The Russian Cinema Research Group at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College
London, is affiliated to the Centre for Russian Studies and was founded
in the autumn of 2002. It draws upon the holdings of the SSEES Video and DVD collection, on which
information can be found at the SSEES Film and Video Database,
and on the expertise of staff working on Russian film in SSEES, UCL and other British universities.
The Research Group holds regular work in progress seminars and welcomes visiting scholars working in the field. It has hosted over 70 speakers, from Great Britain, Russia, the USA, Kazakhstan, France, Germany, Spain and Australia. In the 2008-2009 session it marked
the centenary of the release of the first feature film in Russia in October 1908 by holding 10 seminars, assessing a significant film for each decade of Russian film history.
Rosie Bainbridge, Trinity College, Cambridge
Rosie Bainbridge is writing a PhD thesis on the role of intertitles in Soviet
cinema during the silent era under the supervision of Dr. Emma Widdis.
Professor Birgit Beumers, Central European University, Budapest
Professor Beumers is Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Central European University. She completed her D.Phil at St Antony's College, Oxford and specialises on contemporary Russian culture, especially cinema and theatre. Her publications include Burnt by the Sun (2000), Nikita Mikhalkov: Between Nostalgia and Nationalism (2005), PopCulture: Russia! (2005) and A History of Russian Cinema (Oxford and New York, Berg, 2009). She is the editor of Russia on Reels: The Russian Idea in Post-Soviet Cinema (1999) and 24 Frames: Russia and the Soviet Union (2007). She is also the editor of the online journal KinoKultura and of the journal Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema. She is currently working on post-Soviet cinema and on the history of Russian animation.
Daniel Bird, University of Sheffield
Mr Bird is completing hisPhD thesis on the apparent convergence of the thinking of Bakhtin, Eisenstein and Vygotskii on the subject of inner speech and primitive thought during the interwar period. He is investigating the similarities between the three thinkers in terms of both the ideas of their time and the institutional contexts that shaped their work. Prior to his PhD research he worked both as a film writer and as a programmer. His first book, on Roman Polanski, was published in 2002 and Wallflower Press will publish his book on Walerian Borowczyk in 2009. He has organised retrospectives on several Eastern European filmmakers including Vera Chytilova, Jerzy Skolimowski and Andrzej Zulawski. He has produced a number of documentary films for DVD, including profiles of Polanski's early career in Poland and England. He has also worked on several feature films in various capacities, most recently Juraj Jakubisko's Bathory (2008). Currently he co-teaches an undergraduate course on Russian and Eastern European film at Sheffield University.
Dr Philip Cavendish, SSEES, UCL
Dr Cavendish teaches Russian film at both BA and MA level in SSEES. He contributes to the UCL MA in Film Studies and the UCL BA course in European Film. Among his recent publications are 'The Hand that Turns the Handle: Camera Operators and the Poetics of the Camera in Pre-1917 Russian Film' Slavonic and East European Review, 78, 2004, pp. 201-45; 'The Men with the Movie Cameras: The Theory and Practice of Camera Operation Within the Soviet Avant-Garde of the 1920s', Slavonic and East European Review, 85, 2007, 4, pp. 658-97; 'Zemlia/Earth', in in B. Beumers (ed.), The Cinema of Russia and the Former Soviet Union (24 Frames series), London & New York: Wallflower Press, 2007, pp. 57-67; and the book Mainstream Soviet Cinema during the Silent Era: Camera Operators and the Poetics of Visual Style, London, UCL Arts and Humanities Series, 2007, 220pp + frame-stills.
Dr Yuna de Lannoy
Dr de Lannoy completed a thesis which compares Kurosawa and Eisenstein's approaches to Japanese art, Dostoevsky and music in 2009. She has investigated how the objectification of their respective cultures led to the persistent presence of 'otherness' in their cinemas. Among others things, she examined Kurosawa's developing use of Noh as a medium for adapting western plays, and discusses Eisenstein's approach to Central Asia, specifically through an analysis of his unrealized project, Ferghana Canal.
Her publications include 'Revisiting Akira Kurosawa's The Idiot: a comparison with Sergei Eisenstein', Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema vol. 2 no. 1, 2011 (forthcoming), and 'Innovation and Imitation: an analysis of the soundscape of Akira Kurosawa's chambara westerns', in Kalinak (ed.), Music in the Western: A Routledge Handbook on Music and Screen Media, Routledge, 2011 (forthcoming).
Dr de Lannoy has taught Japanese cinema at Oxford Brookes University, Birkbeck College and Antwerp University.
Dr Natascha Drubek-Meyer
Dr. habil. Natascha Drubek-Meyer is Heisenberg Fellow at the University of Regensburg where she teaches in Media Studies and Slavic Studies. She completed her MA and PhD in Slavic Studies & History of Eastern Europe at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (Munich) where she also received her habilitation in the field of Russian and Film Studies dealing with early cinema in Russia from a cultural & media studies perspective. Parallel to her university career she worked at the Filmmuseum in Munich where she also curated film seasons. She was awarded the Feodor-Lynen Research Grant (Humboldt-Stiftung) to do research in Russia (2004-2006) and the Marie Curie Fellowship at the Film School FAMU in Prague with the project: "Hypertextual Film Presentation" (2006-2008). With N. Izvolov she co-authored the method Hyperkino (www.hyperkino.net). In 2008 she produced the first Hyperkino DVD in Berlin and Prague. She is co-editor of Das Zeit-Bild im osteuropäischen Film nach 1945, Köln-Weimar 2010. Since 2003 she has been the editor of the "Film & Screen Media" section of www.ARTMargins.com (University of California) and co-editor of the series "osteuropa medial", published by Boehlau. Her habilitation will soon be published under the title Russisches Licht. Von der Ikone zum vorrevolutionären Kino. Currently she is researching Soviet anti-religious films. She lives in Berlin and splits her spare time between Prague and Hove.
Professor Julian Graffy, SSEES, UCL
Professor Graffy teaches Russian film at SSEES. He contributes to the UCL MA in Film Studies and the UCL BA course in European Film. He is the author of Bed and Sofa: The Film Companion, KINOFile Film Companion, 5, I.B.Tauris, London and New York, 2001, x + 125 pp. and of Chapaev: The Film Companion, KINOFile Film Companion, 12, I.B.Tauris, London and New York, 2010, x + 134 pp. His most recent publications include a study of Kira Muratova's film Chekhovskie motivy: 'Difficult people: Kira Muratova's Cinematic Encounter with Chekhov', Essays in Poetics, 31, 2006, pp. 180-212; 'History, Memory, Water: the Reclamation of Georgian Identity in Irakli Kvirikadze's Film The Swimmer', Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 1, 2007, 3, pp. 299-327; 'The foreigner's journey to consciousness in early Soviet cinema: the case of Protazanov's Tommi', in Insiders and Outsiders in Russian Cinema, ed. Stephen M. Norris and Zara M. Torleone, Bloomington and Indiana, Indiana University Press, 2008, pp. 1-22; 'Scant sign of Thaw: Fear and anxiety in the representation of foreigners in the Soviet films of the Khrushchev years', in Russia and Its Other(s) on Film: Screening Intercultural Dialogue, ed. Stephen Hutchings, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 27-46; '"But where is your happiness, Alevtina Ivanovna?" New debates about happiness in the Soviet films of 1956' in Petrified Utopia. Happiness Soviet Style, ed. Marina Balina and Evgeny Dobrenko, Anthem Press, London and New York, 2009, pp. 217-37; 'Writing about the cinema of the Stalin years: the state of the art', Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 10, 4, Fall 2009, pp. 809-23; and 'Literature and Film', in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Russian Literature, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Marina Balina, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 235-50; 'Borderline Obsessive. A Soviet Cinematic Preoccupation of the 1930s', Rabota i sluzhba. Sbornik pamiati Rashita Iangirova, comp. Jan Levchenko, St Petersburg, Svoe izdatel´stvo, 2011, pp. 162-91; 'Living and Dying in Sokurov's border zones - Days of Eclipse', in The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov, ed. B. Beumers and N. Condee, London and New York, I.B. Tauris, 2011, pp. 74-89. He edited 'A Hundred Years of Russian Film: the forgotten and the under-rated', a publication to mark the centenary of feature film production in Russia in which 22 scholars wrote about Russian films that have been unjustly ignored, in Studies in Russian & Soviet Cinema, 2, 2008, 3, pp. 327-354. He is at present engaged on a book about the representation of foreigners in 100 years of Russian films, and the light it sheds upon Russian identity and Russians' perception of their relationships with East and West.
Alexander Graham
Alexander Graham recently graduated with Distinction from the MA in Film Studies programme at UCL, having written a dissertation project on the films of Aleksei Iur´evich German under the supervision of Professor Julian Graffy. His first published work is an article based on this project, entitled 'Immersion in Time: History, Memory and the Question of Readability in the Films of Aleksei German', Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, Vol. 6 (2), 2012, pp. 177-216. Alexander is currently researching film and moving image art that deals with the experiences of African students in the Soviet Union, in preparation for a forthcoming exhibition to be curated by Professor Mark Nash of the Royal College of Art in collaboration with the Calvert 22 gallery in Bethnal Green, London. He is also part of a team working on the foundation of a future study program involving exchanges between postgraduate students of visual art and film curatorship at St. Petersburg State University and several UK academic institutions.
Dr Seth Graham, SSEES, UCL
Dr Graham teaches courses in Russian culture at the BA and MA level at SSEES. His publications include 'The New American Other in Recent Russian Cinema' (in Screening Intercultural Dialogue, ed. Stephen Hutchings, Palgrave, forthcoming), '"The Power of the Yurt": Cinema in Post-Soviet Central Asia' (Studia Filmoznawcze, 27, 2007), 'Models of Male Kinship in Perestroika Cinema' (in Fathers and Sons on Screen, ed. Yana Hashamova and Helena Goscilo, forthcoming), and several film reviews and articles in Kinokultura and Studies in Slavic Cultures. He has also written English subtitles for the films Play for a Passenger (dir. Vadim Abdrashitov, 1995) and Twelve Angry Men (dir. Nikita Mikhalkov, 2007).
Dr JJ Gurga, SSEES, UCL
Dr Gurga recently completed a PhD at SSEES on Ukrainian poetic cinema of the 1960s and 1970s and its reception, under the supervision of Dr Philip Cavendish.
Dr John Haynes, Department of History, University of Essex
Dr Haynes, who is the author of New Soviet Man. Gender and Masculinity in Stalinist Soviet Cinema, Manchester University Press, 2003, teaches film at the University of Essex. Among his recent publications on Russian film is 'Film as political football: The Goalkeeper', Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 1, 2007, 3, pp. 283-97.
Dr Anke Hennig, Free University, Berlin
Dr Hennig is working in the Collaborative Research Center 626 "Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits" at the Free University, Berlin on her postdoctoral project - "Fictional Temporality in Cinematic and Literary Tenses" and, together with a colleague, Armen Avanessian, recently founded a forum on speculative poetics in poetry, literary theory and philosophy (www.spekulative-poetik.de).
She studied Russian and German literature in Berlin and Moscow and graduated at the Peter Szondi Institute with her dissertation exploring historical questions of "The Soviet Cinematic Dramaturgy of the 30's". Her most recent publications are: Sowjetische Kinodramaturgie [Soviet Cinematic Dramaturgy], Vorwerk 8, Berlin, 2010; Über die Dinge. Texte der russischen Avantgarde [About Things: Russian Avant-garde Texts], (ed.) Fundus, Hamburg 2010; Predmet (issledovanija) i forma literatury [The Object (of Investigation) and the Form of Literature], in Logos: Filosofskij žurnal [Logos: Philosophic Journal], Moscow 2010, pp. 162-175; "Kak my rabotaem nad kinoscenariem" Vzgljady O. Brika v kontekste kinodramaturgii 1930-ych gg. ["How we work on the scenario" O. Brik's Point of View in the Context of the Cinematic Dramaturgy of the 30s], in Pervye Brikovskie čtenija [First Brik Readings], MGUP, Moscow 2011, pp. 402-407.
Dr Jeremy Hicks, Queen Mary, University of London
Jeremy Hicks is a Senior Lecturer in Russian at Queen Mary University of London (UK). He is the author of Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007) and First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938-46 (University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming December 2012). He has also published various articles on Russian and Soviet film, literature and journalism in Russian Review, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, Kinovedcheskie zapiski, Revolutionary Russia and Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Televison.
Professor Stephen Hutchings, University of Manchester
Professor Hutchings teaches Russian film, media and culture at the University of Manchester. He has researched the relationship between literature and film and is author of Russian Literary Culture in the Camera Age: The Word as Image (London: Routledge, 2004), and co-editor of Screening the Word: Soviet and Post-Soviet Screen Adaptations of Literature (London: Routledge, 2005) and editor of Russia and Its Other(s) on Film: Screening Intercultural Dialogue, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, xiv + 242 pp. He is currently completing AHRC-funded projects examining respectively post-Soviet television culture, and European television representations of Islam.
Professor Lilya Kaganovsky, University of Illinois
Professor Kaganovsky teaches in the Program in Comparative and World Literature, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Department of Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois. Recent publications include How the Soviet Man was Unmade. Cultural Fantasy and Male Subjectivity under Stalin (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008); articles on gender in Soviet and post-Soviet cinema; and two forthcoming edited volumes: Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s, with Lauren M. E. Goodlad and Robert A. Rushing (Duke University Press, Spring 2013), and Sound, Music, Speech in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema, with Masha Salazkina (Indiana University Press, Fall 2013).
Ms Claire Knight, University of Cambridge
Claire Knight is completing her PhD on late Stalin era cinema, using popular feature films to analyse the postwar recentralization of political, ideological and cultural authority under Stalin. Her work engages with Stalin epics, rural films, Hollywood and Nazi trophy films, and the filmed theatrical productions known as fil´my-spektakli. Claire is currently Modern European History Lecturer at King's College London.
Professor Diane P. Koenker, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Professor Koenker teaches in the Department of History at the University of Illinois, specializing in the history of twentieth-century Russia and the Soviet Union. From 1996 to 2006 she served as editor-in-chief of Slavic Review. In 2006, she co-edited, with Anne E. Gorsuch, Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism (Cornell University Press). Her history of Soviet vacations and tourism, Club Red: Vacation Travel and the Soviet Dream, will be published by Cornell University Press in spring 2013; it includes both feature and documentary films among its sources. Also to appear in 2013 will be an edited collection (with Anne E. Gorsuch), The Socialist Sixties: Crossing Borders in the Second World (Indiana University Press). She has begun, also with Anne Gorsuch, a new project on the 1960s Soviet Union as a consumer society, drawing extensively on films of the period.
Dr. Susan Larsen, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University
Susan Larsen recently left the University of Chicago to take a post as Lecturer in Slavonic Studies at Cambridge. Her research explores issues of gender and national identity in Russian culture from the late 18th century to the present. Her film-related publications include articles on gender and ethnicity in the work of Kira Muratova, melodramatic masculinity, and the post-Soviet blockbuster. She is currently completing a book on girls' culture in Russia from 1764 to 1917 and contemplating a new project on Soviet filmmakers' response to French and Italian cinema during the Thaw. Her most recent publication is a translation of a film scenario by Andrei Platonov, "Father-Mother" (New Left Review, Fall 2008).
Dr Mark Le Fanu
Dr Le Fanu wrote the first English-language book about Tarkovsky's films in 1987 (The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, BFI Books). Since then he has written about the director in a variety of publications and online journals and has published interviews with a number of his artistic collaborators (see for example www.nostalghia.com , 8 December 2007: "Interview with Tarkovsky's cameraman Vadim Yusev"). Le Fanu has also written essays on Eisenstein and on early Russian cinema ("Props, Objects and Magical Images: An Investigation into Some Eisenstein Imagery", www.16-9.dk , March 2010; "Before Eisenstein", The Cambridge Quarterly, vol.XXI, no. 1, 1992; "The Eisenstein Enigma", Encounter, February 1989). After an excursus into classical Japanese cinema (Mizoguchi and Japan, BFI Books 2005) Le Fanu is currently writing a book about the persistence of spiritual and religious themes in 20th century world cinema, with a section that will be focused on the prominent contribution made to the art form in this context by Eisenstein, Tarkovsky, Shepit´ko, Sokurov and others.
Dr Daniel Levitsky, SSEES, UCL
Dr Levitsky recently completed a thesis entitled Soviet history in Cinema: The Making of New Myths and Truths at SSEES, UCL under the supervision of Dr Philip Cavendish.
Professor Stephen Lovell, King's College London
Stephen Lovell is Professor of Modern European History at King's College London. He is the author of The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras (2000), Summerfolk: A History of the Dacha, 1710-2000 (2003) and Destination in Doubt: Russia since 1989 (2006). He is presently engaged on a history of Russia since World War II where the themes of mass culture and westernization, with extensive reference to cinema, will be prominent. Another current research interest is the cinematic depiction of radio and public speaking.
Dr Ian McDonald, University of Brighton
Dr McDonald is a sport sociologist and documentary filmmaker based in the Chelsea School at the University of Brighton. He is currently researching the politics of physical culture and sport in the Soviet Union through a study of Soviet narrative and documentary sport films.
Dr Muireann Maguire, Wadham College, Oxford
Dr Maguire completed her PhD thesis on the persistence of Gothic-fantastic themes and characters in Soviet twentieth-century literature at Cambridge University in 2009. She is also interested in the use of Gothic-fantastic motifs in film of the same period, such as Konstantin Eggert's Medvezh´ia svad´ba and Eizenshtein's Ivan Groznyi. She has articles forthcoming in Modern Language Review, New Zealand Slavonic Journal, and Gothic Studies. Her new research project investigates the cultural representation of scientists in Russian and Soviet culture between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, focussing on key scientific stereotypes such as the engineer, the alchemist, the biologist, and the astrophysicist. She takes a general interest in Soviet science-fiction films and novels. Dr Maguire is currently converting her doctoral dissertation into a book, while completing a smaller project on the portrayal of animals in Soviet film.
Dr Chiara Mayer-Rieckh, SSEES, UCL
Dr Mayer-Rieckh has recently completed a PhD thesis on the significance of the philosophical concept of tselostnost´ and the motif of memory in the work of Platonov, Rasputin and Tarkovskii under the supervision of Professor Julian Graffy.
Dr Milena Michalski, King's College London
Dr Michalski is Research Associate on the AHRC Beyond Text project 'Pictures of Peace and Justice'. Other current research focuses on aesthetically and technologically experimental fiction and documentary films of the 1920s-30s, as well as still photography and photomontage, relating to the themes of the first Five Year Plan. Long-standing research interests include the films of Abram Room. She is author (with James Gow) of War, Image and Legitimacy: Viewing Contemporary Conflict (Routledge, London and New York, 2007). Recent work includes 'Abstraction and Construction in the USSR 1928-33' for Tate Modern's Abstract Connections symposium, entries on Abram Room's Tret´ia Meshchanskaia and Aleksandr Macheret's Dela i liudi in Nikita Braguinski and Ekaterina Vassilieva (eds), 100 fil´mov. Kanon russkogo i sovetskogo kino, Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (forthcoming) and 'Construction and reconstruction: Komsomol and 'The Giant and the Builder', The Ivens Magazine, 2010.
Dr Jamie Miller
Dr Miller is particularly interested in the relationship between politics and the development of the Soviet film industry in the Stalin era. He is the author of Soviet Cinema: Politics and Persuasion under Stalin, London and New York, I.B. Tauris, 2010, xv + 222 pp. and journal articles about Soviet film in the Stalin period. He is currently researching the history of the Mezhrabpom / Mezhrabpomfil´m film studio over the period 1923-1936.
Dr Rachel Morley, SSEES, UCL
Dr Morley has recently completed a PhD thesis on the representation of the female performer in pre-Revolutionary Russian film under the supervision of Professor Julian Graffy and Professor Pamela Davidson. She has published several articles on early Russian film, including: 'Gender Relations in the Films of Evgenii Bauer', Slavonic and East European Review, 81, 2003, 1, pp. 32-69; '"Crime Without Punishment": Reworkings of Nineteenth-century Russian Literary Sources in Evgenii Bauer's Child of the Big City' in S. Hutchings and A. Vernitski (eds), Russian and Soviet Film Adaptations of Literature, 1900-2001: Screening the Word, London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005, pp. 27-43; 'Zhizn´ za zhizn´ / A Life for a Life', in B. Beumers (ed.), The Cinema of Russia and the Former Soviet Union (24 Frames series), London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2007, pp. 13-22; '1912: The Incestuous Father-in-law (Snokhach)' in J. Graffy (ed.), 'Special Feature: Russian Cinema Centenary. A Hundred Years of Russian Film: the Forgotten and Under-rated', Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 2, 2008, 3, pp. 327-54 (pp. 331-32); and 'Performing Femininity in an Age of Change: Evgenii Bauer, Ivan Turgenev and the Legend of Evlaliia Kadmina' in Robert Reid and Joe Andrew (eds), Turgenev: Art, Ideology, Legacy, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010, pp. 269-316. Her recent work includes short articles on Vladimir Romashkov's Sten´ka Razin (1908), Petr Chardynin's Molchi, grust´, molchi... (Be Still, Sadness, Be Still..., 1918) and Sergei Bondarchuk's Sud´ba cheloveka (A Man's Fate, 1959), for Nikita Braguinski and Ekaterina Vassilieva (eds), 100 fil´mov. Kanon russkogo i sovetskogo kino, Vinnitsa, Ukraine: Globus-Press (forthcoming in 2011). Dr Morley is currently revising her thesis for publication as a monograph.
José Manuel Mouriño
José Manuel Mouriño is a researcher, essayist and Spanish filmmaker who is writing a PhD thesis at the University of Vigo (Spain) under the supervision of Dr Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego. He has curated exhibitions in Spain and Portugal on important figures in cinema history such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Michelangelo Antonioni, and published essays on the same directors as well as on Norman Mclaren and Georges Perec. At present he is also conducting a research project on Mikhail Romm. He works for the Andrei Tarkovsky International Institute as a representative in Spain. He is the author of the documentary film White Days. Notes about the filming of Nostalgia by Andrei Tarkovsky.
Maria Pasholok, Magdalen College Oxford
Ms Pasholok is a D.Phil. candidate at the University of Oxford, where she is writing a thesis on the representation of interior space in 1920s Russian film and literature, under the supervision of Prof. Catriona Kelly. Focusing on topological features such as proximity, separation and borders, her dissertation examines the configuration of a range of imaginary homes and cinematic sets to demonstrate the significance of interior space to any discussion of the revolutionary culture. She has produced a number of documentary films for DVD, including biographical films about Victor Shklovskii and Boris Pasternak (both for the Centre of National Films, Moscow). She worked as a script editor on the animation movie Star Dogs: Belka and Strelka (2010) that has won several awards at international film festivals. Maria also co-taught an undergraduate course on European cinema at the University of Oxford, and writes film reviews for a number of Russian and British magazines as a freelance journalist.
Dr Alastair Renfrew, Department of Russian, University of Durham
Alastair Renfrew is Reader and Head of the Department of Russian at the University of Durham, where he teaches film and literature. Among his recent writings on Russian film is 'Against adaptation? The Strange Case of (Pod)Poruchik Kizhe', Modern Language Review, 102, 2007, pp. 157-76. He has published widely on the cultural and critical environment of the Soviet 1920s and 1930s, and is currently completing a monograph history of the Russian and Soviet Cinema for Routledge's National Cinemas series.
John A. Riley, Birkbeck College, University of London
Mr Riley is preparing to submit his PhD thesis on the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, under the supervision of Professor Ian Christie. The thesis approaches Tarkovsky non-intentionally, against the many reductive interpretations of his work produced by an uncritical acceptance of Tarkovsky's own programmatic writing. The many resonances between Tarkovsky's films and the work of others are conceptualised as reflections, double exposures and hauntings.
Mr. Riley has written on Tarkovsky and Sokurov for Senses of Cinema, and on the documentaries of Vitalii Mansky for APEngine.org. Projects currently underway include an article exploring the themes and aesthetics of the film Ladoni (Palms) and organising a series of screenings of contemporary Russian films.
Dr Andrei Rogatchevski, School of Modern Languages and Cultures (Slavonic Studies), University of Glasgow
Dr Rogatchevski teaches Russian film as part of the Slavonic Studies Level 1 module, and also, as an Honours option. He is primarily interested in the interaction between film/TV and literature. Among his publications on film are 'An Unknown Source of King, Queen, Knave?' [on Abram Room's film Bed and Sofa] The Nabokovian, 49, 2002, pp. 9-12; 'May the [Police] Force Be with You: The Television Adaptations of Alexandra Marinina's Detective Novels (with Special Reference to The Coincidence of Circumstances)', Russian Studies in Literature, 40, 2004, 3, pp. 79-94; and a section on Vladimir Maiakovskii, Eduard Limonov and the art of cinema in A Biographical and Critical Study of [the] Russian Writer Eduard Limonov, The Edwin Mellen Press 2003, pp. 89-91. Dr Rogatchevski has also contributed several entries (on Nikita Mikhalkov, Aleksandr Kaidanovskii, documentary films and film festivals/prizes) to The Routledge Encyclopedia of Contemporary Russian Culture (2007), as well as a comparative study of Fedor Dostoevskii's novel "Idiot" (1868) and Roman Kachanov Jr.'s film Daun Khaus (2001), to an edited volume on madness in Russian culture (2007).
His book Filming the Unfilmable: Casper Wrede's 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' (co-authored with Ben Hellman) Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society, 94, Stuttgart, Ibidem, 248 pp., was published in 2010.
Dr Andrey Shcherbenok
Dr Shcherbenok wrote his first dissertation on Russian literature at St. Petersburg State University (2001) and his second dissertation on Soviet cinema at UC Berkeley (2006). In 2006-2009 he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is currently a Royal Society Newton International Fellow at the University of Sheffield. His publications include Dekonstruktsiia i klassicheskaia russkaia literatura (Moscow: NLO, 2005), "The Enemy, the Communist, and Ideological Closure in Soviet Cinema on the Eve of the Great Terror." Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. 10.4 (Fall 2009). 753-777; "Asymmetric Warfare: The Vision of the Enemy in American and Soviet Cold War Cinemas." Kinokultura. 28 (April 2010); "Russian/Soviet Screened Sexuality: An Introduction." Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema. Vol. 3 (2), 2009. 135-145; "'Killing Realism': Insight and Meaning in Anton Chekhov." Slavic and East European Journal. 54.2 (Summer 2010). 297-315.
Dr Shcherbenok is currently working on a research project "Soviet Past as the Traumatic Object of Contemporary Russian Culture" and completing his second book project, "Trauma and Ideology: Stalinist Cinema and Its Contexts."
Raisa Sidenova, Yale University
Ms Sidenova is a Ph.D. Candidate in Film Studies and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, where she is working on a dissertation entitled From Pravda to Vérité: Soviet Documentary on Film and Television, 1953-1982, under the supervision of Prof. John MacKay and Prof. Charles Musser.
Professor Nariman Skakov, Stanford University
Professor Skakov is an Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University. He completed a DPhil thesis for the University of Oxford on the cinema of Andrei Tarkovskii in the summer of 2009. His article '(Im)Possible Translation of [Tarkovsky's] Nostalgia' was published in Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 3, 2009, 3, pp. 309-33. He is currently completing a book-length study of Tarkovskii.
Dr Alexandra Smith, Department of European Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh
Alexandra Smith is Reader in Russian at the University of Edinburgh. She teaches courses on Russian literature and film, and
contributes to the postgraduate programme on Film studies. She is the author of several books and articles on Russian literature and film,
including the book Montaging Pushkin. Pushkin and Visions of Modernity in Russian Twentieth-Century Poetry (Amsterdam and New
York: Rodopi, 2006). Currently she is writing a book on the interaction between poetry and film, focusing on the representation of Russian
modernist poets in film.
Dr Vlad Strukov, Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies, University of Leeds
Dr Strukov is Lecturer in the Department of German, Russian and Slavonic Studies and in the Centre for World at the University of Leeds. He teaches courses in Russian cinema, media and new media, digital cinema and animation; he is also a co-director of the Leeds MA programme in World Cinemas. He is the founding editor of Static, an international journal supported by the Tate and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, and of the journal Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media. He works independently as a new media, film and animation curator. Dr Strukov's research on film, animation, mass media and national identity has appeared in the Slavic and East European Journal, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal and other publications. Among his recent publications is 'The Return of Gods: Andrei Zviagintsev's Vozvrashchenie', Slavic and East European Journal, 51, 2007, 2. He is currently working on a project that deals with the issues of digital and web-induced arts, space, authorship and film.
Alissa Timoshkina, King's College London
Ms Timoshkina is a PhD candidate at King's College, London, where she is writing a thesis on the representation of the Holocaust in Soviet cinema, under the supervision of Professor Ginette Vincendeau and Professor Stephen Lovell. She has organised and curated a number of film seasons and festivals in London (including the 2nd Russian Film Festival, 2008, the 'Behind the Wall' film season at Tate Modern and the Barbican, 2009 and the 'Sergei Paradjanov Festival' at the BFI and the National Theatre 2010). She has written film reviews for Sight and Sound and KinoKultura and is currently co-editing a book on European cinema to be published by I.B. Tauris in 2014.
Dr Anna Toropova, SSEES, UCL
Anna Toropova wrote a thesis entitled Symptoms of Desire: Myth, Fantasy and Spectacle in Stalinist Cinema at SSEES, UCL under the supervision of Dr Seth Graham and Dr Susan Morrissey. Focusing on the genres of melodrama, war film, musical, and 'personality cult' film, the project uses psychoanalytic theory to explore the relationship between desire and ideology in the processes of cinematic signification.
Dr Julia Vassilieva, Monash University, Melbourne
Julia Vassilieva is a lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Monash University. Her research interests centre on historical film theory and criticism, intersection of film, politics and philosophy, and contemporary Russian cinema and popular culture. She has conducted extensive research in the Eizenshtein archives in Russia and has published widely on Eizenshtein in English and in Russian. Her publications include "Between Utopia and Event: Beyond the Banality of Local Politics in Eisenstein", Film-Philosophy, 15, "Capital and Co: Kluge, Eisenstein, Marx", Screening the Past, 31, "Sergei Eisenstein's ¡Qué viva México! through Time: Historicising Value Judgment", Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 24.5. Among her recent publications are also "Religious Discourse as an Empty Signifier in the Post-Communist Russian Cultural Space", Aesopic Voices, 2011, and "The Russian Wheel of Fortune: Mass Culture and the Production of the Capitalist Subject in Post-Communist Russia" forthcoming in Continuum, 2012. She is co-editor, with Con Verevis, of After Taste: Cultural Value and the Moving Image, Routledge, 2012.
Candyce Veal, SSEES, UCL
Candyce Veal is currently completing her PhD thesis on the significance of aviation and flight in Stalinist film. She assisted with Russian film courses at SSEES, UCL between 2004 and 2010. Seminar papers include: 'Intrigan, Letchiki, Nebesnyi Tikhokhod: Levels of Flight in Three Stalinist Films', Russian Cinema Research Group Seminar, SSEES, UCL, 15 October 2007; 'Planes of Discourse: Defining Soviet Women Through Aviation Images on Screen', 'Russia on Screen: Identity and Appropriation' Conference, Queen Mary College, London University, 10 May 2008; 'Unique Moments in Aviation, Flight and Transformation in Early Stalinist Film', PhD Research Group Seminar Series, SSEES, UCL, 3 June 2010; 'Gaining Wings: Love and Creativity at the Cusp of Stalinist Film', Russian Aviation and Space: Technology and the Cultural Imagination Conference, Leeds University, 28-30 October 2010. Her contribution; 'Letchiki', is
included in the collection of review articles celebrating a centenary of
Russian film: Noev kovcheg russkogo kino: ot 'Sten´ki Razina' do 'Stiliag',
Globus-Press, Vinnytsia, Ukraine, 2012.
Giuliano Vivaldi
Mr Giuliano Vivaldi is an independent film scholar based in Moscow and Brighton. He has translated the subtitles for Elem Klimov's film Sport, Sport, Sport and studied briefly at VGIK (the Russian State Institute for Cinematography). He is currently researching Soviet documentary and sport narrative films (with Dr Ian McDonald). He has published a review article for the online journal Film Philosophy on the essays of Pudovkin. He is preparing for publication articles on Boris Barnet (for the Senses of Cinema site) and on Elem Klimov.
Justine Waddell
Justine Waddell is a trustee of the Kino Klassika Foundation, which aims to restore and (re)present classics of Soviet cinema. She also works in film in several other capacities, notably as an actor, her last feature film role being Zoia in Aleksandr Zeldovich's Target (2011).
Dr Emma Widdis, Trinity College Cambridge
Dr Widdis is the author of Visions of a New Land. Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2003 and Alexander Medvedkin, Kinofiles Filmmakers' Companion, 2, London and New York, 2005 and the editor, with Simon Franklin, of National Identity in Russian Culture. An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, 2004. Among her recent publications are 'Dressing the part: clothing otherness in Soviet cinema', in Insiders and Outsiders in Russian Cinema, ed. Stephen M. Norris and Zara M. Torlone, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2008, pp. 48-67; 'Faktura: Depth and Surface in Early Soviet Set Design', in Studies in Russian & Soviet Cinema, 3, 2009, 1, pp. 5-32; 'Sew yourself Soviet: the pleasures of textile in the machine age', in Petrified Utopia. Happiness Soviet Style, ed. Marina Balina and Evgenii Dobrenko, Anthem Press, London and New York, 2009, pp. 115-32; and 'Socialist senses: film and the creation of Soviet subjectivity', Slavic Review, 71, 2012, 3, pp. 590-618. She is currently working on a book which explores the significance of tactile imagery in Soviet film.
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