CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015
| Author | Korenewsky, Aaron Wesley |
|---|---|
| Title | Facing the Enemy: An Analysis of Online Discourse Over the Representation of the Nazi Enemy in Fyodor Bondarchuk's 2013 War Film Stalingrad |
| Summary | Fyodor Bondarchuk’s 2013 Stalingrad was both the Russian Federation’s first IMAX production and its highest grossing domestic blockbuster. Stalingrad was also steeped in controversy, particularly over its Nazi character Peter Kahn, who was labeled by some as “an enemy with a face” and by others as a glorification of Nazism. Though similar depictions of Nazis developed in Hollywood and other Western cinema nearly 50 years ago and represent shifting understandings of the Second World War, a recent surge in literature on present-day representations of Nazism in world media has largely overlooked the area of the former Soviet Union. The thesis attempts to fill this gap by attempting to explain why the representation of the Nazi figure in Stalingrad generated the divided discourse it did by conducting a thematic analysis of a corpus of film reviews published online between September and November 2013. In doing so, this thesis identifies a memory war, in which three major meta-themes relied upon by Russian film critics in discussing Stalingrad’s Nazi are uncovered. These meta-themes suggest certain societal anxieties with the present-day narrative and memory of the Great Patriotic War, including worry over foreign interference in Russia’s national mythology and whether or not the memory of the war can be successfully transferred to and instilled in the youngest generation. |
| Supervisor | Kovacs, Andras; Siefert, Marsha |
| Department | Nationalism Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2015/korenewsky_aaron.pdf |
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