Bodrov's Prisoners of the Mountains

[Sylvia Swift]

there was a thread about this on slavcin-l (what used to be closely
watched frames online) a few months ago.  i crosspost with joan's
permission.  she will try to track down the source.  i didn't save any
other messages from the thread, so i don't know who "we" in dc are.
sylvia swift
madonna at socrates.berkeley.edu
-----

On Thu, 28 Jan 1999, Joan Neuberger wrote:

>    Here in D.C. we (a few of us) were particularly bothered by the
>"pseudo-Caucasian" language mix used in "Prisoner . . . " I guess the
>director figured that anything non-Russian goes with anything else
>non-Russian.


It seems to me that I read an interview with Bodrov (in Seanc maybe?) in
which he said that he intentionally mixed the languages  in order to
preclude conclusions about national specificity. In the same context he
complained that while many critics attacked him for mixing languages, no
one noticed that he also mixed time periods, dressing some characters
in nineteenth-century dress, again to preclude specificity -- his effort
to reach for universality and refer to issues of his own time--Chechnya.
Specious reasoning perhaps, but not based on ignorance of or disdain for
the non-Russian languages.

Joan
_________________________________________
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Joan Neuberger
Director
Center for Russian, E. European and Eurasian Studies
&
Associate Professor
Department of History
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712-1163
512-475-7219