Russian Film Symposium 2006

[Vladimir Padunov]

Russian Film Symposium 2006:
White Russian--Black Russian: Race and Ethnicity in Russian Cinema
http://www.rusfilm.pitt.edu

What is race?  What is ethnicity?  How was that line drawn differently 
under the 74 years of socialism and what are its consequences for 
present-day Russia?

The impulse for this year’s symposium, White Russian--Black Russian: Race 
and Ethnicity in Russian Cinema, is the explosion of racial and ethnic 
conflict in the Russian Federation since the Soviet collapse in 1991. 
Western media have so far concentrated on three aspects of this violence: 
the second Chechen war in the Caucasus; skinhead attacks on foreign 
tourists in St. Petersburg; and the growth of anti-Semitism, especially in 
Moscow.  The violence, however, is much more extensive and pervasive, 
extending to the murders of foreign students from South America in Voronezh 
and Rostov; the arson in the Moscow dormitory for African students; the 
constant “document checks” of swarthy people conducted by the police in all 
Russian cities; the campaign by the mass media in Russia (now firmly back 
under state control) to characterize all Chechens as terrorists, etc.  As 
much as the first post-Soviet decade can be characterized as a war by 
organized crime against emerging civil society, this second decade is 
marked by the state’s (both open and concealed) war against ethnic and 
racial minorities.

Not surprisingly, these conflicts have dominated Russian cultural 
production as well.  Earlier symposia, such as Arrogance & Envy (2003), 
examined narrative and visual conflict in the cinematic strategies of 
Russo-Soviet cultural producers (from Stalin’s era through Putin’s), 
vilifying Americans as the enemy, as “the other-out-there.”  This practice, 
however, was always accompanied by the vilification of “the other-in-here,” 
although the identity of this internal “other” shifted at historical 
moments: nobility and bourgeoisie (under Lenin); kulaks, NEP-men, 
saboteurs, “enemies of the people,” and suspect ethnic minorities (under 
Stalin); closet “Stalinists,” usually Georgians (under Khrushchev); 
Chechens (under El'tsin and Putin).

With the exception of the conditions of the Civil War (1918-21), the 
“other-in-here” has been marked as non-Russian--whether the non-Russian who 
is nationalist (Ukrainian, Transcaucasian, Balt, Central Asian, etc.) or 
the non-Russian who is biologically inferior (Gypsies, Ingush, Chukcha, 
Dagestanis, Kalmyks, Chechens, etc.).  Indeed, many of these groups are 
often referred to casually as “chernye zhopy” in Russian everyday speech, 
an obscene term best translated into Victorian English as “black behinds,” 
analogous to the infamous “n-word” in English.

White Russian--Black Russian: Race and Ethnicity in Russian Cinema examines 
this phenomenon in two fora: public screenings at the Melwood Screening 
Room of Pittsburgh Filmmakers, accompanied by brief introductions and 
public discussion; and a scholarly component at the University of 
Pittsburgh, consisting of research presentations, screenings, and debate. 
This year’s films will provide a survey of representational strategies in 
depicting ethnic and racial minorities in Soviet and Russian cinema, from 
the silent era--Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Heir of Ghengis Khan (1928) and 
Aleksandr Zarkhi’s and Iosif Kheifits’ My Motherland (1933)--through the 
Stalinist years--Mikhail Dubson’s The Border (1935), Grigorii Aleksandrov’s 
Circus (1936), and Vladimir Korsh-Sablin’s Seekers of Happiness (1936)--the 
Stagnation era and perestroika--Edmond Keosaian’s The Elusive Avengers 
(1966), Emil' Lotianu’s The Gypsy Camp Rolls into the Sky (1976), Aleksandr 
Mitta’s The Tale of How Tsar Peter Married off his Negro (1976), Aleksandr 
Askol'dov’s Commissar (1967; released 1987), Nikita Mikhalkov’s Close to 
Eden (1991)--to the present?Aleksei Balabanov’s Dead Man’s Bluff (2005), 
Pavel Lungin’s roots (2005), and Larisa Sadilova’s Needing a Nanny (2005).

The Russian Film Symposium is supported by the University of Pittsburgh, 
Pittsburgh Filmmakers, and the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable 
Trust Fund of The Pittsburgh Foundation.

_________________________________________
Vladimir Padunov
Associate Director, Film Studies Program
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
1433 Cathedral of Learning          voice: 1-412-624-5713
University of Pittsburgh               FAX: 1-412-624-9714
Pittsburgh, PA 15260                       padunov at pitt.edu

Russian Film Symposium        http://www.rusfilm.pitt.edu

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