Russian Cinema

Abstract

While Soviet and Russian cinema was rather understudied until the collapse of the USSR, since the early 1990s there has been a rise in publications and scholarship on the topic, reflecting an increase in the popularity of film and cultural studies in general. However, different periods of Soviet cinema have been covered quite unevenly in scholarship. Largely, this has to do with the accessibility of films: whereas films of the Soviet avant-garde have been widely available—many of the early Soviet films were shown in film clubs and film societies around the world at the time of their making—from the 1930s onward the Soviet Union cut its ties with the West, and films of the Stalinist era remained isolated in their own culture. With the Cold War and the subsequent Thaw, that situation changed, and once again a number of Soviet films became available through festivals and limited distribution. However, it was not until glasnost and perestroika that an interest in Soviet cinema sparked and led to television screenings and releases of new or unshelved films. Strangely, English-language scholarship has continued to focus on the “big” names, those directors whose films were released and distributed abroad, while the works of filmmakers both of auteur cinema (e.g., Kira Muratova) and popular cinema (e.g., Leonid Gaidai and Eldar Riazanov) often remain understudied. Nevertheless, scholars in the Slavic field have engaged more and more with film and visual art, making a huge contribution to the field of Russian film studies. It is often a tightrope walk to classify texts written by leading film scholars with limited access to original sources because of the language barrier, and texts by Slavic scholars with expertise in the culture but a philological background. Yet this “dilemma” also means that the spectrum of scholarship is wide-ranging and engages with a number of different approaches and perspectives on Russian cinema—from historical to political and ideological, from visual and aesthetic to narrative, from theoretical to thematic. This bibliography includes English-language publications only and follows Library of Congress transliteration (without diacritics) outside the citations.