Pitt Professor's New Book Explores Russia's Imperial Legacy Through Contemporary Russian Cinema

PITTSBURGH-In her new book "The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema" (Oxford University Press), University of Pittsburgh professor Nancy Condee examines films from contemporary Russian cinema and notes that "we cannot make sense of current Russian culture without accounting for its imperial legacy."

A film historian in Pitt's Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Condee discussed several of the films she features in her new book during a May 21-23 book launch and screening at the Anthology Film Archive, 32 Second Ave., New York City. Featured films included Alexander Sokurov's "Alexandra" (2007), set in Chechnya; Aleksei German's "My Friend Ivan Lapshin" (1983), which the Soviet Union banned for 14 years; and "Cargo 200" (2008), Aleksei Balabanov's drama about a serial killer.

Through analysis of the works of the late-Soviet and post-Soviet-period auteurists Kira Muratova, Vadim Abdrashitov, Nikita Mikhalkov, Aleksei German, Aleksandr Sokurov, and Aleksei Balabanov, Condee seeks to know whether a Russian imperial legacy is evident in the films' manner and structure or representation, the conditions of films' productions, the recurrent preoccupations of leading filmmakers, or the ways in which collective belonging is figured or disfigured in the films.

Director of Pitt's graduate program for cultural studies from 1995 to 2006, Condee is a specialist in contemporary Russian culture and cultural politics, Soviet cultural politics, late-Soviet and post-Soviet cinema, imperial and postcolonial theory, and Soviet and post-Soviet popular culture. She also is a Pitt Film Studies Program faculty member.

Condee is cofounder and coeditor of the journal "Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema" and serves on a number of editorial and advisory boards, including those of "Kinokultura," "Critical Quarterly," and "Russian Studies in Literature." She has worked as a consultant on film projects for the Public Broadcasting System, "Frontline" documentaries on the Soviet Union and Russia, the Edinburgh Festival, the National Film Theatre in London, the San Francisco Film Festival, and the Library of Congress. With Vladimir Padunov, Pitt professor of cultural studies and film studies, Condee is coorganizer of Pitt's Russian Film Symposium, held annually in May.

Condee also is a senior associate member of St. Antony's College at Oxford University and a member of the Russian Guild of Cinema Scholars and Critics (Union of Cinematographers of the Russian Federation) and, for more than a decade, has been one of two U.S. scholars annually invited to and supported by the Kinotavr Film Festival (Sochi), Russia's leading postsocialist film festival. Condee also has served for six years as chair of the board of directors of the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the largest U.S. grant agency for social-science research in the former socialist bloc.

Anthology Film Archives is an international center for the preservation, study, and exhibition of film and video with a particular focus on American independent and avant-garde cinema and its precursors found in classic European, Soviet, and Japanese film.

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