The Alexander Medvedkin Reader

This is an enormously important and long-awaited project in film studies: it is collection of selected writings by the filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin, rendered into English. There is no equivalent volume in Russian or in any other language, so this is an original work. Alexander Medvedkin (1900-89) belongs in the canon of major Soviet filmmakers. He invented a form of "total” documentary cinema for workers in the early Soviet era that was aimed at bridging the distance between film and life, whereby the target audience of a film would be involved in its making, and then their viewing and discussion of it would become the basis for action to change their work situation and relations. He was also a major satirist at a time when the Soviet authorities feared the ambiguities of satire and tried to confine laughter to narrowly prescribed channels. Medvedkin’s work remains a crucial link in the history of documentary cinema, especially in its more engaged or agitational forms. He was a true-believing, card-carrying Communist, but he was also a victim of the Soviet regime. Soviet institutions prevented him from fully achieving what he hoped to accomplish as an artist because he behaved as an individualist who sought to produce artistic projects in defiance of obstacles from the authorities.