Necrorealism as Situation: Parallel Cinema’s Resonances with the Situationist International

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

Abstract

This paper will revisit films of the underground “parallel cinema” movement of the late Soviet period to rethink and recapture their liberatory desires for a social world radically unconstrained at the level of everyday life: speech, gesture, and social relationships. New light can be shed on the Necrorealist group by comparing their aims and methods to that of the Situationist International in France. Despite their different aesthetics, historical contexts, and attitudes towards theorization, both groups aimed to revolutionize daily life by defamiliarizing the social codes, rooted in dominant ideology and the system of production, that governed every aspect of everyday life in their contemporary societies. By identifying Guy Debord’s theory of “The Spectacle” as the totality which the parallel filmmakers sought to shatter, this presentation invites further consideration of contemporary “Spectacles,” whether authoritarian or late-capitalist, and imagine the new aesthetic forms required to unveil and destabilize them.

Author

• Katya Lopatko, UC Santa Barbara