Download or read book Between Hollywood and Moscow written by Stephen Gundle and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2000-12-04 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the postwar years, Italy underwent a far-reaching process of industrialization that transformed the country into a leading industrial power. Throughout most of this period, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) remained a powerful force in local government and civil society. However, as Stephen Gundle observes, the PCI was increasingly faced with challenges posed by modernization, particularly by mass communication, commercial cultural industries, and consumerism. Between Hollywood and Moscow is an analysis of the PCI’s attempts to cope with these problems in an effort to maintain its organization and subculture. Gundle focuses on the theme of cultural policy, examining how the PCI’s political strategies incorporated cultural policies and activities that were intended to respond to the Americanization of daily life in Italy. In formulating this policy, Gundle contends, the Italian Communists were torn between loyalty to the alternative values generated by the Communist tradition and adaptation to the dominant influences of Italian modernization. This equilibrium eventually faltered because the attractive aspects of Americanization and pop culture proved more influential than the PCI’s intellectual and political traditions. The first analysis in English of the cultural policies and activities of the PCI, this book will appeal to readers with an interest in modern Italy, the European left, political science, and media studies.
Download or read book Moscow Believes in Tears written by Louis Menashe and published by New Academia Publishing, LLC. This book was released on 2014-09-16 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique collection of writings and interviews highlights the important role that cinema can play for understanding Russian history, politics, culture and society in all phases-Tsarist, Soviet and post-Soviet. "This is the book for the Russian movie aficionado - personal, pointed, funny, frank and full of all kinds of inside stories and political folk tales. It is a fascinating window on Soviet/Russian pop culture that only a cultural Marco Polo and fanatical movie-goer like Louis Menashe would even dare attempt."-Hedrick Smith, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Russians and The New Russians"Menashe combines an encyclopedic knowledge of Russian history and society of the past 50 years with a broad-ranging and sensitive eye for cinematic meaning and detail."-Anthony Anemone, The New School University"This sparkling collection of film reviews, essays and interviews with filmmakers is a cultural history of Russia over the past 25 years. Highly recommended to everyone interested in Russia and the movies."-Denise J. Youngblood, University of Vermont, and author of Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds."A great national cinema is explored in its myriad colors and textures. Not a traditional history, the book is an archive of insights captured across years of passionate viewing."-Jerry W. Carlson, The City College and Graduate Center CUNY, host of the popular program, "City Cinematheque.""Menashe allows us to see both Russia's present and her past through his crisp, clear and fresh lens of a true expert who loves the country and its films, but always remains critical enough to see their flaws and merits."-Birgit Beumers, University of Bristol
Download or read book Soviet Life written by and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Moscow Diaries written by Richard Bryant and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2008-03-01 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Post-Soviet Russia. The Wild Wild East. Richard Bryant offers a glimpse at real life behind what remains of the rusting Iron Curtain. At a time when relations between the United States and Russia are once again tense, Richard's work is a telling portrait of life in modern Moscow. From train journeys across four timezones to airport security inspections, you'll never look at Russia the same way again.
Download or read book Moscow Prime Time written by Kristin Roth-Ey and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-15 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Nikita Khrushchev visited Hollywood in 1959 only to be scandalized by a group of scantily clad actresses, his message was blunt: Soviet culture would soon consign the mass culture of the West, epitomized by Hollywood, to the "dustbin of history." In Moscow Prime Time, a portrait of the Soviet broadcasting and film industries and of everyday Soviet consumers from the end of World War II through the 1970s, Kristin Roth-Ey shows us how and why Khrushchev’s ambitious vision ultimately failed to materialize. The USSR surged full force into the modern media age after World War II, building cultural infrastructures—and audiences—that were among the world’s largest. Soviet people were enthusiastic radio listeners, TV watchers, and moviegoers, and the great bulk of what they were consuming was not the dissident culture that made headlines in the West, but orthodox, made-in-the-USSR content. This, then, was Soviet culture’s real prime time and a major achievement for a regime that had long touted easy, everyday access to a socialist cultural experience as a birthright. Yet Soviet success also brought complex and unintended consequences. Emphasizing such factors as the rise of the single-family household and of a more sophisticated consumer culture, the long reach and seductive influence of foreign media, and the workings of professional pride and raw ambition in the media industries, Roth-Ey shows a Soviet media empire transformed from within in the postwar era. The result, she finds, was something dynamic and volatile: a new Soviet culture, with its center of gravity shifted from the lecture hall to the living room, and a new brand of cultural experience, at once personal, immediate, and eclectic—a new Soviet culture increasingly similar, in fact, to that of its self-defined enemy, the mass culture of the West. By the 1970s, the Soviet media empire, stretching far beyond its founders’ wildest dreams, was busily undermining the very promise of a unique Soviet culture—and visibly losing the cultural cold war. Moscow Prime Time is the first book to untangle the paradoxes of Soviet success and failure in the postwar media age.
Download or read book Lonely Power written by Lilia Shevtsova and published by Carnegie Endowment. This book was released on 2010-08 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Lonely Power, adapted from the Russian version, Lilia Shevtsova questions the veracity of clichTs about Russiauby both insiders and outsidersuand analyzes Russia's trajectory and how the West influences the country's modernization.
Download or read book Soviet Born written by Karolina Krasuska and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-12 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2010, when The New Yorker published a list of twenty writers under the age of forty who were “key to their generation,” it included five Jewish-identified writers, two of whom—American Gary Shteyngart and Canadian David Bezmozgis—were Soviet-born. This publicity came after nearly a decade of English-language literary output by Soviet-born writers of all genders in North America. Soviet-Born: The Afterlives of Migration in Jewish American Fiction traces the impact of these now numerous authors—among others, David Bezmozgis, Boris Fishman, Keith Gessen, Sana Krasikov, Ellen Litman, Gary Shteyngart, Anya Ulinich, and Lara Vapnyar—on major coordinates of the Jewish American imaginary. Entering an immigrant, Soviet-born standpoint creates an alternative and sometimes complementary pattern of how the Eastern and Central European past and present resonate with American Jewishness. The novels, short stories, and graphic novels considered here often stage strikingly fresh variations on key older themes, including cultural geography, the memory of World War II and the Holocaust, communism, gender and sexuality, genealogy, and finally, migration. Soviet-Born demonstrates how these diasporic writers, with their critical stance toward identity categories, open up the field of what is canonically Jewish American to broader contemporary debates. This book is also freely available online as an open-access digital edition.
Download or read book The Black Russian written by Vladimir Alexandrov and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “altogether astonishing” true story of a black American finding fame and fortune in Moscow and Constantinople at the turn of the 20th century (Booklist, starred review). The Black Russian tells the true story of Frederick Bruce Thomas, a man born in 1872 to former slaves who became prosperous farmers in Mississippi. But when his father was murdered, Frederick left the South to work as a waiter in Chicago and Brooklyn. Seeking greater freedom, he traveled to London, then crisscrossed Europe, and—in a highly unusual choice for a black American at the time—went to Russia. Because he found no color line there, Frederick settled in Moscow, becoming a rich and famous owner of variety theaters and restaurants. When the Bolshevik Revolution ruined him, he barely escaped to Constantinople, where he made another fortune by opening celebrated nightclubs as the “Sultan of Jazz.” Though Frederick reached extraordinary heights, the long arm of American racism, the xenophobia of the new Turkish Republic, and Frederick’s own extravagance brought his life to a sad close, landing him in debtor’s prison, where he died a forgotten man in 1928. “In his assiduously researched, prodigiously descriptive, fluently analytical” narrative (Booklist, starred review), Alexandrov delivers “a tale . . . so colourful and improbable that it reads more like a novel than a work of historical biography.” (The Literary Review). “[An] extraordinary story . . . [interpreted] with great sensitivity.” —The New York Review of Books
Download or read book Cinema of Obsession written by Dominique Mainon and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 2007 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cinema of Obsession traces the history of obsessive love and erotic fixation. Seminal works of obsession, The Blue Angel, Peter Ibbetson, and Phantom of the Opera are seen as setting the groundwork for films that follow. The book defines and surveys examples of the explosive nature of amour fou, issues of male control (no matter how tenuous), and the fugitive couple - love on the run - in such films as Romeo and Juliet, Last Tango in Paris, Vertigo, Basic Instinct, and Wild at Heart. Male masochism is explored through film noirs, including Criss Cross, The Killers, Gilda, and The Postman Always Rings Twice. The book shifts gears in its finale and concentrates on the female gaze, films of female obsession: Jane Eyre, The Piano, The Lover, Fatal Attraction, and Vanilla Sky.
Download or read book The Other Side written by Robert (Robert D.) English and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 1987-01-01 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do Soviets think of Americans? What do they learn from books, newspapers, and films about life in America? How do we, as Americans form opinions about life in the U.S.S.R? Through the selective use of both Soviet and American materials, The Other Side explores these and other provocative questions that are central to public understanding of how perceptions affect U.S.-Soviet relations. The Other Side also examines the many differences between Soviet and American media, such as the role of the press, and offers article-by-article comparisons of Soviet and American press coverage of the same events. Appropriate for citizen of all ages, and groups as well as individuals, The Other Side includes a Reader's Guide, suggested educational projects, an annotated bibliography, and guidance for discussion leaders.
Download or read book The International Relations of the Middle East in the 21st Century written by Tareq Y. Ismael and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive and timely survey of Middle Eastern international relations, Tareq Ismael provides in-depth analysis of the interrelated dimensions of confrontation that have entangled almost every aspect of life in the region, transforming it into a 'penetrated political system'. Essential for readers interested in the Middle East, international relations, politics, history and public policy.
Download or read book Performing Femininity written by Rachel Morley and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-12-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oriental dancers, ballerinas, actresses and opera singers the figure of the female performer is ubiquitous in the cinema of pre-Revolutionary Russia. From the first feature film, Romashkov's Stenka Razin (1908), through the sophisticated melodramas of the 1910s, to Viskovsky's The Last Tango (1918), made shortly before the pre-Revolutionary film industry was dismantled by the new Soviet government, the female performer remains central. In this groundbreaking new study, Rachel Morley argues that early Russian film-makers used the character of the female performer to explore key contemporary concerns from changing conceptions of femininity and the emergence of the so-called New Woman, to broader questions concerning gender identity. Morley also reveals that the film-makers repeatedly used this archetype of femininity to experiment with cinematic technology and develop a specific cinematic language."
Download or read book The Shadow of War written by Stephen Lovell and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-06-24 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking the achievements, ambiguities, and legacies of World War II as a point of departure, The Shadow of War: The Soviet Union and Russia, 1941 to the Present offers a fresh new approach to modern Soviet and Russian history. Presents one of the only histories of the Soviet Union and Russia that begins with World War II and goes beyond the Soviet collapse through to the early twenty-first century Innovative thematic arrangement and approach allows for insights that are missed in chronological histories Draws on a wide range of sources and the very latest research on post-Soviet history, a rapidly developing field Supported by further reading, bibliography, maps and illustrations.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Cinema written by Peter Rollberg and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-07-20 with total page 891 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russian and Soviet cinema occupies a unique place in the history of world cinema. Legendary filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Dziga Vertov, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Sergei Paradjanov have created oeuvres that are being screened and studied all over the world. The Soviet film industry was different from others because its main criterion of success was not profit, but the ideological and aesthetic effect on the viewer. Another important feature is Soviet cinema’s multinational (Eurasian) character: while Russian cinema was the largest, other national cinemas such as Georgian, Kazakh, and Ukrainian played a decisive role for Soviet cinema as a whole. The Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Cinema provides a rich tapestry of factual information, together with detailed critical assessments of individual artistic accomplishments. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Cinema contains a chronology, an introduction, and a bibliography. The dictionary section has over 600 cross-referenced entries on directors, performers, cinematographers, composers, designers, producers, and studios. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Russian and Soviet Cinema.
Download or read book Russian Popular Culture written by Richard Stites and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1992-08-20 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a side of Russian life that is largely unknown to the West - the world of popular culture. By surveying detective and science fiction, popular songs, jokes, box office movie hits, stage, radio and television, Professor Richard Stites introduces the people and cultural products that are household words to Russian people. Spanning the entire twentieth century, the author examines the subcultures that draw upon and enrich Russian popular culture. He explores the relationship between popular culture and the national and social values of the masses, including their heroes and myths, and assesses the phenomenon of the celebrity from the silent screen star to the latest rock music idol. Richard Stites pays particular attention to the dramatic battle between elite and popular culture and to the intervention of revolutions, wars, and the state in the production and control of this culture.
Download or read book The Apartment A Century of Russian History written by Alexandra Litvina and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 20th-century Russian history comes to life through six generations of a family in their Moscow apartment The Apartment: A Century of Russian History explains the true history of 20th-century Russia through the fictitious story of a Moscow family and their apartment. The Muromtsev family have been living in the same apartment for more than a century, generation after generation. Readers are taken through different rooms and witness how each generation actually lived alongside the larger social and political changes that Russia experienced. A search-and-find element has readers looking for objects from page to page to see which items were passed down through the generations. Beautifully illustrated with minute details, this book helps readers engage with Russia’s history in an all new way. The book includes a timeline, glossary, bibliography, and index.
