Getting to Know the Big Wide World (1978): Kira Muratova and the Labor of Love

• In Event: Rescuing Utopias: Searching for Liberatory Potentials in Late Soviet Cinema

Abstract

This paper reevaluates Kira Muratova’s 1978 film Getting to Know the Big Wide World (Poznavaya belyi svet, 1978), highlighting its ambiguous relationship to socialist realist conventions and subversive approach to romantic love. The paper argues that the film privileges private over collective feeling and, through careful engagement with René Girard's Deceit, Desire and the Novel, suggests a reading of love in the work as fundamentally mediated and frequently arising in defiance of social demands.

Author

• David Gomiero Molina, U of Chicago