Early Russian Cinema Through Parody
An online lecture by Dr. Anna Kovalova
Early Russian cinema remains less studied and less widely known than either early European and American cinema or the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s. This lecture introduces some of the defining features of pre-revolutionary Russian cinema by examining its reflection in parody—both within cinema itself and in the broader culture surrounding it.
From an early stage, filmmakers began to parody familiar cinematic conventions and formulas. Film journalism developed its own genre of humorous or fictionalized writing about cinema, which likewise frequently relied on parody. At the same time, newly emerging cinematic clichés were mocked in theatrical plays, satirical magazines, cartoons, and other cultural forms. Taken together, these parodies provide an unusual record of what contemporaries perceived as the most recognizable features of Russian cinema: its preference for tragic endings, elaborate and verbose intertitles, and recurrent narrative formulas.
By tracing these parodic responses across different media, the lecture explores not only what early Russian cinema looked like, but also how its conventions became recognizable as conventions—and what this process can tell us about the development of cinema as a cultural form.
About the Speaker
Anna Kovalova, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. She has edited a collection of screenplays by Nikolai Erdman (Kinostsenarii, 2010). She is the author of Kinematograf v Peterburge 1896-1917 (“Cinema in St. Petersburg” with Yuri Tsivian, 2011). She has published in Dickens Quarterly, Film History, Kinovedcheskie zapiski, The Russian Review, Slavonic and East European Review, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, Osteuropa, and other journals. She is the editor-in-chief of Daydreams, the first scholarly database of feature films produced in the Russian Empire.
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This program will be recorded and posted to the museum’s YouTube channel.