Joan Neuberger

Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible, was no ordinary movie. Commissioned by Joseph Stalin in 1941 to justify state terror in the sixteenth century and in the twentieth, the film's politics, style, and epic scope aroused controversy even before it was released. In This Thing of Darkness, Joan Neuberger offers a sweeping account of the conception, making, and reception of Ivan the Terrible that weaves together Eisenstein's expansive thinking and experimental practice with a groundbreaking new view of artistic production under Stalin. Drawing on Eisenstein's unpublished production notebooks, diaries, and manuscripts, Neuberger's riveting narrative chronicles Eisenstein's personal, creative, and political challenges and reveals the ways cinematic invention, artistic theory, political critique, and historical and psychological analysis went hand in hand in this famously complex film. Neuberger's bold arguments and daring insights into every aspect of Eisenstein's work during this period, together with her ability to lucidly connect his wide-ranging late theory with his work on Ivan, show the director exploiting the institutions of Soviet artistic production not only to expose the cruelties of Stalin and his circle but to challenge the fundamental principles of Soviet ideology itself. Ivan the Terrible, she argues, shows us one of the world's greatest filmmakers and one of the twentieth century's greatest artists observing the world around him and experimenting with every element of film art to explore the psychology of political ambition, uncover the history of recurring cycles of violence and lay bare the tragedy of absolute power.

Picturing Russian Empire offers a new way to approach the history of Russia as an empire and as a state located in a world characterized by a churning, dynamic exchange of people, ideas, and practices. It presents readers with a visual tour of the lands and peoples that constituted the Russian Empire and those that confronted it, defied it, accommodated to it, and shaped it at various times in more than a millennium of history. Bringing together scholars and experts from across the world and from various disciplines, Picturing Russian Empire consistently raises big historical questions to stimulate readers to think about images as embedded in the diverse, lived worlds of the Russian empire. The authors challenge the reader to not only to see images as the creations of individuals, but as objects circulating among viewers in a variety of contexts, creating new impressions, meanings, and experiences.

Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible, was no ordinary movie. Commissioned by Joseph Stalin in 1941 to justify state terror in the sixteenth century and in the twentieth, the film's politics, style, and epic scope aroused controversy even before it was released. In This Thing of Darkness, Joan Neuberger offers a sweeping account of the conception, making, and reception of Ivan the Terrible that weaves together Eisenstein's expansive thinking and experimental practice with a groundbreaking new view of artistic production under Stalin. Drawing on Eisenstein's unpublished production notebooks, diaries, and manuscripts, Neuberger's riveting narrative chronicles Eisenstein's personal, creative, and political challenges and reveals the ways cinematic invention, artistic theory, political critique, and historical and psychological analysis went hand in hand in this famously complex film. Neuberger's bold arguments and daring insights into every aspect of Eisenstein's work during this period, together with her ability to lucidly connect his wide-ranging late theory with his work on Ivan, show the director exploiting the institutions of Soviet artistic production not only to expose the cruelties of Stalin and his circle but to challenge the fundamental principles of Soviet ideology itself. Ivan the Terrible, she argues, shows us one of the world's greatest filmmakers and one of the twentieth century's greatest artists observing the world around him and experimenting with every element of film art to explore the psychology of political ambition, uncover the history of recurring cycles of violence and lay bare the tragedy of absolute power.

Eisenstein's last, unfinished masterpiece is a strange, complex and haunting film. Commissioned personally by Stalin in 1941, the project placed Eisenstein in the paradoxical situation of having to glorify Stalinist tyranny in the image of Ivan, without sacrificing his own artistic and political integrity - or his life. Drawing on sources that include Eisenstein's personal archive and the memoirs of those involved in Ivan's making, Joan Neuberger's vivid account reveals how, in almost impossible circumstances, he managed to create a film of cinematic innovation, intellectual depth and political critique. She reveals the film to be both a great work of art and a product of the time and place in which it was made.

This brief textbook chronicles the political, economic, and social changes that revolutionized Europe during the nineteenth century. Designed to allow professors to assign supplemental readings of their choice, and including chronologies, supplemental reading lists, maps, and illustrations for ease of reference, this book is the perfect choice for any undergraduate course on 19th-Century European history.

In this pioneering analysis of diffuse underclass anger that simmers in many societies, Joan Neuberger takes us to the streets of St. Petersburg in 1900-1914 to show us how the phenomenon labeled hooliganism came to symbolize all that was wrong with the modern city: increasing hostility between classes, society's failure to "civilize" the poor, the desperation of the destitute, and the proliferation of violence in public spaces.