A Companion to Russian Cinema by Birgit (ed.) Beumers (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 751 witnessed what some critics have called the ‘fourth revolution’ of Russian architecture (after 1917, the Stalin revolution, and Khrushchev’s reforms), as architects found new clients in Russia’s nouveau riche and interior design rose to prominence in architectural practice (p. 284). Significant continuities can be traced in Russian architecture from the late- to post-Soviet periods as well. As Anderson notes, many institutions survived the transition and, like their lateSoviet counterparts, Russian architects of today continue to engage actively with the international architectural community. Anderson has written a rich and full account of Russian architecture over the last 150 years of its development. In Russia, Anderson draws on his own extensive research on the Stalin period and on a wide collection of the historical literature available in Russian, German, English, French and Italian. This book is an indispensable reference for the specialist and a thorough introduction for those new to Russian architectural history. Department of History Katherine Zubovich Ryerson University Beumers, Birgit (ed.). A Companion to Russian Cinema. Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas. Wiley Blackwell, Chichester and Malden, MA, 2016. xvi + 656 pp. Illustrations. Notes. References. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. $195.00: £156.00: €187.20 (hardback); $156.99: £140.99: €168.99 (e-book). Part of the Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas series, the much anticipated A Companion to Russian Cinema is a rich and capacious volume. Edited by Birgit Beumers, one of the field’s most knowledgeable and indefatigable scholars, it comprises twenty-five newly commissioned chapters, written by leading experts and academics working in Russian cinema studies independently or at various American, British, Canadian, French, Hungarian and Russian institutions. In her helpful Introduction, which provides a concise survey of the state of the field and outlines the Companion’s scope and structure, Beumers acknowledges that attempting to provide a comprehensive account of the whole history of Russian cinema in the Companion would have been ‘ambitiously [to] aim at the impossible’ (p. 1). Instead, therefore, she elects to focus on the ‘task of “filling gaps”’ (p. 4), by including contributions that explore some of the significant films, periods, filmmakers and genres that have been ‘traditionally neglected in film histories and scholarship’ (p. 2). Divided into five thematically organized parts, the Companion thus seeks to provide ‘five alternative histories of Russian cinema’ (p. 16). Accordingly, within each part the chapters are arranged in a SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 752 loosely chronological order, to convey a ‘sense of progression’ (p. 4). While each of the five parts does not cover the complete one-hundred-and-ten-year period since Russian feature filmmaking began, the Companion as a whole does broadly achieve this. If there are gaps in its coverage, however, this is intentional; in Beumers’ words, ‘The more holes we have laid bare, the better’ (p. 16), for the volume thus aims ‘to uncover new areas for investigation, and trigger exciting new research to fill [those] gaps’ (p. 16). Part One, ‘Structures of Production, Formation, and Exhibition’, focuses on the establishment, during the first half of the twentieth century, of institutional infrastructures relating to film exhibition, to the training of filmmakers and to film production. In chapter one, Anna Kovalova, building on Iurii Tsiv´ian’s seminal work on early Russian cinema and its cultural reception, offers a history of the many cinemas that lined St Petersburg’s Nevskii Prospect in the period 1900–10. Rich in fascinating details gleaned from memoirs and the contemporary film press, Kovalova’s account vividly evokes the experience of the average film-goer in this period. Chapter two, by Masha Salazkina, explores the development of Soviet film education in the 1920s and 1930s by providing a history of Moscow’s State Film Institute VGIK, the world’s first specialized film school, founded in 1919 to train the first generation of Soviet filmmakers. Each of the remaining three chapters focuses on a film studio. Robert Bird contributes a history of Lenfil´m, Russia’s second-largest studio, surveying films made there between 1919 and 2014 and exploring the extent to which the studio possessed and retains a defining ‘institutional aesthetic’ (p. 66). Oksana Sarkisova focuses on Vostokfil´m, best known...