Revisionist heroes and dissident heroines: Gender, nation and war in soviet films of "the Thaw"

Global Society

Volumn 24, Issue 3, 2010, Pages 401-419

  Steans, Jill ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

COMMUNISM; GENDER; MASS MEDIA; NATIONALISM; WAR;

USSR;

EID: 77954507757     PISSN: 13600826     EISSN: 1469798X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13600826.2010.485562     Document Type: Article

References (89)

1. Lynne Attwood (ed.), Red Women on the Silver Screen: Soviet Women and Cinema from the Beginning to the End of the Communist Era (London: Pandora, 1993), pp. 79-82.
2. Roland Bleiker, "The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory", Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 30, No. 3 (2001), pp. 509-533.
3. For other examples of work that speak to the relationship between aesthetics and international politics see Steve Smith, "Singing Our World into Existence", International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 3 (2004), pp. 499-515.
4. Gerard Holden, "Cinematic IR, the Sublime, and the Indistinctness of Art", Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 34, No. 3 (2006), pp. 793-818.
5. Roland Bleiker, "Art after 9/11," Alternatives, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2006), pp. 77-99.
6. Iver Neumann and Daniel Hexon, Harry Potter and International Relations (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).
7. Roland Bleiker and Emma Hutchinson, "Fear No More: Emotions and World Politics", Review of International Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2008), pp. 115-135.
8. Roland Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
9. As Gerard Holden has noted, international politics and engagements with visual culture, art and aesthetics cannot be subsumed under any one theoretical tradition. Gerard Holden, "World Literature and World Politics: In Search of a Research Agenda", Global Society, Vol. 17, No. 3 (2003), p. 235.
10. More-over, cinema is but one representational form that has fallen within the purview of IR during the past 10 years or so; the field has also developed research trajectories that explore the relationship between Art and Politics and Popular Culture and IR. There is a growing literature in this area; for examples of work on art and (international) politics see Costas Constantinou, "The Beautiful Nation: Reflections on the Aesthetics of Hellenism", Alternatives, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2006), pp. 53-73.
11. Alex Danchev, On Art and War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009).
12. For examples of work on popular culture and international politics see Jutta Weldes, To Seek Out New Worlds: Exploring the Links between Science Fiction and World Politics (London: Palgrave, 2003).
13. Debbie Lisle, The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
14. See, for example, Michael J. Shapiro, Cinematic Geopolitics (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 119.
15. K.R.M. Short (ed.), Feature Films as History (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), p. 16.
16. Lenin said: "If I could have control over the medium of motion pictures, I would need nothing else in order to convert the entire world to communism." Cited in Attwood, op. cit., p. 54.
17. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).
18. Antonia Lant, Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 31.
19. Alan Williams (ed.), Film and Nationalism (London: Rutgers University Press, 2002), p. 2.
20. Deniz Kandiyoti, "Identity and its Discontents", Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 20, No. 3 (1992), pp. 429-443.
21. Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed Books, 1986).
22. Partha Chatterjee, "Whose Imagined Communities?", Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 20, No. 3 (1991), pp. 521-525.
23. Nira Yuval Davis and Floya Anthias, Woman, Nation, State (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1989).
24. George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (Madison, WF: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).
25. See, for example, Christine Sylvester, War, Feminism and International Relations (London: Palgrave, 2003).
26. For example, Cynthia Enloe's early work in IR pointed to the central importance of visual imagery and symbolism. See Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense on International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). Feminist scholars have been in the vanguard of engagement between IR and cinema.
27. See, for example, Cynthia Weber, "Feminism", in International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2004).
28. idem, Imagining America at War (London: Routledge, 2006).
29. Anderson, op. cit.
30. See also Williams, op. cit., p. 2.
31. For work that traces the cultural traditions in Russian cinema within the context of the aesthetic turn in IR specifically, see Cerwyn Moore, "Tracing the Russian Hermeneutic: Reflections on Tarkovsky's Cinematic Poetics and Global Politics", Alternatives, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2009), pp. 59-82.
32. Williams, op. cit., p. 4.
33. Ibid., p. 3.
34. Doreen Massey and Pat Jess (eds), A Place in the World? Places, Cultures and Globalization (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1995), p. 65.
35. Kandiyoti, op. cit.
36. Chatterjee, op. cit.
37. See John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC/Penguin Books, 1972).
38. Laura Mulvey, "British Feminist Film Theory's Female Spectators: Presence and Absence", Camera Obscura, Nos. 20/21 (1989), pp. 68-81.
39. David Gillespie, Russian Cinema (London: Longman, 2003), p. 124.
40. Denise J. Youngblood, Russian War Films: On the Cinema Front, 1914-2005 (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2007).
41. Georg Lukacs, "Realism in the Balance", in Ronald Taylor (ed.), Aesthetics and Politics (London: NLB, 1977).
42. Gillespie, op. cit., p. 104.
43. Ibid., p. 113.
44. Op. cit., p. i. Literary references married happily with Soviet ideological preferences. As Lukacs held, Russian writers were "sons of the people" (Lukacs, op. cit., p. 54).
45. See Michael Shapiro, "Sounds of Nationhood", Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 30, No. 3 (2001), pp. 583-601. While Shapiro's work is drawn upon here as an example of work in IR, it should be noted that scholars of nationalism have long since made this argument. Hence post-structural perspectives in IR complement a long-established literature on nationalism from other fields of study. For example, for a series of interesting arguments about national identity, including works focusing on Russia.
46. See Anthony D. Smith, "The Golden Age of National Renewal", in Geoffrey Hosking and George Schopflin (eds.), Myths and Nationhood (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 36-59.
47. Geoffrey Hosking, "The Russian National Myth Repudiated", in Hosking and Schopflin, op. cit., pp. 198-210.
48. For a fascinating account of how the classic "character types" of Russian folklore have been consistently applied in Russian literature, theatre, television and film, see Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968).
49. See Lukacs on Gorky, op. cit., p. 56.
50. Russia has long been positioned by outsiders as on the margins of Europe, required to make its case for inclusion in "European" cultural heritage. Iver B. Neumann, Uses of the Other: "The East" in European Identity Formation (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
51. See also idem, "Russia as a Great Power, 1815-2007", Journal of International Relations and Development, Vol. 11, No. 2 (2008), pp. 128-151.
52. idem, "Russia's Standing as a Great Power, 1494-1815", in Ted Hopf (ed.), Russia's European Choice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 13-33.
53. Barbara Koenig Quart, Women Directors: The Emergence of New Cinema (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), p. 3.
54. Lilya Kaganovsky, How the Soviet Man was Unmade: Cultural Fantasy and Male Subjectivity under Stalin (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008).
55. Attwood, op. cit., p. 64.
56. Gillespie, op. cit., p. 85.
57. Ibid., p. 63.
58. see also Attwood, op. cit., p. 68.
59. Barbara Heldt, Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 2
60. Cited in Gillespie, op. cit., p. 83.
61. Youngblood, op. cit., p. 57.
62. Ibid., p. 58.
63. Ibid., p. 60.
64. Youngblood, op. cit., p. 60.
65. See also Attwood, op. cit., p. 53.
66. Youngblood, op. cit., p. 60.
67. Chukhrai, Interview, Ballad of a Soldier, Nouveaux Pictures, DVD release date 29 January 2007.
68. Cynthia Enloe, "Feminist Thinking about War, Militarism and Peace", in B. Hess and M. Ferree (eds.), Analyzing Gender: A Handbook of Social Science Research (Beverley Hills, CA: Sage, 1987).
69. Mikhail Kalatozov, The Cranes are Flying (1957), Nouveaux Pictures, DVD release date 29 January 2007.
70. Nancy Hartsock, "The Barracks Community in Western Political Thought: Prolegomena to a Feminist Critique of War and Politics", Women's Studies International Forum, Vol. 5, No. 4 (1982), pp. 283-286.
71. Kaganovsky, op. cit.
72. Gillespie, op. cit., p. 88.
73. Lant, op. cit., p. 78.
74. See also Oksana Bulgakova, "The Metamorphoses of the Soviet Film Heroine", in Attwood, op. cit., p. 168.
75. Gillespie, op. cit., p. 88.
76. Ibid., p. 88.
77. Lant, op. cit., p. 75.
78. Ibid., p. 76.
79. Larisa Shepitko, in Larisa: A Film by Elem Klimov, cited in Barbara Koenig Quart, Women Directors: The Emergence of a New Cinema (New York: Praeger, 1988), p. 210.
80. Larisa Shepitko, Wings (1966), Criterion; DVD release date 12 August 2008.
81. Larushka Ivan-Zadeh, "The Lady Vanishes", The Guardian (10 January 2005), available: (accessed 21 December 2009).
82. Attwood, op. cit., p. 83.
83. Ibid., p. 147.
84. Ibid., p. 183.
85. Cited in Quart, op. cit., p. 210.
86. Mark Le Fanu, The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky (London: BFI Books, 1987).
87. This point is discussed in some detail by Roland Bleiker in the conclusion to his book Aesthetics and World Politics, op. cit. See also Cerwyn Moore, "Reading the Hermeneutics of Violence: The Literary Turn and Chechnya", Global Society, Vol. 20, No. 2 (2006), pp. 179-198.
88. Holden, "World Literature and World Politics", op. cit., p. 233.
89. Bleiker recognises that this must be part of the agenda of the aesthetic turn in IR; Roland Bleiker, "Learning from Art: A Reply to Holden's 'World Literature and World Politics'", Global Society, Vol. 17, No. 4 (2003): 415-428.