The cinema of Soviet Kazakhstan, 1925-1991: an uneasy legacy

researched case study, but is this book, considered as a whole, greater than the sum of its parts? Kelly’s case studies prove in exhaustive detail what we have long known: for all the Soviet film bureaucracy’s claims to centralised control over every stage of the production, it never really functioned that way. Production was messy, convoluted and unpredictable; as difficult as it was for some not-very-rebellious filmmakers to function, there was still plenty of space for subversive work. Jamie Miller’s and Maria Belodubrovskaya’s studies of filmmaking in the Stalin era have demonstrated that very well, in much less detail than Kelly provides, but with much greater attention to developing an analytical framework that allows readers to better understand the ‘big picture’. Of course, the period under consideration in Soviet art house, the Brezhnev era, has been understudied compared to others, but not to the extent that it appears to be here. While Kelly pays careful attention to all Russian language sources, she does not seem to be interested in engaging with what scholars outside Russia have written, beyond merely listing their books in her voluminous notes, where they tend to be buried. I was particularly surprised by the failure to engage intellectually with Josephine Woll’s Real images, for example, because like Kelly, Woll was also interested in framing the long 1960s aesthetically, and some of their work overlaps, not specifically, but conceptually. And some important and potentially relevant work is just absent, such as Tony Shaw’s detailed analysis of the production history of The Blue Bird (a disastrous Lenfilm & Twentieth-Century Fox coproduction that pops up several times) in the Journal of Cold War Studies nearly a decade ago. Some readers of SRSC will likely take issue with all or part of my assessment, seeing the cornucopia of new details in this book about Lenfilm’s operations as more than compensating for the lack of a real thesis or sustained analysis. Unfortunately, it must also be noted that Oxford University Press has obviously pinched pennies in the production: cramped type, poor quality paper, drab cover art, low contrast reproductions and no bibliography. Shortcomings aside, Soviet art house is still a major monograph written by a leading scholar at one of the world’s greatest universities – and published by its very own press. It certainly deserves a more fitting presentation.