{"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}
{"title":"The transformation of ‘divisive’ daughters-in-law in Central Asian cinema","authors":"Jamile Satybaldiyeva","doi":"10.1080/17503132.2021.2024039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503132.2021.2024039","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The article explores the transformation of images of daughters-in-law in Central Asian cinema of the Soviet and post-Soviet era. The images of daughters-in-law (kelin) are laden with cultural, social and political meanings that reveal various aspects of identity and gender politics and state ideology in the Central Asian states. The kelins are seen as important symbols of the continuation of patriarchal traditions, yet they also belong to societies where debates on gender roles are becoming increasingly more pronounced. The representations of the daughter-in-law in Central Asian film, thus, has become a contested site showcasing various ideological perspectives, from discourses of female re-traditionalisation to their critique and debate.","PeriodicalId":41168,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema","volume":"16 1","pages":"44 - 60"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45706507","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":"The phenomenon of Partisan Cinema: alternative film production in Kazakhstan (Appendix: A Manifesto)","authors":"S. Abishev, E. Lumpov, Inna Smailova","doi":"10.1080/17503132.2022.2028257","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503132.2022.2028257","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article explores the phenomenon of Partisan Cinema in Kazakhstan in the 2010s in a historical and social context. It explains the funding situation in Kazakhstani film production in order to contextualise the rise of an independent cinema, and places the emergence of socially engaged cinema in the context of early Kazakh experiences with film in the 1930s and the Kazakh New Wave of the late Soviet era. The key films of the movement are analysed, including Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s Constructors and The Owners, as well as Zhosulan Poshanov’s Toll Bar. The absurdism in Yerzhanov’s The Plague at the Karatas Village is singled out and shown as a typical feature of Partisan cinema as it engages with the impossibility of social change, both thematically and stylistically. The framework for this socially engaged cinema is connected to the social realism of the 1950s and 1960s as manifest in the British group of the Angry Young Men. This connection, as well as the principle of Partisan Cinema, are set out in the group’s Manifesto of 2014, appended to this article.","PeriodicalId":41168,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema","volume":"16 1","pages":"61 - 78"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46068890","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":"Psychomotor aesthetics: movement and affect in modern literature and film","authors":"A. Toropova","doi":"10.1080/17503132.2022.2031762","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503132.2022.2031762","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41168,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema","volume":"16 1","pages":"84 - 85"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45162652","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":"Cinemasaurus: Russian film in contemporary context","authors":"R. Morley","doi":"10.1080/17503132.2022.2031761","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503132.2022.2031761","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41168,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema","volume":"16 1","pages":"82 - 84"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43884118","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":"Faster, higher, stronger, comrades! Sports, art, and ideology in late Russian and early Soviet culture","authors":"Stephen M. Norris","doi":"10.1080/17503132.2022.2026156","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503132.2022.2026156","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41168,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema","volume":"16 1","pages":"81 - 82"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46133567","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}