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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.
List of contents
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
2 Soviet Comedies for 'Our Time': Cinematic Remaking in 21st-Century Russia
3 The Journey of a Film: Aleksei Gherman's Hard to Be a God, 1968-2013
4 'Waiting for Change': Sergei Solov'ev and the Dreams of the Young Generation
Part II. Characters
5 The Prostitute as Everywoman: The Role and Evolution of the Sex Worker in Russian Cinema
6 'Thank God We're Not Alive': The Rock Star in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema.
7 Neither Here, Nor There: The Trickster in the Cinema of Perestroika and the Early 1990s
8 'We'll meet in Tahiti': The Traveller between East and West in Russian Films of the 1990s
Part III. Genres
9 Reality Excess: Chernukha Cinema in the Late 1980s
10 A Genre in Crisis? Satirical Comedy during Perestroika
11 Articulating Dissonance between Man and the Cosmos: Soviet Scientific Fantasy in the 1980s and its Legacy
12 Revising History, Remaking Heroes: Soviet-Russian Cinema and the Civil War
About the author
Birgit Beumers is Professor of Film Studies at Aberystwyth University.
Eugénie Zvonkine is an Associate Professor of Cinema at the University of Paris 8.
Summary
This book examines how far the collapse of the Soviet Union represented a threshold that initiated change and whether there are continuities which gradually reshaped cinema in the new Russia. It considers a range of films and film-makers and explores their attitudes to genre, character and aesthetic style.
