World War II, Film, and History by Chambers John Whiteclay;Culbert David; & David Culbert

Author:Chambers, John Whiteclay;Culbert, David; & David Culbert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated

NOTES

The author wishes to thank Frank Manche! for his astute critique of an earlier draft of this chapter.

1. The cultural and social ramifications of the war have been virtually unexplored. Instead, the overwhelming majority of the hundreds of books on the subject have been military or diplomatic histories. For contemporary exceptions, see John Garrard and Carol Garrard, eds., World War II and the Soviet People (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992); and John Barber and Mark Harrison, The Soviet Home Front: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II (London: Longman, 1992). The works most closely related to the subject of this chapter, however, are Nina Tumarkin’s idiosyncratic but interesting examination of the war cult, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York: Basic Books, 1994); and Richard Stites, ed., Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

2. For the only scholarly surveys in English on this subject, see Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, 1917–1953 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), chap. 9; and Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), chap. 4. Tumarkin, in Living and the Dead, covers literature extensively, but pays scant attention to film.

3. She Defends Her Motherland was released in the United States as No Greater Love, a typical example of American retitling to emphasize the personal over the political. This film and other heroine films are discussed in Françoise Navailh, “The Emancipated Woman: Stalinist Propaganda in Soviet Feature Film, 1930–1950,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 12, no. 3 (1992): 208–10.

4. Ivan’s Childhood became My Name Is Ivan in its U.S. release, an especially senseless example of retitling.

5. For a contemporary example of “old-style” Soviet criticism that makes these movies sound like what they are not—that is, glorification of war—see Rostislav Iurenev, Kratkaia istoriia sovetskogo kino (Moscow: Biuro propagandy sovetskogo kinoiskusstvo, 1979), pp. 195–97 (in English, the section is entitled “Heroes of the Great War”). For a more “enlightened” discussion of the Thaw, also by a Soviet film historian (but written for the Western audience at the end of the glasnost era), see Neya Zorkaya, The Illustrated History of Soviet Cinema (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1989), chap. 5.

6. For a discussion of the cinema of the Brezhnev era, see Anna Lawton, Kinoglasnost: Soviet Cinema in Our Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

7. Denise J. Youngblood, “Post-Utopian History as Art and Politics: Andrei Tarkovskii’s Andrei Rublev,” in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1995).

8. It is worth noting that Nikolai Gubenko, a gifted actor and theater director, became Gorbachev’s last minister of culture, yet another indication of the influence later enjoyed by makers of such films.

9. Elem Klimov is the widower of Larissa Shepitko, who died in an automobile accident in 1979.

10. There is a brief discussion of Come and See in Lawton, Kinoglasnost, pp. 225–26. For Ivan’s Childhood, see Zorkaya, Illustrated History of Soviet Cinema, pp.

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