This monograph traces the history of Kazakh filmmaking from its conception as a Soviet cultural construction project to its peak as fully-fledged national cinema to its eventual re-imagining as an art-house phenomenon. The author’s analysis places leading directors—Shaken Aimanov, Abdulla Karsakbaev, Sultan-Akhmet Khodzhikov, Mazhit Begalin—in their sociopolitical and cultural context.

This social and cultural analysis provides a new understanding of Kazakhstan’s younger generations that emerged during the rule of Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has been presiding over Kazakhstan for the thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Half of Kazakhstan’s population was born after he took power and have no direct memory of the Soviet regime. Since the early 2000s, they have lived in a world of political stability and relative material affluence, and have developed a stron...

This collection covers the major trends of the media environment of the post-Communist world and their recent development, with special focus on Russia and the post-Soviet space. The term ‘media environment’ covers not just traditional print and electronic media, but new media as well, and ranges from the political to entertainment and various artistic spheres. What role do market forces play in the process of media democratization, and how do state structures regulate, suppress, or use ca...

Russian and Soviet cinema occupies a unique place in the history of world cinema. Legendary filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Dziga Vertov, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Sergei Paradjanov have created oeuvres that are being screened and studied all over the world. The Soviet film industry was different from others because its main criterion of success was not profit, but the ideological and aesthetic effect on the viewer. Another important feature is Soviet cinema’s multinat...

Drawing on newly declassified government files, this is the dramatic story of how a forbidden book in the Soviet Union became a secret CIA weapon in the ideological battle between East and West.In May 1956, an Italian publishing scout took a train to a village just outside Moscow to visit Russia’s greatest living poet, Boris Pasternak. He left carrying the original manuscript of Pasternak’s first and only novel, entrusted to him with these words: “This is Doctor Zhivag...

Andrei Tarkovsky is the most celebrated Russian filmmaker since Eisenstein, and one of the most important directors to have emerged during the 1960s and 70s.Although he made only seven features, each one was a major landmark in cinema, the most well-known of them being the mediaeval epic Andrei Rublev - widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time - and the autobiographical Mirror, set during the Russia of Stalin's purges in the 1930s ...

With a revised foreword by Brookings President Strobe Talbott and a new introduction by Berlin’s editor, Henry Hardy.George Kennan, the architect of US policy toward the Soviet Union, called Isaiah Berlin the patron saint among the commentators of the Russian scene.” In The Soviet Mind, Berlin proves himself fully worthy of that accolade. Although the essays in this book were originally written to explore the tensions between Soviet communism and Russian culture, the thin...

From the reign of Tsar Nicholas II to the brutal cult of Stalin to the ebullient, uncertain days of perestroika, nowhere has the inextricable relationship between politics and culture been more starkly illustrated than in twentieth-century Russia. In the first book to fully examine the intricate and often deadly interconnection between Russian rulers and Russian artists, cultural historian Solomon Volkov brings to life the experiences that inspired artists like Tolstoy, Stravinsky, Akhmato...

One of the last representatives of a brand of serious, high-art cinema, Alexander Sokurov has produced a massive oeuvre exploring issues such as history, power, memory, kinship, death, the human soul, and the responsibility of the artist. Through contextualization and close readings of each of his feature fiction films (broaching many of his documentaries in the process), this volume unearths a vision of Sokurov's films as equally mournful and passionate, intellectual, and sensual, and als...

"North Korea is not just a security or human rights problem (although it is those things) but a real society. This book gets us closer to understanding North Korea beyond the usual headlines, and does so in a richly detailed, well-researched, and theoretically contextualized way."---Charles K. Armstrong, Director, Center for Korean Research, Columbia University"One of this book's strengths is how it deals at the same time with historical, geographical, political, artistic, a...

Part of the Directory of World Cinema series, this title includes contributions from some of the leading academics in the field. It features film recommendations from a range of genres for those interested in watching more cinema from these regions. It also features comprehensive filmography as an index. Given the prevalence of important new wave cinemas across Eastern Central Europe in the post-war, post-Stalinist era (Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia), this new volume of th...

Over the last decade, audiences worldwide have become familiar with highly acclaimed films from the Romanian New Wave such as 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007), The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005), and 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006). However, the hundred or so years of Romanian cinema leading to these accomplishments have been largely overlooked. This book is the first to provide in-depth analyses of essential works ranging from the silent period to contemporary ...