Lida Oukaderova specializes in the history and theory of film, with particular focus on European and Russian cinema. She recently finished her book The Cinema of the Soviet Thaw: Space, Materiality, Movement, which examines conceptions of space in Soviet film of the 1950s and 1960s. The book pursues close readings of key films of the period in the context of contemporaneous spatial developments, including shifts in architecture and urban planning; developing interest in urban mobility; new pushes to “conquer” nature, and the gender-driven organization of private and public environments. Among the directors examined are Mikhail Kalatozov, Georgy Danelia, Kira Muratova and Larisa Shepitko; the book also includes a chapter on critical debates surrounding Soviet panoramic cinema. A Russian translation of the book is in progress.
Currently, Dr. Oukaderova is working on her next book, In Pursuit of the Common: Soviet and Russian Cinema since the 1960s. Taking the 1960s as a historical moment where the Soviet socialist ideals of community began to lose their broad acceptance, the book examines the cinematic permutations of “the common” in the late socialist and post-socialist period, with particular focus on the work of Marlen Khutsiev, Roman Karmen, Kira Muratova, Sergei Paradzhanov and Andrei Zvyagintsev.
Books
In Pursuit of the Common: Soviet and Russian Cinema Since the 1960s. Manuscript in progress.
The Cinema of the Soviet Thaw: Space, Materiality, Movement (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017)
Selected Articles and Essays
“From Mastery to Indistinction: Nature in Thaw-Era Cinema.” In Masha Shpolberg, ed., Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe. New York: Berghahn, forthcoming 2022.
“The Convertibility of Meaning: Soviet Readings of Money in the 1920s.” In Festschrift in Honor of Janet Swaffar, Katherine Arens and Maxim Hiram, forthcoming 2022.
Book review: “From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema Between the Second and the Third World,” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinemas, Vol. 15 (2), 2021.
Book review: “Arctic Cinema and the Documentary Ethos,” Slavic Review, Vol. 80 (1), Spring 2021, 187-89.
“Revolution through Motion: Soy Cuba, 1964.” In 100 Years of Soviet Cinema, Daniel Fairfax, ed. Melbourne: Leda Tapes Organization, 2019.
Book review: “Gynny v Parizhe: k metageografii russkoi kul’tury,” Slavic Review, Vol. 77(3), 2018, 843-844.
“I am Cuba and the Space of the Revolution,” Film and History, 44(2) 2014, 4-21.
"The Sense of Movement in Georgy Danelia's Walking the Streets of Moscow, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 4(1), 2010, 5-21.
"Money, Translation and Subjectivty in Isaak Babel's 'Guy de Maupassant." Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, 50 (2002-2003) : 161-168.