Soviet Rock on Screen

Nyhet

The Life, Death, and Resurrection of a Film Genre

Inbunden, Engelska, 2026

1 359 kr

Kommande

As the Iron Curtain fell and Cold War suspicions thickened in the second half of the twentieth century, the quintessentially American genre of rock and roll, seen as a potent symbol and product of an enemy ideology, quickly became a clandestine import in the USSR. The Soviet underground embraced the forbidden sounds, despite official propaganda that called rock stars social parasites and corrupting sluggards. The genre grew in popularity until it could no longer be ignored. In the Soviet Union’s last decade, a flailing film industry, controlled by and dependent on an increasingly unstable central government, seized on the rock star as a central figure—and the Soviet rock film was born. In Soviet Rock on Screen, Rita Safariants chronicles the birth, life, death, and resurrection of a genre that rapidly became one of the most readily recognized cultural signifiers of the perestroika era and which continues to reflect and codify Russian culture. During their initial heyday in the 1980s, rock films were influenced by and encouraged the cultural shifts of perestroika and the incipient political storm. Today, Safariants argues, the reemergence and reconfiguration of the genre indicates the extent to which Soviet-era cultural emblems inform Russian national identity and obliquely support the current political repression under Putin.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2026-03-31
Mått152 x 229 x 23 mm
Vikt567 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor304
FörlagUniversity of Wisconsin Press
ISBN9780299354800

Tillhör följande kategorier

Film inom Kultur
Populärmusik inom Kultur
Europas historia inom Historia och arkeologi
Konsthistoria inom Kultur
Musikböcker inom Kultur
Musikhistoria inom Kultur

List of Illustrations Note on Translation and Transliteration Introduction 1 Singing Along with the Establishment: Aleksandr Stefanovich’s The Soul and Start from Scratch 2 Rockin’ Past the Suspicion Machine: The Rock-and-Roll Blockbuster and the Soviet Film Industry 3 The Tsoi Effect: Soviet Rock Stars On-Screen 4 The Leningrad Rock Film: Valerii Ogorodnikov’s The Burglar and the Soundtrack of Late-Soviet Adolescence 5 The Brothers of Rock: Aleksei Balabanov and the Moral Downfall of the Soviet Rock Star 6 Raising the Dead: Sequels, Remakes, Legacies, and the Post-Soviet Rock Film 7 “Tsoi Lived, Tsoi Lives, Tsoi Will Live On”: Preserving the Rock Star Body in the Post-Soviet Biopic Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

“Safariants has created a new archive of texts that allow us a deeper view into the perestroika period, helping us see how the last decade of the USSR has shaped Russia’s present. A highly original contribution.” - Lilya Kaganovsky, author of The Voice of Technology: Soviet Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1928–1935“A fun, deeply researched, persuasively argued tour through the rise, fall, and resurrection of the Soviet rock film, a genre that played a major role in Gorbachev’s USSR and that has seen a surprising resurrection in Putin’s Russia.” - Stephen Norris, author of Blockbuster History in the New Russia: Movies, Memory, Patriotism