Forum and intensive lectures at Nanjing University

"Russian film as a history of representation" /
URA Masaharu (Russian art and literature, University of Tokyo)

This lecture analyzes Russian movies from the perspective of the theory of cultural representation. Russian culture has since the Middle Ages been dominated by an extremely strong logocentrism. Therefore the cinematic art representing the visual culture of the 20th century has always been forced to confront this “logos”.
The history of Russian movies in the 20th century was nothing else than a struggle with representations: Eisenstein and Vertov, who escaped from the bonds of words by joining hands with the Russian Avantgarde, which was trying to nullify the effect of words, and who thus caused a revolution of cinematic language; the Russian movies of the early Stalinist era, which were vertically integrated into a cultural hierarchy which placed “literature” at the top; and finally Tarkovsky and Parajanov, who cause the disassembling of the logocentrism of socialist realism by visual pleasure.

References are marked by *
1) Melodramatic aspects in Russian silent movies.
*Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception.

2) The discovery of the montage: from Crechov to Eisenstein
*Denise J. Youngblood, Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918-1935.

3) The aggressive aspects of cinema: Eisenstein
*David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein.

5) From the 1920s to the 1930s: the “Horizontal” and the “Vertical”
*Richard Taylor and Derek Spring (eds.), Stalinism and Soviet Cinema.

6) The rediscovery of the “pleasure of the visual”: Tarkovsky and Parajanov
*Vida T. Johnson and Graham Petrie, The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue.

Japanese references
＊Iwamoto Kenji, Roshia avanguarudo no eiga to engeki (Suiseisha, 1998)
＊Oishi Masahiko, Tanaka Yo (ed.), Roshia avanguardo 3 kino eizo gengo no sozo, Kokushokankokai, 1994
＊Lyda and Jean Schnitzer, Martan (ed.), Kaiso no roshia avanguarudo
(translated by Iwamoto Kenji, Oishi Masahiko, Miyamoto Shun) Shinjidaisha, 1987