Realism and the Boneyard of Progress: Non-Synchronicity in Post-Bolotnaya Cinema

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Method IV: Uneven and Combined Development: Keywords for Russian, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Culture

Abstract

The paper examines a mode of historicity that emerged in Russian cinema in the mid-2010s – a mode inflected by the liberal ideology of progress that takes the provinces as its privileged space. Drawing on Bloch’s concept of the non-synchronous and the work of historians Harry Harootunian and François Hartog, the presentation focuses on Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan (2014) and Natal’ia Meschaninova’s Hope Factory (2014), showing how they construct the provinces as spaces of an atavistic past that can only be surpassed through an infusion of liberal, progressive values from outside/Moscow. In both films, the striking realism of the mise-en-scène rubs against idealism contained in their way of looking. This collision ultimately determines the limits of the films’ critique, unraveling the shortcomings in ideas about modernity in Russian progressive thought, which go unexamined in the almost complete absence of a critique of neoliberalism.

Author

• Daria V. Ezerova, U of Cambridge (UK)