A History of Russian Cinema

Birgit Beumers. A History of Russian Cinema. Oxford: Berg, 2009. 328 pp. Appendix. Chronology. Index. $32.95, paper.As Russian film courses have become increasingly common on university campuses, many instructors have been obliged create Readers, in which students are provided with articles and chapters by the leading Slavic scholars. Missing of late has been an adequate history of Russian cinema that could chart for students the developments from silent film contemporary post-Soviet fare. Jay Leyda's Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (originally published in 1960), long a mainstay, can no longer bring students to the present as it had once promised. Now, Birgit Beumers offers a text perfectly suited for survey courses of Russian/Soviet cinema. It will not completely replace those original Readers, but it will provide the concise and clearly written survey that has been much needed of late.A History of Russian Cinema is organized into eight chapters (and an appendix and chronology), beginning with the first time that Auguste and Louis Lumiere's films were shown in Russia, right through the election of Dmitrii Medvedev as president in 2008 marking, in particular, a century of Russian cinema since the first Russian-produced film, Stenka Razin (1908), was screened. Beumers states that this book is meant as a chronological overview of the advances and trends of Russian cinema as they have been connected political, historical, cultural and social developments (p. 1).Chapter One concentrates on the establishment of Russian film companies, Evgenii Bauer's melodramas, and the role of cinema in political agitation. The following chapter examines cinema for the masses (1919-1929) with a particular focus on Soviet montage and the Cultural Revolution. Attention is paid the directors Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Aleksandr Dovzhenko. Chapter Three covers the Purges, the Second World War and the Cold War ( 1 930-1 953). It is argued that these films abandon the experimentation of the previous period and are mainly concerned with creating heroic images. In the chapter on the Thaw (1954-1966), Beumers successfully captures many of the ambiguities and complexities (p. 1 12) of the period, while highlighting a new concentration on youthfulness, the individual experience, and laughter. This interlude of hope, however, was soon dashed as Russia was forced endure the Stagnation (19671982). Soviet cinema suffered greatly during the early 1970s, but did begin make a recovery with the work of Andrei Tarkovskii and Nikita Mikhalkov, as well as with the international success of the Academy Award winning Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (1979). …

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