Late Soviet Art Cinema on the Peripheries as a Socialist Modernism

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

Abstract

In this paper I propose to interpret the radical cinematic experimentation of Sergei Parajanov, Iurii Ilyenko, Leonid Osyka, and Tengiz Abuladze as Socialist Modernism. Formally complex ethno-national Soviet cinema of the 1960s-70s has a lot in common with what is known as “high modernism” in post-war Western critical discourse. Suggesting a possible overlap and parallels between ‘high modernism’ and what I call ‘socialist modernism’ does not imply that the Soviet filmmakers followed the “bourgeoise” aesthetic trend and therefore had a subversive, anti-Soviet agenda in mind. Rather, this proposition implies the need to reconsider the Cold-war-inflected opposition between “Lukàcsian” realism and “Greenbergian” modernism.

Author

• Olga Kim, Williams College