Time Travel and Time Loops in Late Soviet Film and Literature

• In Event: Liberating Narratives: Experiments with Soviet Film Storytelling

Abstract

This paper focuses on the 1987 film Mirror for a Hero (directed by Vladimir Khotinenko, screenplay by Nadezhda Kozhushanaia). The perestroika film addresses the question: How to try go about making sense of the Stalinist past? It puts two rival interpretive frameworks into dialog with each other—one descriptive, the other narrative. The first rests on the device of the time loop—repeating the same day over and over, time is annulled. The result is a thick description. The second strategy is associated with time travel—the protagonist travels back to the past, changing it in an effort to address deficiencies in the present. The historical past is imagined as a (fictional) narrative space. The paper contextualizes the film, and the question it posits—to narrate or to describe?—in the broader context of Soviet and post-Soviet time travel fiction, tracing the development of this theme in popular literature, film, and television.

Author

• Jessica E Merrill, Columbia U