The Contemporary Russian Cinema Reader: 2005–2016 by Rimgaila Salys (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 771 (and Dhooge in particular) brings into focus the need for a new edition of Nabokov’s lectures, especially if such serious scholarship on the lectures is going to continue. Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages and Meghan Vicks Literatures, University of Colorado, Boulder Salys, Rimgaila (ed.). The Contemporary Russian Cinema Reader: 2005–2016. Film and Media Studies. Academic Studies Press, Boston, MA, 2019. 402 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $29.95 (paperback). In the midst of teaching a rather generic history class at McGill University some years ago, class discussion moved to issues related to national mythmaking, invented history, the creation of national heroes, and the like. Rather unimaginative topics even then, though in the wake of the 1995 independence referendum in Quebec, they all seemed to have both more urgency and relevance. More than a few students, when questioned by their instructor, while insisting Canada had ‘no heroes’, also noted to me if they were forced to choose, and Pierre Trudeau was after all too clichéd a choice, then Paul Henderson would suffice. Who? Henderson was the hockey player who led Team Canada to victory over the Soviet Union in the ‘Summit Series’ in 1972. This was not only, it seems, a foundational moment in modern Canadian nationalism. For many Soviet citizens it represented a time when they strode across the global stage, globalization before the term became superfluous. Legend No. 17 (released in 2013), one of the most popular Russian films in recent decades, is a biopic representing the life of the late Valerii Kharlamov, a star of that Canadian-Soviet contest. It is also a film that, for whatever its flaws, has proven to be especially popular among my students. It is also the subject of Greg Dolgopolov’s discerning chapter in Rimgaila Salys’s uneven, but ultimately rewarding, edited book under review. Legend No. 17, especially its celebration of the Soviet victory in game one in Montreal was, according to the film’s producer Leonid Vereshchagin, something that might ‘unite’ all generations in a collective outpouring of pride ‘for our country’; indeed he compared it to ‘Gagarin’s flight, this victory’ (p. 272). The editor’s parameters for this collection are that it ‘seeks to provide undergraduate students [in Russian cinema and culture courses] with an introduction to significant Russian films that are available with English subtitles’ (p. 7). Salys’s volume comprises chapters on seventeen ‘Russian’ films made over the past fifteen years. There are additional chapters further elucidating some of the seventeen films or their directors. There are little obvious motifs that link the films, except that they might be labelled as Russian SEER, 98, 4, OCTOBER 2020 772 (whatever that might mean in the ‘globalized’ world perpetually signified by Vlad Sturkov in his introduction), and that they were released after 2005. More on allusive common themes later. Some of the chapters address films that are now well-trodden artifacts in contemporary film literature. These writings include informed and detailed synopses of the films, and offer perceptive discussions of their historical and production contexts. This is, of course, essential in a text ostensibly aimed at the uninitiated. The more instructive chapters are richly dialogic, enveloping the reader in a post-Soviet Russian cinematic culture that is both part of a perceived global film industry and frustratingly, to some, bound to the Soviet past. These include chapters on the late Aleksei Balabanov’s Dead Man’s Bluff (2005), by Aleksandr Prokhorov; and Cargo 200 (2007), by Anthony Anemone; Salys’s on Valerii Todorovskii’s Hipters (2008); and Sergei Loznitsa’s My Joy (2010), written by Justin Wilmes. Andrei Zviagintsev is the most celebrated, at least internationally, post-Soviet Russian director, and two of his films are treated here: Elena (2011), written by Elena Prokhorova, and Leviathan (2014) by Julian Graffy. Tatiana Mikhailova’s contribution is a fascinating piece on Silent Souls (2010), directed by Aleksei Fedorchenko. Hard to Be a God (2013), by the late Aleksei German, is the subject of chapters by Anton Dolin and Elena Stishova. Directors such as the late Balabanov, Loznitsa, Zviagintsev and the late German, are fixtures in the rapidly expanding literature on modern Russian film. The attention given...