This book highlights the significant role that production artists played when Russian cinema was still in its infancy. It uncovers Russian cinema's connections with other art forms, examining how production artists drew on both aesthetic traditions and modernist experiments in architecture, painting and theatre as they explored the new medium of cinema and its potential to engender new models of perception and forms of audience engagement. Drawing on set design sketches, archival documents and film-makers' memoirs, Eleanor Rees reveals how less-canonical films such as Behind the Screen (Kulisy ekrana, 1919) and Palace and Fortress (Dvorets i krepost ́, 1923), were remarkable from a design perspective, and also provides new readings of well-known films, such as Children of the Age (Deti veka, 1915) and Strike (Stachka, 1925). Rees brings to light information on significant but understudied figures such as Vladimir Egorov and Sergei Kozlovskii, and highlights the involvement of well-known figures such as Lev Kuleshov and Aleksandr Rodchenko. Unlike the majority of late Imperial directors and camera operators, many early-Russian production artists continued to work in cinema in the Soviet era and to draw on practices forged before the 1917 Revolution. In spanning the entire silent era, this book highlights the often overlooked continuities between the late-Imperial and early-Soviet periods of cinema, thus questioning traditional historical periodisations.

Film emerged in pre-Revolutionary Russia to become the 'most important of all arts' for the new Bolshevik regime and its propaganda machine. This text is a complete history from the beginning of film onwards and presents an engaging narrative of both the industry and its key films in the context of Russia's social and political history.

-- Includes a comprehensive introductory essay on the history of the film poster -- Presents 161 full-page color posters -- Includes biographies of the designers featured The film poster, the youngest in the poster family, inherited many generic features of the commercial advertisement: the drive and energy and the abundance of information. However, it was necessary for the film poster to distinguish itself from the collage of advertisements, as an announcement of a motion picture. Its artistic design had to imply the most characteristic and easily recognizable features of the film -- what impressed the audience most -- the very idea of the "motion picture." This intriguing volume is based on silent film posters from the Russian collections. Full-page reproductions of 161 Russian silent film posters are presented here in chronological order: from the very beginning of the 20th century until the 1930s.

This volume explores the cinema of the former Soviet Union and contemporary Russia, ranging from the pre-Revolutionary period to the present day. It offers an insight into the development of Soviet film, from 'the most important of all arts' as a propaganda tool to a means of entertainment in the Stalin era, from the rise of its 'dissident' art-house cinema in the 1960s through the glasnost era with its broken taboos to recent Russian blockbusters. Films have been chosen to represent both the classics of Russian and Soviet cinema as well as those films that had a more localised success and remain to date part of Russia's cultural reference system. The volume also covers a range of national film industries of the former Soviet Union in chapters on the greatest films and directors of Ukrainian, Kazakh, Georgian and Armenian cinematography. Films discussed include Strike (1925), Earth (1930), Ivan's Childhood (1962), Mother and Son (1997) and Brother (1997).

Covering painting, sculpture, prints, drawings, books, photographs, costumes, and examples of industrial architectural, and theatrical design, it is "a significant addition to the small number of books on the Russian avant-garde. It contains 19 authoritative and enlightening essays; short sections (good for reference) on each artist ... with biographies, bibliographies; a detailed chronology of the period; and a general bibliography. The whole text is extremely useful. The works themselves ... are astonishingly relevant to the 1980s." - Library Journal.

European cinema from the late 1920s to the late 1930s is famous for its attention to detail in terms of set design and visual effect. Focusing on developments in Britain, France, and Germany, Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema provides a comprehensive analysis of the practices, styles, and function of cinematic production design during this period, and its influence on subsequent filmmaking patterns.