Maria Belodubrovskaya

Maria Belodubrovskaya’s current work is on the history, theory, and aesthetics of Soviet cinema. Her first book, Not According to Plan: Filmmaking under Stalin (Cornell UP, 2017), is a revisionist history of Soviet filmmaking during the Stalin era (1930–1953) and an institutional study of how ideology structures cultural production. It examines five institutions of Soviet cinema—policymaking, production planning, directing, screenwriting, and censorship—to show that it was impossible to build a mass-producing culture industry while working with artisanal production methods, weak control mechanisms, and an entitled artistic workforce.

She is currently working on her second book, Jolly Fellows: Film Aesthetics and the Pleasures of Socialist Realism, which addresses Soviet film aesthetics during this same period. The book looks at Soviet cinema’s approach to style and narrative in comparison with Hollywood and other major film traditions. It seeks to challenge some received notions about Soviet film’s ideological conformity and socialist realism while showing how the Soviet cinematic tradition fits into the transcultural aesthetic discourse.

An additional research trajectory deals with fundamental questions of film aesthetics. Belodubrovskaya is working on a series of articles dealing with narrative pleasure. Her study of Sergei Eisenstein has revisited cinematic attractions as a function of narrative rather than spectacle. She has proposed that Alfred Hitchcock was the master of surprise, not suspense, for in practice, as opposed to in word, the director cared more about uncertainty than about suspense. Her essay on the language of film explores the minimal cinematic unit, and she is currently at work on a theory of the page turner.