The Rites of Nations: Performing Identities on Soviet and Post-Soviet Screen

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

In our own, “post-modern” times, nations are habitually construed as “illusory communities”, or fluctuating bodies, which are not “enduring parts of social structure”, but rather, exist in the minds of peoples as something constructed or performed in/through various social or symbolic rites and practices. This panel revisits the precursory practice of social constructivism in nation-building, which originated in the Soviet Union to draw particular attention to the cinematic staging of national identity on Soviet and post-Soviet screens. Indeed, itself a product of social constructivism par excellence, the Soviet state was actively using the moving image for the purpose of symbolic nation building: initially, to enact particular national identities, the Soviet screen became the driving cultural force of early-Soviet strategy of indigenisation, and subsequently, to visually shape and perform a different, unified and assimilated image of the Soviet nation. Seemingly at least, the new forms of social and political organisation introduced to the Eurasia by the advent of the post-Soviet era, required new cinematic forms to perform and legitimize the historical moment. Yet, as this panel will also show, a variety of old and new cinematic genres continue to perform the old rites, thereby creating a complex cultural hybrid in which new visual forms are turned into vehicles of primordial identity strategies. By focusing on three distinct periods of Soviet and post-Soviet cinematic history, this panel will highlight the ways in which the moving image has actively shaped or expressed a complex and multifaceted social dynamic.

Sub Unit

• Cinema/Television/Electronic Media

Chair

• Anthony Anemone, The New School

Papers

• Socialist (Non-)Places: Tashkent-Dwellers in Uzbek Cinema of the Long 1960s - Olga Kim, U of Pittsburgh

• The Cinematic Heterotopia in Otar Iosseliani’s 'French' Films - Dusan Radunovic, Durham U (UK)

• Blockbuster Biopic in Putin’s Russia - Sergei Toymentsev, New Europe College (Romania)

Discussant

• Oksana Sarkisova, Central European U (Hungary)