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Title Sequences in Russian Cinema: Design, Poetics and Paratexts
17 March 2025, 5:30 pm–7:00 pm
A SSEES Cinema Research Group with Professor Yuri Leving (Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University)
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
SSEES
Location
-
Masaryk roomUCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies16 Taviton streetLondonWC1H 0BW
Yuri Leving’s talk is devoted to analyzing opening and closing titles in Russian and Soviet films – their aesthetics, design, and paratextual motifs. For a long time, film studies did not show much interest in the film title sequences and there does not exist any academic study of “opening credit sequences” in Russian film history. He argues that credit sequences should be understood as semi-autonomous objects, intelligible in their own right. In title design, therefore, relationships exist between typography and background images, animation, and optical effects. Applied to typography in credits, where the goal is to create an inner logic between the content and meaning of the film, filmmakers try to make visible the relationship between the text and other elements constituting the total visual design of the frame. These discourses weave a complex, deeply coded matrix of meanings and semantics that goes far beyond the mere presence of words and images on screen.
Image credit: A collage of closing credits. From Y. Leving’s archive.
About the Speaker
Professor Yuri Leving
(Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University) specializes in contemporary Russian literature and film, Eastern European cinema, the visual arts, and digital humanities. He has published 11 monographs and nine edited collections, including Nabokov in Motion (2022), A Revolution of the Visible (2018), Marketing Literature and Posthumous Legacies (2013), Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl – Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design (2013), Anatomy of a Short Story (2012), and Keys to The Gift: A Guide to Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel (2011). Leving has held prestigious research fellowships, including an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Fellowship at Heidelberg University and an affiliation with the American Academy in Rome. Since 2007, he has served as the founding editor of the Nabokov Online Journal. In recognition of his scholarly contributions, the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) awarded him the 2017 Outstanding Contribution to Scholarship award, and he was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2023. In addition to his academic work, Leving has directed and produced three documentaries on Brodsky, Nabokov, and, most recently, Akhmatova’s Orphans. Disassembly (2024).