From Victimhood to Empowerment: Representing Women in 1920s Soviet Georgian Cinema

(Hardback)

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From Victimhood to Empowerment: Representing Women in 1920s Soviet Georgian Cinema brings the cinematographic works of Georgias State Film Industry from the margins of the Soviet film studies to the center. The book focuses on womens representations and explores how the gender roles were modified throughout the decade according to the new social and political ideals employing the discourse analysis, postcolonial perspectives, and psychoanalytical feminist film theories. Bringing together Soviet Georgias most important films of the period, the book inspects the female bodys symbolic function in the aspects of class dichotomy, orientalised other, revolutionary setting and as the heroine and the villain of the new social order- the New Soviet Woman and the Nepwoman (a person who engaged in private enterprise during the New Economic Policy of the 1920s) respectively. In the light of Bolsheviks preoccupation and endeavour to improve woman question, the book surveys to what extent womens screen images were emancipated during the decade and what the functional meaning of this emancipation was in the given context, how the new ideals of New Soviet woman were inscribed in the periods films, and how these ideals were combined with Georgian nationality.

Reviews

Attentive to cinematic language and socio-cultural context, this ground-breaking book examines representations of women in 1920s Soviet Georgian cinema, tracing their evolution from victimized object to empowered subject. Revealing much of importance about womens history in Georgia, its national focus also deepens our understanding of the early Soviet cinema industry. * Rachel Morley, Associate Professor, University College London, UK *

Author Bio

Salome Tsopurashvili is an assistant professor of Gender and Film Studies at Ilia State University, Georgia. In 2019-2020 she was a fellow at New Europe College, Romania, and a visiting researcher at International Gender Studies center at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford, UK, in 2018. She lectured at Tbilisi State University (2010-2017) and Ilia State University (2018-2019) in Tbilisi, Georgia.