Second World War in the Soviet Union: society under occupation, collaboration, mobilization, war narrative, sortie de guerre and war purges
Soviet documentary cinema: mobilization tool, educational practices, film production and structures, war on screen, Soviet trial films.
Legacy of war and accountability in Soviet-type regimes (1940s-1980s): police work, national criminal justice, public trials of war criminals, social expectations, historical narratives through justice, Cold War rivalry and propagandas, worldwide circulations, international criminal law
Current projects: (1) “The True War? Soviet operators and directors of documentary films in the Second World War.” This book project aims to fill a gap in non-Russian-speaking studies of Soviet cinema. The latter is most often studied for its contribution to the avant-garde (in fiction or documentary) or, on the contrary, for the political and ideological function that was increasingly narrowly assigned to it from the Stalinist period onward. Focusing on how the film industry in the USSR mobilized to film an unprecedented conflict, the World War II the book shifts the focus from the political authorities to the production structures: from the ministerial directorate in charge of documentary films to the studio and director at the front. This shift allows us to interrogate in a new way the unpublished images captured by Soviet cameras in 1939–1945. The goal is to understand what meaning(s) the various actors–minister, section chief, studio director and censor, editor and finally frontline cameraman–may have given to their work and work. It consists of five analytical chapters and two documentary sections (in close connection with the corresponding chapters), i.e., archival documents translated from Russian and annotated.
(2) “Fedor Fedorenko: Crimes and Judgment Between West and East in Hot and Cold War.” The next book project will examine inter-bloc competition and cooperation on criminal investigations of the most seriously implicated (but unindicted) perpetrators of crimes from World War II. In the wake of my most recent research (Cahiers 2020, and University Rochester Press 2022), it looks into the weaving together of justice, history and memory, focusing not only on the state and institutional actors, but also on the social actors of all kinds, from individuals to sophisticated international organizations like the World Jewish Committee.
