Cinemasaurus

Cinemasaurus PDF

Author: Nancy Condee

Publisher: Academic Studies PRess

Published: 2020-04-14

Total Pages: 437

ISBN-13: 1644693747

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Cinemasaurus examines contemporary Russian cinema as a new visual economy, emerging over three decades after the Soviet collapse. Focusing on debates and films exhibited at Russian and US public festivals where the films have premiered, the volume’s contributors—the new generation of US scholars studying Russian cinema—examine four issues of Russia’s transition: (1) its imperial legacy, (2) the emergence of a film market and its new genres, (3) Russia’s uneven integration into European values and hierarchies, (4) the renegotiation of state power vis-à-vis arthouse and independent cinemas. An introductory essay frames each of the four sections, with 90 films total under discussion, concluding with a historical timeline and five interviews of key film-industry figures formative of the historical context.

Historical and Cultural Transformations of Russian Childhood

Historical and Cultural Transformations of Russian Childhood PDF

Author: Marina Balina

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-11-30

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1000780724

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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.

Russian TV Series in the Era of Transition

Russian TV Series in the Era of Transition PDF

Author: Alexander Prokhorov

Publisher: Academic Studies PRess

Published: 2021-12-14

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 1644696460

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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.

Soviet Films of the 1970s and Early 1980s

Soviet Films of the 1970s and Early 1980s PDF

Author: Marina Rojavin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-05-30

Total Pages: 146

ISBN-13: 1000378276

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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.

AI for Games and Animation

AI for Games and Animation PDF

Author: John David Funge

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 1999-07-22

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1439864012

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John Funge introduces a new approach to creating autonomous characters. Cognitive modeling provides computer-animated characters with logic, reasoning, and planning skills. Individual chapters in the book provide concrete examples of advanced character animation, automated cinematography, and a real-time computer game. Source code, animations, imag

Chekhov in Context

Chekhov in Context PDF

Author: Yuri Corrigan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-02-28

Total Pages: 573

ISBN-13: 1108901743

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Premier playwright of modern theater and trailblazer of the short story, Anton Chekhov was also a practising doctor, journalist, writer of comic sketches, philanthropist and activist. This volume provides an accessible guide to Chekhov's multifarious interests and influences, with over 30 succinct chapters covering his rich intellectual milieu and his tumultuous socio-political environment, as well as the legacy of his work in over two centuries of interdisciplinary cultures and media around the world. With a Preface by Cornel West, a chronology and Further Reading list, this collection is the essential guide to Chekhov's writing and the manifold worlds he inhabited.

Modern Russian Cinema as a Battleground in Russia's Information War

Modern Russian Cinema as a Battleground in Russia's Information War PDF

Author: Alexander Rojavin

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-08-01

Total Pages: 173

ISBN-13: 104010259X

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This book explores how modern Russian cinema is part of the international information war that has unfolded across a variety of battlefields, including social media, online news, and television. It outlines how Russian cinema has been instrumentalized, both by Kremlin allies and its detractors, to convey salient political and cultural messages, often in subtle ways, thereby becoming a tool for both critiquing and serving domestic and foreign policy objectives, shaping national identity, and determining cultural memory. It explains how regulations, legislation, and funding mechanisms have rendered contemporary cinema both an essential weapon for the Kremlin and a means for more independent figures to publicly frame official government policy. In addition, the book employs formal cinematic analysis to highlight the dominant themes and narratives in modern Russian films of a variety of genres, situating them in Russia’s broader rhetorical ecosystem and explaining how they serve the objectives of the Kremlin or its opponents.

Soviet Self-Hatred

Soviet Self-Hatred PDF

Author: Eliot Borenstein

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2023-06-15

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1501769901

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Soviet Self-Hatred examines the imaginary Russian identities that emerged following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Eliot Borenstein shows how these identities are best understood as balanced on a simple axis between pride and shame, shifting in response to Russia's standing in the global community, its anxieties about internal dissension and foreign threats, and its stark socioeconomic inequalities. Through close readings of Russian fiction, films, jokes, songs, fan culture, and Internet memes, Borenstein identifies and analyzes four distinct types with which Russians identify or project onto others. They are the sovok (the Soviet yokel); the New Russian (the despised, ridiculous nouveau riche), the vatnik (the belligerent, jingoistic patriot), and the Orc (the ultraviolent savage derived from a deliberate misreading of Tolkien's epic). Through these contested identities, Soviet Self-Hatred shows how stories people tell about themselves can, tragically, become the stories that others are forced to live.

Starlight and Stargazers

Starlight and Stargazers PDF

Author: Helena Goscilo

Publisher: Academic Studies PRess

Published: 2024-05-21

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13:

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Celebrification has thrived for centuries in literature, theater, music, and other cultural spheres, as vividly illustrated by Byron, Sarah Bernhardt, and Paganini. It especially effloresced in cinema after the symbolically named Lumière brothers pioneered movies as light-projected “moving life” to be contemplated and shared in the intimate darkness of theaters. Actors and actresses such as Valentino and Garbo acquired the status of divine beings whose life on and offscreen stimulated fascination and a passionate devotion most frequently invested in religious figures. The recent explosion in social media has only amplified immeasurably the scale and intensity of that adulation. Yearning for the seemingly transcendent, fans as mere mortals seek contact with celebrities as objects of worship that, like nocturnal stars, are simultaneously remote yet accessible. Starlight and Stargazers examines the multifaceted nature and specific manifestations of film celebrification in Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic, Poland, Soviet Russia/Russia, and Ukraine before and after 1991