Left Perspectives on Aesthetics across Media I: Eco-Poetic-Cinema from Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Yugoslavia

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel explores ecological approaches to poetic cinema from Ukraine, Georgia, Yugoslavia, and Armenia with a focus on understudied works by filmmakers including Iurii Illienko, Otar Ioseliani, Vatroslav Mimica, and Artavazd Peleshyan. We ask not only how these filmmakers address the environmental concerns of their day, but also how they construct an ecology of images in terms of atmosphere, light, scale, and sound. What were the production circumstances that allowed for the flowering of poetic cinema in the 1960s and 70s? How did these filmmakers engage or reject the techniques and justifications of the avant-garde? How were they influenced by national, international, and even cosmic concerns? How did they attempt to preserve or re-narrate the cultural memories of their respective homelands? Our panelist will pose and discuss these questions in terms of several lesser-known films. In his presentation, Brian Fairely examines Ioseliani’s documentary Old Georgian Song (1969) with an ear to understanding how sound mediates between man-made and organic worlds. In her talk, Ana Cohle considers how Illienko’s Lisova Pisnia. Makva (1980) critiques and destabilizes anthropocentric hierarchies. In his talk, Filip Sestan, delves into the afterlife of Sergei Eisenstein’s notion of Nonindifferent Nature through the films of Yugoslav director Vatroslav Mimica. Finally, in his talk, Daniel Schwartz interrogates Peleshyan’s notion of distance montage as figuring a cybernetic and reflex-oriented conception of the cosmos. Together, our panelists seek to open new avenues of research in the field of Soviet and Socialist poetic cinema.

Sub Unit

• Cinema, Television, Electronic Media

Chair

• Daniel Paul Schwartz, McGill U (Canada)

Papers

• In the Beginning Was the Song: The Sound of Labor in Ioseliani’s Cinematic Cosmology - Brian Fairley, U of Pittsburgh

• The Forest Reimagined: Iurii Illienko’s Lisova Pisnia and Ukrainian Ecocinema - Ana Cohle, Princeton U

• The Origins of Associative Editing in Vatroslav Mimica’s Cinema: Is Nature Indifferent to Revolution?  - Filip Sestan, UC Berkeley

• Distance Viewing: Artavazd Peleshyan and the Cosmic Documentary - Daniel Paul Schwartz, McGill U (Canada)

Discussant

• Anne Eakin Moss, U of Chicago