My dissertation situates itself at the intersection of several fields: Soviet cultural studies, film genre theory, and masculinity studies. It investigates the articulation of genre categories in Soviet and post-Soviet cinema industries, with a specific focus on the cultural context within which the buddy film emerges in late Soviet culture. This genre is unique within contemporary Russian cinema for providing a visual and narrative structure within which the masculine crisisa topic widely written about by Russian sociologists and gender scholarsbecomes visible. This masculine crisis is more often than not masked by compensatory, hyper-macho images in other genres (e.g., war films, gangster films, historical epics). The buddy film, by contrast, exhibits a type of masculinity rarely glimpsed on screen; these characters are the disillusioned, the marginalized, and the disenfranchised men of late- and post-Soviet society.
My argument is grounded in a thorough examination of male-centered Russian buddy films from 1970 until the present dayspecifically, I look at such films as A. Smirnovs Belorusskii vokzal (1970), P. Lungins Taksi-bliuz (1990), V. Abdrashitovs Vremia tantsora (1997), A. Rogozhkins Kukushka (2002), V. Todorovskiis Liubovnik (2002), and A. Muradovs Pravda o shchelpakh (2003). I also dedicate the final chapter to a consideration of several notable exceptions to the standard male buddy film: V. Todorovskiis Strana glukhikh (1998), S. Bodrov Jr.s Sestry (2001), F. Popovs Kavkazkaia ruletka (2002), and M. Liubakovas Zhestokost' (2007) in which two women substitute for the typical male pair.
I draw on the work of Althusserian film genre theorist Rick Altman, who seeks out the source of genre components in social practice. Altman insists on acknowledging the historicism and subjectivity in the study of genre. Relying on such considerations of genre, my dissertation treats the buddy film from several perspectives: it looks at the genres antecedents from the Stalinist and Thaw periods, it tracks changes in the genre as cultural and ideological imperatives shift over the past seventy years, and it considers how gender representations adapt to these cultural and ideological transformations.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-12082009-185653 |
| Date | 29 January 2010 |
| Creators | Seckler, Dawn A |
| Contributors | David MacFadyen, Lucy Fischer, Vladimir Padunov, Nancy Condee |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-12082009-185653/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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