Abstract
This essay employs Pavel Lungin's Tycoon (Oligarkh, 2002) to examine the ways that popular film genres are used to represent history and to shape national memory. Tycoon was the first major Russian film to treat the so-called ‘transition to capitalism’ from a historical perspective. In explaining why the director employed the American gangster film genre to depict Russia's recent past, the essay calls attention to his use of the genre's conventions for representing the passing of time and other dimensions of historical experience, as well as his flexible adaptation to Russian circumstances of the critique of Americanism at the genre's ideological core. It also illuminates various dimensions of the collective memory of the 1990s by exploring the socially marked perspectives (intelligentsia, official, bourgeois, popular etc.) presented in the film and the critical response to its interpretation of history in Russian cinema journals and the popular press.
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