Sensations of Cinematic Interiority in European Socialist Film

• In Event: Rethinking Cold War Aesthetics and Politics: Feminism, Modernism, Socialism

Abstract

This paper explores cinematic interiority in socialist film as a possible site of defiance using examples of Larisa Shepitko’s Wings (USSR, 1966), Věra Chytilová’s Something Different (1963), and Kurt Maetzig’s The Rabbit Is Me (GDR, 1965). Beginning in the mid-1950s, socialist cinemas often feature heroines who in some way do not conform to social norms and are often given space for self-reflection, day-dreaming, and other expressions of interiority that, arguably, could never be fully legible. Although the women are embedded in the collective, their interiority withholds disclosure. Taking inspiration from Hannah Arendt’s investigations into the workings of the mind, and Giuliana Bruno’s work on the surface, this paper proposes a more expansive understanding of interiority onscreen. I suggest that, in addition to narrative content and such formal devices as the closeup and interior monologue, cinematic interiority extends to visual and aural surfaces where legibility at the level of verbal meaning is subsumed by the surfaces, textures, and other “exterior” qualities of the screened image and sound. What are the gender politics of these cinematic glimpses into a heroine’s interior world? And what is at stake in the emphasis on private thought and emotion in a society that prized the collective above the individual and prescribed intelligibility as a fundamental aspect of an aesthetic?

Author

• Viktoria Paranyuk, Pace U