This Is Not a Pipe: Soviet Historical Reality and Spectatorial Belief in Perestroika and Post-Soviet Cinema (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Russian Cinema of the Dissolution
The paper takes the issue of Russian reckoning cinema after 1989. This current can be defined as comprising the films which try to lay the foundations of a new narrative about the Soviet Union (alternative to the dominant narrative). The authors reflect on the specificity of the filmmakers' critical attitude towards the previous system. The story of the break-up of the Soviet Union turns to be a story of the great catastrophe -the tragedy of the whole society, abandoned by hypocritical intelligentsia and deceived by political elites.
Cinema in the mirror of the Soviet and Russian film criticism
This monograph is devoted to the topic of cinema in the mirror of the Soviet and Russian film criticism. The book is intended for educators, students, researchers, film / media critics, journalists, for the readers who are interested in the problems of film and media criticism, film studies.
Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis : Baltic cinemas after the 90s: shifting (hi)stories and (id)entities, 2010
Annotation: There are two feature films Das Leben der Anderen, Germany, 2006, and Kurpe, Latvia, 1998, analysed here in terms of their representations of the past. In spite of differences in perspective, genre, time period portrayed, time and mode of production, to name just few, both of these films are devoted to the same primeval idea – the search for truth. It is both truth in its ideal form as well as truth about the soviet/socialist past. Abstract: Marija Weste, PhD candidate, University of Linköping, Taking a walk in the past: An analysis of representations of the soviet past in films Das Leben der Anderen and Kurpe This article analyses two films portraying the recent Soviet/Socialist past in Latvia and in Germany. These films are Kurpe, 1998, by Laila Pakalnina and Das Leben den Anderen, 2006, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. In spite of differences in perspective, genre, time period portrayed, time and mode of production, to name just few, both of these films are devoted to the same primeval idea – the search for truth. It is both truth in its ideal form as well as truth about the soviet/socialist past. Moreover, both films Kurpe and Das Leben den Anderen are an attempt to reflect upon the methods of search for truth and the various truths at our, as spectators/eyewitnesses disposal, thus providing a meta-perspective for the subject of truth. Also the respective film reviews are preoccupied with the search for truth, the question on the agenda is if the films portray truth or fail in doing so. Of vital importance in the discussions upon the subject of truth is the perspective, the point of view of respective speaker or the gaze adopted in the current paper as a general term describing the position of eyes as the key perceptive organ in film be it camera, eye of the author, spectator's place or actor's
The Civil War and Revolution in Stalinist Films. Cult Films, Evasiveness and Clichés
Ekphrasis. Images, Cinema, Theory, Media, 2014
Having as a starting point the fact that the Stalinist cinematography played the role of an institution in producing history, the paper proposes analysis of films which tackle the Civil War and the Russian Revolution. Regardless of what films we take into account, whether the cult films of the Soviet cinematography-October (1927) directed by S. Eisenstein or The End of St. Petersburg (1927) directed by V. Pudovkin; some famous adaptations-And Quiet Flows the Don (1930) or Chapaev (1934); films inspired by historical figures-Baltic Deputy (1936) and Kotovsky (1942)-we point out to patterns, related to war, time and memory. The analyzed films reflect a peculiar way of building history, which reveals facets of Stalinist era. On one hand, Stalinist art and rhetoric of the '30s install a temporal hierarchy of high importance for the Soviet Union-designating the October Revolution and Russian Civil War as a crucial moment, a variation of the Great Time in Mircea Eliade's understanding, which was at the beginning, but also the celebrated paradigm of the new history, projected into the future (Clark 2000, 39-40). On the other hand, Socialist Realism established the basis of what proved to be a fruitful system of using renowned heroes from the collective mentality in order to canonize them through ideological fictionalization, historicizing and film adaptation, with all subsequent mythologizing mutations, so that a greater impact on the masses would be acquired 1. Our main concern is to identify the ways in which the following aspects are articulated in films: legitimacy of the Stalinist regime and related myths (great family and variations of "father" and "son" relationship, graveside oaths, picking up the banner, (female) martyr, etc.), representation of The Civit War and Revolution.
The Militarization of the Past in Russian Popular Historical Films
This paper is devoted to the problem of the militarization of culture in modern Russia. The two key scientific fields are public history and the politics of memory. Firstly, based on the official documents and statements of authorities, the paper will characterize the relations between the state and Russian cinema as well as the role of history and historical films in the contemporary politics of memory. Secondly, after identifying the role of popular cinema in Russia, the paper will explore the characteristics of historical periods in popular films, based on the hypothesis that the Russian past is mostly represented around or inside war, while the criticism of war is becoming less and less important for popular cinema
Corvinus Journal of International Affairs
The study of cinema as a tool of ideological and political influence for Soviet propaganda is an important subject for studies of the Cold War. The following paper examines the portrayal of enemies of the Soviet Union in Soviet movies. The focus is on the times under post-WW2 leaders, namely Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev. The discussion of the wide range of instruments used by filmmakers is organised in terms of two distinct thematic frameworks in the article: that of gender discourse and spy movies. The paper illustrates the portrayal of Western characters and the Western lifestyle through Soviet narratives. This often entailed de-humanizing American women and de-masculinizing American men or glorifying Soviet spies as the national heroes.
Politics of Memory and Cinematography in Modern Russia: the October Revolution and the Civil War
International Public History, 2018
This article discusses the representation of the era of the October Revolution and the Civil War in contemporary Russian popular cinema. It describes the modern tools used by the state to create new images of the past and to reconstruct history in Russian popular culture. It also considers how Russian society has reacted to this official discourse.
On Sleep and Oblivion in Post-Soviet Film
THE IMPRINTS OF TERROR The Rhetoric of Violence and the Violence of Rhetoric in Modern Russian Culture, 2006
The legacy of Stalinism, and more generally Soviet totalitarianism, has remained an ethically unresolved issue in the post-Soviet culture and society. The failure to accept responsibility for the regime of terror distinguishes Russia from Germany, Switzerland, and even France where the need to take responsibility for the midcentury events are acknowledged to various degrees. Yet, the literary, visual, and cinematic representations of the past in the post-Soviet culture have been profuse. Analyzing the tropes common to these representations is one way to understand the logic of post-Soviet retrospection. The visual rhetoric of post-Soviet films is the subject of this paper. I emphasize the word visual as it often contradicts the intended effect of accompanying texts. Discussed here are fiction and documentary films produced in the early 1990s, made for mass audiences in the attempt to visually represent, at the end of glasnost', the collective memory of the Soviet past, or perhaps the collective dream about the Soviet past.