Blockbuster History in the New Russia: Movies, Memory, and Patriotism

Notes

319 N O T E S 1. Introduction This introduction benefited from a lively discussion on December 4, 2009, at the Havighurst Center’s work-in-progress series . I want to thank my colleagues Vitaly Chernetsky, Karen Dawisha, Josh First, Mila Ganeva, Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, and Ben Sutcliffe for their comments and critiques. 1. See the Karo Film website, www .karofilm.ru (accessed January 25, 2012). 2. Birgit Beumers, “Cinemarket, or the Russian Film Industry in ‘Mission Possible,’” Europe-Asia Studies 51, no. 5 (1999): 871. 3. See Laura Holson and Steven Lee Myers, “The Russians Are Filming! The Russians Are Filming!” New York Times, July 16, 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/ 07/16/business/yourmoney/16russia.html ?scp=2&sq=russian%20are%20filimg%20 the%20russians&st=cse. 4. “O kompanii/obshchaia informatssia ,” Karo Film website, www.karofilm.ru/ about (accessed January 25, 2012). 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. “Multiplexing Russia: A Talk with Karo’s Leonid Ogorodnikov,” Film Journal , September 1, 2005, www.filmjournal .com/filmjournal/esearch/article_display .jsp?vnu_content_id=1001022020. 9. Holson and Myers, “The Russians Are Filming!” 10. Quoted in Amie Ferris-Rotman and Thomas Peter, “Russia Sees Revival in Film-Making,” New York Times, June 3, 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/ technology/03iht-RUSfilm.4.13434938 .html. 11. Quoted in Boris Fishman, “Its Freedoms No Longer New, Russian Cinema Matures,” New York Times, October 23, 2003, www.nytimes.com/2003/10/23/ movies/its-freedoms-no-longer-newrussian -cinema-matures.html?scp=1&sq =russian%20cinema&st=cse. 12. Quoted in Nick Paton Walsh, “Russian Cinema Holds Out for a New Type of Hero,” The Guardian, September 28, 2002, 19. See also Greg Dolgopolov, “Liquidating the Happy End of the Putinera ,” KinoKultura 21 (July 2008), www .kinokultura.com/2008/21-dolgopolov .shtml. 13. Quoted in Holson and Myers, “The Russians Are Filming!” 14. Louis Menard has argued that “blockbusters today are commercials; 320 Notes to pages 5–7 they’re commercials for themselves.” Contemporary American blockbusters specifically market themselves to capture foreign box office receipts; and, as Menard puts it, “foreign audiences aren’t paying to hear an interesting conversation.” See his “Gross Points,” New Yorker 80, no. 45 (February 7, 2005): 82–87. Menard’s views about the “emptiness” of Hollywood blockbusters and its aim to generate as much money as possible from foreign distribution was translated and included in the Seans roundtable on the Russian blockbuster cited below. 15. For more on these issues, see I. E. Kokarev, Kino kak biznes i politika: sovremennaia kinoindustriia SShA i Rossii: uchebnoe posobie (Moscow: Aspekt-Press, 2009). 16. Here I draw on the work of Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 183–86. 17. Stephen Lovell, The Soviet Union: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 27. 18. This is the argument made by Evgeny Dobrenko in his Stalinist Cinema and the Production of History: Museum of the Revolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008). 19. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 120. 20. I borrow the unmaking and remaking idea from Caroline Humphrey, The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies After Socialism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002). 21. The figures are from “Dark Blue World (2001): International Box Office Results ,” Box Office Mojo website, www.box officemojo.com/movies/?page=intl&id= darkblueworld.htm (accessed January 25, 2012). For more on postcommunist Czech historical films, see Peter Hames, “The Ironies of History: The Czech Experience,” in Anikó Imre, ed., East European Cinemas (London: Routledge, 2005): 135–50. 22. See “Ballots and Box Office: Did Poland’s President Exploit Katyn Tragedy?” Spiegel, October 5, 2007, www.spiegel.de/international/ europe/0,1518,509645,00.html. 23. “Katyn (2009): International Box Office Results,” Box Office Mojo website, www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page =intl&id=katyn.htm (accessed January 25, 2012). Katyń had a limited release in Russia and provoked some interesting responses. Some viewers who posted comments on the online forum Kinopoisk interpreted Wajda’s film as anti-Russian; others viewed it as a necessary act of national atonement. See the discussion on “Katyń,” Kinopoisk website, www.kinopoisk.ru/level/1/film/ 270249 (accessed January 25, 2012). 24. I have tackled this subject in two articles that focus on Central Asian cinema: “The Gifts of History: Young Kazakh Cinema and the Past,” KinoKultura 27 (January 2010), www.kinokultura.com/2010/ 27-norris.shtml; and “Landscapes of Loss: The Great Patriotic War...