Russian Midterm 1

Anastasia 1997

Don Bluth and Gary Goldman

• Romanticizes imperial russia

• Motifs: music box, song, motif

• Clear bad and good

• Rasputin: his fault for uprising of Russian citizens NOT because they were being starved

• Omniscient from Dowagers Empress

• Restricted from Anastasia’s POV

• Subjective: we get their thoughts from the songs

• Dmitri as a positive in American cinema:

  • Entrepreneur, trickster, redemption arc

• Anastasia not a damsel in distress

Black Widow 2021

Kate Shortland

• Marvel

• Identity of a Russian family:

  • Serves state first then family

  • Vodka love

• Men not taken seriously, women rule the house (soviet families)

• Cold War legacies: obsession with comparing to American and hoping they still think of them as equals (not so much after cold war but during yes)

• Superhero and melodrama genres

• Other families in the film: widows under Dreykov, the avengers (found family)

Soviet Toys 1924

Dziga Vertov

• NEP man: portrayed as gluttonous with food and money and women

• Experimental political propaganda

• He is only defeated by the merging of a working man and a peasant (hammer and sickle)

• Everyone is then hung on a new year’s tree

• Priests are bribed by NEP man then killed

• Advertising the people’s bank where the taxes from NEP man go, new year’s tree, and film studio

China In Flames 1925

Valentina Brumberg and collective

• Villainized the west and religion

• Colonialism in china from western powers, fight back, soviet solidarity with china

• Imperialism robbing china, chinese rich and servants oppressing chinese people

• Hole in great wall of china

• Missionaries as snakes

• Text from lenin as a call to action

The Little Humpback Horse 1947

Ivan Ivanov-Vano

• Tsar is comedic, not the villain and easily manipulated

• Fairytale

• Distinct good and bad 

• Cel animation

• No morals, only luck!

• Villain physical appearance xenophobic because he’s not Russian (not snub nosed)

• Two older brothers like parents and he is the child (youngest always a fool, brothers always bossy)

• Deliberately not validating hard work (only luck)

• Magical helper: little humpbacked horse

Alexander Nevsky 1938

Sergei Eisenstein and Dmitri Vasilyev

• Usable past: manipulate the past for whatever they want to promote

• 1300s-1200s

• Supposed to be stalin

• People’s tsar (cares

• Film to raise patriotic spirit and prepare for war

• Banned when friends with germany, brought back when enemies with germany

• Bad russian rich people: merchants

• Catholic bad, orthodox good

  • Catholics: burning children

  • Orthodox: Nevsky final speech in front of orthodox cathedral

• Germans: white, purity, evil with blond curls, ice, mechanical, feminized, geometric

• Russians: dark, organic, masculine, dynamic/human, curved lines

• Getting idea on how to trap Germans from a peasant telling a folk tale

• Folk tale motifs:

  • Natural elements

  • Animal symbolism

  • Traditional women’s lament

  • Parable of the hare and the fox

  • Motif of rival suitors

• Sequence of closures:

  • Reuniting romantic lovers

  • Court of justice

    • Soldiers forced to fight so go free

    • Knights exchanged for soap

    • Russian nobleman killed by crowd (rich people bad)

  • Making merriment: orders people to drink and be happy

  • Final warning: to internal people (fight when called) and external people (you’ll be defeated)

• Mother happiest about the marriage

Circus 1936

Grigorii Aleksandrov

• Re-eduction of positive hero: Marion

  • Franz: mentor

  • Ivan: love interest and mentor

• People-mindedness:

  • Easy to understand follow with no tricks or ambiguity

• Class-mindedness:

  • Support poor and oppressed against rich and spoiled

• Party-mindedness:

  • Promoting communism 

• Re-education:

  • Comes to the USSR and thinks it’s like the US and she has to hide her black son

  • When people find out, no one cares and all accept her so she thinks the USSR is amazing and wants to stay forever

    • She thinks a soviet man can be racist which the film shows is an impossibility and its her mistake and she must overcome it

• America: racist, bad, materialistic

• USSR: welcoming, good, not materialistic

• Song of the Motherland: sung in several different languages, starts and ends in russian (russia first)

• No longer sexualized, seen as an equal

• Music comedy and social realism

• In the red square

Silver Dust 1953

Abram Room

• Soviet fantasy of America, show america is bad but still want their consumer goods and cars

• Communism is oppressed and so are black people

• Black people only personality traits is being oppressed and need to be saved by the white communist savior complex man

• The scenes in Dr. Steal’s lab are staged in the style of German Expressionism

• Mad scientist trope: his youngest son ends up dying from it and then he dies as well

• Experimenting on prisoners of war and black people

• Older son good, cause communist

• Younger son bad because in cahoots with german nazi scientist who gets him killed

• Older son:

• Dr. Schneider: Nazi scientist

  • Marys son is ben

The Millionaire 1963

Sergei Mikhalkov (writer)

Yuri Prytkov

• Obsessionism with consumerism in america

• Making fun of rich people in the US

• Trying to show that money can get you anywhere

• Doesn’t matter who you are, just that you have money

• Dance scene: animal-like, following money

• Rhyming couplets

A Lesson Not Learned 1971

Valentin Karavaev

• Cel animation with photomontage (collage)

• See excerpts from newspapers and photographs from war

• berlin wall stops spread of German Revanchism (trying to bring back old ideas from WWI)

• America/UK/west shares ideals with Nazis and will go easier on them than Russians

• Truce agreement between west Germany and the USSR stops fascist ideologies from spreading

• German military pose as wounded soldier to get into better, more comfortable prison than USSR side

• The bible as mein kampf

Jack Frost 1964

Aleksander Rou

• Multiple folk tales combination

• Nastya is perfect no re-education needed

• Imperfect male protagonist (ivan) vain and arrogant to humble and kind

• Magical helpers:

  • Grandfather mushroom: ivan doesn’t thank him so he turns him into a bear, when he thinks of other people first, he gets turned back

  • Baba yaga: comedic villain, villain to try and break ivan and Nastya apart

  • Jack frost: helps Nastya because shes humble doesnt help sister because shes rude

• Women either ugly and bad or pretty and good

• Step mother always evil and the fault for everything

• Ends in a marriage

• Kid friendly because step sister no die

Film Film Film 1968

Fedor Khitruk

• Not disney style, limited animation

• Lack of dialogue, only sound effects and music (away from stalinist-era)

• Photo montage of western movie stars at the beginning

• Censors behind closed doors

Winnie the Pooh 1969-1972

Fedor Khitruk

• No christopher robin

• Childrens drawing style for background

• Limited animation

• Nostalgic trip into childhood

• Winnie the pooh not social realism

  • More comedic and not morality (arrogant and philosophical)

Junior and Karlsson 1968

Boris Stepansev

• Based on works of Swedish author Astrid Lindgren (western author) Pippi longstocking

• Child’s perspective and focus on child’s imagination

• Urban and contemporary city in sweden

• Junior is lonely even though he has good family because he want dog

• Karlsson: trickster, causes chaos, middle-aged man friend who flies

  • Loves jam too much

  • Opposite of socialist realist mentor because he causes chaos and is arrogant

• Thaw culture: many different perspectives on how to interpret the world (child and adult)

  • Perspective of child as main trope of neo-realism

• Experimental animation

• Lack of socialist realist re-education

• Child’s point of view

• Things of anarchy

• Limited setting

Soyuzmultfilm

single centralized studio 1936

Little humpbacked horse

logo of Mosfilm: the worker and the collective farm woman 1937

• Vera Mukhina

• Hammer and sickle

• Shown in world fair at paris facing off against (eagle=america)

• symbolizes union of working class

Russian Cinema Reader

• Russians called the cold war the thaw

• Stalin’s death as the marker or the beginning of the thaw era

• Other key events marking the end of the thaw:

  • A palace coup that voted Nikita Khruschev out of office

  • Restoration of stalin-era title of general secretary of the communist party

  • KGB arrested Andei Sinivskii and Yuli Daniel for publishing prose abroad that differed from approved ones

  • Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia

  • Fifth main administration for ideological subversion: polices soviet artistic filmmakers

• Last years of stalin’s rule as cine-anemia (decrease in film production due to strict ideological control over the industry and low funding)

• Chose three main directions when making WWII films:

  • reviving traditions of the 1920s avant-garde

  • Incorporating neorealist aesthetics into their film style

  • Depicting the war through the lens of art cinema narration

• “The stagnation era model of ideological control was not about ubiquitous fear,mass terror or the promise of communist utopia; rather it was about limiting access to information and the continual harassment of those few, like Tarkovsky, who did not give up and continued exercising artistic agency.”

Brandenberger article

• Russia: National Bolshevism

• 100th year death anniversary in 1937: Pushkin

  • Pushkin: great poet, not from Russia but brought to Russia

  • Russian national poet

  • Celebrated his death because it was more convenient than celebrating his birth

• Moved from internationalism to russo-centric

• Bolshevism: original revolution of 1917, they were internationalists

• Aleksander Drostovsky: a revolution should never end

• National bolshevism: oxymoron

• Russo-centrism: preaches equality, but always makes sure Russia appears on top “first among equals”

• Literature, folklore, cinema, and art

• Explosion of nationalism shown in all art forms

• “Usable past” (not all past is good so you have to pick and choose): past that contributes good things/defines the present. People in power and artists decide this

  •  “imagined community:” national is a strange animal, we feel that we are a community of people who have common history, literature, and stories of the past which promotes unity

Laura Pontieri

How did animation change in the 1950s and beyond?

• Change to limited animation (not 3D, look more like drawings and less smooth)

• Artistic interpretation itself changes

• Not only constrained to propaganda or fairy tales anymore, can have contemporary themes and setting

• Mixed audiences

• Contemporary themes

  • Loneliness as an issue rather than starvation and war (issues under stalin)

• Satirical moments are cartoons style

• Production: creative workshops, authors

georges melies

• Magician, actor, director, producer

• tied with trick cinema and invented special effects and fantasy genre

• A Trip to the Moon (1902)

• pre-revolution

• Over 500 films

Ladislas Starewicz

• Director, stop-motion animation

• Cameraman’s revenge (1912)

• He’s Polish and worked in France after he emigrated from Russia

Dziga Vertov

• Director of Soviet experimental/avant-garde cinema

• Soviet Toys (1924)

• Man with a Movie Camera as well

Grigorii Alexandrov

• Director of stalinist backstage/show musicals

• Circus (1936)

• His wife at the time was almost always the lead actress in his films

Boris Shumiatskii

• Head of soviet film government industry (Soyuzkino)

• Introduced Soviet Hollywood into the film industry

• cinema for the millions

Aleksander Rou

• Director

• Jack Frost (1964)

  • Cinema of attractions: purpose of displaying (man into bear)

• Also director New adventures of Puss in Boots (1958)

Fedor Khitruk

• Director

• Film Film Film (1968) and Winnie the Pooh (1969-1972)

• Also made The man in the frame

Boris Efimov

• Soviet political cartoonist

• Wrote A Lesson Not Learned (1971)

• Drew political cartoons of people at the nuremberg trials

• Ukrainian and Jewish

Sergei Mikhalkov

• Soviet author

• Wrote the script for The Millionaire (1963)

• Was originally a child’s poet

• Wrote soviet national anthem lyrics

trick cinema

• The use of certain techniques like manipulating the film and camera to give film special effects

• A Trip to the Moon (1902): the clip where the rocket hits the moon in the eye. They stop filming briefly and then start filming again with the rocket in the moon’s eye to give the effect that the rocket just hit the moon in the eye. The rocket just spontaneously appears on the moon.

• Beginning in 1902 and on

stop-motion animation

• Type of film animation where different frames are made by pausing filming and adjusting the characters and the set repeatedly to make a cohesive clip

• Cameraman’s Revenge (1912): when Mr. Beetle throws the grasshopper off the chair, each movement made is from a different frame where they paused filming and adjusted the characters

• Beginning in 1912 and on

cel animation

• Type of animation style with vibrant colors, 3D characters, each frame individually drawn. Disney-style animation.

• The Little Humpback Horse (1947)

• Began in the 1930s until the 1950s

New economic policy (NEP)

• everything was centralized with no private ownership (capitalistic)

• 1921-1927

• Soviet Toys: NEP man at the table gorging himself on food who is eventually killed by the merging of the working man and peasant

Cinema for the Millions

• Ban on experimentation and turn to formalism

• Idea of mass accessibility supports film industry

• Tool for education, shape of collective consciousness for entire population, unification

• 1930 

• Circus

Positive Hero

• Aspect of socialist realism where the protagonist must go through re-education

• Goes through re-education (protagonist), flawed

• 1934 (socialist realism started)

• marion from circus

Soviet Hollywood

• Ideas coming from hollywood but adjusted to soviet ideology and socialist realism

• 1930

• Boris Shumiastkii

• Entertaining ideology

• Musical numbers while working only

• Clear plot and good vs. bad

• Love story and re-education story

• circus

  • Good versus bad

Rotoscoping

• a technique used in animation to capture live action frame by frame: the goal is to imitate live action

• Snow white: evil queen sitting in chair reference photo

• 1915

Sergei Eisenstein

director

Alexander Nevsky 1938

friends with Walt Disney