Russian Film Symposium 2003
Program One

35mm at Pittsburgh Filmmakers

Mon May 5	Tue May 6	Fri May 9	Sat May 10
			5pm Aleksei Balabanov: Brother 2, 2000.
8pm Aleksandr Dovzhenko: Farewell, America, 1949-50. Discussion by Vance Kepley, Jr.	8pm Lev Kuleshov: The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, 1924. Live musical accompaniment by Robert Kubacki (accordion). Discussion by Lucy Fischer	7.30pm Aleksandr Dovzhenko: Farewell, America, 1949-50. 9.15pm Aleksei Balabanov: Brother 2, 2000. Discussion by Gerald McCausland.	7.30pm Pavel Lungine: Tycoon, 2002. Discussion by Bill Judson. Farewell banquet.

Screenings take place at the Melwood Screening Room.

The quartet of films being shown at Pittsburgh Filmmakers' Melwood Screening Room spans a period of almost eighty years (1924-2002). Each reflects the constituent tropes and traumas of the cultural moment in which it was made, yet when considered together the films in the series turn out to be linked in ways that testify to certain enduring motifs of Russian anti-Americanism. That those motifs still resonate today is demonstrated not only by the two post-Soviet films in the series – Aleskei Balabanov's Brother 2 (2000) and Pavel Lungine's Tycoon (2002) – but by current events. The sitting US and Russian presidents' short-lived period as "soulmates" has rather publicly ended due to discord over Iraq. Yet the undercurrent of "Yankee-phobia" in Russia has in fact found consistent expression throughout the post-Soviet period, and flare-ups have been triggered not only by geopolitical and military catalysts such as the eastward expansion of NATO, the bombardment of Serbia, and the US invasion of Iraq, but also by more civilian humiliations such as the 2002 Winter Olympics, and even the comical depiction of a Russian cosmonaut in the 1998 American film Armageddon. The by-now codified status of the US as "the world's only superpower" is a constant, stinging reminder of Russia's perceived obsolescence on the world stage. American audacity, as it is often constructed by Russia's alternating superiority and inferiority complexes, contributes to a relationship that we have termed more succinctly (and less clinically) as "arrogance and envy."

The two Soviet-era films in the series – Lev Kuleshov's The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924) and Aleksandr Dovzhenko's Farewell, America (1949-50) – enact the "centripetal fantasy" of Soviet Marxism, depicting the "first socialist society" as an irresistible draw for forward-thinking foreigners, even (or especially) those from the very maw of the capitalist West. The fact that both films were made following actual demographic shifts in the opposite direction – the first and second waves of Soviet emigration – exemplifies the responsive (and revisionist) nature of anti-American cultural production in Russia.

The symbolic "dialogue with America" has been conducted on the level of form as well as content. Kuleshov in Mr. West and Balabanov in Brother 2 expertly incorporate Hollywood techniques in their filmmaking, as if to demonstrate mastery of the "enemy's" representational strategies while impugning the socioeconomic and moral environments in which those strategies developed (the über-capitalist hero of Lungine's Tycoon also demonstrates this Russian capacity to out-American the Americans). Kuleshov's film is a veritable sampler of American film genres, including the western and the slapstick comedy, while Balabanov uses the visual and narrative vocabularies of the action film, the road movie, and even the video game. Narratively, the two films neatly bookend the eight-decade period that separates them; Brother 2 might be retitled Mr. East in the Land of the Capitalists, and comes to the same conclusion as its predecessor: America's financial might and flair for spectacle are no match for the deep-tissue sincerity and righteousness of Russia. As Russian cultural producers struggle to define, develop, and market a post-Soviet "national idea," they have found that Russia's various and competing self-images are still inextricably bound to its view of the US.