Exposure: The Politics of the Soviet Film Industry

Ian Christie is Anniversary Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck College and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the co-curator of our exhibition at GRAD Unexpected Eisenstein. He co-curated Eisenstein: His Life and Art (Oxford Museum of Modern Art/Hayward Gallery, 1988). Ian also co-edited Eisenstein Rediscovered (1993) and The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896-1939 (1988). He is the author of monographs on Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger and Martin Scorsese.

Claire is based at St Antony’s College, Oxford, where she is the Max Hayward Visiting Fellow at the Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre for 2016-17. She works on late Stalin era cinema, 1945-53, a period known as “the death of Soviet cinema” for its stringent censorship, low production rates, and seemingly cliched films replete with happy peasants and odes to Stalin. Her research focuses particularly on popular films and trophy films, which were Hollywood and Nazi productions captured by the Red Army as spoils of war and re-edited for Soviet audiences during the early Cold War. Claire is currently preparing her first book on postwar popular Soviet cinema, based on her doctorate research at the University of Cambridge. Her publications on trophy films are found in the latest issue of Kritika, and online at http://www.kinokultura.com. 

Alex Graham is a PhD candidate and Wolfson Foundation scholar at UCL-SSEES. His doctoral research focuses on the politics of film production at the Lenfil’m studio in the years between 1961 and 1991. It combines the study of innovation in film aesthetics and institutional structures to ask how late-Soviet cinema functioned as a creative industry and an ideological system. Alex has written an extended article on the cinema of Aleksei German Sr. and maintains an active research interest in the work of this filmmaker. His recent collaborations in screening Russian and Soviet cinema include participation in the BIMI Essay Film Festival, the Open City Documentary Festival and the SSEES Centenary Film Festival.