Russian Cinema by David Gillespie (review)

Abstract

MLRy 99.2, 2004 561 in Nabokov's writing), and David Larmour examines the theme of sports in Glory, noticing through it the protagonist's ambiguous gender identity yet at the same time ignoring the much more clearly ambiguous issue of the protagonist's mixed origins, a question crucial to a novel that ends with a pseudo-patriotic return to Russia. On the whole, this is an interesting and thought-provoking volume, not without flaws but certainly recommended to anyone interested in Nabokov in particular and in the ideological construction of literary discourse in general. SSEES, University College London Anat Vernitski Russian Cinema. By David Gillespie. Harlow: Longman. 2003. x + 20ipp. ?7.49. ISBN 0-582-43790-3 (pbk). David Gillespie's book Russian Cinema can be seen as a companion volume to his earlier Early Soviet Cinema: Innovation, Ideology and Propaganda (London: Wallflower, 2000). It is similar in both design and intent; the earlier volume was an overview of six key Soviet films of the 1920s that, in the words of Dziga Vertov, would steer film-making away from the 'sweet embraces of the [gypsy] romance' (p. 72) and into the wider waters of civic consequence. Russian Cinema extends this cultural cartography and maps the often choppy seas of Soviet film-making under Stalinism, the relative calm and tedium of the Thaw and Stagnation, to consider the disorienting vistas of post-socialist cinema. This study is timely, since briefer time spans and a more concentrated focus have been emphasized in key English-language monographs and collections of recent years (Birgit Beumers, Russia on Reels: The Russian Idea in Post-Soviet Cinema (London: Tauris, 1999); Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society 1917?53 (Cambridge: Cam? bridge University Press, 1992); Anna Lawton, Kinoglasnost: Soviet Cinema in Our Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), and The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema (London: Routledge, 1992); Josephine Woll, Real Im? ages: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw (London: Tauris, 2000); and Denise Youngblood, The Magic Mirror: Moviemakingin Russia 1908-1918 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999)). A broad overview of Russian cinema as a whole in the light of post-Soviet developments is long overdue, and?considering the proliferation of social and theoretical shifts that gave birth to such a need?it is fittingthat this book is written primarily for newer readers and viewers, for an audience that explicitly in? cludes undergraduates. With an emphasis upon plot summaries, the book assigns over 300 films to a number of rubrics that thankfully sidestep a strict synonymy between politics and picture shows. Rather than move chronologically through the history of Russian film-making, we have instead groupings of films vis-d-vis their connection to literature, comedic traditions, gendered emphases, dogma, military history, and the prolonged, often prickly debate over whether stories of moral import were best framed by private or public narratives. This prejudicing of what Gillespie himself calls the 'cultural dynamics and aes? thetic values' (p. vii) of the century on screen will be of marked value to university filmcourses, especially with the accompanying bibliographies: they both abridge the contents of key cinematic studies and propose sufficientfurtherreading fornewcomers to the field. Each chapter is furthermore supplemented with a list of thematically or aesthetically associated films,which helps to bolster the notion of Russian cinema as a system of incongruous tendencies or cross-cultural practices that nurtured healthy multiplicity even during the most terrible years ofthe Soviet Union. The respectful revisionism of this volume is none the less informed or underwritten by an enduring concern for 'the political imperative of Russian cinema that was so 562 Reviews dominant' (cf. Chapter 6) in the Soviet period. When, therefore,itcomes to prolonged attention to one director outside of the book's encyclopaedic objectives, it is perhaps not surprising that the author chooses Andrei Tarkovskii, juxtaposed with Eisenstein (Nostalgia and The Sacrifice are described with special poignancy). I would take polite issue with this choice, since by opting for a director who in the West embodies a spirit of contrariness in Soviet cinema, we may be reinstating the very binarism of dogma that this book wishes to sidestep. None the less, I might then counter my...