Beyond Socio-Historical Trauma with Olga Zhukova and Iskra Babich: Re-Reading Cinema of Perestroika
Abstract
Cinematography of perestroika (and the early post-Soviet period) entails mixed terra-in, often described as a socially-critical “black wave” chernukha; the period saw an unprecedented number of works by female directors, which remain to be addressed by film scholarship. This article examines the cinematic opus of Olga Zhukova (1954-) who produced five feature films in the period 1990–1994. This article discusses her films, which were not well received by critics and accused of being pretentious and artificial, alongside another Soviet director, Iskra Babich (1938–2001). I re-examine the formation of Zhukova’s cinematic speech, focusing on the interplay of the audio-visual and corporeal, to argue that her works create specific times paces which defy the immediate socio-political references provided by the seemingly formative linear narratives, and bypass the patriarchal dichotomies underpinning the latter.
References
Adzhikhina, N. (2006). Tri istochnikai sostavnye chasti novogo russkogo feminizma. Russky zhurnal 2006. Available from: http://www.russ.ru/pole/Tri-istochnika-i-tri-sostavnye--chasti-novogo-russkogo-feminizma (Accessed 25. 8. 2018).
Borenstein, E. (2008). Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Brashinsky, M., & Horton, A. (1994). Russian Critics on the Cinema of Glasnost. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brooks, P. (1976). The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. London, New Haven: Yale UP.
Gomel, E. (2009). Postmodern Science-Fiction and Temporal Imagination. London, New York: Continuum.
Gorky, M., Radek, K., Bukharin, N., & Zhdanov, A. (1977). Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Graham, S. (2000). Chernukha and Russian Film. Studies in Slavic Cultures 1 (2000): 9–27.
Isakava, V. (2005). “Russian noir”: Chemukha Phenomenon in post-soviet fiction and film. Ann Arbor: UMI.
Isakava, V. (2009). The body in the dark: body, sexuality and trauma in perestroika cinema. Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 3(9), 201–214.
Keunan, B. (2010). The Chronotopic Imagination in Literature and Film. Bakhtin, Bergson and Deleuze on Forms of Time. In N. Bemong, P. Borghart, M. De Dobbeleer, K. Demoen, K. De Temmerman and B. Keunen (eds.): Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications, Perspectives: 35–56. Ghent: Academia Press.
Kino-T. Available from: http://kino-teatr.ru (Accessed 25. 8. 2018).
Lawton, A. (2002). Before the Fall: Soviet Cinema in the Gorbachev Years. Philadelphia: Xlibris Corporation.
Mayne, J. (1980). On the edge of the dialectic: Women’s space in Soviet film narrative. Jump Cut, 23 (1980): 26–29.
Montgomery, M. V. (1994). Carnivals and Commonplaces: Bakhtin’s Chronotope, Cultural Studies, and Film. New York: Peter Lang.
Navailh, F. (2003). The Image of Women in Contemporary Soviet Cinema. In A. Lawton (ed.): The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema: 209–228. London and New York: Routledge.
Sobchack, V. (1998). ‘Lounge Time’: Post-War Crises and the Chronotope of Film Noir. In N. Browne (ed.): Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory: 129–170. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Tsirkun, N. (2010). Noveishaya istoriya otechestvennogo kino (1986–2000). Saint-Petersburg: Seans.
Woll, J. (2000). Real Images: Soviet Cinemas and the Thaw. London: I. B. Tauris.
Copyright (c) 2019 International Journal of Science and Society
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
.png)
.jpg)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
1.png)
.jpg)
-modified.png)
-modified.png)
-modified.png)
