Overview

Journey through the development of the magical film works of Russia's ""King of the Fairy Tales,"" Aleksandr Rou. More than fifty years after his death, the Soviet filmmaker, Aleksandr Rou, remains a cinematic icon in Russia and many other countries of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Dubbed ""King of the Fairy Tales"" and ""The Main Storyteller of the Country,"" he transformed the landscape of Soviet fantasy and fairy-tale cinema during a directorial career that stretched from 1938 to 1972. From the heights of Stalinist propaganda cinema, through Khrushchev's Thaw, and into the Brezhnev Stagnation era, Rou's films celebrated and perpetuated the nation's folkloric traditions while constantly refreshing them for new generations of young audiences. The book traces the developments of Rou's work on fairy-tale film, providing cultural and technical contexts of production and analyzing the features that mark Rou's personal style. In English-speaking countries Rou's work remains relatively little known, having received only limited theatrical distribution in the West. With home entertainment now offering wider opportunities to discover his unique and exhilarating works, this book provides a timely introduction to the work of one of the world's great masters of fairy-tale cinema.

Full Product Details

Author:   Deborah Allison (University of East Anglia.)
Publisher:   Intellect
Imprint:   Intellect Books
Dimensions:   Width: 17.00cm , Height: 1.40cm , Length: 24.40cm
Weight:   0.591kg
ISBN:  

9781835950647

ISBN 10:   1835950647
Pages:   244
Publication Date:   21 February 2025
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements    Note on Translation and Transliteration       Introduction: The Storyteller A Cinema for the Millions: The Pre-War Fairy Tales and Socialist Realism                       The Magic Fish (1938)                       Vasilisa the Beautiful (1939)              The Little Humpback Horse (1941)    The War Years and ‘The Enemy’             Fighting Film-Collection No. 7 (1941)                       Kashchei the Immortal (1945)            The Film Famine and After: Exile from Fairyland             The Tale of Tsar Saltan (uncompleted)                      The Documentaries: Artek (1949), A Day of Wonderful Impressions (1949) and in the Crimea (1950)              May Night (1952)                   Secret of the Mountain Lake (1954)               A Precious Gift (1956)           Fairy Tales, Folklore and Fantasy as Modern Texts in the Thaw             New Adventures of Puss in Boots (1958)                   The Magic Weaver (1959)                  Cinderella (1960)                    The Night before Christmas (1961)                 The Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors (1963)      Late-Career Fairy Tales: The ‘Storyteller’ Quartet             Jack Frost (1964)                    Through Fire, Water and … Brass Pipes (1968)                    Barbara the Fair with the Silken Hair (1969)             Golden Horns (1972)    Epilogue: Rou’s Legacy                     A Posthumous Production: Finist – The Bright Falcon (1975)                      The People’s Artist     Filmography    Bibliography

Reviews

'[Allison] arranges her coverage of Rou’s work by political period and carefully shows how each group of films responded to the demands of the time. Thus, this book will be useful not only to those who wish to know more about this little known, but very important, filmmaker and his contribution to Soviet cinema, but also to those interested in politics and how they impacted the Soviet artistic world.' -- Natalie Kononenko, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema

Author Information

Deborah Allison is a London-based cinema programmer and an associate research fellow at De Montfort University’s Cinema and Television History Research Institute. Her previous books include Film Title Sequences: A Critical Anthology (2021), The Cinema of Michael Winterbottom (2012) and the co-authored The Phoenix Picturehouse: 100 Years of Oxford Cinema Memories (2013).  

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