Textures of Memory in Films of the Soviet Peripheries

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel proposes to consider the possibilities of mise-en-scène as a category in post-Stalin Soviet cinema. This multivalent category refers to the elements that the filmmaker can control during a shoot – the performances, settings, placement of the camera, costumes, props, lighting – as well as to how the finished film looks projected on the screen. By focusing on various aspects of mise-en-scène, but especially on environments and bodies, the papers investigate how films made in the Soviet peripheries in the 1960s and 1970s visualize history – including memory, historical violence, and questions of gender.

In her paper, Viktoria Paranyuk analyzes the moments of stillness and movement as the formal configurations of the relationship between the fictional and the autobiographical, the private and the political, past and present in Lana Gogoberidze’s Transfigurations (1968) and Some Interviews on Personal Matters (1978). Lida Oukaderova’s paper focuses on the relationship between physical environments and the memory of traumatic events through a close analysis of El’ior Ishmukhamedov’s Tenderness (1966). Elizabeth Papazian considers how the historical and spatial groundedness of on-location shooting in Central Asian historical films intersects with, and potentially disrupts, the prescribed temporality and spatiality of the Soviet modernization framework.

Sub Unit

• Cinema, Television, Electronic Media

Chair

• Elizabeth A. Papazian, U of Maryland, College Park

Papers

• Women’s Bodies Situated: The Politics and Poetics of Movement and Stasis in Lana Gogoberidze’s Films - Viktoria Paranyuk, Pace U

• Landscapes of Memory in El’ior Ishmukhamedov’s 'Tenderness' (Uzbekfilm 1966) -

• The Imprint of Time in the Central Asian Historical Film - Elizabeth A. Papazian, U of Maryland, College Park

Discussant

• Emma Widdis, U of Cambridge (UK)