing meanings of ‘poetic cinema’; the parallels and divergences between the poetic cinema of the 1920s and the 1960s; the use of the terms ‘poetic cinema’ vs. ‘auteur cinema’; and the overlap between ‘poetic’ and ethno-national cinemas during the late 1960s and 70s. The ambiguities of the term ‘poetic cinema’ in Russo-Soviet critical discourse at different ‘thaws’ and ‘freezes’ in Soviet cultural history point to a repressed ‘other’ behind the realist mandate that dominated Soviet cinema and culture.","PeriodicalId":41168,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema","volume":"16 1","pages":"105 - 119"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47546339","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Haptic visuality, sensation and politics in Eisenstein’s film theory","authors":"P. Branco","doi":"10.1080/17503132.2022.2056992","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503132.2022.2056992","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this article, I analyse the convergences between haptic visuality and Sergei Eisenstein’s film theory, in particular his ideas on rhythm, sensorial thought, organic unity, pathos and ecstasy in order to consider the extent to which they constitute the core of a ‘cinema of sensation’ that, for Eisenstein, serves a very important political drive. Simultaneously positioned at the core of avant-garde criticism of traditional models of representation on the one hand, and political revolutionary ideas on the other, cinema appears, to Eisenstein, as a privileged space in which to bring the representative imagery dominant in ‘bourgeois societies’ into question and to put art at the service of the Revolution. My intent is to assess how Eisenstein combines avant-garde aesthetic aims and experimental film practices with the goals of politically engaged creations. This combination is achieved through the exploration of a haptic use of images that prefigure a ‘cinema of sensation’. This article therefore takes the form of a double analysis: on the one hand, it examines the relationship between haptic visuality and Eisenstein’s film theories; on the other, it questions how haptic visuality plays a fundamental role in harmonising the apparently opposite vectors of aesthetic avant-garde and materialistic political drives.","PeriodicalId":41168,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema","volume":"16 1","pages":"88 - 104"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43434016","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Shaping the genealogy of the Soviet intelligentsia in two film adaptations of the 1960s","authors":"M. Mayofis","doi":"10.1080/17503132.2022.2052683","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503132.2022.2052683","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article traces the role of the intelligentsia as represented in the cinema of the Thaw through two Soviet films from 1960: The Blind Musician by Tat’iana Lukashevich and The Northern Story by Evgenii Andrikanis. Both films were adaptations of literary texts: a short novel by Vladimir Korolenko originally published in 1898, and a novella by Konstantin Paustovskii published in 1938 respectively. The protagonists of both films belong to diverse generations of the Russian intelligentsia. Based on an analysis of the films and archival research of the scripts, this article demonstrates that these two films covertly revisit the historical role of Russia’s intelligentsia, which they present as an independent force of historical progress, albeit inspired by the ‘common people’. This new image of the intelligentsia was created by film-makers who had worked in cinema since the 1920s and early 30s, and who remembered Stalin’s humiliation of intellectuals. They opposed to the experience of the late 1940s and its anti-cosmopolitan campaigns the heroic myth of the revolutionary intelligentsia. This myth represented the intelligentsia as Russia’s liberators and was traced back to the pre-Revolutionary period. Both films combine the aesthetics of Stalinist cinema and local experiments that tended to destabilise it.","PeriodicalId":41168,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema","volume":"16 1","pages":"120 - 140"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46356799","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Alisa Seleznёva, a girl alone in outer space: rethinking gender, family and state in late-Soviet children’s science fiction and animation","authors":"Aleksandra Shubina","doi":"10.1080/17503132.2022.2052684","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503132.2022.2052684","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article investigates the potential of children’s literature and animation in late-Soviet Russia to subtly reflect the ways in which state ideology and public attitudes towards societal development and social institutions transform, merge with, mimic and come into conflict with one another. The article focuses on a comparative analysis of two Soviet children’s science-fiction texts about the character Alisa Seleznёva, otherwise known as ‘the girl from the future’. These texts are Kir Bulychёv’s novella Alisa’s Journey (1974) and Roman Kachanov’s animated adaptation of this same tale, The Mystery of the Third Planet (1981). The article argues that the emphasis on the experience of a female character, underrepresented in male-dominated Soviet culture, and the choice of a child protagonist is an expression of scepticism towards the normative social roles found within nuclear families, professional and school environments, and the gender behaviours promulgated by the Soviet master discourse.","PeriodicalId":41168,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema","volume":"16 1","pages":"141 - 158"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46886338","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}