Most histories of Soviet cinema portray the 1970s as a period of stagnation with the gradual decline of the film industry. This book, however, examines Soviet film and television of the era as mature industries articulating diverse cultural values via new genre models. During the 1970s, Soviet cinema and television developed a parallel system of genres where television texts celebrated conservative consensus while films manifested symptoms of ideological and social crises. The book examines the genres of state-sponsored epic films, police procedural, comedy and melodrama, and outlines how television gradually emerged as the major form of Russo-Soviet popular culture. Through close analysis of well-known film classics of the period as well as less familiar films and television series, this groundbreaking work helps to deconstruct the myth of this era as a time of cultural and economic stagnation and also helps us to understand the persistence of this myth in the collective memory of Putin-era Russia. This monograph is the first book-length English-language study of film and television genres of the late Soviet era.

Russian TV Series in the Era of Transition examines contemporary Russian television genres in the age of transition from broadcast to post-broadcast television. Focusing on critical debates and the most significant TV series of the past two decades, the volume’s contributors—the leading US and European scholars studying Russian television, as well as the leading Russian TV producers and directors—focus on three major issues: Russian television’s transition to digital post-broadcast economy, which redefined the media environment; Russian television’s integration into global television markets and their genre systems; and major changes in the representation of gender and sexuality on Russian television.

Historical and Cultural Transformations of Russian Childhood is a collection of multidisciplinary scholarly essays on childhood experience. The volume offers new critical approaches to Russian and Soviet childhood at the intersection of philosophy, literary criticism, film/visual studies, and history. Pedagogical ideas and practices, and the ideological and political underpinnings of the experience of growing up in pre-revolutionary Russia, the Soviet Union, and Putin’s contemporary Russia are central venues of analysis. Toward the goal of constructing the "multimedial childhood text," the contributors tackle issues of happiness and trauma associated with childhood and foreground its fluidity and instability in the Russian context. The volume further examines practices of reading childhood: as nostalgic text, documentary evidence, and historic mythology. Considering Russian childhood as historical documentation or fictional narrative, as an object of material culture, and as embodied in different media (periodicals, visual culture, and cinema), the volume intends to both problematize but also elucidate the relationship between childhood, history, and various modes of narrativity.

This book explores a new character archetype that permeated Soviet film during what became known as the era of Stagnation, a stark period of loneliness, disappointment, and individual despair. This new type of character was neither negative nor positive, but nevertheless systematically undermined Soviet norms of behaviour, hairstyle, dress, lifestyle, and perspective, in stark contrast to Socialist Realism’s traditional, positive hero who fought for Soviet values and who vanquished the enemies of socialism. The book discusses a wide range of films from the period, showing how the new antiheroic archetype of Stagnation resonated through a multitude of characters, mostly male, and vividly reflected the realities of Soviet life. The book thereby provides great insight into the lives, outlook, and psychology of citizens in the late Soviet period.

Drawing on documents from archives in St Petersburg and Moscow, 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 two opening chapters trace the various crises that beset film production between 1961 and 1970 (Chapter 1) and 1970 and 1985 (Chapter 2). These are followed by a chapter on the working life of the studio and particularly the technical aspects of production (Chapter 3), and a chapter on the studio aesthetic (Chapter 4). The second part of the book comprises close analyses of fifteen films that are particularly typical of the studio's production and which had especial impact within the studio and beyond. .

A panoramic survey of nearly a century of Russian films on wars and wartime from World War I to more recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Chechnya, with heavy emphasis on films pertaining to World War II.

This wide-ranging collection investigates the father/son dynamic in post-Stalinist Soviet cinema and its Russian successor. Contributors analyze complex patterns of identification, disavowal, and displacement in films by such diverse directors as Khutsiev, Motyl', Tarkovsky, Balabanov, Sokurov, Todorovskii, Mashkov, and Bekmambetov. Several chapters focus on the difficulties of fulfilling the paternal function, while others show how vertical and horizontal male bonds are repeatedly strained by the pressure of redefining an embattled masculinity in a shifting political landscape.