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Soviet Art House provides a unique look into a Soviet film studio from the 1960s to the years leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It tells the story of how filmmakers struggled with and overcame ideological and economic constraints to create oppositional and highly original movies in an authoritarian society.
List of contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Terminology, Abbreviations, and Transliteration
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction: The Art House
- Chapter 1. Big Hopes and Trouble, 1961-1969
- Chapter 2. "Serious" Movies and the Box Office, 1970-1985
- Chapter 3. The Cinema-Centaur: Lenfilm as Film Factory
- Chapter 4. Non-Existent Reality: The Lenfilm Aesthetic
- Chapter 5. Pleasure and Danger: Yuly Fait, A Boy and a Girl (1966)
- Chapter 6. The Indifference of Time: Gennady Shpalikov, A Long Happy Life (1967)
- Chapter 7. Regulated Immediacy: Viktor Sokolov, A Day of Sunshine and Rain (1967)
- Chapter 8. More in Expectation than Hope: Naum Birman, Chronicle of a Divebomber (1968)
- Chapter 9. Cold War Fears: Savva Kulish, The Dead Season (1968)
- Chapter 10. Personal Happiness: Vitaly Melnikov, Mother's Got Married (1969)
- Chapter 11. Trust in Talent: Ilya Averbakh, Monologue (1972)
- Chapter 12. Spontaneous Music: Dinara Asanova, Woodpeckers Don't Get Headaches (1974)
- Chapter 13. Fervor and Tenderness: Gleb Panfilov, May I Speak? (1976)
- Chapter 14. Private Grief, Public Mourning: Sergei Mikaelyan, The Widows (1977)
- Chapter 15. Ludic Love: Kira Muratova, Getting to Know the Wide World (1978)
- Chapter 16. Cast a Cold Eye: Boris Frumin, Errors of Youth (1978)
- Chapter 17. Socialist Embarrassment: Viktor Tregubovich, Go If You're Going (1978)
- Chapter 18. The Powers of Irony: Igor Maslennikov, The Queen of Spades (1982)
- Chapter 19. Hystoria: Aleksei German, My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1984)
- Conclusion: Arthouse Beyond the Art House
- Filmography
About the author
Catriona Kelly is Professor of Russian at the University of Oxford and a leading historian of Russian culture and society. She is the author of numerous books on Russian modernism, gender history, the history of childhood, national identity, and the recent history of Leningrad/St Petersburg, some of which have been translated into Russian.
Summary
Soviet Art House provides a unique look into a Soviet film studio from the 1960s to the years leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It tells the story of how filmmakers struggled with and overcame ideological and economic constraints to create oppositional and highly original movies in an authoritarian society.
Additional text
To embark on making an art house movie under Brezhnev, the author shows with the clarity and insight of someone who spent years on studying the Lenfilm studio papers, was tantamount to submitting one's creative will to a variety of whims and whips—institutional and ideological. Every chapter in Kelly's book devoted to this or that art film reads like a perilous journey that ends in a miraculous survival.
