Feeling Revolution: Cinema, Genre, and the Politics of Affect Under Stalin

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.