The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov

by Beumers, Birgit; Condee, Nancy

• ISBN13: 9781848853430
• ISBN10: 1848853432
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-11-15
• Publisher: Bloomsbury

Summary

Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark is generally acclaimed as a milestone in cinematography. In this film Sokurov reversed the idea of montage, creating instead the sensation of an uninterrupted flow of time encompassing three centuries of Russia's cultural history through a single, 90?minute take. Yet this film is but one milestone in the work of this versatile director. Since the 1990s, Sokurov's films have had international recognition at film festivals and through foreign distribution. In this, the first Englishlanguage book to cover Sokurov's full oeuvre, leading scholars on Sokurov unravel his work on documentaries; his early films and literary adaptations; his trilogy on leaders focussing on the decaying body; his films on passing youth and approaching age; and, of course, Russian Ark. The book also provides samples of the major Russian?language studies of Sokurov's films to provide the reader with an insight into Russian approaches to Sokurov.

Author Biography

Birgit Beumers is Reader in the Russian Department at Bristol University. Her publications include Burnt by the Sun (I.B. Tauris, 2000) and Nikita Mikhalkov (I.B. Tauris, 2004), Pop Culture Russia! and A History of Russian Cinema. She is editor of Russia on Reels: The Russian Idea in Post-Soviet Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 1999) and The Cinema of Russia and the Former Soviet Union (24 Frames). She is also editor of the online journal KinoKultura and of Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for the Tauris KINO Series. Nancy Condee is Professor of Slavic Studies and member of the Film Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh. Her publications include The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema as well as the edited and co-edited volumes Soviet Hieroglyphics: Visual Culture in Late Twentieth-Century Russia, and Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity. She is Executive Producer for the CD-Rom database on Russian cinema, Thaw Cinema.

Table of Contents

Contents * Preface: Liubov Arkus (St Petersburg) * Introduction: Beumers and Condee * Sokurov and the documentary * Literary and cinematic affinities * Intimate Encounters * Remapping the Empire * Russian Responses * Single film reviews * Script-Sound-Editing * Works