Ruptures and Continuities in Soviet/Russian Cinema Styles, characters and genres before and after the collapse of the USSR

This book, based on extensive original research, examines how far the collapse of the Soviet Union represented a threshold that initiated change or whether there are continuities which gradually reshaped cinema in the new Russia. The book considers a wide range of films and film-makers and explores their attitudes to genre, character and aesthetic style. The individual chapters demonstrate that, whereas genres shifted and characters developed, stylistic choices remained largely unaffected.

Acknowledgments & Note on Transliteration Contributor Details List of Illustrations Introduction Re-construction, or perestroika: re-visioning, re-making, re-framing Birgit Beumers and Eugénie Zvonkine Part I. Styles 1 Perestroika and Parallel Cinema Boris Yukhananov 2 Soviet Comedies for ‘Our Time’: Cinematic Remaking in 21st-Century Russia Victoria Donovan 3 The Journey of a Film: Aleksei Gherman’s Hard to Be a God, 1968–2013 Eugénie Zvonkine 4 ‘Waiting for Change’: Sergei Solov'ev and the Dreams of the Young Generation Birgit Beumers Part II. Characters 5 The Prostitute as Everywoman: The Role and Evolution of the Sex Worker in Russian Cinema Emily Schuckman Matthews 6 ‘Thank God We’re Not Alive’: The Rock Star in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema. Rita Safariants 7 Neither Here, Nor There: The Trickster in the Cinema of Perestroika and the Early 1990s Mark Lipovetsky 8 ‘We’ll meet in Tahiti’: The Traveller between East and West in Russian Films of the 1990s Julian Graffy Part III. Genres 9 Reality Excess: Chernukha Cinema in the Late 1980s Volha Isakava 10 A Genre in Crisis? Satirical Comedy during Perestroika Otto Boele 11 Articulating Dissonance between Man and the Cosmos: Soviet Scientific Fantasy in the 1980s and its Legacy Natalija Majsova 12 Revising History, Remaking Heroes: Soviet-Russian Cinema and the Civil War Stephen M. Norris

Birgit Beumers is Professor of Film Studies at Aberystwyth University. Eugénie Zvonkine is an Associate Professor of Cinema at the University of Paris 8.