Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception

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by Yuri Tsivian,

Edited by Richard Taylor,

Translated by Alan Bodger,

Foreword by Tom Gunning

University of Chicago Press

Due/Published April 1998, 274 pages, paper

ISBN 0226814262

New in Paper! This book traces the history of cinema in Pre-Revolutionanry Russia.

Review

While many Western journalists sat at the feet of Thomas Edison and cooed when shown the first films, Russians had a more troubled response to the nature of cinema. While Soviet film has had its fair share of studies (the leaders of the Soviet Union, of course, enthusiastically used film to spread their message) Tsivian work is one of the few to concentrate on Russian film before 1917, a subject that regrettably has received scant attention. Tsivian interest lies not so much in the films themselves but rather how members of Moscow and St. Petersburg's educated elite reacted to the new medium (for many early viewers it was the medium as well as the physical conditions of movie-watching, rather than the narrative, that held their interest) of film. Writers on film such as Gorky and the Russian symbolists had complicated reactions to film: on the one hand they view it as the embodiment of the urban modern world but, on the other, they saw its nature as a kind of prophecy of the apocalypse. Tsivian writes, "The symbolists saw its pale illumination casting the shadows of the final twilight which anticipated the world of the dead." As one might garner from the quote, the decline of czarist Russia weighed very heavily on how the Russian elite reacted to the film. Successful both on the cultural/historical as well as film theory fronts (Tsivian makes a significant contribution to reception theory), Early Cinema in Russia is an impressive and much-needed work.