Natasha Poljakowa

Dr. Natasha Poljakowa (UK) is a film historian with a specialisation in German and Soviet cinema. Between October 2017 and March 2018 she was a visiting scholar at the Brandenburgisches Zentrum für Medienwissenschaften (ZeM).

Her current research interests include cinema of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich in the context of cross-cultural relations in European cinema, and the history of film archiving. She is currently working on a book manuscript dealing with the distribution, censorship and reception of German and Austrian films in the Soviet Union in the 1920s.

After completing her internship at the Austrian Filmmuseum (Vienna) in 2013, she worked as a guest researcher on the German film collection in Gosfilmofond and in 2016 completed her Ph.D. in German-Soviet relations in film in the 1920s funded by the Royal Holloway, University of London. As a stipendiary of the AHRC’s Modern Languages and Film Programme launched by the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies in 2013, she undertook a research trip to Deutsches Filminstitut.

The scholarship at ZeM will allow Dr. Poljakowa to broaden her research focus by spending several weeks at the archives and libraries in Berlin and Potsdam. As a visiting scholar, Dr. Poljakowa will contribute to the ZeM’s Mediengeschichte und Erinnerungskultur research focus and participate in ZeM's various events. She will continue working on the impact of foreign films on the Soviet film culture in the interwar period. Her project will explore the development of film censorship and re-editing mechanisms in the Soviet Union during the 1920s-1940s.

Her secondary research project in collaboration with Alexander Zöller touches upon the history of ‘trophy’ films in Gosfilmofond and the reconstruction of the Reichsfilmarchiv catalogue. On November 2017, she will introduce the film screening of Abram Room's Buchta smerti, as part of the series "1919. Revolution" at the Deutsches Historisches Museum (Berlin).