This biography came into being after extensive research in Moscow, Berlin, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles. The author is the first to analyze Eisenstein's diaries and correspondence' materials that were inaccessible in the past. Eisenstein's relations with Freemasons, Rosicrucians and Stalin, with rivals and admirers, with psychoanalysts who treated him are no longer faded out. Was Eisenstein homosexual? A Stalinist? A conformist? A dissident? He left no clear answers for his biographers. Oksana Bulgakowa's study of Eisenstein's life tries to uncover these themes in his films and drawings, between the lines of his diaries and letters, in his drafts to screenplays, projects, and research. Late in life Eisenstein viewed this research as his only possible means of salvation from the compromises he had consciously made with himself and his creativity. Oksana Bulgakowa (b. 1954) graduated from the Moscow Film Institute VGIK in 1977. In the same year she moved to Berlin/GDR and received her doctoral degree from Humboldt University in 1982. She works as an author, editor, translator, and filmmaker. Since 1998 she has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, USA. For further information go to www.PotemkinPress.com]

This innovative volume challenges the ways we look at both cinema and cultural history by shifting the focus from the centrality of the visual and the literary toward the recognition of acoustic culture as formative of the Soviet and post-Soviet experience. Leading experts and emerging scholars from film studies, musicology, music theory, history, and cultural studies examine the importance of sound in Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet cinema from a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives. Addressing the little-known theoretical and artistic experimentation with sound in Soviet cinema, changing practices of voice delivery and translation, and issues of aesthetic ideology and music theory, this book explores the cultural and historical factors that influenced the use of voice, music, and sound on Soviet and post-Soviet screens.

This innovative volume challenges the ways we look at both cinema and cultural history by shifting the focus from the centrality of the visual and the literary toward the recognition of acoustic culture as formative of the Soviet and post-Soviet experience. Leading experts and emerging scholars from film studies, musicology, music theory, history, and cultural studies examine the importance of sound in Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet cinema from a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives. Addressing the little-known theoretical and artistic experimentation with sound in Soviet cinema, changing practices of voice delivery and translation, and issues of aesthetic ideology and music theory, this book explores the cultural and historical factors that influenced the use of voice, music, and sound on Soviet and post-Soviet screens.

Welche Filmtheorie ist hilfreich, um eine Erkenntnisfrage zu klären? Wie wirkt sich die theoretische Perspektive auf die Filmanalyse aus? Diese Fragen bestimmen grundlegend jede Untersuchung. Um den besonderen Fokus einer Theorie offenzulegen, stellt dieses Lehrbuch einen Spielfilm ins Zentrum:  Blow Up (GB, I, USA 1966) von Michelangelo Antonioni. Blow Up wird wechselweise beleuchtet aus dem Blickwinkel der Narratologie, Bildtheorie und Musiktheorie, der Stil- und Genretheorie, des Neoformalismus und der quantitativen Filmanalyse, der Psychoanalyse und Gender Studies, der Realismustheorie und des Poststrukturalismus, der Intermedialitätstheorie und der Medienkulturtheorie. Welche Konturen des Films treten im Schlaglicht einer Theorie hervor, welche werden durch sie verborgen? Wie können sich zwei Modelle ergänzen? Wo schließen sie einander aus? Die Beiträge führen in die zentralen Positionen und Kategorien jeder Theorie ein und wenden die Modelle unmittelbar auf den Film an. Um die Besonderheiten der Perspektiven herauszustellen, reflektieren die Autor*innen jeweils abschließend die Analogien, Differenzen und Synergien sowie die Vor- und Nachteile komplementärer Theorien.  

Das verborgene Gedachtnis des Kinos schlummert in den filmischen Dingen, die seine Bilder moeblieren. Sie sind stets prasent, werden aber selten bewusst erfasst. Wer bislang den Blick auf diese Dinge richtete, verstand sie als materielle Kultur vergangener Zeiten, die der Film konserviert, manchmal auch als zu Objekten materialisierte Ideen. Die Beitrage dieses Bandes versuchen, die filmischen Dinge wie handelnde Personen zu betrachten und ihre stummen Monologe wahrzunehmen, um zu verfolgen, welche Interaktionen Dinge im Film ausloesen, mit welchen Bedeutungen und emotionalen Farbungen sie in verschiedenen Genres und in Filmen aus diversen Epochen versehen wurden. Die Beitrage fragen, ob sich diese Bedeutungen der filmischen Dinge geandert haben und was diese AEnderungen bestimmte. Wie wurde die Wahrnehmung eines filmischen Dinges, der Umgang mit ihm und seine affektive Ladung mit filmischen Mitteln inszeniert?

Sergei Eisenstein was born in Riga in 1898. His father was a Jew of German origin who had converted to Russian Orthodoxy and who passed himself off as a Baltic baron. His mother was the daughter of wealthy Russian (and traditionally anti-Semitic) merchants from St.Petersburg. Eisenstein's life was full of unforeseen diversions and turns of events. Would he become an architect like his father and go into German exile in 1918? Would he be banished as a Freemason in 1925, or stay in the USA in 1932? Would he be sentenced by a special court in 1939 to be executed, like his friends Isaak Babel and Vsevolod Meyerhold? Or would he ultimately die as a Stalin Prize winner (for "Ivan the Terrible," Part I) of a heart attack caused by the ban on Part II? This biography came into being after extensive research in Moscow, Berlin, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles. The author is the first to analyze Eisenstein's diaries and correspondence?materials that were inaccessible in the past. Eisenstein's relations with Freemasons, Rosicrucians and Stalin, with rivals and admirers, with psychoanalysts who treated him?are no longer faded out. Was Eisenstein homosexual? A Stalinist? A conformist? A dissident? He left no clear answers for his biographers. Oksana Bulgakowa's study of Eisenstein's life tries to uncover these themes in his films and drawings, between the lines of his diaries and letters, in his drafts to screenplays, projects, and research. Late in life Eisenstein viewed this research as his only possible means of salvation from the compromises he had consciously made with himself and his creativity. Oksana Bulgakowa (b. 1954) graduated from the Moscow Film Institute VGIK in 1977. In the same year she moved to Berlin/GDR and received her doctoral degree from Humboldt University in 1982. She works as an author, editor, translator, and filmmaker. Since 1998 she has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, USA. For further information go to www.PotemkinPress.com]

What did Kazimir Malevich (1878 - 1935), the proponent of pure abstraction in painting, have to do with film, that mechanical repository of everything that is banal and worthless? It was only in 1924 that Malevich described film as a system that fixed reality beyond the cultural idea. Nonetheless between 1925 and 1929 he wrote several articles on film as well as a script. The texts by the man who created the 'black square' that are assembled in this volume, and are for the most part translated into German for the first time, lead us to the heart of the debate about movement and acceleration as central metaphors for modernity in the international avant-garde. His contradictory reflections on the new medium document the friction between the metaphysical programme of Suprematist abstraction and the mediatic attributes of film. Malevich arranges the melodramas of Mary Pickford, the comedies of Monty Banks, the films of Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Walter Ruttmann and Yakov Protazanov within his historical model of the rise of Modernism from Cezanne through Cubism and Futurism, to Suprematism. In this process almost all his essays deal with the 'missed encounter' between film and art, because Malevich perceives film as the perfected form, not of Naturalism but of the principles of the new painting - dynamism and abstraction. For more information, please visit the publisher's website at www.PotemkinPress.com.