About

Lida Oukaderova is an Associate Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Art History at Rice University. Her teaching includes introductory courses in global film history and advanced seminars exploring cinema in relation to architecture, urban history, discourses of justice, and theories of gender and sexuality. Her research focuses on the cinemas of the Soviet republics and post-Soviet nations. She is the author of The Cinema of the Soviet Thaw: Space, Materiality, Movement, which examines shifting conceptions of space in Soviet film of the 1950s and 1960s, situating cinema within the political and cultural transformations of the immediate post-Stalin era. Her work demonstrates how Soviet films engaged with broader efforts to reorganize public, private, and natural spaces, reflecting and shaping new spatial practices across architecture, interior design, landscape development, and everyday life during that period. She has also edited ReFocus: The Films of Larisa Shepitko, the first English-language volume dedicated to the Ukraine-born Soviet filmmaker, and is currently completing her second book, In Pursuit of the Common: Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema Since the 1960s, which explores how cinema from the former Soviet republics engages with the creation of shared spaces, languages, and experiences that transcend individual and group identities, reimagining collectivism beyond socialist frameworks.

Research topics

• History
• Psychology
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Economic history
• Art
• Literature
• Art history
• Gender studies
• Law

Selected publications

• Introduction

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2024-08-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 10 Larisa Shepitko’s Ecologies

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2024-08-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 2. From Mastery to Indistinction: Nature in Thaw-Era Cinema

  Berghahn Books · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Psychology
  • Art history
  PublisherDOI

• From Mastery to Indistinction:

  Berghahn Books · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  PublisherDOI

• The Cinema of the Soviet Thaw

  Academic Studies Press eBooks · 2023-12-31

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Following Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviet Union experienced a dramatic resurgence in cinematic production. The period of the Soviet Thaw became known for its relative political and cultural liberalization; its films, formally innovative and socially engaged, were swept to the center of international cinematic discourse. In The Cinema of the Soviet Thaw, Lida Oukaderova provides an in-depth analysis of several Soviet films made between 1958 and 1967 to argue for the centrality of space-as both filmic trope and social concern-to Thaw-era cinema. Opening with a discussion of the USSR's little-examined late-fifties embrace of panoramic cinema, the book pursues close readings of films by Mikhail Kalatozov, Georgii Danelia, Larisa Shepitko and Kira Muratova, among others. It demonstrates that these directors' works were motivated by an urge to interrogate and reanimate spatial experience, and through this project to probe critical issues of ideology, social progress, and subjectivity within post-Stalinist culture.

  PublisherDOI

• Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos. Ed. Lilya Kaganovsky, Scott McKenzie, and Anna Westerstahl Stenport. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. ix, 372 pp. Index. Photographs. $85.00, hard bound. $36.00, paper.

  Slavic Review · 2021-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos. Ed. Lilya Kaganovsky, Scott McKenzie, and Anna Westerstahl Stenport. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. ix, 372 pp. Index. Photographs. 36.00, paper. - Volume 80 Issue 1

  PublisherDOI

• From internationalism to postcolonialism: literature and cinema between the second and the third world

  Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema · 2021 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • History
  PublisherDOI

• Gunny v Parizhe: K metageografii russkoi ku΄ltury. By Dmitrii Zamiatin. St. Petersburg: Izdatel΄stvo Aleteiia, 2016. 306 pp. Appendix. ₽769, paper.

  Slavic Review · 2018-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

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• The Cinema of the Soviet Thaw

  Indiana University Press eBooks · 2017-05-15 · 13 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Cinema of the Soviet Thaw: Space, Materiality, Movement

  2017-05-15 · 7 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Following Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviet Union experienced a dramatic resurgence in cinematic production. The period of the Soviet Thaw became known for its relative political and cultural liberalization; its films, formally innovative and socially engaged, were swept to the center of international cinematic discourse. In The Cinema of the Soviet Thaw, Lida Oukaderova provides an in-depth analysis of several Soviet films made between 1958 and 1967 to argue for the centrality of space-as both filmic trope and social concern-to Thaw-era cinema. Opening with a discussion of the USSR's little-examined late-fifties embrace of panoramic cinema, the book pursues close readings of films by Mikhail Kalatozov, Georgii Danelia, Larisa Shepitko and Kira Muratova, among others. It demonstrates that these directors' works were motivated by an urge to interrogate and reanimate spatial experience, and through this project to probe critical issues of ideology, social progress, and subjectivity within post-Stalinist culture. (source : éditeur)

  PublisherDOI

Awards & honors

• 2020 - DAAD Summer Research Stay, Humboldt University Berlin