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Session Submission Type: Panel
The period of perestroika and glasnost witnessed significant revisions of the Soviet past in the public imagination, particularly in relation to the repressions of the Stalinist era and the violence of the Second World War. This panel considers perestroika both as a rich period for the cultural production of memory and as a subject of contemporary cultural texts that imagine the past, with a focus on cinema as a medium that is especially well suited for reframing historical paradigms. Anna Sbitneva examines the sounding of the traumatic Stalinist era and its lingering traumas during perestroika in Repentance, analyzing Tengiz Abuladze’s use of sound to confront and rethink historical narratives, reflecting on Stalinist repressions through allegorical sound storytelling. Sydney Stotter compares Elem Klimov’s film Come and See and Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history Last Witnesses as texts that complicate memory and interrogate multiple forms of seeing: most explicitly in the sense of witnessing violence, but also in perceiving one’s own historical subjectivity. Finally, Maria Natalyuk examines how the TV series The Boy's Word: Blood on the Asphalt reconstructs the historical context of perestroika through the topic of criminality and creates a new form of “imagined community” for contemporary audiences in the turbulent political context of today’s Russia.
Stalinism Caught Between Polyphony and Monophony: The Sounding of a Dictator in Tengiz Abuladze’s Repentance - Anna Sbitneva, U of Southern California
Paradigms of Witnessing and Historical Subjectivity in the Works of Svetlana Alexievich and Elem Klimov - Sydney Stotter, Harvard U
Nostalgia and Criminality: Reconstructing Perestroika in Zhora Kryzhovnikov’s 'Slovo Patsana' - Maria Natalyuk, U of Pittsburgh