Comparative Socialist Cinemas of Extraction

• In Event: Nature, For and Against I: Marx, Nature, Cinema

Abstract

This paper searches for the possibility for cinema to engage in an ecological critique of industrial extraction in the most unlikely of places: films about oil drilling from the USSR and China. Focusing on Chuang ye (The Pioneers, dir. Yanfan Yu, 1974-5), Siberiada (dir. Andrei Konchalovsky, 1979), and Glavnaia burovaia (Main Drilling, dir. Stanislav Belianinov, 1980), the authors examine the relationship of cinema to the practices of industrial extraction in late socialism. We consider how a socialist version of what Brian Jacobson calls “industrial world making” conceives of labor processes and the biosphere via cinema.
Co-presented with Paola Iovene, Associate Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago

Author

• Anne Eakin Moss, U of Chicago