Russian Film Symposium 2005: The Yellow House of Cinema

[Vladimir Padunov]

Russian Film Symposium 2005: The Yellow House of Cinema
University of Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh Filmmakers
2-7 May 2005
www.rusfilm.pitt.edu

What feast is in the Yellow House afoot,
And wherefore are the multitudes there thronging??
---Boris Pil'niak, Mahogany.

"Yellow house," a Russian colloquialism, means "insane asylum."  Russia's 
film union and its principal screening venue is Moscow's famous House of 
Cinema.  This year Pittsburgh's annual Russian Film Symposium invites you 
to visit the Yellow House of Cinema, a selection of Russia's newest and 
most interesting films.

"The Yellow House of Cinema" examines the themes, visual practices, and 
cultural politics in recent Russian cinema around issues of social 
psychosis, dementia, mania, folly, lunacy, aberration, and the absurd. 
This theme is a productive one for the present moment, and offers some 
striking insights into Russia's social identity over the centuries. 
Russia--the pre-1917 Russian Empire, the Soviet Empire, or the Russian 
Federation--has never had a coherent or consistent "national identity." 
Instead, from the Muscovite state of the mid-16th century through the 
present, Russia has borne an imperial identity, marked by the presence of a 
strong center that subsumed discrete ethnic identities--Ukrainian or 
Belorussian, Georgian or Armenian, Kazakh or Uzbek--as territories at its 
(often underdeveloped and occupied) periphery, where identity was never 
separated from "otherness."  This dilemma was brought to resolution neither 
with the Soviet Union's loss of its East European satellite states nor with 
its fragmentation in 1991 into fifteen Newly Independent States (NIS).  The 
history of the Russian Federation since 1991 continues to be marked by 
further internal fragmentation, discrete independence movements that have 
gripped outlying regions of the state.  The war in Chechnya is merely the 
most familiar example; less violent attempts at secession continue in 
Dagestan, Ingushetia, Tartarstan, Yakutia, and other regions.

Russia's identity crisis, then, is a dual one.  On the one hand, it is 
marked by the state's continued adherence to an imperial mentality 
predicated on the total exercise of economic and legislative control from 
the (imperial) political center, marked in recent months by the 
re-appropriation of the state's control over natural resource and 
technology industries, as well as the elimination of regional and 
gubernatorial elections and the on-going conflict in Chechnya.  On the 
other hand, this search is marked by a dislocation within social 
consciousness concerning the very definition of a "Russian-ness" 
irreducible (yet again) to a set of negatives: "not" European, "not" Asian, 
"not" Caucasian, "not" New Russians, "not" Jewish, etc.  The conflict 
between the two parts of this identity search have been recurrently 
represented in contemporary Russian culture as a kind of disorder within 
the social body of the Russian state, a disorder assigned for cinematic 
treatment in The Yellow House, the [in]sane asylum, a place of both refuge 
and detention.
_________________________________________
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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