The Cinema of Yakov Protazanov

By F. Booth Wilson

SERIES: Global Film Directors

Rutgers University Press

Best known for Aelita (1924), the classic science-fiction film of the Soviet silent era, Yakov Protazanov directed over a hundred films in a career spanning three decades. Called "the Russian D.W. Griffith" in the 1910s for his formative role in the first movies in the last years of the Russian Empire, he fled the Civil War and maintained a successful career in Europe before making an unusual decision to return to Russia now under Soviet power. There his films continued their remarkable success with audiences undergoing a bewildering and often brutal revolutionary transformation. Rather than treating him as an indistinct, if capable craftsman, The Cinema of Yakov Protazanov argues that his films are suffused with a unique creative vision that reflects both his mindset as a traditional Russian intellectual and his experience of dislocation and migration after 1917. As he adapted his films to revolutionary culture, they intermingled different voices and reinterpreted his past work from a disavowed era. Offering fresh perspectives of Protazanov’s films, the book will give readers a new appreciation of his career. The book offers a uniquely valuable vantage point from which to explore how cinema reflected a society in transformation and a seminal moment in the development of cinematic art.

Protazanov is that rare exception of a filmmaker, who made the transition from pre-Revolutionary to Soviet cinema, and who in-between those phases spent several years abroad, in France and Germany; therefore, he does not fit easily within the temporalities of film history. Moreover, his work across various genres, his popularity, and his unflinching professionalism in the face of diverse political regimes has made him fall from the radar of scholarship focused largely on the Soviet avant-garde. Booth Wilson's book fills this gap with an in-depth study of Protazanov's career and a fine analysis of his films, drawing on a wealth of sources for this portrait of Soviet cinema's maybe most popular filmmaker.'

Birgit Beumers, Professor of film studies at the University of Aberystwyth, Wales, and editor of the journals KinoK

Cinema is an anywhere art. Lubitsch did well in Germany, and even better in Hollywood. Max Ophüls' creative itinerary includes Germany, Hollywood, and France. Protazanov's boomeranged: Imperial Russia, France, and back to Russia, this time Soviet. An indifferent artisan? A promiscuous shapeshifter? Not so fast. As we learn from Wilson's perceptive and penetrating study, the more Protazanov changed, the more he stayed himself—a genuine anywhere artist. Yuri Tsivian, author of Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties

F. Booth Wilson is a lecturer in the Department of Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley. He has published extensively on film history, theory, and aesthetics in a variety of scholarly journals.

Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Note on Transliteration
Introduction: A Proto- and Protean Filmmaker
1          A Mobile Career
2          The Politics of Literary Adaptation
3          Revolutionary(-era) Traditionalism
4          Abroad at Home
5          Making Comedy Serious
6          The Didactic Voice from Tolstoy to Lenin
Conclusion
Selected Filmography
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Related Titles