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Ambiguous Images: New Perspectives on the Cinema of the Soviet Thaw

Sun, November 24, 4:30 to 6:15pm, San Francisco Marriott Marquis, Floor: LB2, Salon 11

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

For many decades, it has been a commonplace that the cinema of the Soviet Thaw marked a distinctive departure from the Grand Style cinema of the Stalin era. Triggered by the political and cultural changes after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party, and as a reaction to rigidity and artificiality of the late-Stalinist canon, Soviet filmmakers of the 1950s and early 1960s allegedly strove to bring “naturalness, candor and sincerity” into their work. It has been assumed that despite restrictions and censorship imposed on film productions during this period Soviet cinema was driven by belief in “personal vision, originality and innovation”. Recently, this uniform picture of Thaw cinema was questioned by new research, which assumed that despite technical inventions and some remarkable changes in film language, the cinema of the Thaw was also a continuation, a re-framing of the previous canon of “high” socialist realism and totalitarian mythology. At the same time, traditional Soviet topics such as Socialist family, positive hero, war, or collective belief in a communist Utopia were contradicted by parables functioning as subversive voices against totalitarianism. On the basis of various cinematic examples (key films of the Thaw, melodrama, political satire, adventure genre) our round table is set to explore and discuss various ambiguities and irregularities in the Soviet cinema of the Thaw.

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Roundtable Members