The Collapse of the Soviet Century: Cinema's Finite Look into the Infinite

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Title:	The Collapse of the Soviet Century: Cinema's Finite Look into the Infinite
Authors:	Callow, James
Date:	2017-10-27
Issue Date:	2019-10-05 12:11:54 (UTC+8)
Abstract:	2017 is the centenary of the Soviet Revolution. It is also the speculative year in which Alexei German Jr.’s 2015 film, Under Electric Clouds, is set. German’s film, like good science fiction, reflects on the present and recent past. This paper connects German’s film to others from the former USSR that appeared in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, notably Kira Muratova’s The Asthenic Syndrome (1990), Artur Aristakisyan’s Palms (1994), and Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002). Linking these films is the withdrawal of vision into blindness, where ‘vision’ is presented in both senses: as plain sight and as teleology, that conceptual idea of the progress of history. The writing of history, howevercontentiously, offers the retrospective representation of past events. Cinema operates in the present tense, excepting historical recreation as a costume pageant which follows the re-writing of history as literature. Cinema of its time forms the artefacts of history, the manner of looking, or representing, at a moment in time. What these films demonstrate is the persistent obscuring of vision, where vision is torn away from the signifying criteria of language and politics, leaving only the persistence of looking. German’s film reiterates that continued withdrawal of vision amid the drastic reshaping of the former Soviet Bloc. As the iconography of the most teleological of political systems is gradually erased, its symbols nothing but fleeting, finite entities, German’s cinema maintains a relentless gaze into a future history that is both infinite and blind.
Appears in Collections:	[Department of English Language and Culture] Proceeding

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