Search results for ""author joan neuberger""

This Thing of Darkness, Joan Neuberger's engrossing production history of Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, is a major contribution to the study of Eisenstein and thus informs the history and theory of cinema and the study of Soviet culture and politics. Neuberger's ability to mine, interpret, and connect Eisenstein's voluminous, intriguingly digressive writings makes this book exceptional.— Karla Oeler, Stanford University Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible, was no ordinary movie. Commissioned by Joseph Stalin in 1941 to justify state terror in the sixteenth century and in the twentieth, the film's politics, style, and epic scope aroused controversy even before it was released. In This Thing of Darkness, Joan Neuberger offers a sweeping account of the conception, making, and reception of Ivan the Terrible that weaves together Eisenstein's expansive thinking and experimental practice with a groundbreaking new view of artistic production under Stalin. Drawing on Eisenstein's unpublished production notebooks, diaries, and manuscripts, Neuberger's riveting narrative chronicles Eisenstein's personal, creative, and political challenges and reveals the ways cinematic invention, artistic theory, political critique, and historical and psychological analysis went hand in hand in this famously complex film. Neuberger's bold arguments and daring insights into every aspect of Eisenstein's work during this period, together with her ability to lucidly connect his wide-ranging late theory with his work on Ivan, show the director exploiting the institutions of Soviet artistic production not only to expose the cruelties of Stalin and his circle but to challenge the fundamental principles of Soviet ideology itself. Ivan the Terrible, she argues, shows us one of the world's greatest filmmakers and one of the 20th century's greatest artists observing the world around him and experimenting with every element of film art to explore the psychology of political ambition, uncover the history of recurring cycles of violence and lay bare the tragedy of absolute power.

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Imitations of Life views Russian melodrama from the eighteenth century to today as an unexpectedly hospitable forum for considering social issues. The contributors follow the evolution of the genre through a variety of cultural practices and changing political scenarios. They argue that Russian audiences have found a particular type of comfort in this mode of entertainment that invites them to respond emotionally rather than politically to social turmoil. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including plays, lachrymose novels, popular movies, and even highly publicized funerals and political trials, the essays in Imitations of Life argue that melodrama has consistently offered models of behavior for times of transition, and that contemporary televised versions of melodrama continue to help Russians cope with national events that they understand implicitly but are not yet able to articulate. In contrast to previous studies, this collection argues for a reading that takes into account the subtle but pointed challenges to national politics and to gender and class hierarchies made in melodramatic works from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Collectively, the contributors shift and cross borders, illustrating how the cultural dismissal of melodrama as fundamentally escapist and targeted primarily at the politically disenfranchised has subverted the drama’s own intrinsically subversive virtues. Imitations of Life will interest students and scholars of contemporary Russia, and Russian history, literature, and theater.Contributors. Otto Boele, Julie Buckler, Julie Cassiday, Susan Costanzo, Helena Goscilo, Beth Holmgren, Lars Lih, Louise McReynolds, Joan Neuberger, Alexander Prokhorov, Richard Stites

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Picturing Russian Empire offers a new way to approach the history of Russia as an empire and as a state located in a world characterized by a churning, dynamic exchange of people, ideas, and practices. It presents readers with a visual tour of the lands and peoples that constituted the Russian Empire and those that confronted it, defied it, accommodated to it, and shaped it at various times in more than a millennium of history. Bringing together scholars and experts from across the world and from various disciplines, Picturing Russian Empire consistently raises big historical questions to stimulate readers to think about images as embedded in the diverse, lived worlds of the Russian empire. The authors challenge the reader to not only to see images as the creations of individuals, but as objects circulating among viewers in a variety of contexts, creating new impressions, meanings, and experiences.

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