Russian Film Symposium 2003
Program Four (Supplementary)

Thaw and Stagnation (1961-1986)

Wed May 7

10am Grigorii Roshal': Trial of the Insane, 1961. Iulian Semenov and Vladimir Shredel': Night on the 14th Parallel, 1971.

2pm Mikhail Shveitser: Mister MacKinley's Flight, 1975. Vladimir Krasnopol'skii and Valerii Uskov: Participation in a Murder, 1986.

Screenings take place at 106 David Lawrence Hall.

There will be no formal introductions to or post-screening comments on the films in this program, which is intended to be informational only. Post-screening discussions will be welcome but are not built into the schedule. The first two films (morning) are from the Thaw (1956-68), the second two (afternoon) are from the Stagnation period (1968-86).

The four films, however, belong to distinctly different genres, providing an opportunity to begin examining changes that occur in the imaging of (anti-) Americanism as this topos moves from one genre to another in the Soviet film industry over a quarter of a century. All four films are set in "the West," with Soviet life and reality never directly represented on the screen. Instead, Soviet life and reality – at least as packaged by the Soviet media for domestic consumption – provide the necessary subtext (the unspoken but condemning alternative to the bankrupt legal and moral systems "over there") that enabled Soviet audiences to understand the film "correctly" from the viewpoint of cultural administrators.

Soviet life and reality, therefore, are not so much "absent" in these films as they are overly "present" in the ways they determine the representational strategies in imaging the "other." Conceding capitalism its material bounties, these films probe the devastating consequences both ushered in and masked by the paradise of consumer goods and technological splendors: the hollow moral core on which this kingdom is constructed. The "other" in these films is invariably the victim, whether on the screen or in the eyes of the Soviet audience. Oppressor and oppressed in these films represent not so much two incompatible and antagonistic classes within capitalism as they stand for the necessary preconditions and inevitable consequences of capitalism. Regardless of how the contradictions between the two are imaged (comically, tragically, melodramatically) oppressors and oppressed are equally answerable for the resulting social and moral disorder.