About
24
Publications
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114
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Introduction
I write about and research Russian and Soviet film and cultural history. I am particularly interested in how memory of the Soviet era, especially WWII and the Holocaust have been perceived in changing ways since those events. My current project The Victory Banner, is focused on the image of the flag raised above the Reichstag on 30 April 1945, and its use in Russian collective (or cultural) memory of the war.
Additional affiliations
September 1998 - present
Queen Mary University of London
Position
- Professor
Publications
Publications (24)
Mark Donskoi's The Unvanquished (Nepokorennye, Kiev Studios, 1945) should be seen as the first feature film to reconstruct events of the Holocaust, the first film in a genre that has become as prominent as it is important since the impact of Schindler's List (Spielberg, 1993). This article considers Donskoi's film in the broader context of portraya...
Konstantin Simonov's article about Majdanek, entitled “The Extermination Camp” and published in Krasnaia zvezda on August 10, 11, and 12, 1944, has typically been dismissed as irrelevant to our understanding of the Holocaust, due to its downplaying of the extent of Jewish victims. However, a detailed analysis of Simonov's article shows it to consti...
In February 1922, the Save the Children Fund released a short documentary film, Famine, as part of their campaign to raise money for famine relief in Russia. The enormously successful campaign itself and this use of film are widely seen as a significant moment in the history of modern humanitarianism. However, while this was not the first or only f...
The extreme high-angle photograph of a Red Army soldier, supported by a comrade as he hoists the Soviet flag from the roof of the Reichstag over the smouldering ruins of Berlin, is a widely recognized iconic image of the end ofWorldWar II in Europe. Its filmic counterpart, black-and-white footage of the assault on the Reichstag, starts with many sh...
This dossier seeks to expose and challenge the pervasive assumption that the modern secular icon is necessarily still or photographic and therefore marginal to the moving imagery of film and cinema. Our focus, in the following three case studies, on images linked to political violence reflects how this theme has dominated our notion of an icon thro...
From the beginnings of the medium, children have been among the most passionate cinemagoers, and children have been ubiquitous in film. This chapter analyses how the Soviets pioneered children's cinema, how they attempted to confront the problems associated with this form, and to mobilize the symbolic potential of the child to shape films to their...
The Phantom Holocaust is a very important book on the largely neglected subject matter of Soviet representations of the Holocaust, and it succeeds in bringing to light a wealth of substantially fresh material. It does so based on extensive and exciting archival work, the unearthing of truly unknown, forgotten, and sometimes censored items. This is...
The Soviet war crimes trials at Krasnodar, in July 1943, and Khar′kov, in December 1943, are rarely considered, or thought to contribute to understanding of the Holocaust. This article argues that, despite their propagandist aims, unsound legal basis and silence over the specific fate of the Jews, the trials were discussed by the Soviet press in wa...
Most early Western perceptions of the Holocaust were based on newsreels filmed during the allied liberation of Germany in 1945. Little, however, was reported of the initial wave of material from Soviet filmmakers who were in fact the first to document these horrors. In First Films of the Holocaust, Jeremy Hicks presents a pioneering study of Soviet...
With his 2005 film, Blockade, Sergei Loznitsa established himself internationally as a documentary filmmaker of note, and this latest effort enhances his reputation as the innovative maker of a new kind of historical documentary solely comprising re-edited archive footage.
The most innovative aspect of Loznitsa's filmmaking, however, is his absolut...
Soviet films of the silent era famously shook the world. After its 1926 Berlin premiere, Battleship ‘Potemkin’ was said to have ‘left an indelible mark in the history of world cinema’.1 It was the most prominent of a number of Soviet films to have done so, including those of Pudovkin and Dovzhenko. This influence is normally assumed to have ended w...
In the period 1923–25, the worker and peasant correspondent movement (rabsel′korovskoe′ dvizhenie) marked a partial exception to Bolshevik denigration of the informational function of the press. Through an analysis of contemporary debates, especially the statements of key figures such as Bukharin and Stalin, this article charts the evolution of the...
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of London, 2000.
