Film as Dissident in Literary Television-Plots of Vladimir Sorokin

• In Event: Film and Freedoms of Expression: Production, Aesthetics, Mediology (Late Socialism and Beyond)

Abstract

Drawing on material from Vladimir Sorokin’s play “Happy New Year” (1987/1998) and the story “White Square” (2017) the talk is going to show how the televisual “place of power” is on different levels opposed by the medium of film. For the play with its focus on Soviet official TV-news, film references produce a) additional reflexive perspective to TV and b) anticipation of the liberated any yet structurally state-contaminated early post-Soviet television. In talk-show-centered “White Square” cinema is an almost exclusive intratextual instance for deconstructing Russian telecracy in its state after 2014. Thus Sorokin’s texts let us see how film supports literature/writing in its ability to produce a free, enlightened (in Kantian sense) subject.

Author

• Innokentij Urupin, U of Konstanz (Germany)