In January 2020, Screen International reported that 2020 would be the year that global storylines dominated film and TV. Just two months later, in the grips of the COVID-19 pandemic, the global film industry found itself frozen in time and space: production shut down; festivals cancelled or moved online; and scriptwriters asked to adjust their work according to the new no-contact conventions of the COVID-era. Statista Research Development forecasts that cinema revenue in Russia will be down some 24 billion rubles by the end of 2020 due to the pandemic, and that financing for film, television, and animation will drop by 11.5 billion rubles in that same period. Now, as the global film economy begins to reopen (movie theatres in Moscow opened on August 1), it remains unclear if Russian viewers will return to theatres, or if the coronavirus has sealed cinema's fate in favor of home streaming once and for all.

This acute contemporary moment—a moment when, among many other things, the global film industry finds itself on the precipice of historic change—is as good a time as any to conduct a survey of the field. The present volume, Cinemasaurus, does precisely that. It offers readers a nuanced snapshot of Russian film at three main levels: 1) the films themselves (from conception to post-production); 2) the festivals (focusing on Kinotavr, arguably Russia's most important annual festival); and 3) film criticism and scholarship on Russian cinema (specifically, the Pittsburgh Russian Film Symposium, which for more than twenty years has served as the leading venue for Russian film criticism in English).

The book is arranged in five parts. The first four are organized thematically and include a total of twelve contributions, ranging from explorations of (post)Soviet and (non)European identity in Russian film to genre conventions and modalities like horror, comedy, theatricality, violence, auteurism, and consumerism. Each part begins with a framing essay written by a leading scholar in the field. Contributions are not so much focused on individual films or particular directors as they map the broader landscape of Russian filmmaking in the contemporary era, providing a theoretical framework for a discipline still very much in the making. The title of the volume is an English approximation of the festival name Kinotavr, itself a likely play on the Russian word for dinosaur (dinozavr), as the festival's early logo was an image of a winged dinosaur in a crown. And like the catalog of unwieldy dinosaur names, which combine Greek and Latin roots to describe how a particular dinosaur might have looked or behaved, the present volume arranges Russian filmmaking into the cinematic equivalents of “genus” and “species,” serving as a reference manual for decoding main trends over the past twenty years.

Part Five adds to this contribution by including interviews with leading figures: media executive and President of Kinotavr Alexander Rodnyansky; Kinotavr programmer Sitora Alieva; film entrepreneur Paul Heth; editor of the two leading journals in the field, Birgit Beumers; and Vladimir Padunov, director of the Pittsburgh Russian Film Symposium since 1999.

And yet, Cinemasaurus is not just a survey of Russian film as an industry and discipline. It is also the first formal record of the Pittsburgh school of Russian film criticism, which has not yet been named as such, but which has had an unsurpassed impact on the study of Russian film in the US. Of the seventeen contributors to the present volume, each has some connection to the University of Pittsburgh, past or present. The authors of the four framing essays are all current Pittsburgh faculty or former graduate students, now established experts elsewhere. Pittsburgh is also home to the largest collection of films from Russia and the CIS outside the former Soviet Union. Nonetheless, the Pittsburgh school, if we allow ourselves to use this term, is not so much a geographical constant as it is a reference to a specific kind of training in Russian cinema at those three levels identified earlier: films and directors; the industry, from festivals to distribution; and the practice of film scholarship in its cross-cultural, Russian-English contexts. Pittsburgh—and in particular, the Slavic Department at the University of Pittsburgh and the Russian Film Symposium—functions like a telephone switchboard, whereby all the roads of Russian film scholarship eventually, in one way or another, lead back to Pittsburgh. Cinemasaurus is, among many things, a record of this important intellectual history.