I am a fourth-year PhD student in Film and Media Studies with a Concentration in Slavic. My research is concerned with contemporary Russian cinema, film and new media audiences, popular culture and neoliberalism, and cult and horror film. My research explores specifically Russian ways of forming and developing film cults in order to point to under-explored and unarticulated ways in which filmmakers and viewers participate in culture.
I teach film as well as courses on Russian culture. One of the courses I have taught both as a recitation instructor and as the lead instructor is RUSS 0090: Russian Fairy Tales—the highest-enrollment course offered by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, capped at 350 students and always fully enrolled. In seminars, I use both readings and visual resources, such as films and YouTube videos, as illustrative material. For the Humanities Engage Curricular Development grant, I chose to add a film component for a makeup exam that is routinely offered in the course. For this task, I am collaborating with the course’s lead instructor Jonathan Lincoln Auxier and the course’s original developer Professor David J. Birnbaum.
Russian Fairy Tales is a general-education course, so its scope is broad: it introduces Russian fairy tales as a form of community entertainment for all types of people that is tied very closely to the deepest roots of different societies’ cultures. This course presents an overview of Russian history and culture (including the visual arts, animation, and film) in order to initiate students into a wide variety of critical approaches for examining texts and other cultural artifacts. A new collections-based module will enhance all of the key skills that students acquire in the course, especially “Displaying a sound, introductory-level knowledge of the highlights of Russian history and of the ways in which Russian cultural artifacts have intersected with the fairy-tale tradition.”
The proposed module will serve as a makeup exam, providing students with the chance to improve an unsatisfactory grade on a previous assessment. The students will have to select a movie adaptation of a fairy tale from the University of Pittsburgh Russian and East European Film Collection or any official YouTube channel that features subtitled copies of the films, then choose one of the critical frameworks taught in the course. Using that framework, they will have to analyze the movie in a 6–8 page essay. The students will learn how to navigate the existing film collections (either in the university library or on the Internet) and how to look up and choose a movie that is appropriate for the analysis that they are required to perform. A well-written essay will replace the score of the student’s worst exam with the class average score on that exam. In the process, students will be supported by a guide on how to navigate the University of Pittsburgh Russian and East European Film Collection and official YouTube channels. The students will be able to access the university collection of DVDs through the Media Resources Center at Hillman Library and its website or the collections legally available on YouTube.
At this point, the biggest surprise for me is the constantly changing availability of the old Soviet films. Several months ago, when I was just planning this project, many of the films where officially available on YouTube channels owned by the respective studios. Some of those films are now legally available only without English subtitles, and some have just disappeared from free public access. The main conclusion that I take from this is the great importance of Pitt’s own DVD collection of Russian and East European Films.