Film and Television Genres of the Late Soviet Era

Alexander Prokhorov and Elena Prokhorova have written an excellent, highly informative, analytically deep, and lucid book that will impact the field with exponentially increasing force. They have laid the foundation for a new conceptualization of late Soviet cinema, TV, and culture in general. Their definitions and descriptions of late Soviet cinematic and TV genres offer an arsenal of tools that can be applied to other works, spheres, and periods of Russian cinema and culture in general. * The Russian Review *
Thorough, engaging, and easy to read, Film and Television Genres of the Late Soviet Era brings a much needed corrective to our notions of late Soviet cinema. The book ably addresses the different genres that characterize Soviet cinematic and televisual production of the Brezhnev era, moving beyond notions of Socialist Realism or “stagnation" to demonstrate the ways in which Soviet cinema and television adapted Western cinematic genres, while at the same time, developing their own specific cinematic and televisual language. The book’s strengths lie in its ability to closely engage with both film and television, drawing connections between them without sacrificing media specificity, as well as to extend the analysis of genre and form to recent film and television productions. Film and Television Genres of the Late Soviet Era is the first book to thoughtfully address the late socialist period and the first to provide a thorough analysis of Soviet genre film. It will become standard reading for anyone interested in Soviet cinema after 1968. * Lilya Kaganovsky, Associate Professor of Slavic, Comparative Literature, and Cinema & Media Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA *
If you want to understand a particular cultural moment after World War II, you have to know the television that people were watching (or not watching). If you want to understand late Soviet and post-Soviet television, you have to read the Prokhorovs. * Eliot Borenstein, Professor of Russian & Slavic Studies and Provostial Fellow, New York University, USA *
A thorough, insightful, and groundbreaking analysis of late Soviet genres in both film and television that provides an historical overview of the topic (and its theoretical underpinnings) as well as discerning discussions of such genres as the prestige film, the police procedural, the comedy, and the melodrama. * Lucy Fischer, Distinguished Professor of Film and English, University of Pittsburgh, USA *