Amid the instability and violence of turn-of-the-century industrialization and urbanization Russians embraced a revolutionary art form to reflect the aspirations and motivations of a new class. In The Magic Mirror Denise Youngblood portrays a newly urbanized entrepreneurial middle class not the revolutionaries or imperialists of historians and the movies they made and paid to see. Upon those screens they saw their lives depicted in all their variety and uncertainty.
Youngblood provides a cultural angle into an era most often viewed through a revolutionary lens. Film and the film...

This book presents a pathbreaking study of Soviet popular cinema in the 1920s. Professor Youngblood focuses on commercial directors, acting genres, box office hits and audience responses to these films and their stars. She also examines the role of foreign films and the governmental and industrial circumstances underlying filmmaking practices of the era. The author demonstrates that during the first decade after the revolution, Soviet cinema was dominated by "bourgeois" directors and middle class tastes and was greatly influenced by Western and pre-revolutionary film cultures.

War movies have long been the most influential genre in Russian cinema, so much so that in the Soviet Union's militaristic society, "cinema front" was used to describe the film industry itself. Denise J. Youngblood, an internationally recognized authority on Russian and Soviet cinema, provides the first comprehensive guide to this long-neglected genre.

Youngblood explores more than 160 fiction films on Russian conflicts from World War I to Chechnya. These movies represent a wide range of cinematic styles and critical receptions. While not ignoring classic war films like Chapaev and...

Sergei Bondarchuk's War and Peace, one of the world's greatest film epics, originated as a consequence of the Cold War. Conceived as a response to King Vidor's War and Peace, Bondarchuk's surpassed that film in every way, giving the USSR one small victory in the cultural Cold War for hearts and minds. This book, taking up Bondarchuk's masterpiece as a Cold War film, an epic, a literary adaptation, a historical drama, and a rival to Vidor's Hollywood version, recovers--and expands--a lost chapter in the cultural and political history of the twentieth century.

Like many great...

The Cold War was as much a battle of ideas as a series of military and diplomatic confrontations, and movies were a prime battleground for this cultural combat. As Tony Shaw and Denise Youngblood show, Hollywood sought to export American ideals in movies like Rambo, and the Soviet film industry fought back by showcasing Communist ideals in a positive light, primarily for their own citizens. The two camps traded cinematic blows for more than four decades.

The first book-length comparative survey of cinema's vital role in disseminating Cold War ideologies, Shaw and Youngblood's study...