Reclaiming Voices in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel brings together papers that treat artistic figures and movements that resisted their designated place in society, Soviet and post-Soviet. Their work collectively signals a politically subversive memorialization of their work in a field and world that attempt to write the history of their art without them. They consequently challenge the memory-work of present and future witnesses historians who have and would have written them off or relegated them to smaller, tidier positions of the text. Kirill Goriachok examines the various creative and compromised ways in which women in film editing during the revolutionary period sought to carve out their place professionally and artistically. Orkhan Aghayev notes the ways in which women in Eastern Europe, the Caucuses, and Central Asia, long after the fall of the Soviet Union, continue a similar struggle to disrupt dissent and repression in the perhaps the even more marginal field of music videos. Alex Strzelecki zones in on the case of Ivan Vyrypaev and the increasing prominence of the political dimension of his theater work that works through the legacy of the Russian and European avant-garde, particularly during the time of resurgent imperial violence. Together, these papers reflect the difficulty and necessity of remembrance, while celebrating the personal throes by which people throughout the span of a hundred years, Soviet and non-Soviet, have shed their slight and shining light.

Sub Unit

• Cinema, Television, Electronic Media

Chair

• Samuel Proffitt Driver, Dickinson College

Papers

• Cut from History: Unseen Women in Soviet Cinema of the 1920s - Kirill Goriachok, U of Cambridge (UK)

• NEDOSLAVYANKA: The Role of Music Video Clips in Decolonization of the Caucasus and Central Asia - Orkhan Aghayev, U of Warsaw (Poland)

• Avant-Garde Performance Across Borders: The Transnational Oeuvre of Ivan Vyrypaev - Alex Strzelecki, Yale U

• All Roads to Revolution: The Construction of the Agitated Viewer via Both Revolutionary Theory and Bourgeois Melodrama - Youngkwang Shin, Harvard U

Discussant

• Samuel Proffitt Driver, Dickinson College