Yaniya Mikhalina. In the Volga-Ural Sky (After Eisentsten. The capture of Kazan), collage 2023
The talk reflects on the Soviet-time cinematic heritage used and reframed in Yanyia Mikhalina’s exhibition Sisterless. How to make sense of these moving images today?
Soviet Union was established as a multinational federation. Developing under tightening ideological control and enjoying a growing outreach, cinema in the early Soviet years was the medium tasked with advancing new visual formulae for the multinational state. Films promoting the new regime were often made by the film studios based in the capital, speaking in the name of those they claimed to represent. They visualized the abstract categories of motherland, nationality, and patriotism, projecting them on the multitude of national communities across the country. The presentation highlights continuities and ruptures in representing spatial and national diversity on film. Starting from the cinematic heritage, I discuss the rhetorical and visual strategies of promoting new (supra)national loyalties, distancing from the colonial legacy as well as the long-term imperial continuities and power hierarchies embedded in the cinematic medium.
Free entrance and open for all!
Dr. Oksana Sarkisova is Research Fellow at Blinken OSA Archivum at Central European University, Director of Verzio International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, Budapest, and co-founder of Visual Studies Platform at CEU. Her fields of research are cultural history, memory and representation, film history, amateur photography, and visual studies. She authored Screening Soviet Nationalities: Kulturfilms from the Far North to Central Asia (2017), co-edited Past for the Eyes: East European Representations of Communism in Cinema and Museums after 1989 (2008), and has published in peer-reviewed journals and collective volumes on film history, nationality politics, contemporary Russian and Eastern European cinema, and amateur photography. She also served as Jury member at International Film Festivals in Nuremberg, Kiyv, Zagreb, Warsaw, Tbilisi, Linz, the Hague, and Venice.