Soviet Art House

Author(s):  
Catriona Kelly

This book examines cinema in the Brezhnev era from the perspective of one of the USSR’s largest studios, Lenfilm. Producing around thirty feature films per year, the studio had over three thousand employees working in every area of film production. The discussion covers the period from 1961 to the collapse of centralized state facilities in 1986. The book focuses particularly on the younger directors at Lenfilm, those who joined the studio in the recruiting drive that followed Khrushchev’s decision to expand film production. Drawing on documents from archives, the analysis portrays film production “in the round” and shows that the term “censorship” is less appropriate than the description preferred in the Soviet film industry itself, “control,” which referred to a no less exigent but far more complex and sophisticated process. The book opens with four framing chapters that examine the overall context in which films were produced: the various crises that beset film production between 1961 and 1969 (chapter 1) and 1970 and 1985 (chapter 2), the working life of the studio, and particularly the technical aspects of production (chapter 3), and the studio aesthetic (chapter 4). The second part of the book comprises close analyses of fifteen films that are typical of the studio’s production. The book concludes with a brief survey of Lenfilm’s history after the Fifth Congress of the Filmmakers’ Union in 1986, which swept away the old management structures and, in due course, the entire system of filmmaking in the USSR.

Author(s):  
Maria Belodubrovskaya

Chapter Three discusses the implications of the director-centered mode of film production and suggests why entrusting self-governance and self-censorship to a select group of director-masters was counterproductive. The Soviet film industry did not have producers, and only directors had the creative and technical expertise to make films. This unique expertise, which was hard to replicate, as well as their status as “engineers of human souls,” put Soviet film directors in a formidable position vis-à-vis the party-state. Moreover, most of them were not propagandists, but artists, and their professional agenda was never entirely subsumed by Stalinism.


Panoptikum ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 24-42
Author(s):  
Monika Talarczyk

The paper is dedicated to the Polish female filmmakers – contributors to feature film production from the period 1945–1989 in the Polish state film industry. The theoretical framework is based on women’s studies and production studies. Author presents and comments on the numbers from the quantitative research, including credits of feature films production, divided into key positions: director, scriptwriter, cinematographer, music, editor, production manager, set designer and assistant director, costume designer. The results are presented in graphics and commented in 5 years blocs. The analysis leads to the conclusions describing the specificity of emancipation in socialist Poland in the area of creative work.


Author(s):  
Evgeniy D. Yeremenko ◽  
◽  
Zoya V Proshkova ◽  

The article is devoted to understanding the image of the Soviet editor in Russian art (using examples of fiction and cinema). The author examines the personal qualities that contributed to the entry of a person into the profession («editorial character») and provides a chronological observation of the «editorial evolution» – in publishing and film production-throughout the Soviet period and the first years of Russia in the 1990s. An important aspect that has been updated since the early 1920s is the active inclusion of women in editorial work. The characteristics of editors of different Soviet periods are analyzed using examples from the prose of M. Bulgakov, V. Shishkov, L. Rakhmanov, A. Tobolyak, V. Astafyev. Portraits of Soviet film editors are considered in the works of J. Gausner, N. Bogoslovsky, V. Makanin, D. Rubina and M. Kuraev. Representatives of the editorial profession are also represented in the films of A. Tarkovsky, V. Zheregy, K. Shakhnazarov and A. Benckendorf. There are two main types in the artistic depiction of editors and their activities: satirical (in a pointed form ridiculing personal and professional shortcomings) and dramatic (reflecting the complexity of editorial characters in their inseparability with the influence of society, historical era). In the final part of the article, the vectors of professional diffusions in the film-editing corps are outlined with the end of the Soviet era and the need to adapt to the new, post-Soviet realities.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lesya Turchak ◽  

The article examines the film production activities of one of the leading figures of socio-political and cultural life of the Ukrainian community in New York and Los Angeles in the mid-twentieth century. The activity of M. Novak in the context of the attempt to develop the Ukrainian film industry in order to outline the national identity is studied. The peculiarities of M. Novak’s professional and public activity in the context of the specifics of the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada and the USA are revealed and his contribution to the Ukrainian film industry abroad is clarified. The study found that the common semantic and stylistic basis of films of the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada and the United States in the 20-60's of the twentieth century. became the baggage of Ukrainian culture of their creators, the traditions of domestic cinema, in which they worked before emigrating, as well as the general attitude to the preservation of traditions of Ukrainian culture of the diaspora in North America, typical of the second wave of emigration in general. Through his own activities in the field of film production and distribution of documentary and feature films, M. Novak contributed to the nation-building dialogue and the actualization of the communicative efficiency of world Ukrainians.


Author(s):  
Anton Kozyryanov

Soviet cinema of the 1930s has long been of particular interest for historians from Russia and abroad. For a long time in historiography, the Soviet art of the 1930s has been associated with the Soviet ideology and propaganda of the stated period. This topic was considered by the outstanding historians such as David Brandenberg, Boris Ilzarov, Yevgeny Gromov, Alexander Dubrovsky, Katerina Clark, etc. At the same time, in the studies on this topic, as a rule, focuses is made on the formation of Russian national ideology in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. In the center of historical research there are literature and cinema cultivating Russian national historical heroes. Besides, cinema comes to prominence in the 1930s. However, in historiography the state of the Soviet film industry in the proposed period is very poorly covered. This paper discusses the state of the Soviet film industry in the 1930s. Based on archival materials of the Main Department of Film Affairs, on the paperwork related to the development of the film industry, as well as memoirs of contemporaries, the author assesses the state of the Soviet film industry at the turn of the 1920s–1930s, as well as traces the development of the film industry in the 1930s. The author highlights the most significant problems of the Soviet cinema of the 1930s, as well as the main projects for solving these problems. Thus, this study makes it possible to assess the state and production capacity of the Soviet film industry in the 1930s.


Author(s):  
Sarah Atkinson

From Film Practice to Data Process critically examines the practices of independent digital feature filmmaking in contemporary Britain. The business of conventional feature filmmaking is like no other, in that it assembles a huge company of people from a range of disciplines on a temporary basis, all to engage in the collaborative endeavour of producing a unique, one-off piece of work. The book explicitly interrogates what is happening at the frontiers of contemporary ‘digital film’ production at a key transitional moment in 2012, when both the film industry and film-production practices were situated between the two distinct medium polarities of film and digital. With an in-depth case study of Sally Potter’s 2012 film Ginger & Rosa, drawing upon interviews with international film industry practitioners, From Film Practice to Data Process is an examination of film production in its totality, in a moment of profound change.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ya-Feng Mon

This book uses the potent case study of contemporary Taiwanese queer romance films to address the question of how capitalism in Taiwan has privileged the film industry at the expense of the audience's freedom to choose and respond to culture on its own terms. Interweaving in-depth interviews with filmmakers, producers, marketers, and spectators, Ya-Fong Mon takes a biopolitical approach to the question, showing how the industry uses investments in techno-science, ancillary marketing, and media convergence to seduce and control the sensory experience of the audience-yet that control only extends so far: volatility remains a key component of the film-going experience.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 19-24
Author(s):  
Heqiang Zhou ◽  
Lei Que

With the in-depth influence of 5G technology on film art, the postmodern culture contained in it is also becoming more and more obvious. Understanding the context of the 5G era and clarifying the origin of film postmodernism culture will help us deeply analyze the cause of the rise of postmodernism film culture, especially the important influence of the expansion of film application scenes, the innovation of the whole industry chain and the evolution of film aesthetics on the rise of postmodernism film culture. In addition, we should also think deeply about the film culture under the post-modernism of 5G era, and explore the way to stick to the benign development of film creation and film industry. To enhance our cognition and appreciation of post-modern film culture, to give play to the positive factors of post-modern film culture, and to promote the healthy and prosperous development of Chinese film production, creation and industry.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 100-117
Author(s):  
Kingsley Chukwuemeka Anyira ◽  
Divine Sheriff Uchenna Joe

The art of video film directing is all encompassing as the director deals with virtually all aspects of film production. This comes with herculean challenges that tend to mar the efforts of directors if not properly addressed. Film scholars cum critics have done a lot of work investing the challenges of the Nigerian Video Film industry with little or no effort to directly ascertain the peculiar challenges of each sector of the industry. To this effect, the paper seeks to source from the directors what these challenges have been over the decade in view and as well through the affected, proffer plausible suppositions asmeasure to ameliorate the identified challenges. In doing so, this paper adopts the view point that the director is the author of the film and thus engages the Survey research method wherein Personal interviews are employed as data collation tool and later analyzed with inferences made from the responses. Conclusively, it anchors on the directors’ views of possible ways to improve/enhance the director’s art in future productions.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document