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

From Victimhood to Empowerment: Representing Women in 1920s Soviet Georgian Cinema brings the cinematographic works of Georgia’s State Film Industry from the margins of the Soviet film studies to the centre.The book focuses on women’s 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 Georgia’s most important films of the period, the book inspects the female body’s symbolic function in the aspects of class dichotomy and ethnic hierarchies.It analyzes the construction of the ‘Oriental other’ by the Russian colonial imagination and its subsequent dismantling in the context of the Caucasus’s de-Orientalization.It also examines the characteristics embodied by the ‘heroine’ and ‘villain’ of the new social order-the New Soviet Woman and the NEPwoman-and explores women’s transformat