Soviet Cinema

The first and only publication on Armenian film poster art, this catalogue presents all of the surviving and known examples and includes an extensive essay about the subject by curator and art historian Vigen Galstyan. The publication attempts to reinstate film poster design within the context of 20th century modern Armenian art, and reveal the broader significance of this neglected heritage as a vivid embodiment of socialist and Armenian cultural modernity.

Esta investigación tiene como propósito analizar la potencialidad revolucionaria que José Carlos Mariátegui reconoció en el cine realista vanguardista de la Rusia Soviética y en el cine realista de Charles Chaplin entre 1919 y 1929, al concebir a ambos como capaces de llegar a las masas obreras y concientizarlas sobre las injusticias sociales dentro del capitalismo. Hay que señalar que el contexto europeo que Mariátegui vivió en su exilio fue lo que influenció en su perspectiva del cine como arma revolucionaria, pues tuvo contacto directo con un cine vanguardista europeo y soviético que, a diferencia del hollywoodiense, sí estaba más vinculado a fomentar una conciencia política crítica. Así, en futuras publicaciones como “El Alma Matinal”, Mariátegui se dedica a analizar el cine soviético a partir de cómo su nacionalización permite que sea un cine accesible a todo el pueblo ruso, y a partir de su contenido anticapitalista revolucionario. Sin embargo, dentro del cine hollywoodiense, Mariátegui rescató la cinematografía de Charles Chaplin: sus personajes representativos del pueblo obrero, y su crítica hacia las injusticias sociales del capitalismo.

Este trabajo propone que Mariátegui reconoció al cine soviético y al cine de Chaplin como producciones que priorizaban los fines políticos de crítica y cambio socioeconómico; por ende, demostrando la potencialidad del cine como arma de revolución cultural.  De acuerdo a ello, en un primer capítulo analiza las características generales del cine de Hollywood, de Europa vanguardista y de la Rusia Soviética, junto con sus diferencias fundamentales en lo estético y en su rol político. También se retratan los rasgos específicos del cine de Charles Chaplin. En el segundo capítulo, a partir de los apuntes de Mariátegui entre 1911 y 1919, se analiza el potencial revolucionario del cine más radical de los tres: el soviético, y de la cinematografía excepcional dentro de Hollywood: la de Charles Chaplin. Desde la lectura del pensador peruano, se concluye que mientras que el cine soviético se configuraba como un subespecie sin clases con claro contenido anticapitalista debido a ser reflejo de una ideología comunista clara, el cine de Chaplin funcionó dentro de Hollywood como una producción excepcional que aún así era crítica con el capitalismo y más representativa del obrero que los otros éxitos comerciales hollywoodienses. Para tal propósito se ha realizado una búsqueda bibliográfica de investigaciones de reciente publicación que interpretan las fuentes primarias donde Mariátegui expone su perspectiva. En este sentido, las investigaciones de Christian Zegarra, Álvaro Campuzano, Mónica Bernabé, Michelle Clayton, entre otros, han sido fundamentales.

Mexico (University of Chicago Press, 2008). She is currently working on a new project, an international history of political modernism and film theory. Abstract: This essay considers the history of Soviet Indian coproductions focusing on Ali Baba and 40 Thieves (1980) as a political allegory over the fate of the multination state. It addresses the formal utopian character of the film and the excessive threat of sexual violence in the songand-dance numbers.

First interview with Andrei Tarkovsky on July 10, 1984, in Milan, a few hours after his press conference at which he announced that he would never return to the USSR. In the interview he talks inter alia about his relationship with Goskino, his film Nostalgia, responds to Solzhenitsyn's criticism of Rublev, and, for the first time, publicly reveals his intention to shoot The Sacrifice. The interview was broadcast in Russian on Radio Liberty on July 13 and 14, 1984.

Nacido en Tiblisi (Georgia) en 1925 y diplomado en el VGIK de Moscú, Marlén Jutsiev es director de cine, guionista, actor, profesor y protagonista destacado de la Nueva Ola Soviética de los años cincuenta y sesenta. Su película La puerta de Ílich (Zastava Ilitsa, 1965) se convirtió en un símbolo no oficial de la era Jruschev debido a los problemas con los censores soviéticos, que obligaron a un nuevo remontaje del film. La nueva versión se estrenó tres años después bajo el título Tengo veinte años (Mne dvadzat let, 1965). En esta entrevista inédita, celebrada en mayo de 2014, Marlén Jutsiev repasa su vida y su obra, explorando su infancia, los años en el VGIK, el origen de sus películas y los problemas con la censura soviética.

The  paper  researches  the  contribution  of  the  first women  working  in  the  cinema  of  the  Central  Asian  region  in  the  late  1920-1930s,  to  trace  their  interpretation  of  the  problem  of  the  emancipation  of  the Oriental woman in their creative works, bringing the examples of the early films like the joint Kyrgyz-Uzbek film The Covered Van (1927), the following Tajik films When the Emirs Die (1931), The Roof of the World (1939) and Without the Paranja (Burqa) (1940), and the Turkmen film Dursun (1940).

Кристина Танис, Европейский Университет в Санкт-Петербурге Послевоенная система кинопроката, трофейное кино и «советская общественность» В 1948 году в СССР вышел трофейный фильм «Жизнь Рембрандта» («Rembrandt», Hans Steinhoff, 1942) 1 . В советском прокате немецкий байопик о жизни известного художника был лишен указаний на свое происхождение -оригинального названия, заглавных и заключительных титров. При этом фильм начинался со следующей вступительной надписи: «Суровый реализм этого гениального мастера был не понят и не дооценен его современниками. Творческая непримиримость Рембрандта привела его к конфликту с буржуазной средой. Многочисленные завистники и враги разорили художника и довели его до полной нищеты. Но ни горе, ни травля не сломили Рембрандта. Неутомимо и вдохновенно трудясь до последнего дня своей жизни, он создал великие произведения живописного искусства» 2 .

Colección Signo e imagen/Cineastas. Ed. Cátedra, Madrid, 2010.
ISBN: 978-84-376-2666-6
408 páginas.

· Ficha de la editorial: https://catedra.com/libro.php?codigo_comercial=195082

Quizá Andrei Tarkovski haya sido uno de los últimos románticos. Sus películas son representaciones del hombre frente a la inmensidad de la naturaleza. Como en las del pintor Caspar David Friedrich. Reflejos de un humanista que quiso o sintió la necesidad de ahondar en el enigma de la existencia y que se materializaron en siete exploraciones sobre la conciencia humana. Y al mismo tiempo títulos con los que trató de elevar el cine a la categoría de arte. Siete recorridos físicos, pero también psíquicos. El de unos individuos en estado de crisis que adquieren la condición de seres errantes. Porque el itinerario es el único medio para hallar alguna certeza, si es que la hay, que alivie sus conflictos internos. De ahí la estructura de este estudio, a modo de crónica de viaje, de una espiral concebida desde la sugerencia, desde la insinuación, incluso desde el juego, sin pretender establecer verdades categóricas. Porque en el arte sólo existe la verdad del creador que, después, cada uno interpretará a su manera. Como lo hará con este libro.

· Contenido PDF: Cubiertas e índice del libro.

This essay outlines the development of technological and material base that stimulated and shaped the development of Soviet amateur film culture, and highlights the impact of planned economy on this process. It focuses on two periods: the 1920s and early 1930s when various Proletkult organizations, most notably the Society of Friends of Soviet Cinema (ODSK) and its efforts to develop filmmaking as a new proletarian art, and, second, the decade between 1957 through the late 1960s when advocacy by a group of enthusiastic professional filmmakers focused on creation of a parallel infrastructure for amateur filmmaking. Abandoning the earlier ambition to erase the difference and eliminate the hierarchy between amateur and professional cinema, this later effort was instrumental in organizing domestic production of small-gauge film equipment and supplies, and marked the beginning of a large-scale amateur film movement in the Soviet Union. The essay also discusses the role of the “economy of favors” in this process.

This chapter examines how the Arctic was figured as a porous sheet of ice separating the East and West Blocs during the Cold War and held a privileged position in Hollywood and Soviet filmmaking from the 1950s to the 1980s. Stenport’s case studies range from early alien invasion films such as The Thing From Another World (1951), USSR national icebreaker epics such as The Red Tent (1969), political thrillers such as Ice Station Zebra, 1968), Oscar winning ‘Real Life Adventures’ Disney documentaries such as Men Against the Arctic (1955) to television series such as The Big Picture (1951-1964). Stenport examines a wide swath of cinematic forms from the U.S., the USSR, Sweden, and Norway not previously analysed in tension with one another, showing how these are put to environmental and ideological uses.

Keywords:  Cold War, USSR, Soviet Cinema, Hollywood, The Thing from Another World, Christian Nyby, Virgil Vogel, Terror in the Midnight Sun, The Big Picture, The Red Tent, Mikhail Kalatzov, Orion’s Belt

Brutalist architecture prevailed in post-war England in the 1950s and spread, during the 1960s and 1970s, to Asia, North America and the Soviet bloc. This radical architectural style - predominantly made of concrete - soon reshaped high-tech public and private buildings, monuments and even parks in both urban and rural areas. In the Soviet bloc, cantilever and monolithic architecture became an integral part of expressive brutalism, whose origins can be traced back to the constructivist experiments of the 1920s and 30s. The raw concrete that was used in brutalist architecture initially stood for durability. Imposing, monumental and sometimes extravagant, the new style embodied political confidence and authority. However, it also came to unveil one of the Soviet Union’s most fundamental contradictions. While the complex futuristic structures still had an ultimate public purpose, aesthetically they sacrificed the socialist principles of collectivist uniformity and productive standardization.

The aim of the article is to establish the meaning-making function of signs that refer to the work and biography of Vladimir Vysotsky in building axiological and aesthetic conflict, which is the axis of the plot of Alexander Stefanovich’s film “Start All Over Again” (1985). This conflict, depending on the layer of film narration and the level of its perception, can be described in categorial oppositions of the formal and the informal, the controlled and the uncontrolled, the ordered and the spontaneous, the public and the independent, the recognized and the unrecognized, the non-artistic and the artistic. As the result of the introduction of events very freely related to the plot into the text of the film, due to the many semantic inclusions, references and hints, Aesopian strategies, thanks to the way some scenes are edited, Vysotsky’s figure becomes a powerful tool fort an enrichment of the semantic field of the film. An equally important generator of meanings is Andrei Makarevich, who plays the role of a young bard and introduces the context of the creative work of the Mashina Vremeni group into the film's semantic field.

The paper is based on the visual and sociological interpretation of the specific element of the Soviet everyday life within the period from 1950s till 1980s. From the very beginning, clothing styles and images were used by Communist authorities to impose some important ideological trends on society. There was collectivism, modesty, simplicity, unselfishness, obedience, respect for authority, and hard work in addition to a variety of features of Soviet morality, as well as even more controversial Soviet ideas. Popular culture in the Soviet Union, especially cinema and television, contained both entertainment and propaganda in different proportions. The presented analysis of stories from the selected Soviet movies concerns the specific perspective of the social identity creation, lifestyle construction and imitation strategies of the common Soviet citizens. Social differentiation within clothing styles as symbols of status is shown rather frequently in the movies, especially in the earlier period, as a way to delineate social and moral borders between working class, on the one side, and intelligentsia, on the other.

The Georgian legend about a youth bricked up alive in the wall of Suram Fortress inspired many writers and film makers before Sergei Parajanov. In his cinematic rendering of this legend, Parajanov uses the camera as a paintbrush. The prologue of the film introduces the main subject -the construction of the Suram fortress -as well as the means by which this legend will be rendered. Central in this prologue is the still life-like shot of the six wood en buckets filled with diverse construction materials and arranged as if on a palette. These construction materials of diverse colors include the main ingredient for tempera painting -eggs. Egg tempera was particularly widely used in medieval paintings such as Orthodox icons and Persian miniatures. The eggs in the prologue allude above all to these medieval painterly traditions, which, in turn, serve as the main visual reference throughout the film. When a character in the subsequent scene mixes these construction materials on a wooden board, he prepares not only for the construction of the fortress but at the same time for the creation of the film by painterly means. As though to reinforce this overlap between the painterly rendition of the film and the construction of the fortress, the crumbling of the fortress shown in the opening credits is expressed as an assault on the camera lens, which captured this fortress in black and white documentary style. Right after the shattering of this black and white shot a meticulously constructed and richly colored tableau opens, synthesising in one shot almost all the subsequent visual and aural motives of the film.

Stalin's commonly known taste for Grigori Aleksandrov’s film „Volga-Volga”(1938) provides one with the ability to consider the movie as a very special unit of Stalinist cultural discourse since it had the highest possible informal sanction - "the leader likes it". The film also got a formal official sanction in 1941, when Aleksandrov,  with the composer of the film’s music and two of the actors, received the First Degree Stalin Prize. That year, the Stalin Prizes – the highest state award for creative achievements – were granted for the first time, becoming a measure of official evaluation of recent achievements. In case of literature and art, the period under review (within 6-7 years) was in fact the same as the time since the introduction of socialist realism. In this way „Volga-Volga” gained the status of an officially recognized masterpiece of socialist realism in cinema, the director becoming a living classic.
The present article is dedicated to the analysis of the category of joy in Aleksandrov's film. It seeks to examine what this category can tell us about the Soviet world and how it refers to the complex of mythological images typical for the semiotic field of Stalinist culture; finally, it explores the conditions that led "joy" to becoming a totalitarian mythologem.

uc qul pur ere recupere se partage actuellement entre: -un fonds Ehrler aux Archives d;Etat de Genève. constitué d,une partie des archives évoquées supra, il concerne aussi bien les domaines politiques, artistiques que scolaires. ce fonds est accessible et son inven_ taire est en cours d'achèvement.

*Junior Yr Undergrad* The issue of “fatherlessness” has been a legitimate epidemic in Europe after the massive loss of male lives in World War II.  The impact of this ‘fatherlessness’ on the family unit has been a recurring theme in many Central European films and is associated with the development of a “metaphysics of absence” within the dialectic of the narratives of these films.  A possible explanation for this recurring theme has been provided by the journalist, Vladimir Chernov, who maintains that country’s leaders and screen personalities compensated as virtual fathers.  I would like to suggest that directors also have an impulse toward concretizing their “message” through auteurist guidance and support that helps build a structured relationship with their spectator. They too become a surrogate father for a society whose family units all too often are left bereft of ‘real’ father figures.

The Soviet cinematographic culture of perestroika refl ected the social and political processes of the time, as well as the Russian culture of 1986-1990 period. The movies of the time showed journalistic qualities, in particular in the selection of themes they addressed. Among them were, on the one hand, various pathologies, for instance those affecting top Party offi cials, but also pathologies of the economy, of the social life, and, on the other hand, various manifestations of the revolt of the youth and the rise of subcultures. The burning issues were institutionalized violence (e.g. in the army), as well as the multifarious problem of settling accounts with communism by bringing up the question of the Stalinist terror and the subject of the individual and social identities in the totalitarian context. The cinematographic culture of the period of perestroika provided a platform for new aesthetic approaches. In particular it enabled the pursuit of a language capable of describing the phenomena so far absent from the public discourse due to censorship. The new cinematographic culture also unmasked the close ties between the earlier aesthetics and the ideology. The new themes and the new aesthetics became intertwined in the fi gure of alienation. The paper discusses the cinematographic descriptions of the intergenerational aspect of the phenomenon of estrangement.

1932 kam es um einen der letzten sowjetischen Filme, die in Österreich noch ins Kino kamen, zu einem Eklat mit gerichtlichen Folgen: Der Film, Dziga Vertovs spektakulärer erster Tonfilm ENTUZIAZM (SIMFONIJA DONBASSA), war nur einen Tag regulär im Wiener Kreuz-Kino gelaufen, und zwar am 20.5.1932, dem Tag, an dem Engelbert Dollfuß seine Kanzlerschaft antrat. Tags darauf wurde der Film von der Polizei beschlagnahmt und gegen die Kinobesitzerin Golda Landau und den Verleiher des Filmes, Josef Szende, ein Mitglied der Kommunistischen Partei Österreichs, Anzeige erstattet. Ein halbes Jahr später wurde Szende zu zwei Wochen bedingtem Arrest verurteilt. Wer war Josef Szende? Vor allem aus Gerichtsakten lassen sich die Umrisse eines Lebenslaufes rekonstruieren, in dem filmischer und politischer Aktivismus einander kurzfristig trafen.

AK-47: Kalashnikov (2020) is a biographical film about Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov (1919–2013), the inventor and designer of the AK-47 automatic rifle. This Russian film, released in February of last year, follows the young Kalashnikov as he is bombarded by Germans during WWII and is interspersed with flashbacks of his childhood. Disturbed by the failure of a newly designed gun that nearly gets a comrade killed when it jams, he examines the parts and lists out various problems with the new design.

Between the 1930s and the 1960s, much emphasis was put in the Soviet Union on the technological development of the country. One of the latest wonders of technology was the tractor, which harvested crops efficiently and rapidly. This article is concerned with the Soviet cinematic representation of work with tractors as the most erotic characteristic of a man. A man attractive to women in Soviet cinema is not handsome but rather is someone proficient in operating a tractor. On the other hand, a man who does not know how to operate a tractor is represented as impotent and is ridiculed by female characters. Several romantic films were produced in which the relationship between the protagonists developed against a background of the use of a tractor. These films became iconic and classic: everyone saw them many times and knew their scripts by heart. Most of the films depict a young Soviet man and his path to the heart of his girlfriend, and some show the maturation of the young character and his transformation into a real man. These goals are achieved through his work as a tractor driver. Examples of this are films like The Rich Bride (romantic comedy, 1937), Tractor Drivers (romantic drama, 1939), Cossacks of the Kuban (romantic comedy, 1949), It Happened in Penkovo (romantic drama, 1957), and Knight’s Move (comedy, 1962). In all these films, work with tractors is represented as an integral part of the “machismo” of the Soviet man.

В Советском Союзе с 1930-х по 1960-е гг. большое внимание уделялось технологическому развитию страны. Одним из последних чудес техники того времени был трактор, работа на котором позволяла эффективно и быстро обрабатывать поля. Статья посвящена советскому пропагандистскому представлению работы на тракторе как самой эротической составляющей маскулинности в советском кино. Мужчина, привлекательный для женщин в советском кино, был не красавцем, а человеком, который умел управлять трактором. С другой стороны, если он не умел управлять трактором, он был представлен как импотент и подвергался осмеянию героями фильма, особенно женщинами. Был выпущен ряд романтических фильмов, в которых отношения между героями развивались в соответствии с умением мужчины управлять трактором. Они стали культовыми, классическими: все видели их много раз и знали их сценарии наизусть. Большинство фильмов изображало молодого советского героя и его путь к сердцу подруги, а некоторые показывали его возмужание и превращение в настоящего мужчину. Эти цели достигались благодаря работе героя на тракторе. Примерами таких кинокартин были «Богатая невеста» (романтическая комедия, 1937), «Трактористы» (романтическая драма, 1939), «Кубанские казаки» (романтическая комедия, 1949), «Дело было в Пенькове» (романтическая драма, 1957) и «Ход конем» (комедия, 1962). Во всех них умение управлять трактором представлялось как важнейшая характеристика советского мужчины.

What is freedom of speech for a man who does not know how to write, who does not know how to read? why Africans studied cinema not in Western countries, but in Soviet Moscow? the present study is -in connection to the Soviets- the story of African Cinema, when it was born. From 1962-1963, the Senegalese Ousmane Sembène​, who is known as the “father” of African cinema, studied filmmaking at the Gorky Film Institute in Moscow, filming for the Gorky Film Studio​, Moscow. Soviet director Mark Donskoy​ was his mentor.  In the 1960s, Ousmane Sembène developed a particular interest in film art, in an attempt to reach an African popular audience, 80 percent of whom did not know how to write, how to read or have access to books in any language.  After studying at the Moscow Film School, under Dotskoi's supervision, Sembène returned to Africa and made three short subject films, all reflecting his strong social commitment. ‘La influencia del cine mudo soviético en los cineastas africanos’. La Necesidad- the Need :

Julian Graffy, Chapaev, I.B. Tauris: London, 2009; x + 134 pp., 15 illus.; 9781850439875, £12.99 (pbk) The mandate of the KINOfiles Film Companion series released by I.B. Tauris is to provide authoritative, approachable studies of the high points of Russian and Soviet cinema. The latest addition to this series, Julian Graffy's Chapaev, meets this target, if not in fact -in true Soviet style -overfulfilling it. Directed by Georgi and Sergei Vasiliev (who were unrelated, despite being popularized as the 'Vasiliev Brothers'), the 1934 cinematic re-envisioning of Furmanov's novel about Civil War hero Vasili Ivanovich Chapaev was an immediate hit with Stalin and Soviet audiences. The film went on not only to serve as the model for the cinematic application of socialist realism (the aesthetic mode that defined official art from 1935 to the collapse of the Soviet Union), but also to occupy a continuous, if metamorphosing, place in Soviet and Russian culture.

First interview with Andrei Tarkovsky on July 10, 1984, in Milan, a few hours after his press conference at which he announced that he would never return to the USSR. In the interview he talks inter alia about his relationship with Goskino, his film Nostalgia, responds to Solzhenitsyn's criticism of Rublev, and, for the first time, publicly reveals his intention to shoot The Sacrifice. The interview was broadcast in Russian on Radio Liberty on July 13 and 14, 1984.