Announcement: Russian Film Symposium 2012 at the University of Pittsburgh

[Alex Rudd]

I'm posting the message below for list member Vladimir Padunov, who is
unable to post it himself right now for technical reasons.  Should you
wish to respond directly to him, his e-mail address is
padunov at pitt.edu.

- Alex, list owner of SEELANGS

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Russian Film Symposium 14
Camp Cinema: Russian Style

The term “camp,” originating from the French verb se camper and
meaning “to flaunt,” has no equivalent in the Russian language, and
invites an area of research almost completely unknown to Russian film
scholars.  The major working task of the Russian Film Symposium at the
University of Pittsburgh this year is to conceptualize Soviet and
Russian camp cinema.

A stable definition of camp in western criticism is itself
problematic.  Susan Sontag’s seminal article, “Notes on Camp” (1964)
set off a barrage of objections, with many activists claiming that
Sontag took camp’s sexual transgressive nature, and unrightfully
turned it into a popularized aesthetic that featured frivolity, the
conflation of high and low cultures, and style over substance.
Political reclamations of camp have traced its history back to Oscar
Wilde and essentialized its expression as an effeminate, male
homosexual aesthetic.  Nevertheless, both sides would agree that camp
is a subject that craves attention: it is performative,
improvisational, and defined by stylized acts, regardless of its own
self-awareness or audience.  Camp cinema can be considered both a
product, as well as a way of queer reading by audiences, who celebrate
what is considered (by the mainstream) bad taste.  In adapting our own
working definition for Russo-Soviet cinema, the symposium participants
will consider all angles of this politicized debate over camp.

What use, then, is “camp” for Russian cinema?  Western discussions of
camp and its politics of identity often note the attempt of
distinction, a separation from bourgeois, normative, mainstream
culture.  Explicit representations of gender or sexual transgression
in Soviet cinema are almost absent, however, and the famous saying
proclaimed: “In the USSR there is no sex” (“В СССР секса нет”).
Homosexuality was declared illegal under the rule of Stalin in the
1930s until the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Although this law was
repealed in 1993, the Russian Federation has recently moved toward
similar acts of discrimination, with lawmakers in St. Petersburg
backed by the pro-Kremlin United Russia Party this November approving
a bill that would ban any public promotion of homosexuality.  Camp
sensibilities, inserted into the popular market of the Russian film
industry, can offer an alternative aesthetic to both the
social-normativity and hyper-masculinity of the Putin era.

Arguably, camp performances have existed throughout Russo-Soviet film
history, finding a place within both the heavily centralized state
film industry of the Soviet period to the privatized studios of
present-day Russia.  This year’s retrospective program will
investigate a variety of approaches to camp.  The Soviet style of the
past can become newly discovered camp treasures in The Amphibian Man
(1962) as well as Abram Room’s recently restored A Severe Young Man
(1936).  The pure stylized performances of Aleksandr Bashirov and
Renata Litvinova, “Russian camp icons” of art-house cinema, are on
full display in House under a Starry Sky (1991) and The Goddess
(2004).  Popular genre films Hello, I’m your Aunt (1975) and more
recently Feliks Mikhailov’s Jolly Fellows (2010) celebrate the
transgressive performances of drag queens.

A conceptualization of camp could also open new avenues to the
existing historiographies of Russo-Soviet cinema.  A camp reading of
Soviet film history would account for films such as Aleksandr
Medvedkin’s Happiness (1934) and Grigorii Aleksandrov’s Jolly Fellows
(1934), whose playfulness and frivolity were in stark contrast to the
ideologically laden socialist realist films of the 1930s.  How did
these camp commodities pass through the censored Soviet cinema
industry ambiguously, closeted, yet existing for public consumption by
those who recognized their aesthetic codes?  Likewise, while studies
of Russian culture in the 1990s almost solely focused on the darkness
of chernukha, Russian films also playfully celebrated the démodé, or
the historical trash of the Soviet era in films such as Sergei
Livnev’s Hammer and Sickle (1991) and Sergei Debizhev’s Two Captains
Two (1992).  Finally, camp products often engage the high culture of
imperial Russia’s and the Soviet Union’s past: the image of Russia’s
most prized poet, Aleksandr Pushkin, absurdly clashes with popular
culture of the modern present in both Iurii Mamin’s Sideburns (1990)
and Vladimir Mirzoev’s remake of Boris Godunov (2011).

What does a camp reading of Russian cinema say about its viewership,
from domestic audiences, film festival connoisseurs, to film studies
scholars abroad?  We invite you to come discuss the topic at the
fourteenth annual Russian Film Symposium, Camp Cinema: Russian Style,
which will be held on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh from
Monday 30 April through Saturday 4 May 2012, with evening screenings
at the Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ Melwood Screening Room.  This year the
Russian Film Symposium will take its daring performances to new
venues, with a screening of Slava Tsukerman’s Liquid Sky (1982) at the
Riverside Drive-in movie theater, with the director Tsukerman himself
introducing the film.

The Russian Film Symposium is supported by the University of
Pittsburgh: the Office of the Dean of the Kenneth P. Dietrich School
of Arts and Sciences, the University Center for International Studies,
the Center for Russian and East European Studies, the Humanities
Center, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, the Film
Studies Program, the Graduate Program for Cultural Studies, the
Graduate Russian Kino Club, the Graduate and Professional Student
Assembly, and a grant from the Hewlett Foundation.

Andrew Chapman

___________________________________________
Vladimir Padunov
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Associate Director, Film Studies Program
University of Pittsburgh
427 Cathedral of Learning
Pittsburgh, PA 15260

Phone: 412-624-5713                      FAX: 412-624-9714

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

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