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Clare Kitson, Yuri Norstein and Tale of Tales: An Animator's Journey, John Libbey, 2005. ISBN: 0 86196 646 5
Thomas Tode, Barbara Wurm et al, eds, Dziga Vertov: The Vertov Collection at the Austrian Film Museum, SYNEMA/Ostterreichisches Filmmuseum, 2006. ISBN: 3-901644-19-9
The recent appearance of two apparently very different books about major Russian filmmakers provides an opportunity to take the temperature of current scholarship about the Soviet period in the year that has seen various events marking the twentieth anniversary of Gorbachev's perestroika. Clearly the reformers of 1986 could not have anticipated that relaxing censorship and the central control of artistic organisations would unleash a rising tide of dissent that would ultimately lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union. And it may be that the high-profile reforms of the cinema and press, which allowed previously banned films to circulate and be openly discussed, were not decisive in the larger political arena. Yet the almost visceral impact of such contemporary films as Is It Easy to be Young? (Yuris Podnieks, 1986) and Little Vera (Vasily Pichul, 1988), together with the 'unshelving' of Askoldov's long-banned The Commissar (1967/1987) and the revelation of the hitherto suppressed careers of Kira Muratova, Alexei Gherman and Alexander Sokurov, certainly contributed to a cultural awakening that would prove irresistible.
However, an important dynamic within this awakening was less the desire to expose the brutality of Stalinism, than to celebrate aspects of the Soviet experience that had long been censored, especially the closeness and solidarity of daily life during the 1930s and 40s, even within the infamous communal apartments. German's My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1983-5) puzzled many outside Russia by its apparent nostalgia for this era, but few admirers of Yuri Norstein's widely celebrated animation The Tale of Tales (1979) would have recognised that it too sprang in part from the same desire to celebrate ordinary life in Stalin's time. This impulse emerges clearly in Clare Kitson's wonderfully intimate and illuminating account of the genesis and complex trajectory of Norstein's masterpiece. In his first outline for the film, developed jointly with the writer Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, herself already a controversial chronicler of the sorrows and joys of everyday Soviet life, Norstein frankly expressed this desire to evoke his childhood in the Moscow...