Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema / Edition 1

by Ian Christie, Professor Richard Taylor, Richard Taylor

Overview

This is the first collection to be inspired and informed by the new films and archival material that glasnost and perestroika have revealed, and the new methodological approaches that are developing in tandem. Film critics and historians from Britain, America, France and the USSR attempt the vital task of scrutinising Soviet film, and re-examining the Cold War assumptions of traditional historiography.
Whereas most books on Soviet giants have glorified the directorial giants of the ‘golden age' of the 1920s, Inside the Film Factory also recognises the achievements of popular cinema from the pre-Revolutionary period through to the 1930s and beyond. It also evaluates the impact of Western cinema on the early experimenters of montage, Russian science fiction's influence on film-making, and the long-suppressed history of Soviet Yiddish productions. Alongside the new perspectives and source material on the much-mythologised figures of Kuleshov and Medvedkin, the book provides the first extended accounts in English of the important but neglected careers of directors Yakov Protazanov and Boris Barnet.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415115957
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	11/03/1994
Series:	Soviet Cinema Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	276
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Richard Taylor, Ian Christie, Professor Richard Taylor

Table of Contents

Illustrations, Notes on contributors, Notes on contributions, General editors’ preface, Acknowledgements, Note on transliteration and translation, Introduction: Entering the film factory, 1 Early Russian cinema: some observations, 2 Kuleshov’s experiments and the new anthropology of the actor, 3 Intolerance and the Soviets: a historical investigation, 4 The origins of Soviet cinema: a study in industry development, 5 Down to earth: Aelita relocated, 6 The return of the native: Yakov Protazanov and Soviet cinema, 7 A face to the shtetl: Soviet Yiddish cinema, 1924—36, 8 A fickle man, or portrait of Boris Barnet as a Soviet director, 9 Interview with Alexander Medvedkin, 10 Making sense of early Soviet sound, 11 Ideology as mass entertainment: Boris Shumyatsky and Soviet cinema in the 1930s, Notes, Index

Editorial Reviews

‘It is a valiant and long-overdue project.'

From the Publisher