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Session Submission Summary

Rescuing Utopias: Searching for Liberatory Potentials in Late Soviet Cinema

Thu, November 21, 2:00 to 3:45pm EST (2:00 to 3:45pm EST), Boston Marriott Copley Place, Floor: 3rd Floor, Brandeis

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel reconsiders late-Soviet cinema's liberatory and subversive possibilities by examining films that complicate the pre-defined canonical forms which came to dominate mainstream cinematic production in the late Soviet period. By engaging seemingly far and disconnected forms and genres of Soviet cinema, from Kira Muratova’s love triangles, to Eldar Ryazanov’s “vagrant” comedy, and underground “parallel” cinema, we seek to show that liberatory possibility remained ever-present in filmic discourse. In doing this, we also work to free the films and their frequently minoritarian and powerless characters from the readings that fix them squarely in their historical periods and relegate them to spaces of nonsensicality, apoliticality, and conformity. We engage with theoretical perspectives rarely used in Slavic studies, such as the writings of René Girard and Jacques Rancière, making the case for their actuality in Soviet contexts but also noting their limitations outside of Western ones. Notions of love, democracy, artistic and formal freedom, and escaping alienation in everyday life necessarily take us to consider the utopian aspects of late-Soviet film, whose visionary qualities have been overshadowed by the subsequent failures of the utopias to materialize in broader social reality. We argue that the questions posed by these films remain important as we search for utopian possibility amidst the current catastrophes and thus we see the problem of recovering, repairing, and reanimating the utopias of late-Soviet cinema as standing particularly acute today.

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