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.
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