New Russian Cinema — Webinar Series w/ the Harriman Institute at Columbia University
Russian Film Club at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University invites you to a webinar series dedicated to New Russian Cinema. Click on the links to register or visit the Harriman Institute website.
NEW RUSSIAN CINEMA
Organized and moderated by Daria Ezerova (Harriman Institute) and Mark Lipovetsky (Columbia)
FEBRUARY 24, 7:00 PM
New Sci-Fi Horror: Sputnik (Egor Abramenko, 2020)
Eliot Borenstein (NYU), Tomi Haxhi (Columbia), Julia Vaingurt (UIC)
Taking heed from the Alien franchise—and rife with references to the original 1979 film—Egor Abramenko’s 2020 sci-fi horror Sputnik is the story of a Soviet encounter with an alien lifeform from space. Abramenko explores a relatively underrepresented genre in mainstream Russian cinema in a way that stays true to Ridley Scott’s genre playbook and simultaneously offers a critique of the state and the abuse of power. A body slowly destroyed from the inside thus not only provides many possibilities for dramatic blood splatter, but also offers an apt metaphor of the crumbling edifice of late socialism that is destroying itself from within.
The film is available on Hulu.
Lioudmila Fedorova (Georgetown), Ilya Gerasimov (Ab Imperio), Anne Lounsbery (NYU)
Adaptations of literary classics set in the present either preserve the text in full, creating clashes with the present-day setting (Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet,1997), or adapt the plot to the modern setting as closely as possible, resulting in a loose adaptation (Clueless,1995; Ten Things I Hate About You, 1999; Sherlock, 2010-2017). Based on Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 novel, Grigorii Konstantinopol’skii mini-series Dead Souls (2020) combines the two approaches, resulting in an incisive comedy that is both burlesque and sharply critical of present-day Russian mores. At the same time, the series poses the question of how far a filmmaker can go in creating a “loose adaptation” and what ultimately defines a successful screen version of a literary classic.
The series is available on ivi.tv.
MARCH 23, 7:00 PM
New Historical Cinema II: Dear Comrades (Andrei Konchalovsky, 2020)
Pavel Khazanov (Rutgers), John MacKay (Yale), Peter Rutland (Wesleyan)
Dear Comrades, Andrei Konchalovsky’s twenty-first feature-length film, focuses on the Novocherkassk Massacre of 1962. Shot similarly to his 2016 film Paradise, Dear Comrades has had rave reviews: “stunning” (The Guardian), “a masterpiece” (The New Yorker). The film raises questions about historical accuracy: Konchalovsky asserted that for him “there is no difference between fake history and real history” and that one “usually believe[s] in character, not in facts.” A continuation of our discussion of Beanpole (2019) in the fall, this webinar will focus on the changing attitudes to historical accuracy in the making of period dramas and whether we can speak about the emergence of New Historical Cinema in Russia of the 2010s-2020s.
The film is available on Hulu or on Film Forum
Tatiana Mikhailova (Columbia), Elena Prokhorova (William & Mary), Sasha Prokhorov (William & Mary)
The interest in robots and androids in Russian film and television has come and gone since the second half of the 20th century, from the success of Planet of the Storm (1961) and The Adventures of Elektronik (1979) to near-oblivion in the 1990s. In the 2010s-2020s, with the series like Better Than Us (2018) and Project “Anna Nikolaevna” (2020), cyborgs, fembots, and androids returned to the Russian screen. While the interest in the topic may stem from the global success of the likes of Westworld (2016-) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017), these series offer a fresh way of commenting on Russian realities, touching upon the issues of gender, power, and corruption, and posing a broader question of what is compelling about the post-human as a theme in Russian television.
Better than Us is available on Netflix.
Project “Anna Nikolaevna” is available on YouTube.