Soviet Art House

Soviet Art House
Author: Catriona Kelly
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 541
Release: 2021
Genre: History
ISBN: 0197548369

Drawing on documents from archives in St Petersburg and Moscow, the analysis portrays film production "in the round" and shows that the term "censorship" is less appropriate than the description preferred in the Soviet film industry itself, "control," which referred to a no less exigent but far more complex and sophisticated process. The book opens with four framing chapters that examine the overall context in which films were produced. The two opening chapters trace the various crises that beset film production between 1961 and 1970 (Chapter 1) and 1970 and 1985 (Chapter 2). These are followed by a chapter on the working life of the studio and particularly the technical aspects of production (Chapter 3), and a chapter on the studio aesthetic (Chapter 4). The second part of the book comprises close analyses of fifteen films that are particularly typical of the studio's production and which had especial impact within the studio and beyond. .

The Cinema of Russia and the Former Soviet Union

The Cinema of Russia and the Former Soviet Union
Author: Birgit Beumers
Publisher:
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2007
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9781904764984

This volume explores the cinema of the former Soviet Union and contemporary Russia, ranging from the pre-Revolutionary period to the present day. It offers an insight into the development of Soviet film, from 'the most important of all arts' as a propaganda tool to a means of entertainment in the Stalin era, from the rise of its 'dissident' art-house cinema in the 1960s through the glasnost era with its broken taboos to recent Russian blockbusters. Films have been chosen to represent both the classics of Russian and Soviet cinema as well as those films that had a more localised success and remain to date part of Russia's cultural reference system. The volume also covers a range of national film industries of the former Soviet Union in chapters on the greatest films and directors of Ukrainian, Kazakh, Georgian and Armenian cinematography. Films discussed include Strike (1925), Earth (1930), Ivan's Childhood (1962), Mother and Son (1997) and Brother (1997).

Soviet Posters

Soviet Posters
Author: Maria Lafont
Publisher: Prestel Publishing
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2007
Genre: Posters, Soviet
ISBN: 9783791337524

This massive book of Soviet propaganda posters, many rare and never before published, is at once a revealing historical document and a sublime example of graphic art at its best. Dating from 1917 to the beginning of the Cold War, the posters in this book feature the work of such major Russian ground-breaking avant-garde designers as El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko as well as extraordinary works by anonymous artists. Presented in full color, the 250 posters gathered here range in themes from warnings about the dangers of alcohol abuse and the creeping Nazi menace to illustrations of utopian harmony and the Soviet industrial machine. A brief illustrated introduction offers a chronological overview of the period that produced such eloquent art, which has long been a major source of inspiration to artists and designers.

The Cinema of Soviet Kazakhstan 1925–1991

The Cinema of Soviet Kazakhstan 1925–1991
Author: Peter Rollberg
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 467
Release: 2021-02-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1793641757

This monograph traces the history of Kazakh filmmaking from its conception as a Soviet cultural construction project to its peak as fully-fledged national cinema to its eventual re-imagining as an art-house phenomenon. The author’s analysis places leading directors—Shaken Aimanov, Abdulla Karsakbaev, Sultan-Akhmet Khodzhikov, Mazhit Begalin—in their sociopolitical and cultural context.

In the Soviet House of Culture

In the Soviet House of Culture
Author: Bruce Grant
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2020-10-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0691219702

At the outset of the twentieth century, the Nivkhi of Sakhalin Island were a small population of fishermen under Russian dominion and an Asian cultural sway. The turbulence of the decades that followed would transform them dramatically. While Russian missionaries hounded them for their pagan ways, Lenin praised them; while Stalin routed them in purges, Khrushchev gave them respite; and while Brezhnev organized complex resettlement campaigns, Gorbachev pronounced that they were free to resume a traditional life. But what is tradition after seven decades of building a Soviet world? Based on years of research in the former Soviet Union, Bruce Grant's book draws upon Nivkh interviews, newly opened archives, and rarely translated Soviet ethnographic texts to examine the effects of this remarkable state venture in the construction of identity. With a keen sensitivity, Grant explores the often paradoxical participation by Nivkhi in these shifting waves of Sovietization and poses questions about how cultural identity is constituted and reconstituted, restructured and dismantled. Part chronicle of modernization, part saga of memory and forgetting, In the Soviet House of Culture is an interpretive ethnography of one people's attempts to recapture the past as they look toward the future. This is a book that will appeal to anthropologists and historians alike, as well as to anyone who is interested in the people and politics of the former Soviet Union.

The House of Government

The House of Government
Author: Yuri Slezkine
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 1123
Release: 2017-08-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400888174

On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Grossman’s Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine’s gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin’s purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children’s loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union. Completed in 1931, the House of Government, later known as the House on the Embankment, was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 505 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a movie theater and a library to a tennis court and a shooting range. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building’s residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet state until some eight hundred of them were evicted from the House and led, one by one, to prison or their deaths. Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, The House of Government weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable human saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking
Author: Anya von Bremzen
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2013-09-17
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307886832

A James Beard Award-winning writer captures life under the Red socialist banner in this wildly inventive, tragicomic memoir of feasts, famines, and three generations “Delicious . . . A banquet of anecdote that brings history to life with intimacy, candor, and glorious color.”—NPR’s All Things Considered Born in 1963, in an era of bread shortages, Anya grew up in a communal Moscow apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen. She sang odes to Lenin, black-marketeered Juicy Fruit gum at school, watched her father brew moonshine, and, like most Soviet citizens, longed for a taste of the mythical West. It was a life by turns absurd, naively joyous, and melancholy—and ultimately intolerable to her anti-Soviet mother, Larisa. When Anya was ten, she and Larisa fled the political repression of Brezhnev-era Russia, arriving in Philadelphia with no winter coats and no right of return. Now Anya occupies two parallel food universes: one where she writes about four-star restaurants, the other where a taste of humble kolbasa transports her back to her scarlet-blazed socialist past. To bring that past to life, Anya and her mother decide to eat and cook their way through every decade of the Soviet experience. Through these meals, and through the tales of three generations of her family, Anya tells the intimate yet epic story of life in the USSR. Wildly inventive and slyly witty, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is that rare book that stirs our souls and our senses. ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Christian Science Monitor, Publishers Weekly

The Legacy of World War II in European Arthouse Cinema

The Legacy of World War II in European Arthouse Cinema
Author: Samm Deighan
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2021-06-08
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1476643393

World War II irrevocably shaped culture--and much of cinema--in the 20th century, thanks to its devastating, global impact that changed the way we think about and portray war. This book focuses on European war films made about the war between 1945 and 1985 in countries that were occupied or invaded by the Nazis, such as Poland, France, Italy, the Soviet Union, and Germany itself. Many of these films were banned, censored, or sharply criticized at the time of their release for the radical ways they reframed the war and rejected the mythologizing of war experience as a heroic battle between the forces of good and evil. The particular films examined, made by arthouse directors like Pier Paolo Pasolini, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Larisa Shepitko, among many more, deviate from mainstream cinematic depictions of the war and instead present viewpoints and experiences of WWII which are often controversial or transgressive. They explore the often-complicated ways that participation in war and genocide shapes national identity and the ways that we think about bodies and sexuality, trauma, violence, power, justice, and personal responsibility--themes that continue to resonate throughout culture and global politics.

The personality cult of Stalin in Soviet posters, 1929–1953

The personality cult of Stalin in Soviet posters, 1929–1953
Author: Anita Pisch
Publisher: ANU Press
Total Pages: 538
Release: 2016-12-16
Genre: Design
ISBN: 176046063X

From 1929 until 1953, Iosif Stalin’s image became a central symbol in Soviet propaganda. Touched up images of an omniscient Stalin appeared everywhere: emblazoned across buildings and lining the streets; carried in parades and woven into carpets; and saturating the media of socialist realist painting, statuary, monumental architecture, friezes, banners, and posters. From the beginning of the Soviet regime, posters were seen as a vitally important medium for communicating with the population of the vast territories of the USSR. Stalin’s image became a symbol of Bolshevik values and the personification of a revolutionary new type of society. The persona created for Stalin in propaganda posters reflects how the state saw itself or, at the very least, how it wished to appear in the eyes of the people. The ‘Stalin’ who was celebrated in posters bore but scant resemblance to the man Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, whose humble origins, criminal past, penchant for violent solutions and unprepossessing appearance made him an unlikely recipient of uncritical charismatic adulation. The Bolsheviks needed a wise, nurturing and authoritative figure to embody their revolutionary vision and to legitimate their hold on power. This leader would come to embody the sacred and archetypal qualities of the wise Teacher, the Father of the nation, the great Warrior and military strategist, and the Saviour of first the Russian land, and then the whole world. This book is the first dedicated study on the marketing of Stalin in Soviet propaganda posters. Drawing on the archives of libraries and museums throughout Russia, hundreds of previously unpublished posters are examined, with more than 130 reproduced in full colour. The personality cult of Stalin in Soviet posters, 1929–1953 is a unique and valuable contribution to the discourse in Stalinist studies across a number of disciplines.