Insiders and Outsiders in Russian Cinema

Description

Explores the depiction of foreignness in Russian and Soviet films

Identifying who was "inside" and who was "outside" the Soviet/Russian body politic has been a matter of intense and violent urgency, especially in the high Stalinist and post-Soviet periods. It is a theme encountered prominently in film. Employing a range of interpretive methods practiced in Russian/Soviet film studies, Insiders and Outsiders in Russian Cinema highlights the varied ways that Russian and Soviet cinema constructed otherness and foreignness. While the essays explore the "us versus them" binary well known to students of Russian culture and the ways in which Russian films depicted these distinctions, the book demonstrates just how impossible maintaining this binary proved to be.

Contributors are Anthony Anemone, Julian Graffy, Peter Kenez, Joan Neuberger, Stephen M. Norris, Oleg Sulkin, Yuri Tsivian, Emma Widdis, and Josephine Woll.

Contents
Introduction: Insiders and Outsiders in Russian Cinema / Stephen M. Norris

1. The Foreigner's Journey to Consciousness in Early Soviet Cinema: The Case of Protazanov's Tommi / Julian Graffy
2. The Wise and Wicked Game: Reediting, Foreignness, and Soviet Film Culture of the Twenties / Yuri Tsivian
3. Dressing the Part: Clothing Otherness in Soviet Cinema before 1953 / Emma Widdis
4. Under the Big Top: America Goes to the Circus / Josephine Woll
5. Eisenstein's Cosmopolitan Kremlin: Drag Queens, Circus Clowns, Slugs, and Foreigners in Ivan the Terrible / Joan Neuberger
6. The Picture of the Enemy in Stalinist Films / Peter Kenez
7. Identifying the Enemy in Contemporary Russian Film / Oleg Sulkin
8. About Killers, Freaks, and Real Men: The Vigilante Hero of Aleksei Balabanov's Films / Anthony Anemone
9. Fools and Cuckoos: The Outsider as Insider in Post-Soviet War Films / Stephen M. Norris

List of Contributors
Volume Editors
Index

Sujets

• Former Soviet Union
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Película fotográfica
• URSS
• General officer
• Eastern Europe
• Russian
• Russia
• Documentary film
• Cinema
• General
• Film
• Culture
• Russie
• Media

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 14 mai 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253027900
• Langue: English

Extrait

Insiders and Outsiders in Russian Cinema
Insiders and
Outsiders
in Russian Cinema
Edited by Stephen M. Norris
and Zara M. Torlone
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington and Indianapolis
In memory of Josephine Woll, admired colleague and friend
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
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© 2008 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Insiders and outsiders in Russian cinema / edited by Stephen M. Norris and Zara M. Torlone.
p.     cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-253-35145-6 (cloth) — ISBN 978-0-253-21982-4 (pbk.)
1. Aliens in motion pictures. 2. Outsiders in motion pictures. 3. Motion pictures—Russia (Federation)—History. I. Norris, Stephen M. II. Torlone, Zara M. PN1993.5.R9I59 2008 791.430947--dc22
2007045910
1   2   3   4   5   13   12   11   10   09   08
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Insiders and Outsiders in Russian Cinema / Stephen M. Norris
1. The Foreigner’s Journey to Consciousness in Early Soviet Cinema: The Case of Protazanov’s Tommi / Julian Graffy
2. The Wise and Wicked Game: Reediting, Foreignness, and Soviet Film Culture of the Twenties / Yuri Tsivian
3. Dressing the Part: Clothing Otherness in Soviet Cinema before 1953 / Emma Widdis
4. Under the Big Top: America Goes to the Circus / Josephine Woll
5. Eisenstein’s Cosmopolitan Kremlin: Drag Queens, Circus Clowns, Slugs, and Foreigners in Ivan the Terrible / Joan Neuberger
6. The Picture of the Enemy in Stalinist Films / Peter Kenez
7. Identifying the Enemy in Contemporary Russian Film / Oleg Sulkin
8. About Killers, Freaks, and Real Men: The Vigilante Hero of Aleksei Balabanov’s Films / Anthony Anemone
9. Fools and Cuckoos: The Outsider as Insider in Post-Soviet War Films / Stephen M. Norris
List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
The editors gratefully acknowledge the following people for their help with this volume’s publication: Karen Dawisha, Director of the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at Miami University; Anne Clemmer, Brian Herrmann, and Daniel Pyle at Indiana University Press; Karen Kodner, our copy editor; and Melissa Cox Norris, who designed the original version of the cover.
Introduction
Insiders and Outsiders in Russian Cinema
Stephen M. Norris
At the 26th Moscow International Film Festival in 2004, Dmitrii Meskhiev’s World War II drama Our Own ( Svoi ) captured the grand prize. The film explores one of the central issues of wartime—the way in which populations are divided into “ours” and “theirs.” Meskhiev does not settle for simple definitions of these terms. He sets his film in a town occupied by the Nazis, a place where the local population must choose between resistance and collaboration, passivity or action, life and death. These choices force the characters in the film to confront the issue of who exactly is “our own.” In the case of the village headman (played by Bogdan Stupka) this choice divides his family.
Svoi opens with a Nazi attack on an unnamed Red Army post. Two of the main characters, one a Russian NKVD officer (Sergei Garmash), the other a Jewish commissar (Konstantin Khabenskii), escape the attack by changing out of their uniforms and into peasant clothes. They are captured by the Germans and forced to march in a prisoner column. Because of their change of clothes they are spared the fate of fellow NKVD members and Jews in the USSR, the specific targets of the Nazi war of extermination launched in the east. Clothing in this instance becomes a means by which Soviet citizens can lay claim to different identities, switching not just garments but meanings of “us” and “them.” In the case of the two protagonists, these boundaries are crossed in two senses. For those living under occupation, they have become more like Russian villagers and less like Soviet oppressors; while in the eyes of the occupiers they have become less “Jewish” and more “Slavic.”
The two fall in with a fellow survivor of the attack, a sniper named Mit’ka (Mikhail Evlanov). As they march in a prisoner column, the young soldier lets them know that his village is nearby. When the column turns a bend in the road, the three escape. Once they reach the village, they meet Mit’ka’s father, the headman, and learn that he spent years in the Gulag after being branded a kulak. Mit’ka, now an escapee, threatens to disrupt the delicate balance that his father had achieved by working with the Nazis and local collaborators in an effort to protect “his” village and his two daughters, both of whom have husbands fighting in the Red Army. The headman quickly ascertains the true identities of his son’s comrades, and must decide how to proceed.
The tension that the film depicts revolves around the headman and his choices—who, ultimately, is svoi ? His son, whose escape leads the Nazi occupiers to ratchet up searches in the village? His daughters, whose husbands’ actions also threaten to destroy the peace? His fellow villagers, including Mit’ka’s girlfriend Katia (Anna Mikhalkov), who have also learned how to survive under Nazi occupation? The two escapees and Red Army members, who represent the system that sent him to the camps? Or his occupiers, some of whom are local people also upset with Soviet power? Meskhiev’s film blurs the lines between “us” and “them,” between outsiders and insiders, categories that Soviet culture attempted to define clearly. Moreover, none of the characters represent an officially approved “us” in the Stalin era: POWs, kulaks, and anti-Soviet collaborators are not part of the ideal Soviet society.
Svoi tackles issues that are covered in this volume’s essays: the title of the film alone, combined with the decisions characters must make, plays with the idea of who belongs and who does not. The contributions that follow place concepts of “ours” and “theirs,” of outsiders and insiders, at the center of Soviet and Russian film history. Scholars of Russian film have largely written about cinema from three perspectives: works that focus on a given era (usually stressing how films relate to politics), 1 monographs that explore a particular director (often critically acclaimed ones such as Sergei Eisenstein or Andrei Tarkovskii, but even more commercially successful ones like Nikita Mikhalkov), 2 or works that focus on genres within Russian cinema. 3 The essays that follow instead approach Russian film from a different angle, one that examines how films and filmmakers over the course of the twentieth century attempted to identify what it meant to be “Soviet” and what it meant to be “Russian.” 4 The contributions focus upon two crucial periods in Russian history, two eras where questions of outsiders, others, and identities have been at their most fluid. 5
Julian Graffy examines early Soviet films, when identifying a sense of “Sovietness” was paramount both to filmmakers and Soviet officials. Film proved to be an important medium through which Soviet citizens could learn about who belonged and who did not. Early Soviet films and their directors offered images of foreign outsiders who could become insiders through acceptance of the Soviet system. Graffy argues in his essay that the process of defining who is “ours” and who is “theirs” has long played an important role in Russian cinema. He explores the ideological role that foreign characters played in early Soviet cinema. In particular, Graffy analyzes how Soviet films established the basis for who could be seen as “ours” in the USSR. Graffy’s focus on foreigners and how foreign characters “achieved consciousness” by visiting the Soviet Union reveals that the attempt to clarify who was an outsider and who was not formed a central aspect of Soviet films.
Yuri Tsivian furthers this discussion of foreignness in early Soviet culture by focusing on a little-studied aspect of Russian film cultures: the reediting of films for foreign consumption and for domestic viewing. Soviet authorities in the 1920s, fearful of the influence foreign cinema might have upon domestic audiences, employed film reeditors to make foreign films more ideologically acceptable (and thus make “