Russian film critic Maya Turovskaya writes in Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry that when she attended a special screening of Andrey Tarkovsky’s first film, Ivan’s Childhood, at a meeting of the Union of Cinematographers of the USSR, the prevailing opinion amongst the audience was that of awe mixed with confusion. This feeling of mystification, of seeing […]
Aleksei Balabanov is one of Russia’s best known directors of the 1990s and his movies are known for capturing the essence of those turbulent years. Balabanov’s Education and Early Work By Matthew Jensen Aleksei Oktyabrinovich Balabanov was born in the town of Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) on 25 February 1959. He studied at the Gorky Pedagogical […]
In his seminal work, Men Without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917-1929, Eliot Borenstein characterized the period of Russian history immediately following the October Revolution as an era of immense sexual upheaval, arguing that the Soviet Union experienced not one, but two sexual revolutions occurring “at opposite ends of the sociopolitical spectrum … […]
New wave, an art world term for any time when a sudden explosion of art is made with experimental styles, is an apt title for the movement that elevated the Kazakhstan film industry from obscurity to international fame in just a matter of years. In an interview for the Los Angeles Times in 1990, Forrest […]
Like many other great Soviet filmmakers of the Russian avant-garde, David Abelevich Kaufman – better known by his revolutionary pseudonym Dziga Vertov – came from a largely scientific background, having likely been first introduced to film as a tool in one of his science classes at university. Given this fact, it is perhaps understandable that […]
