The New Russian Documentary: Reclaiming Reality in the Age of Authoritarianism

by Masha Shpolberg (Editor), Anastasia Kostina (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399511056
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	02/28/2025
Series:	Traditions in World Cinema
Pages:	282
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

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 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.

Table of Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
List of Illustrations
Contributors
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

General Filmography

Editorial 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.

University of Vermont Denise J. Youngblood