The RSCPR research group continues with its new seminar mini-series, To-i-ett/Two-in-One, bringing together two papers on different Russia-related topics, in the same place, one talk after another, each followed by a separate discussion. The second duo in the series are Dr Natalija Majsova (Ljubljana/Louvain), who will talk about (post-) Soviet film clubs, and Dr Lars Kristensen (Skövde), who will try to determine whether postcommunism is dead.
Dr Natalija Majsova (13:15 - c. 14:35)
"'You Either Believe a Film or You Don’t': Soviet Film Clubs and Their Afterlives in Contemporary Russia"
This talk traces the contours of Soviet film culture and its specific emanations, film clubs that emerged in response to Soviet media literacy policies of the 1960s and 1970s, taking into account their histories and contemporary realities. The presentation is based on my ethnographically informed fieldwork, performed in the cities of Vladimir, Yekaterinburg, and Novosibirsk in July and August 2018. Drawing on a number of interviews with former and current film club associates, I would like to provide a glimpse into the forms, socio-cultural functions, history and present of these institutions, “sites of memory”, but also incentives for intellectual debate, agents of norm-formation, and venues of direct, as well as indirect intercultural exchange. Drawing on one of my interviewees’ argument that “cinema was the art form that we could transfer to the provinces with the least amount of complications”, I would like to explore the various (academic, cinephile, working class) contexts in which film clubs were formed and functioned, arguing for a variegated typology of these institutions. In doing so, I focus particularly on the notion of “sincerity”, which, as it became clear during the interviews, remains tightly woven into the social fabric of these, now post-Soviet film clubs, partly justifying their persistence in time and space, as well as their particular film selection policies. The argument is supported by contrasting examples, provided by functioning film clubs of a distinctly post-Soviet origin, as obsolete film clubs that did not survive the transition of the 1990s.
Dr Lars Kristensen (c. 14:40 - c. 16:00)
"Is Postcommunism Dead? The Case of Russian Cinema"
The term ‘postcommunism’ indicates a country’s move beyond ‘communism’, in particular beyond Soviet Communism, after 1989. Most authors use the term ‘postcommunist’ this way; they tend to define ‘communist’ and ‘postcommunist’ as located in Eastern Europe and Russia, and use ‘socialist’ and ‘postsocialist’ to describe the economies of these countries (Wachtel 2006). The vast majority of literature on postcommunism defines the term as ‘transitory’, indicating a process that breaks with the communist past (e.g. Sakwa 1999), but the notion of ‘transition’ is also problematic as it projects a one-way flow of political models from the West to the East – a flow reminiscent of colonial flows. Thus, the concept of transition is rather indicative of how the trajectory of postcommunism has been conceptualised – from backward totalitarianism to progressive liberalism. According to Richard Sakwa, postcommunism can also flow back to the West in the sense that postcommunism has an effect on the global political terrain, suggesting global ramifications. This paper will argue that there is an undercurrent flowing back into the West, which makes postcommunists of us all, or a sort of Russification, which has not seen daylight since France’s defeat in the Napoleon wars when ‘bistro’ became a French tavern and not just a call for a quick service. This paper seeks to address the issue of postcommunism and whether it is still meaningful to use the concept in relation to Russian cinema. Is Russian cinema still a postcommunist cinema as determined nearly a decade ago (Kritsensen 2012)?
Works cited:
Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)
Richard Sakwa, Postcommunism (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999)
Lars Kristensen (ed.) Postcommunist Film – Russia, Eastern Europe and World Culture: The Moving Images of Postcommunism (London and New York: Routledge, 2012).