The New Russian Documentary

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.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgmentsNotes on ContributorsNote on TransliterationIntroduction - Anastasia Kostina and Masha ShpolbergPart I. Contesting State Narratives1. Politics and Social Engagement in Recent Russian Documentary Film - Jeremy Hicks2. Everyday Nation-Building: State TV Documentaries in Russia, 2012-2018 - Anastasia Kryachko Røren3. A Palace for Putin: Navalny's Ironic Documentary - Greg DolgopolovPart II. Politicizing History4. The Civic Documentaries of Vitaly Mansky: Text and Subtext - Justin Wilmes5. Yuri Dud, YouTube, and Documentary Civics - Masha Shpolberg6. Found Footage Recontextualization in Twenty-First Century Russian Documentaries: Micro- and Macro-histories - Daria Shembel7. The New Kino-Pravda: Sergei Loznitsa's Compilation Films - Lilya KaganovskyPart 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 Maslenitsyna10. Mediating Crisis Childhoods: The Work of Hanna Polak and Iryna Tsilyk - Anna Tropnikova11. Becoming-Edible: Sergei Loznitsa and Viktor Kossakovsky's ‘Vegan’ Cinema in Blockade (2006) and Gunda (2020) - Raymond DeLucaPart IV. Developing Distinctive Approaches12. Teacher as Producer: Marina Razbezhkina and the Rise of Observational Documentary - Anastasia Kostina13. Alina Rudnitskaya and the Limits of Observational Cinema in Feminist Documentary - Raisa Sidenova14. Aleksandr Rastorguev: Looking into the Face of Humanity - Anna Nieman15. Rescue Missions? The Late Documentaries of Alexander Sokurov - Jeremi SzaniawskiFilmographyIndex

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.