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Youngblood provides a cultural perspective of an era traditionally viewed through a revolutionary lens, exploring how films and the film industry illuminate and reflect the popular attitudes of a turbulent time.
A panoramic survey of nearly a century of Russian films on wars and wartime from World War I to more recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Chechnya, with heavy emphasis on films pertaining to World War II.
Much of the work done on the Post45 literary field carries an implicitly Americanist perspective. Even the name of the field suggests a certain literary history, with certain assumptions and blind spots about national spaces, identities, and histories. But what would Post45 look like when considered from outside of the United States? How do the current contours of the field exclude certain voices, either in the United States or elsewhere in the world? And how would such new perspectives shift the beginning and possible endpoint of that literary period? What new narratives of the contemporary emerge if we begin telling the story in a different year or from a different national or global persp...
Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace, one of the world’s greatest film epics, originated as a consequence of the Cold War. Conceived as a response to King Vidor’s War and Peace, Bondarchuk’s surpassed that film in every way, giving the USSR one small victory in the cultural Cold War for hearts and minds. This book, taking up Bondarchuk’s masterpiece as a Cold War film, an epic, a literary adaptation, a historical drama, and a rival to Vidor’s Hollywood version, recovers—and expands—a lost chapter in the cultural and political history of the twentieth century. Like many great works of literature, Tolstoy’s epic tale proved a major challenge to filmmakers. After several early ef...
The Cold War was as much a battle of ideas as a series of military and diplomatic confrontations, and movies were a prime battleground for this cultural combat. As Tony Shaw and Denise Youngblood show, Hollywood sought to export American ideals in movies like Rambo, and the Soviet film industry fought back by showcasing Communist ideals in a positive light, primarily for their own citizens. The two camps traded cinematic blows for more than four decades. The first book-length comparative survey of cinema's vital role in disseminating Cold War ideologies, Shaw and Youngblood's study focuses on ten films—five American and five Soviet—that in both obvious and subtle ways provided a crucial ...
War movies have long been the most influential genre in Russian cinema, so much so that in the Soviet Union's militaristic society, "cinema front" was used to describe the film industry itself. Denise J. Youngblood, an internationally recognized authority on Russian and Soviet cinema, provides the first comprehensive guide to this long-neglected genre. In this illuminating study, Youngblood explores more than 160 fiction films on Russian conflicts from World War I to Chechnya. These movies represent a wide range of cinematic styles and critical receptions, with particular emphasis on films little known in the West but popular in the USSR. While not ignoring classic war films like Chapaev and...
The final decade of the old order in imperial Russia was a time of both crisis and possibility, an uncertain time that inspired an often desperate search for meaning. This book explores how journalists and other writers in St. Petersburg described and interpreted the troubled years between the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917.Mark Steinberg, distinguished historian of Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, examines the work of writers of all kinds, from anonymous journalists to well-known public intellectuals, from secular liberals to religious conservatives. Though diverse in their perspectives, these urban writers were remarkably consistent in the worries they expressed. They grappled with the impact of technological and material progress on the one hand, and with an ever-deepening anxiety and pessimism on the other. Steinberg reveals a new, darker perspective on the history of St. Petersburg on the eve of revolution and presents a fresh view of Russia's experience of modernity.
Featuring nearly three thousand film stills, production shots, and other illustrations, an authoritative history of the cinema traces the development of the medium, its filmmakers and stars, and the evolution of national cinemas around the world.