ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |11 pages

Introduction: Re-construction, or perestroika

Re-visioning, re-making, re-framing

part I|55 pages

Styles

chapter 2|13 pages

Soviet comedies for ‘our time’

Cinematic remaking in twenty-first-century Russia

chapter 3|14 pages

The journey of a film

Aleksei Gherman’s Hard to Be a God, 1968–2013

chapter 4|17 pages

‘Waiting for change’

Sergei Solov'ev and the dreams of the young generation

part II|75 pages

Characters

chapter 5|19 pages

The prostitute as everywoman

The role and evolution of the sex worker in Russian cinema

chapter 6|18 pages

‘Thank God we’re not alive’

The rock star in Soviet and post-Soviet cinema

chapter 7|18 pages

Neither here, nor there

The trickster in the cinema of perestroika and the early 1990s

chapter 8|18 pages

‘We’ll meet in Tahiti’

Travellers between East and West in Russian films of the 1990s

part III|74 pages

Genres

chapter 9|19 pages

Reality excess

Chernukha cinema in the late 1980s

chapter 10|17 pages

A genre in crisis?

Satirical comedy during perestroika

chapter 11|17 pages

Articulating dissonance between man and the cosmos

Soviet scientific fantasy in the 1980s and its legacy

chapter 12|19 pages

Revising history, remaking heroes

Soviet-Russian cinema and the Civil War