Deborah Allison’s The Films of Aleksandr Rou is the first creative biography and auteur study of the Moscow-based filmmaker who directed sixteen features between 1938 and 1972. While the moniker of auteur is typically reserved for the makers of serious dramas with personal themes, Allison admirably extends the concept to include Rou, who, as she details, made ostentatious and puerile live-action fairytales and comedies perfectly aligned with the politics of the day. Though she does not use the term, Allison makes a strong case that Rou was a master with a consistent aesthetic and idiosyncratic authorial presence. Furthermore, she convincingly demonstrates that Rou’s oeuvre was a powerhouse of ideas on screen adaptation, fantastic storytelling, sharp comedy, and cinematic spectacle.
Rou’s pedigree includes working as assistant director to Iakov Protazanov at the Mezhrabpom Studio in 1930–36; inventing, along with Aleksandr Ptushko, the genre of “Soviet family entertainment” at the Soiuzdetfilm studio in 1936 (4); reinventing the genre at the Gorʹkii Film Studio in 1948; collaborating with brilliant screenwriters Nikolai Erdman, Vladimir Volʹpin, Aleksandr Filimonov, and Evgenii Shvarts; and surviving the Stalin era creatively intact. Allison establishes that except for late Stalinism, when he was forced to make short documentary subjects, Rou had his choice of screenplays, subjects, and actors. He directed the first Soviet color fantasy feature, The Little Humpback Horse (1941), and, after experimenting with early Soviet stereoscopic cinema in the documentary A Day of Wonderful Impressions (1949), made two color features in 3D in the 1950s.
The Films of Aleksandr Rou makes two major contributions to this basic account. First, Allison traces Rou’s use of reverse motion, substitution splices, double exposure, time-lapse photography, large-scale puppetry, and animation to suggest that his conventional, pre-computerized visual effects rival those of the original cinema “magician,” George Méliès. For example, the combination of sound, size, puppetry, framing, and lighting made the giant spider in Rou’s 1939 Vasilisa the Beautiful “the stuff of nightmares,” far surpassing the monstrous creatures in British and American cinema of the day (23). Allison also explores changes in the politics of Rou’s films. Though he adhered to the dominant narratives of his day, he did not hesitate to depart from these when circumstances allowed. For example, while his early film The Magic Fish (1938) idealized rural life and represented the Russian peasant as the positive hero, the comedy A Precious Gift (1954) celebrates “bourgeois” features of modern living of the Moscow middle class (89), and the peasant hero in his best-known “modern” fairytale, Jack Frost (1964), is a spoiled brute (95). The Rou that emerges from Allison’s account is a filmmaker of universal themes, who had his finger on the pulse of popular taste. This insular, craft-centered impression is reinforced when Allison points out that in the latter half of his career Rou indulged in self-citation and self-parody, as if he wished to suggest that elements of his early works were easily transferrable to his current practice.
A great number of books have been written on Soviet auteurs Sergei Eisenstein and Andrei Tarkovskii. The Films of Aleksandr Rou arrives on the current and welcome surge in monographs on Soviet-era filmmakers who had never received dedicated attention in English. These include Rimgaila Salys’s The Musical Comedy Films of Grigorii Aleksandrov (2009), James Steffen’s The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov (2013), Ilana Shub-Sharp’s Esfir Shub: Pioneer of Documentary Filmmaking (2022), Booth Wilson’s The Cinema of Yakov Protazanov (2024), and Maria Corrigan’s Monuments Askew: An Elliptical History of the Factory of the Eccentric Actor (2025). In contrast to these studies, Allison’s work is not based on research in primary documents. While much archival work has been interrupted by Russia’s attack on Ukraine, The Films of Aleksandr Rou usefully shows that new subjects in Soviet film history can continue to be investigated. In leu of archives and in addition to the careful interrogation of secondary sources, Allison takes advantage of new online resources such as blogs, archival sites, and digital documents.
The book is primarily comprised of descriptions and interpretations of Rou’s films. Making close narrative and stylistic analysis exciting is a feat, which Allison accomplishes by addressing the most thrilling and novel aspects of the films. The Films of Aleksandr Rou is clearly a work of love, and Allison’s unabashed appreciation and passion for Rou’s films, which may at times seem campy and old-fashioned, is contagious. If the goal of the book was to entice the English-language readership not only to learn about Rou but to see his films, Allison accomplishes this goal most commendably.
