Introduction: “To Begin With, There Must Be a Will to Remember.”
Chapter 1: Soviet Space and the Battlegrounds of 20th Century Science Fiction Cinema
Chapter 2: Aelita’s Mark and the Many Faces of Utopia
Сhapter 3: The Space Futures of Socialist Realism
Chapter 4: The Space Age and Its Others: Soviet SF between Gagarin and Gorbachev
Chapter 5: Little Soldiers, Perfect Aliens, and Spoilt Brats: Soviet and Post-Soviet Space Kids as Liminal Agents
Chapter 6: An Explosive Expansion: Soviet SF in the 1980s and Its Legacy
Chapter 7: The Province Called Earth: The Trope of Outer Space in Post-Soviet Russian Cinema
Chapter 8: Reinterpretations of the Soviet History of Spaceflight in Contemporary Russian Blockbusters
Conclusion: “If It Got Recorded, It Had To Be True.” Replay, Rewatch, Remember?
Natalija Majsova is assistant professor at the University of Ljubljana.
For those of us who have watched Soviet and Russian space-age,
science-fiction movies over the years, reading this book takes us
back. It's like reading a movie review, if with something of a
delay, well after we've seen the movie, recalling some of the
scenes and dialogue, and learning a few new things too. In the best
of senses, it's also like meeting an old friend and reminiscing
about a shared movie experience. This book encompasses several
generations of movies, the kind we teach and the kind we need to
know more about. Natalija Majsova has written a timely work....
Majsova's comparative approach is valuable. She studies these
movies aligned with popular Russian war epics and gangster movies,
and more recent blockbusters. She matches the Soviet and Russian
movies with the classics of American and European cinema and
television, offering a global perspective. She studies their
moralizing and formative influences, how they indoctrinated and
entertained their audiences about presumed Soviet futures and
pasts. This study will therefore be useful for university courses
teaching film. It will also serve as a rich reference point for
anyone teaching Soviet-Russian history and space-age history, a
resource to better understand the part-real, part-mythical figures
like Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, S. P. Korolev, and Yuri Gagarin.
For Soviet culture, space flight used to be a dream that turned
reality, first on screen and later in the deed. The link between
science and cinema became a testing ground for future achievements
in the cosmos. Natalija Majsova's Soviet Science Fiction Cinema and
the Space Age: Memorable Futures is an engagingly written study of
sci-fi films about space, Soviet and post-Soviet, which studies the
films through a kaleidoscope of approaches, from the cosmos as
utopian space, space exploration, liminality of outer space and
Othering, as well as memory. Majsova offers a refreshing break from
traditional readings of science-fiction film and representation of
space as she subordinates patriotic discourse to a more global
approach. This book makes a great addition to studies of
science-fiction film and cosmic space in Russia.
If you ever wondered what Russian sci-fi cinema was like, and how
it related to the Space Age, you need to look no further than this
pioneering book. Majsova navigates the reader through the almost
unknown and often unsafe terrain with the confidence of Stalker in
Andrei Tarkovsky's eponymous masterpiece.
Natalija Majsova's book is an impressive piece of scholarship,
exemplary in the breadth of material covered in the course of
examining the origins and evolution of Soviet and post-Soviet space
science fiction cinema. By placing the films within a variety of
historical, cultural, and political contexts, Majsova's provocative
and intriguing analyses offer a valuable contribution not only to
the discussions of the genre, but also to the larger discourses on
technological progress, space exploration, utopianism, cultural
memory, and nostalgia.
The future is no longer what it quite used to be, Paul Val�ry
remarked in 1938. In this admirable study, Natalija Majsova offers
an extensive and profound close reading of three dozen Soviet space
films, ranging from science fiction blockbusters Aelita (1924) and
Soliaris (1972) to less widely known cult films such as
Kin-Dza-Dza! (1986) and present-day reinterpretations of the heroic
era of Russian spaceflight. Elegantly interweaving theoretical
insights from science-fiction studies, literary criticism, and
astroculture with a sharp eye for cinematic, compositional, and
historical detail, this book will make readers want to become
viewers, primed to rediscover a fascinating corpus of Soviet and
post-Soviet space utopias. This study is an indispensable guidebook
to those fantastic worlds once far, far away, yet seemingly so
close again.
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