Description
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.
Table of Contents
Introduction Entering the film factory, Richard Taylor, Ian Christie; Chapter 1 Early Russian Cinema, Yuri Tsivian; Chapter 2 Kuleshov’s Experiments and The New Anthropology of the Actor, Mikhail Yampolsky; Chapter 3 Intolerance and the Soviets, Vance KepleyJr; Chapter 4 The Origins of Soviet Cinema, Vance KepleyJr; Chapter 5 Down to Earth, Ian Christie; Chapter 6 The Return of the Native, Denise J. Youngblood; Chapter 7 A Face to the Shtetl, J. Hoberman; Chapter 8 A Fickle Man, or Portrait of Boris Barnet as a Soviet Director, Bernard Eisenschitz; Chapter 9 Interview with Alexander Medvedkin; Chapter 10 Making Sense of Early Soviet Sound, Ian Christie; Chapter 11 Ideology as Mass Entertainment, Richard Taylor;
