Inside the film factory : new approaches to Russian and Soviet cinema /

The "blank pages in our history" that Mikhail Gorbachev decried a few years ago abound in Soviet film history. Directors such as Eisenstein and Kuleshov had both personal and political reasons for proclaiming the montage method as the only proper one for their times, and most film historians have accepted their oversimplifications. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, British film scholars who collaborated on an earlier anthology of articles on Soviet film from the 1920s (The Film Factory, CH, Oct'88) have now produced an exceptionally important volume that calls such preconceived notions into question. In their preface, they assert that "the greatest need is simply to broaden the agenda." They certainly succeed. The articles (and one interview) deal with an exciting range of topics, such as pre-revolutionary film, Soviet Yiddish cinema, and Soviet cinema as a mass entertainment, to name only a few. The essays are of consistently high quality and show impressive knowledge both of the films themselves and the controversies that they elicited. Highly recommended for undergraduate and graduate libraries.-J. M. Curtis, University of Missouri-Columbia