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Traditions in World Cinema

The New Russian DocumentaryReclaiming Reality in the Age of Authoritarianism

Edited by Masha Shpolberg and Anastasia Kostina

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£24.99

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About this book

Investigates the recent expansion in Russian documentary film and its relationship to politics, the media industries, and the public sphere

  • Introduces readers to the key figures, institutions, and practices involved in the Russian documentary boom of 2000-2022
  • Argues that documentary was critical to cultural elites' re-evaluation of Russian history, encouraging a more active civil stance
  • Analyzes how documentary mobilized viewers toward a more progressive and inclusive politics

Over the last three decades, Russian filmmakers and audiences have engaged with documentary cinema with an intensity unseen since the 1920s, when Soviet documentarians helped pioneer the mode. What started as a trickle of artistically minded films in the 1990s, expanded in the 2000s to include a broad range of works, chief among them films seeking to re-evaluate the country’s past and take stock of its present. This efflorescence went hand in hand with the creation of new institutions—film schools, festivals, and online platforms. The rise of YouTube, in particular, helped propel documentary into the cultural mainstream.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 and the Kremlin’s subsequent crackdown on independent media put an end to all this. The New Russian Documentary thus seeks to introduce readers to the key figures, institutions, and practices involved in this vibrant, if ultimately doomed, oppositionary movement.

Reviews

Documentary filmmaking has arguably been the most exciting aspect of post-Soviet Russian cinema as this pioneering collection convincingly demonstrates. By introducing readers to a diverse group of directors and films, the fifteen essays also offer a unique vantage point for understanding contemporary Russia. A significant contribution to documentary studies.
The New Russian Documentary addresses with competence and confidence a corpus of documentary films that have, in the past twenty years, shaped independent and critical discourses in Russian cinema, extending well into other art forms. The 15 chapters by expert authors tell insightful stories about documentary forms, themes and filmmakers, adopting diverse perspectives and making comparisons across a range of cultural contexts.
Rich in insight and diverse in methodologies, The New Russian Documentary is essential reading for film scholars, cultural historians, and anyone seeking to understand both the rise and dismantling of independent Russian documentary cinema. While the invasion of Ukraine and subsequent repression have crushed this sphere, the editors resist nostalgia, framing the book as both a historical record and a call to preserve the knowledge, tactics, and spirit of resistance embodied in these films.
Table of contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgments

Notes on Contributors
Note on Transliteration
Introduction - Anastasia Kostina and Masha Shpolberg
Part I. Contesting State Narratives
1. Politics and Social Engagement in Recent Russian Documentary Film - Jeremy Hicks
2. Everyday Nation-Building: State TV Documentaries in Russia, 2012-2018 - Anastasia Kryachko Røren
3. A Palace for Putin: Navalny's Ironic Documentary - Greg Dolgopolov
Part II. Politicizing History

4. The Civic Documentaries of Vitaly Mansky: Text and Subtext - Justin Wilmes

5. Yuri Dud, YouTube, and Documentary Civics - Masha Shpolberg
6. Found Footage Recontextualization in Twenty-First Century Russian Documentaries: Micro- and Macro-histories - Daria Shembel
7. The New Kino-Pravda: Sergei Loznitsa's Compilation Films - Lilya Kaganovsky
Part III. Advocating for the Vulnerable
8. A Cinema of Volunteers: Women in Russian Documentary - Victoria Belopolskaya
9. National Subjectivity and the Commitment to Queer Visibility: Audible Discourses in Children 404 - Lora Maslenitsyna
10. Mediating Crisis Childhoods: The Work of Hanna Polak and Iryna Tsilyk - Anna Tropnikova
11. Becoming-Edible: Sergei Loznitsa and Viktor Kossakovsky's ‘Vegan’ Cinema in Blockade (2006) and Gunda (2020) - Raymond DeLuca

Part IV. Developing Distinctive Approaches

12. Teacher as Producer: Marina Razbezhkina and the Rise of Observational Documentary - Anastasia Kostina

13. Alina Rudnitskaya and the Limits of Observational Cinema in Feminist Documentary - Raisa Sidenova
14. Aleksandr Rastorguev: Looking into the Face of Humanity - Anna Nieman
15. Rescue Missions? The Late Documentaries of Alexander Sokurov - Jeremi Szaniawski

Filmography

Index

About the contributors

Masha Shpolberg

Masha Shpolberg is Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts at Bard College. Her teaching and research explore global documentary, Central and Eastern European cinema, ecocinema and women’s cinema. In addition to this project, she is also co-editor of Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe. Her academic articles have appeared in The Slavic and East European Journal, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, and The Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television. She has also contributed film criticism Film Quarterly, Senses of Cinema, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She is currently at work on a monograph titled Labor in Late Socialism: The Cinema of Polish Workers’ Unrest, which explores how filmmakers responded to successive waves of strikes by co-opting, confronting, or otherwise challenging the representational legacy of socialist realism.

Anastasia Kostina

Anastasia Kostina is a post-doctoral fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. She holds a PhD in Film & Media Studies and Slavic Languages & Literatures from Yale University. Her current book project, The Mother of Soviet Documentary: Esfir Shub Between Theory and Practice, explores the relationship between politics, aesthetics and gender during the nascent stage of documentary cinema. The work aims to highlight the career of Esfir Shub, the first female documentarian of the Soviet Union. Dr. Kostina's writings on film and media have been featured in such publications as Feminist Media Histories, Film Quarterly, Senses of Cinema, KinoKultura and Apparatus.

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