Stagnant Temporality and the Crisis of Growth in Late-Soviet Cinema

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Cultures of Decline III: Economic Downturn and Second World Cultural Production I

Abstract

The 1972 CPSU Central Committee resolution “О мерах по дальнейшему развитию советской кинематографии” (“On Measures for the Further Development of Soviet Cinematography”) harkened back to the “five year plans'' of the 1930s in which cinema was explicitly marshaled to jumpstart industrial growth. In a period defined by the petering out of the Stalinist developmental model and framed by the beginnings of global economic downturn, the cinematography resolution both documents the changed character of Soviet society in the “period of developed socialism” and also figures the issue of economic growth as both an industrial and aesthetic problem. With this in mind, I draw on Marx’s account of expanded reproduction and tie it to Moishe Postone’s analysis of the experience of historical time to think about cinematic manifestations of historical torpor, linking them to a crisis of value production that elicited contradictory responses from filmmakers. Their work intermingles the mundane and the sublime through moments of ethical dilemma in which an individual’s conflicted relationship to the socialist commons allegorizes the situation of late-Soviet cultural production more generally. In this paper, I will focus on understudied examples of “stagnation era” Soviet cinema: Larisa Shepitko’s Ты и я (You and I, 1971) and Gleb Panfilov’s Прошу слова (I Wish to Speak, 1976), each of which present us with a markedly anti-historical temporality within which individual attempts to selflessly revamp the productivity of the Soviet system encounter resistance from the system itself, generating a kind of animated suspension.

Author

• Zachary Hicks, UC Berkeley