SEER, 92, 4, OCTOBER 2014 760 Jews, Romani and other minority groups’ (p. 43), is not only spurious and deeply flawed, but it also fails to refer to the genocidal policy of the Croatian Ustaša regime. Similarly, the author’s views on the post-Yugoslav afterlife of Bogdanović’s memorials — following the devastating wars of the 1990s — are equally problematic and often slip into a pathetically idealized mode. Achleitner also seems to have overlooked the importance of Bogdanović’s interpretationoflocalhistory,whichparalleledthesameprocessamongvarious national Communist leaders in an increasingly federalizing Yugoslavia during the late 1960s and 1970s. In a certain sense, an aura of historicity surrounding Bogdanović’s memorials and his occasional flirtation with local history gave rise to a rather superficial and uncritical use of the past throughout Yugoslavia, but particularly Serbia in the 1970s and 1980s. Most of these reservations aside, this opulently illustrated book, equipped with 134 eye-catching photographs of high artistic quality taken by the author, the basic facts about each memorial given in chronological order, as well as a dozen of Bogdanović’s own conceptual drawings, represents the first valuable compendium of Bogdanović’s work in English. Based on the author’s personal conversation with the aged Bogdanović, this book could also serve as a valuable source of the architect’s post-Yugoslav re-interpretations of his own memorials. A Flower for the Dead is certainly helpful as a brief insight into an overlooked aspect of the cultural heritage of socialist Yugoslavia. University of Belgrade Aleksandar Ignjatović Bartig, Kevin. Composing for the Red Screen: Prokofiev and Soviet Film. The Oxford Music/Media Series. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2013. xv + 228 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Music examples. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £37.50. Given how canonical Sergei Prokof´ev’s contribution to Soviet film was eventually to become, it is salutary to be reminded how slow and circuitous his path to the genre actually was. As early as 1925, he was approached to write a ‘film-symphony’ that would accompany performances of Battleship Potemkin, although he declined the invitation on the grounds that ‘to accept would be to sign up for Bolshevism, and then farewell to my work in the capitalist countries!’ (p. 6). Ironically, the decisive moment came in early 1930, when Prokof´ev was invited to write the score for What a Widow!, a Hollywood movie starring Gloria Swanson. Nothing came of the encounter, but in a diary entry cited by Kevin Bartig, the composer ruminated prophetically about the aesthetic challenge of writing film music: was it possible, he asked himself, ‘to write simple music that is completely accessible to the masses and still stand REVIEWS 761 to put one’s name on it?’ (p. 13). As his scores for Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible attest, the answer was yes, and Bartig accordingly concludes that ‘in the composer’s lifetime, arguably far more people heard his film music than his ballets, operas, or other works together’ (p. 167). Yet for all that Prokof´ev’s collaborations with Sergei Eizenshtein have been the subject of a considerable body of work by scholars in both musicology and film studies, Composing for the Red Screen: Prokofiev and Soviet Film is the first complete study of the composer’s involvement in no fewer than eight cinematic projects, from Lieutenant Kizhe (1934) to Ivan the Terrible (1944–45). As Bartig suggests, this is partly the result of ‘the “low-brow” genre of film music’ having been marginalized in musicological study until relatively recently’ (p. 4), but it also the result of much of the relevant material having remained inaccessible in archives until relatively recently. In those chapters dealing with less wellknown or even unrealized projects, Bartig’s approach is primarily narrative and biographical. When it comes to writing about Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, Bartig takes a somewhat different line, focusing more explicitly on questions of musical analysis (although in a way that non-specialists will still find accessible). Here, Bartig argues that Prokof´ev’s scores represent less a residual form of modernism (an argument often espoused by those keen to disassociate the composer from the aesthetics of Socialist Realism and Stalinist propaganda), than...