Articles by Justin Wilmes
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Contemporary Russian Documentary: Negotiating the Personal and the Political (ed. Masha Shpolberg and Anastasia Kostina), 2024
Beginning his documentary career in the early 1990’s, Vitaly Mansky rose to international promine... more Beginning his documentary career in the early 1990’s, Vitaly Mansky rose to international prominence in the 2010’s as his bold and provocative films began to address head-on the most pressing topics in Russia and the post-Soviet space—the authoritarian turn of Putin’s Russia, the revitalization of Soviet discourses, and fraught relations with and within Ukraine. As recipient of many of the world’s most prestigious documentary awards, as well as president of ArtDocFest, the largest documentary film festival in Eastern Europe, Mansky is arguably the most influential documentary figure in the Russophone world in the recent period. While his filmography to date consists of thirty films on a striking range of subjects, the work in the 2010’s for which he is best known reflects a marked shift to sociopolitical concerns. Although focusing on disparate subjects, the films Under the Sun (2015), Close Relations (2016), Putin’s Witnesses (2018) and Gorbachev. Heaven (2020) share common civic and philosophical positions and a forceful, though often implicit, critique of developments in contemporary Russia. This chapter examines these recent films, tracing the coherent sociopolitical discourse they construct, as well as key devices that comprise Mansky’s directorial signature—a masterful use of subtext, a realist-interventionist mode that draws upon the Cinéma vérité tradition, and elements of personal lyricism and observational cinema characteristic of the “art documentary” prominent in Russia today. I argue that Mansky’s uncompromising civic cinema of the 2010’s is part of a broader tendency in Russian documentary in the period, which bears witness and doggedly asserts views of history and contemporary events that are censored or marginalized by the prevailing ideology.
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Singing a Different Tune: The Slavic Film Musical in a Transnational Context (Ed. Helena Goscilo, Academic Studies Press), 2023
In the summer of 1981 a young Viktor Tsoi is introduced to Mike Naumenko of Zoopark and the Lenin... more In the summer of 1981 a young Viktor Tsoi is introduced to Mike Naumenko of Zoopark and the Leningrad rock scene. Immediately recognizing the talent of the 19-year-old Tsoi at a party on the beach, Naumenko begins to mentor him and champion his music. While a poignant friendship and musical dialogue emerges between the two songwriters, a romantic connection between Viktor and Natasha, Mike’s wife, quickly becomes evident. The three spend the summer among a close-knit company of Leningrad rockers, feeling their way through this love triangle, their musical collaboration, and aesthetic polemics. Directed by one of Russia’s most experimental and transgressive directors about a beloved cultural icon, it is no surprise that Kirill Serebrennikov’s Leto (Summer) was met with such anticipation and scrutiny, and became arguably the country’s biggest cinematic event of 2018. Leto was nominated for a record-breaking 12 Nika Awards (sometimes referred to as the “Russian Oscars”), and was selected to compete at the 2018 Cannes International Film Festival, where it took home the award for Best Soundtrack. The film was widely acclaimed by Russian critics and viewers, though it had a sharply divided reception by the icons of the Russian rock movement, who raised questions about its historical authenticity.
Part postmodern, backstage musical, part historical biopic, Leto challenges simple categorization, and from this uncomfortable marriage of genres stemmed much of the debate around the film. Given its array of realist features, including naturalistic black and white cinematography, quotidian scenes from the lives of its subjects, and musical performances that are mostly diegetically embedded in the narrative—it is understandable that many viewed and evaluated the film through the lens of a realist, historical biopic, and overlooked its structure as a film musical. Upon closer examination, Leto is in fact meticulously structured as a musical, not merely a film about music. Its twenty distinct musical numbers, which comprise over half of the film, fall into two distinct categories: diegetic rock performances by the musicians and fantasy numbers that clearly enter a performative, supradiegetic space. However, in contrast to classical approaches to the musical, Leto’s engagement with the genre is markedly postmodern, laying bare its own artifice and devices, slipping into free fantasy, but frequently informing the viewer through its narrator Skeptic that, “Тhis never happened.” This chapter examines Leto’s engagement with the musical film genre and considers how its form explores two salient tropes in the Leningrad rock movement: the sociopolitical position of those who wished, as anthropologist Aleksei Yurchak describes, to live vnye (“outside”) of the ideological coordinates of this system; and the problem of derivation and authenticity in a society that idolized foreign cultural expression.
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Chekhov in Context (Ed. Yuri Corrigan, Cambridge University Press), 2023
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Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 2020
Valeria Gai Germanika is a fascinating, complex and contradictory figure. At 35-years-old, she ha... more Valeria Gai Germanika is a fascinating, complex and contradictory figure. At 35-years-old, she has established herself unequivocally as one of the leading directors of post-Soviet cinema, earning major accolades for her feature films, television serials and documentaries, and stirring up considerable buzz with the provocative subject matter and bold aesthetic choices of her works. A small but growing body of scholarship has begun to analyze Germanika’s already notable filmography, primarily focusing on three aspects of her work: the use of post-documentary, hyperrealist aesthetics; an unprecedentedly candid exploration of female subjectivity in contemporary Russia; and her portrayal of youth culture and generational conflict (Beumers and Lipovetsky 2009; Abdullaeva 2011; Vassilieva 2014; Artiukh 2015; Hutchings and Tolz 2015). This article builds upon these studies to present a more comprehensive portrait of Germanika’s oeuvre to date, engaging contemporary auteur theory to identify a discernible and evolving authorial signature throughout her works. By broadening the understanding of the auteur in the 21st century, this article analyzes not only the aesthetic and thematic hallmarks of Germanika’s filmography, but also her role as performative media presence and cultural agent.
We argue that the three thematic preoccupations of Germanika’s films—alternative models of female identity; the traumatic transition from youth to adulthood; and fantasy and carnival—are imbricated in her works and closely connected to her own carefully cultivated authorial myth and personal brand. These themes and tropes are united by a shared epistemology of radical liminality, transgression, rebellion, performativity, and a rejection of stable ideologies. This understanding of transgression and valorized liminality in Germanika’s work helps to account for her own complex and contradictory views on social, political and religious questions. While identifying a certain aesthetic and thematic consistency in her work, we also observe a marked shift in Germanika’s recent films away from aesthetics of hyperrealism to a new expressionism and emphasis on fantasy. In this evolution too we see a certain internal logic, where elements of fantasy and imagination present in her early works have come to dominate in later films.
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Cinemasaurus: Recent Russian Cinema in Contemporary Context, eds. Condee and Prokhorov, 2020
Coming to power in 2000 after a decade marked by political and cultural collapse, Russian Preside... more Coming to power in 2000 after a decade marked by political and cultural collapse, Russian President Vladimir Putin placed geopolitical strength and imperial ambition at the center of his administration. Military incursions in the 2008 Russo-Georgian War, the 2014 annexation of Crimea, and involvement in Ukraine’s Donbass region have expanded Russia’s territorial claims and reasserted its aspirations to former Soviet spheres of influence. Great power displays in both the military arena, such as the intervention in Syria, and in the cultural arena, as during the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics and 2018 FIFA World Cup, have also played a role in cultivating Russia’s image of geopolitical prominence. In light of these events, Russian public intellectuals and political scientists have frequently remarked in recent years on a reawakening of Russian “imperial consciousness,” comparing it variously to a “Weimar syndrome,” following the humiliations and traumas of the 1990s; a mobilization strategy of the Putin administration; or compensation and distraction from domestic stagnation. Regardless, imperialist rhetoric and action have proven effective tools of political consolidation. This is clearly borne out by sociological data, as support for the Putin administration spiked to record levels after each of its incursions into Georgia, Ukraine and Syria respectively.
A corresponding revitalization of imperial discourses can be observed in the realm of aesthetics and culture. Several studies have examined manifestations of the imperial imaginary in post-Soviet cultural production, perhaps most notably Nancy Condee’s The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema (2009). Condee posits that identity formations throughout Russian and Soviet history were primarily imperial rather than national or civic, and analyzes how post-Soviet cinema refracts that imperial legacy in complex ways. The present article continues this line of inquiry, analyzing Russian cinema since 2010. It considers how recent cinema revives tropes and aesthetic tendencies of earlier periods—stark depictions of self and Other; besiegement by external enemies; spiritual superiority and messianism; monumentalism and grand spectacle—but also updates them for a contemporary context, refracting anxieties about Russia’s place in today’s global order. I analyze three key tendencies in Russian neo-imperial cinema: (1) a surfeit of films glorifying Russia’s victory in the Great Patriotic War, in particular Fedor Bondarchuk’s Stalingrad [2013]; (2) the rise of the new Orthodox blockbuster, with particular attention to Andrei Kravchuk’s Viking [2016]; and (3) attempts to combine traditional imperialism and neoliberal globalism, evident in Dmitrii Prygunov’s Dukhless dilogy [2012/2015]. This triangulation of recent themes—war, spiritual messianism, and neoliberal leadership—eloquently reflects Russian cinema’s response to shifts in imperial culture since 2010.
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Contemporary Russian Cinema Reader, 2019
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Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 2018
Ivan Vyrypaev is one of the most influential and celebrated Russian directors in the new millenni... more Ivan Vyrypaev is one of the most influential and celebrated Russian directors in the new millennium, earning major accolades both at home and abroad and virtually unrivalled in his ability to move between theater and cinema. While acting as art director and creative engine behind the experimental Theater Praktika in Moscow from 2006-2016, Vyrypaev wrote and directed over a dozen original plays, one animation, one short, and four feature films. These films and plays reveal an evolving, but discernible method and thematic preoccupations that invite greater examination. While a growing body of scholarship has examined specific aspects of Vyrypaev’s work, surprisingly the central preoccupation that underlies these various devices remains relatively unformulated and unexamined. This article analyzes Vyrypaev’s oeuvre—with particular attention to recent works, the 2013 film Delhi Dance (Tanets Deli) and 2015 play Unbearably Long Embraces (Nevynosimo dolgie obiatiia)—to articulate a theory of ‘subjective re-orientation’ at the heart of his dramaturgy. Building upon other valuable studies of violence, affect and materiality, and performative dialogues in Vyrypaev’s works, this article moves beyond a view of these devices as disparate and experimental to situate them into a more coherent artistic program.
Vyrypaev’s works invariably portray a breaking away from rational, relatively stable conceptions of identity in order to test the boundaries of desire and locate more ‘authentic’ understandings of self. While in Vyrypaev’s earlier, darker works, violent ruptures with stable identity are an end in and of themselves, often leading to a ‘liberated’ destruction of the protagonist; in his recent, more affirmative works, such rebellions lead to self-discovery and the possibility of sustainable spiritual clarity. This article argues that Vyrypaev employs an array of affective devices, including violence, visual and aural saturation, and performative dialogues, to enact what theorist Gilles Deleuze calls a ‘shock to thought.’ However, these dimensions of Vyrypaev’s dramaturgy do not simply destabilize rational perception in order to create a Deleuzian ‘line of flight’ away from discernible meanings into open-ended potential (1989:156; 1987:10). Rather, they reconstitute subjectivity in strikingly affirmative ways according to Vyrypaev’s own vision. By considering a range of influences on his works—from his well-known zeal for Buddhism and eastern religion to postmodern alienation and a general subjective disorientation in post-Soviet Russia—this article sheds light on both Vyrypaev’s sui generis dramaturgy and the resonance of his works in Russia today.
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Russian Literature, 2018
From Radischev and Pushkin to Solzhenitsyn and Yevtushenko, Russian writers have been defined per... more From Radischev and Pushkin to Solzhenitsyn and Yevtushenko, Russian writers have been defined perhaps foremost by their relationship to official power and ideology. Numerous works of scholarship have explored the unique political and civic significance of Russian art. Indeed the heightened civic role of the artist—encapsulated so memorably by Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s line “In Russia, the poet is more than a poet”—has become a commonplace in discussions of Russian culture. Kathleen Parthe’s 2004 study Dangerous Texts: Politics Between the Lines examines this dynamic in the history of Russian literature, arguing that official censorship polarized the field of artistic practices into conformity and subversion, and that, in the absence of a public sphere, many writers felt a civic duty to address social realities, whether directly or through the obliquities of allegory and Aesopian language. While the general validity of such observations is undeniable, what is perhaps more interesting are the tortuous roads between the extremes of conformism and counterculture. Many—perhaps most—case studies confound this binary understanding of the artist as supporter or saboteur.
This article analyzes artistic practices of the Putin-era auteurs through the paradigm of official, unofficial, and semi-official culture. The group of filmmakers, variously referred to as the Russian “New Wave” (Novaia volna) or the “New Quiets” (Novye tikhie), has navigated major shifts in Russian civil society and ideological controls. Russian auteur cinema has taken up the torch from the literature of earlier periods, becoming a key locus for the mediation of taboos and sensitive social issues. In light of a general “visual turn” in culture and the tremendous resonance of particularly controversial films such as Andrei Zviagintsev’s 2014 Leviathan, an argument can be made that the civic poet of today’s Russia is the auteur director. And yet, the films of these directors defy easy analysis and pose a number of ideological paradoxes: Can filmmakers working within a system that is primarily government-funded produce films that are truly countercultural? How might a filmmaker cope with the financial and structural exigencies of the industry and still create something “independent”? Could such forms of critique even be viewed as state-sanctioned and reinforcing the hegemony of official ideology?
This study provides an in-depth discussion of the changing nature of censorship in the film industry in recent years (particularly since the re-election of Vladimir Putin in 2012), arguing that such measures reflect new forms of postmodern, “soft authoritarian” controls that rely on circumscription of counter-discourses rather than their prohibition. My examination of several well-known auteur films of the Putin era will reveal the nature of these changing controls, as well as the strategies artists have adopted in response to them. Engaging theories of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, I examine the “spiral of power and resistance” produced by official ideology and its counter discourses. Moreover, by considering the reception of these films—the debates they provoke on social media, reviews by professional and amateur critics, etc.—I will shed light on their resonance and the discursive spaces they create. Finally, I will draw connections between these film products and the civic engagement of other salient art forms, such as performance and visual art, and theater.
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The Polish Review, 2017
Critics have devoted much attention to the complex ideological discourse
of Bolesław Prus’s The ... more Critics have devoted much attention to the complex ideological discourse
of Bolesław Prus’s The Doll, justly noting that throughout the novel
its protagonist, Stanisław Wokulski, is torn between impulses to romance,
political revolt, science, business, and social progress. These notions, traditionally
associated respectively with the Polish Romantic and Positivist
movements, are articulated and championed in the novel by various characters,
and indeed compete with one another within the conflicted psyches
of individual characters. While critics have increasingly characterized The
Doll as a proto-modernist, dialogic novel, what has received relatively little
attention among scholars of this novel is the pervasive use of the literary
double as a device for exploring Wokulski’s profound ambivalence—and by
extension that of the transitional generation that he represents. Recurring
appearances of Wokulski’s doppelgängers, or mental projections in the form of
voices and visions, manifest his repressed desires, while the novel’s numerous
quasi-doubles—characters bearing an uncanny resemblance—serve as a key
organizing principle of the narrative, providing the protagonist with positive
and negative insight into himself. But rather than attempting to reconcile
these conflicting forces in monologic or dialectical fashion, Prus creates what
literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin calls a dialogic novelistic discourse, marked
by multiple voices and viewpoints, unresolved ambiguities, and “unfinalized”
characters, ever in the process of becoming. In such a reading, not only is
Wokulski a transitional hero, negotiating social, ideological, and economic
changes in Poland at the end of the nineteenth century, but the novel itself
becomes a transitional work during the period of mature realism, demonstrating
many formal features of the dialogic novel, and serving as a “bridge between the realist novel and modernist prose.”
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Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 2014
This article examines two contrasting phenomena in the portrayal of Russian nationhood in recent ... more This article examines two contrasting phenomena in the portrayal of Russian nationhood in recent independent cinema: "neo-chernukha" and "neo-populist" films. While films of the former continue to deconstruct and debunk myths of Russian nationhood prevalent in blockbuster cinema and the media, the latter group reveals a new tendency among indie filmmakers to construct affirmative, albeit fraught, notions of social identification, often by recycling cultural myths and traditions such as Christian collectivism and kenosis. The article gives close analysis of a representative film from each group, My Joy and Iur'ev Day, as well as a number of other examples, and attempts to situate them in the broader discourse of nationhood, both historically and in contemporary society.
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New England Review, 2016
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Australian Slavonic and E. European Studies Journal, Feb 2013
Sergei Dvortsevoi's film Tulpan (2007), which tells the story of a family of nomadic sheep farmer... more Sergei Dvortsevoi's film Tulpan (2007), which tells the story of a family of nomadic sheep farmers on Kazakhstan's Betpak-Dala, or "Hunger Steppe," met with critical acclaim and several awards at international film festivals, including the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes for unique directorial vision. The film’s unexpected success is variously attributed to its effect of authenticity, exotic locale, heartfelt narrative, well-observed characters, and universal themes. Still relatively unexplored, but no less central to the film’s resonance, is the way it moves beyond traditional genres and cultural perspectives. Its genre of “docufiction” and more, the multicultural (national and cultural) background of the filmmakers and the film’s narrative, which all challenge fixed perceptions of familial, cultural, and national identities, invite an analysis of the way the film, its production, and its reception create a discourse of hybridity and fluidity of structures and meanings.
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The Pushkin Review, Nov 2012
In its nearly 200-year history, scholarship on Griboedov’s play Woe From Wit has been dominated b... more In its nearly 200-year history, scholarship on Griboedov’s play Woe From Wit has been dominated by ideological readings. In the first few years of the play’s circulation, it sparked debate between conservative critics and Decembrist-Romantic writers about its depiction of Moscow society. The progressive critics of the mid-to-late 19th century, such as Belinskii and Dobroliubov, praised the work as one of the first sobering depictions of Russian reality, a tradition that, according to them, was continued by Pushkin and Gogol’. Soviet critics would later canonize this reading of Woe from Wit in the 20th century. Many have viewed the work as a Decembrist manifesto and its hero Chatskii as the most articulate spokesman of that movement. Some literary scholars, such as the Formalist Iurii Tynianov, have focused on the historical prototypes for the play’s characters. Modern western scholarship is relatively limited, but has included some re-evaluation of the play’s characters and analysis of its meter and language. However, the main feature of the play – its mixed genre of tragicomedy – has to my knowledge received little attention. It is the aim of this paper to provide a reading of Woe from Wit as a tragicomedy and, in doing so, to show how it anticipated many of Chekhov’s dramatic techniques: an undermined raisonneur and concomitant authorial distancing, a domino effect of unrequited love, constant miscommunication and disconnect between all characters and the incorporation of elements of commedia dell’arte. This reading opposes the view of Chekhov’s dramaturgy as anomalous and unprecedented in Russian letters, and instead suggests a clear evolution of the tragicomic genre, which began with Denis Fonvizin’s The Minor, was developed further in Griboedov’s Woe from Wit and Gogol’s The Government Inspector and culminated in Chekhov’s plays.
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ASEEES.org , 2015
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Film and Book Reviews by Justin Wilmes
KinoKultura, 2024
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Slavic Review, 2021
Review of the Yakut film "Scarecrow" (2020, Davydov).
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KinoKultura, 2021
Review of the film Hypnosis (2020) by Valery Todorovovsky
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Slavic Review, 2020
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Articles by Justin Wilmes
Part postmodern, backstage musical, part historical biopic, Leto challenges simple categorization, and from this uncomfortable marriage of genres stemmed much of the debate around the film. Given its array of realist features, including naturalistic black and white cinematography, quotidian scenes from the lives of its subjects, and musical performances that are mostly diegetically embedded in the narrative—it is understandable that many viewed and evaluated the film through the lens of a realist, historical biopic, and overlooked its structure as a film musical. Upon closer examination, Leto is in fact meticulously structured as a musical, not merely a film about music. Its twenty distinct musical numbers, which comprise over half of the film, fall into two distinct categories: diegetic rock performances by the musicians and fantasy numbers that clearly enter a performative, supradiegetic space. However, in contrast to classical approaches to the musical, Leto’s engagement with the genre is markedly postmodern, laying bare its own artifice and devices, slipping into free fantasy, but frequently informing the viewer through its narrator Skeptic that, “Тhis never happened.” This chapter examines Leto’s engagement with the musical film genre and considers how its form explores two salient tropes in the Leningrad rock movement: the sociopolitical position of those who wished, as anthropologist Aleksei Yurchak describes, to live vnye (“outside”) of the ideological coordinates of this system; and the problem of derivation and authenticity in a society that idolized foreign cultural expression.
We argue that the three thematic preoccupations of Germanika’s films—alternative models of female identity; the traumatic transition from youth to adulthood; and fantasy and carnival—are imbricated in her works and closely connected to her own carefully cultivated authorial myth and personal brand. These themes and tropes are united by a shared epistemology of radical liminality, transgression, rebellion, performativity, and a rejection of stable ideologies. This understanding of transgression and valorized liminality in Germanika’s work helps to account for her own complex and contradictory views on social, political and religious questions. While identifying a certain aesthetic and thematic consistency in her work, we also observe a marked shift in Germanika’s recent films away from aesthetics of hyperrealism to a new expressionism and emphasis on fantasy. In this evolution too we see a certain internal logic, where elements of fantasy and imagination present in her early works have come to dominate in later films.
A corresponding revitalization of imperial discourses can be observed in the realm of aesthetics and culture. Several studies have examined manifestations of the imperial imaginary in post-Soviet cultural production, perhaps most notably Nancy Condee’s The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema (2009). Condee posits that identity formations throughout Russian and Soviet history were primarily imperial rather than national or civic, and analyzes how post-Soviet cinema refracts that imperial legacy in complex ways. The present article continues this line of inquiry, analyzing Russian cinema since 2010. It considers how recent cinema revives tropes and aesthetic tendencies of earlier periods—stark depictions of self and Other; besiegement by external enemies; spiritual superiority and messianism; monumentalism and grand spectacle—but also updates them for a contemporary context, refracting anxieties about Russia’s place in today’s global order. I analyze three key tendencies in Russian neo-imperial cinema: (1) a surfeit of films glorifying Russia’s victory in the Great Patriotic War, in particular Fedor Bondarchuk’s Stalingrad [2013]; (2) the rise of the new Orthodox blockbuster, with particular attention to Andrei Kravchuk’s Viking [2016]; and (3) attempts to combine traditional imperialism and neoliberal globalism, evident in Dmitrii Prygunov’s Dukhless dilogy [2012/2015]. This triangulation of recent themes—war, spiritual messianism, and neoliberal leadership—eloquently reflects Russian cinema’s response to shifts in imperial culture since 2010.
Vyrypaev’s works invariably portray a breaking away from rational, relatively stable conceptions of identity in order to test the boundaries of desire and locate more ‘authentic’ understandings of self. While in Vyrypaev’s earlier, darker works, violent ruptures with stable identity are an end in and of themselves, often leading to a ‘liberated’ destruction of the protagonist; in his recent, more affirmative works, such rebellions lead to self-discovery and the possibility of sustainable spiritual clarity. This article argues that Vyrypaev employs an array of affective devices, including violence, visual and aural saturation, and performative dialogues, to enact what theorist Gilles Deleuze calls a ‘shock to thought.’ However, these dimensions of Vyrypaev’s dramaturgy do not simply destabilize rational perception in order to create a Deleuzian ‘line of flight’ away from discernible meanings into open-ended potential (1989:156; 1987:10). Rather, they reconstitute subjectivity in strikingly affirmative ways according to Vyrypaev’s own vision. By considering a range of influences on his works—from his well-known zeal for Buddhism and eastern religion to postmodern alienation and a general subjective disorientation in post-Soviet Russia—this article sheds light on both Vyrypaev’s sui generis dramaturgy and the resonance of his works in Russia today.
This article analyzes artistic practices of the Putin-era auteurs through the paradigm of official, unofficial, and semi-official culture. The group of filmmakers, variously referred to as the Russian “New Wave” (Novaia volna) or the “New Quiets” (Novye tikhie), has navigated major shifts in Russian civil society and ideological controls. Russian auteur cinema has taken up the torch from the literature of earlier periods, becoming a key locus for the mediation of taboos and sensitive social issues. In light of a general “visual turn” in culture and the tremendous resonance of particularly controversial films such as Andrei Zviagintsev’s 2014 Leviathan, an argument can be made that the civic poet of today’s Russia is the auteur director. And yet, the films of these directors defy easy analysis and pose a number of ideological paradoxes: Can filmmakers working within a system that is primarily government-funded produce films that are truly countercultural? How might a filmmaker cope with the financial and structural exigencies of the industry and still create something “independent”? Could such forms of critique even be viewed as state-sanctioned and reinforcing the hegemony of official ideology?
This study provides an in-depth discussion of the changing nature of censorship in the film industry in recent years (particularly since the re-election of Vladimir Putin in 2012), arguing that such measures reflect new forms of postmodern, “soft authoritarian” controls that rely on circumscription of counter-discourses rather than their prohibition. My examination of several well-known auteur films of the Putin era will reveal the nature of these changing controls, as well as the strategies artists have adopted in response to them. Engaging theories of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, I examine the “spiral of power and resistance” produced by official ideology and its counter discourses. Moreover, by considering the reception of these films—the debates they provoke on social media, reviews by professional and amateur critics, etc.—I will shed light on their resonance and the discursive spaces they create. Finally, I will draw connections between these film products and the civic engagement of other salient art forms, such as performance and visual art, and theater.
of Bolesław Prus’s The Doll, justly noting that throughout the novel
its protagonist, Stanisław Wokulski, is torn between impulses to romance,
political revolt, science, business, and social progress. These notions, traditionally
associated respectively with the Polish Romantic and Positivist
movements, are articulated and championed in the novel by various characters,
and indeed compete with one another within the conflicted psyches
of individual characters. While critics have increasingly characterized The
Doll as a proto-modernist, dialogic novel, what has received relatively little
attention among scholars of this novel is the pervasive use of the literary
double as a device for exploring Wokulski’s profound ambivalence—and by
extension that of the transitional generation that he represents. Recurring
appearances of Wokulski’s doppelgängers, or mental projections in the form of
voices and visions, manifest his repressed desires, while the novel’s numerous
quasi-doubles—characters bearing an uncanny resemblance—serve as a key
organizing principle of the narrative, providing the protagonist with positive
and negative insight into himself. But rather than attempting to reconcile
these conflicting forces in monologic or dialectical fashion, Prus creates what
literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin calls a dialogic novelistic discourse, marked
by multiple voices and viewpoints, unresolved ambiguities, and “unfinalized”
characters, ever in the process of becoming. In such a reading, not only is
Wokulski a transitional hero, negotiating social, ideological, and economic
changes in Poland at the end of the nineteenth century, but the novel itself
becomes a transitional work during the period of mature realism, demonstrating
many formal features of the dialogic novel, and serving as a “bridge between the realist novel and modernist prose.”
Film and Book Reviews by Justin Wilmes
Part postmodern, backstage musical, part historical biopic, Leto challenges simple categorization, and from this uncomfortable marriage of genres stemmed much of the debate around the film. Given its array of realist features, including naturalistic black and white cinematography, quotidian scenes from the lives of its subjects, and musical performances that are mostly diegetically embedded in the narrative—it is understandable that many viewed and evaluated the film through the lens of a realist, historical biopic, and overlooked its structure as a film musical. Upon closer examination, Leto is in fact meticulously structured as a musical, not merely a film about music. Its twenty distinct musical numbers, which comprise over half of the film, fall into two distinct categories: diegetic rock performances by the musicians and fantasy numbers that clearly enter a performative, supradiegetic space. However, in contrast to classical approaches to the musical, Leto’s engagement with the genre is markedly postmodern, laying bare its own artifice and devices, slipping into free fantasy, but frequently informing the viewer through its narrator Skeptic that, “Тhis never happened.” This chapter examines Leto’s engagement with the musical film genre and considers how its form explores two salient tropes in the Leningrad rock movement: the sociopolitical position of those who wished, as anthropologist Aleksei Yurchak describes, to live vnye (“outside”) of the ideological coordinates of this system; and the problem of derivation and authenticity in a society that idolized foreign cultural expression.
We argue that the three thematic preoccupations of Germanika’s films—alternative models of female identity; the traumatic transition from youth to adulthood; and fantasy and carnival—are imbricated in her works and closely connected to her own carefully cultivated authorial myth and personal brand. These themes and tropes are united by a shared epistemology of radical liminality, transgression, rebellion, performativity, and a rejection of stable ideologies. This understanding of transgression and valorized liminality in Germanika’s work helps to account for her own complex and contradictory views on social, political and religious questions. While identifying a certain aesthetic and thematic consistency in her work, we also observe a marked shift in Germanika’s recent films away from aesthetics of hyperrealism to a new expressionism and emphasis on fantasy. In this evolution too we see a certain internal logic, where elements of fantasy and imagination present in her early works have come to dominate in later films.
A corresponding revitalization of imperial discourses can be observed in the realm of aesthetics and culture. Several studies have examined manifestations of the imperial imaginary in post-Soviet cultural production, perhaps most notably Nancy Condee’s The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema (2009). Condee posits that identity formations throughout Russian and Soviet history were primarily imperial rather than national or civic, and analyzes how post-Soviet cinema refracts that imperial legacy in complex ways. The present article continues this line of inquiry, analyzing Russian cinema since 2010. It considers how recent cinema revives tropes and aesthetic tendencies of earlier periods—stark depictions of self and Other; besiegement by external enemies; spiritual superiority and messianism; monumentalism and grand spectacle—but also updates them for a contemporary context, refracting anxieties about Russia’s place in today’s global order. I analyze three key tendencies in Russian neo-imperial cinema: (1) a surfeit of films glorifying Russia’s victory in the Great Patriotic War, in particular Fedor Bondarchuk’s Stalingrad [2013]; (2) the rise of the new Orthodox blockbuster, with particular attention to Andrei Kravchuk’s Viking [2016]; and (3) attempts to combine traditional imperialism and neoliberal globalism, evident in Dmitrii Prygunov’s Dukhless dilogy [2012/2015]. This triangulation of recent themes—war, spiritual messianism, and neoliberal leadership—eloquently reflects Russian cinema’s response to shifts in imperial culture since 2010.
Vyrypaev’s works invariably portray a breaking away from rational, relatively stable conceptions of identity in order to test the boundaries of desire and locate more ‘authentic’ understandings of self. While in Vyrypaev’s earlier, darker works, violent ruptures with stable identity are an end in and of themselves, often leading to a ‘liberated’ destruction of the protagonist; in his recent, more affirmative works, such rebellions lead to self-discovery and the possibility of sustainable spiritual clarity. This article argues that Vyrypaev employs an array of affective devices, including violence, visual and aural saturation, and performative dialogues, to enact what theorist Gilles Deleuze calls a ‘shock to thought.’ However, these dimensions of Vyrypaev’s dramaturgy do not simply destabilize rational perception in order to create a Deleuzian ‘line of flight’ away from discernible meanings into open-ended potential (1989:156; 1987:10). Rather, they reconstitute subjectivity in strikingly affirmative ways according to Vyrypaev’s own vision. By considering a range of influences on his works—from his well-known zeal for Buddhism and eastern religion to postmodern alienation and a general subjective disorientation in post-Soviet Russia—this article sheds light on both Vyrypaev’s sui generis dramaturgy and the resonance of his works in Russia today.
This article analyzes artistic practices of the Putin-era auteurs through the paradigm of official, unofficial, and semi-official culture. The group of filmmakers, variously referred to as the Russian “New Wave” (Novaia volna) or the “New Quiets” (Novye tikhie), has navigated major shifts in Russian civil society and ideological controls. Russian auteur cinema has taken up the torch from the literature of earlier periods, becoming a key locus for the mediation of taboos and sensitive social issues. In light of a general “visual turn” in culture and the tremendous resonance of particularly controversial films such as Andrei Zviagintsev’s 2014 Leviathan, an argument can be made that the civic poet of today’s Russia is the auteur director. And yet, the films of these directors defy easy analysis and pose a number of ideological paradoxes: Can filmmakers working within a system that is primarily government-funded produce films that are truly countercultural? How might a filmmaker cope with the financial and structural exigencies of the industry and still create something “independent”? Could such forms of critique even be viewed as state-sanctioned and reinforcing the hegemony of official ideology?
This study provides an in-depth discussion of the changing nature of censorship in the film industry in recent years (particularly since the re-election of Vladimir Putin in 2012), arguing that such measures reflect new forms of postmodern, “soft authoritarian” controls that rely on circumscription of counter-discourses rather than their prohibition. My examination of several well-known auteur films of the Putin era will reveal the nature of these changing controls, as well as the strategies artists have adopted in response to them. Engaging theories of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, I examine the “spiral of power and resistance” produced by official ideology and its counter discourses. Moreover, by considering the reception of these films—the debates they provoke on social media, reviews by professional and amateur critics, etc.—I will shed light on their resonance and the discursive spaces they create. Finally, I will draw connections between these film products and the civic engagement of other salient art forms, such as performance and visual art, and theater.
of Bolesław Prus’s The Doll, justly noting that throughout the novel
its protagonist, Stanisław Wokulski, is torn between impulses to romance,
political revolt, science, business, and social progress. These notions, traditionally
associated respectively with the Polish Romantic and Positivist
movements, are articulated and championed in the novel by various characters,
and indeed compete with one another within the conflicted psyches
of individual characters. While critics have increasingly characterized The
Doll as a proto-modernist, dialogic novel, what has received relatively little
attention among scholars of this novel is the pervasive use of the literary
double as a device for exploring Wokulski’s profound ambivalence—and by
extension that of the transitional generation that he represents. Recurring
appearances of Wokulski’s doppelgängers, or mental projections in the form of
voices and visions, manifest his repressed desires, while the novel’s numerous
quasi-doubles—characters bearing an uncanny resemblance—serve as a key
organizing principle of the narrative, providing the protagonist with positive
and negative insight into himself. But rather than attempting to reconcile
these conflicting forces in monologic or dialectical fashion, Prus creates what
literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin calls a dialogic novelistic discourse, marked
by multiple voices and viewpoints, unresolved ambiguities, and “unfinalized”
characters, ever in the process of becoming. In such a reading, not only is
Wokulski a transitional hero, negotiating social, ideological, and economic
changes in Poland at the end of the nineteenth century, but the novel itself
becomes a transitional work during the period of mature realism, demonstrating
many formal features of the dialogic novel, and serving as a “bridge between the realist novel and modernist prose.”