Böcker av Birgit Beumers

Ukrainian Cinema: Belonging and Identity during the Soviet Thaw is the first concentrated study of Ukrainian cinema in English. In particular, historian Joshua First explores the politics and aesthetics of Ukrainian Poetic Cinema during the Soviet 1960s-70s. He argues that film-makers working at the Alexander Dovzhenko Feature Film Studio in Kiev were obsessed with questions of identity and demanded that the Soviet film industry and audiences alike recognize Ukrainian cultural difference. The first two chapters provide the background on how Soviet cinema since Stalin cultivated an exoticised and domesticated image of Ukrainians, along with how the film studio in Kiev attempted to rebuild its reputation during the early Sixties as a centre of the cultural thaw in the USSR. The next two chapters examine Sergei Paradjanov's highly influential Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965) and its role in reorienting the Dovzhenko studio toward the auteurist (some would say elitist) agenda of Poetic Cinema.In the final three chapters, Ukrainian Cinema looks at the major works of film-makers Yurii Illienko, Leonid Osyka, and Leonid Bykov, among others, who attempted (and were compelled) to bridge the growing gap between a cinema of auteurs and concerns to generate profit for the Soviet film industry.

In Russia, cinema has become genuinely independent, as a commercial as well as an artistic medium. This book presents the history of Russian cinema from the beginning of film onwards and presents a narrative of both the industry and its key films in the context of Russia's social and political history.

Released in 2002, Russian Ark drew astonished praise for its technique: shot with a Steadicam  in one ninety-six-minute take, it presented a dazzling whirl of movement as it followed the Marquis de Custine as he wandered through the vast Winter Palace in St. Petersburg--and through three hundred years of Russian history.             This companion to Russian Ark addresses all key aspects of the film, beginning with a comprehensive synopsis, an in-depth analysis, and an account of the production history. Birgit Beumers goes on from there to discuss the work that went into the now-legendary Steadicam shot--which required two thousand actors and three orchestras--and she also offers an account of the film's critical and public reception, showing how it helped to establish director Aleksandr Sokurov as perhaps the leading filmmaker in Russia today.

Looks at Russian cinema of the 1990s, describing the currents and common interests of contemporary Russian cinema and studying the work of filmmakers such as Sokurov. A review of the industry in times of economic change is included, with an assessment of its function as a definer of Russia's new identity. In the KINO- THE RUSSIAN CINEMA series.

In this book, Birgit Beumers and Mark Lipovetsky examine the representation of violence in new dramatic works by young Russian playwrights. As the first English-language study of Russian drama and theatre in the twenty-first century, it seeks a vantage point for the analysis of brutality in post-Soviet culture.

Adored by Russian audiences for his commercially-oriented films, and loathed by the Russian intelligentsia for the same, Nikita Mikhalkov is one of the most successful, ambitious and controversial film- directors in the history of Soviet and Russian cinema.

Each of the volumes in this series on Russian cinema investigates the production, context and reception of the film, the people who made it, and the film itself, including its place in world cinema. This title discusses the Oscar-winning film "Burnt by the Sun", directed by Nikita Mikhalov.