Denise J. Youngblood

The magic mirror : moviemaking in Russia, 1908-1918

This work is a study of ten years of native Russian film production through the Revolution of 1917, based almost exclusively on Russian-language primary sources. Showing how these films portrayed and appealed to a new urban middle class, the author examines the organization and evolution of the industry and looks at genres, motifs and themes in 65 of the most important surviving films.

The Fate of Soviet Popular Cinema during the Stalin Revolution

In March 1928, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union held its first all-union conference on cinema affairs. The minutes were published in a hefty volume of more than 450 closely set pages.1 What strikes the reader of these pages more than sixty years later, even one familiar with the institutional and theoretical evolution of Soviet cinema in its first decade, is the obscurity of the debates and their rancorous tone. But what is equally surprising about the discussions is that most conferees evinced little interest in movies. Cinema for them was a lifeless abstraction. That

Cold War Sport, Film, and Propaganda: A Comparative Analysis of the Superpowers

Films and sports played central roles in Cold War popular culture. Each helped set ideological agendas domestically and internationally while serving as powerful substitutes for direct superpower conflict. This article brings film and sport together by offering the first comparative analysis of how U.S. and Soviet cinema used sport as an instrument of propaganda during the Cold War. The article explores the different propaganda styles that U.S. and Soviet sports films adopted and pinpoints the political functions they performed. It considers what Cold War sports cinema can tell us about political culture in the United States and the Soviet Union after 1945 and about the complex battle for hearts and minds that was so important to the East-West conflict.

The Cosmopolitan and the Patriot: The brothers Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky and Russian cinema

Zhili-byli ... Thus begins a Russian fairytale. Once upon a time, not so very long ago, there lived two handsome and talented brothers, Andrei and Nikita. The boys led a charmed life in a far-off land, with their mother, the beautiful princess Natalia, and their father, Sergei, a commoner but a most wondrous spinner of tales. Natalia’s family was an ancient and esteemed one, and the boys grew up surrounded by artists, writers, and musicians. These were dangerous times in the kingdom, and enemies lurked everywhere. Luckily Sergei, who had become a trusted councilor to the King, had the power to shield his family from harm—and from the harsh realities of life outside the manor walls. Andrei and Nikita loved the movies more than anything else and dreamed of becoming famous directors. Their father helped them go to the right schools and introduced them to powerful people. And so their wishes, happily, came to pass. They became great artists, and their films were seen not only by their countrymen, but also by audiences all over the world. This fairytale is true. Andrei Konchalovsky (b. 1937) and Nikita Mikhalkov (b. 1945) were born in the Soviet Union at the height of the Stalin era [1]. Their mother, Natalia Konchalovskaia, was a writer from a noble family, the daughter and granddaughter of two of Russia’s most famous painters, Pëtr Konchalovskii and Vasilii Surikov [2]. Their father, Sergei Mikhalkov (b. 1913), still alive at this writing, was the USSR’s bestknown writer of children’s books, a poet who composed the lyrics to the Soviet national anthem, much despised as a cynical opportunist who had survived by sacrificing others [3]. Theirs was a family joining the Russian gentry with the new Soviet aristocracy— and through times good, bad, and worse, the Mikhalkov–Konchalovskys wanted for nothing. Both brothers attended the prestigious All-Union State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow (VGIK), studied with Mikhail Romm, and became major international film directors. But there their paths diverged. An examination of the very different careers of Andrei Konchalovsky and Nikita Mikhalkov illuminates not only issues critical to our understanding of the artistic intelligentsia in late Soviet and post-Soviet society but as important, the effects of ‘globalization’ on Russian cinema. Globalization and the impact of globalization on non-English language national cinemas is, of course, the central issue in international film studies today. Closely related to this debate is the dominance of the cinematic style dubbed ‘global Hollywood’, that is, the international dominance of the Hollywood style of narrative filmmaking regardless of the country (or countries) involved in the production. This issue is particularly poignant in contemporary Russian cinema, because global Hollywood’s hegemony had been staved off by the Soviet state’s highly centralized, com-