Contemporary Russian Cinema: Symbols of a New Era 9781474407656

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Contemporary Russian Cinema

Contemporary Russian Cinema Symbols of a New Era

Vlad Strukov

To my parents, Maria and Viacheslav, for their unwavering support

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: www.edinburghuniversitypress.com © Vlad Strukov, 2016 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – ­Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in Monotype Ehrhardt by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 0764 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 0765 6 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0766 3 (epub) The right of Vlad Strukov to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

List of Figures vii Acknowledgements viii Note on Transliteration x Figures xi Introduction 1 Conceptualising the period 1 Overview of the contemporary Russian film industry and its institutions4 Critical review of scholarship on contemporary Russian film 10 Contextualising the present study 14 Theorising contemporary Russian cinema 19   1 Abstracted Subjectivity and Knowledge-Worlds: Aleksandr Sokurov’s Taurus (2001) 36   2 The Lacking Sense of Cinema: Aleksandr Proshkin’s The Miracle (2009) 54   3 Gatekeepers of (Non-)Knowledge: Aleksei Balabanov’s Morphine (2008) 72   4 Symbolic Folds and Flattened Discourse: Andrei Zviagintsev’s Elena (2010) 91   5 Non-Knowledge and the Symbolic Mode: Nikolai Khomeriki’s A Tale About Darkness (2009) 109   6 The World and the Event: Kirill Serebrennikov’s St George’s Day (2008) 127   7 A Plea for the Dead (Self): Renata Litvinova’s Goddess: How I Fell in Love (2004) 145   8 Body in Crisis and Posthumous Subjectivity: Igor’ Voloshin’s Nirvana (2008) 163

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  9 The Difficulty of Being Dead: Aleksandr Veledinskii’s Alive (2006) 181 10 Intentionality and Modelled Subjectivities: Aleksei Fedorchenko’s Silent Souls (2010) 199 11 Abandoned Being: Mikhail Kalatozishvili’s The Wild Field (2008) 217 12 Amplifications of Subjectivity: Aleksandr Zel’dovich’s The Target (2010) 236 Conclusions 253 Filmography 258 Bibliography 264 Index 281

Figures

Following page x  1  Aleksandr Sokurov, Taurus (2001)  2  Aleksandr Sokurov, Taurus (2001)  3  Aleksei Balabanov, Morphine (2008)  4  Andrei Zviagintsev, The Return (2003)  5  Andrei Zviagintsev, Elena (2010)  6  Andrei Zviagintsev, Elena (2010)  7  Andrei Zviagintsev, Elena (2010)  8  Aleksandr Veledinskii, Alive (2006)  9  Kirill Serebrennikov, St George’s Day (2008) 10  Kirill Serebrennikov, St George’s Day (2008) 11  Renata Litvinova, Goddess: How I Fell in Love (2004) 12  Renata Litvinova, Goddess: How I Fell in Love (2004) 13  Renata Litvinova, Goddess: How I Fell in Love (2004) 14  Igor’ Voloshin, Nirvana (2008) 15  Igor’ Voloshin, Nirvana (2008) 16  Aleksei Fedorchenko, Silent Souls (2010) 17  Aleksei Fedorchenko, Silent Souls (2010) 18  Aleksei Fedorchenko, Silent Souls (2010) 19  Mikhail Kalatozishvili, The Wild Field (2008) 20  Mikhail Kalatozishvili, The Wild Field (2008) 21  Aleksandr Zel’dovich, The Target (2010) 22  Aleksandr Zel’dovich, The Target (2010) 23  Aleksandr Zel’dovich, The Target (2010) 24  Aleksandr Zel’dovich, The Target (2010)

Acknowledgements

Grateful acknowledgement is due to my home institution, the University of Leeds, where the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, as well as the Dean’s Office of the Faculty of Arts, are the sections to which I am indebted for support and leave time during a critical stage in completing the manuscript. I would like to thank in particular several of my colleagues and friends at my home institution who have offered their kind advice and support over many years. They include Natalya Bogoslavskaya, Paul Cooke, Ingo Cornils, Stephanie Dennison, Helen Finch, Christopher Homewood, Claire Honess, Sarah Hudspith, Thea Pitman, Maxim Silverman and Stuart Taberner. This book has benefited from colleagues’ responses when sections of it were presented at the universities of Amsterdam, Bristol and Cambridge, the College of Fashion London, Freie Universität Berlin, Harvard University, the University of Helsinki, the University of Nottingham, Ohio State University (Columbus), South Federal University (Rostov-naDonu), St Petersburg University and University College London. I am extremely grateful to the colleagues who have read sections of this book, offering their feedback. They include Paul Cooke, Sarah Hudspith, Mark Lipovetsky, Thea Pitman, Elena Trubina and Vera Zvereva. I acknowledge their contribution in respective sections of the book. I feel deep gratitude to Julian Graffy who has contributed to this project by sharing his expertise in Russian film, reading the manuscript and offering his advice. His kindness and support earned him my heartfelt gratitude. I am thankful to Pedro Hernandez for his technical expertise, patience and resources. I am grateful to Victor Apryshchenko and Konstantin Topol’skov for letting me use their base in Barcelona to work on the book. I am also grateful to all those people whose names I do not know, but who tolerated the presence of my laptop and books in coffee shops in London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Budapest, Cadiz, Madrid, Moscow, Paris, Seville, Stockholm and St Petersburg.

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ac kno wle dge me nt s ix I am thankful to Ivan Vyrypaev and Aleksandr Shein for letting me use a still from their Euphoria (2006) as a cover image for this book. Many thanks to Alissa Timoshkina and Ol’ga Davydova for enabling my communication with the film director and producer. This image – and the film – has particular professional and personal resonance for me and I am very happy to include it here. I am grateful to the staff of Edinburgh University Press, particularly Gillian Leslie, Richard Strachan, Eddie Clark and Rebecca Mackenzie, and copy-editor Lyn Flight, for their kind advice and support when preparing the manuscript for publication.

Note on Transliteration

References to sources, titles and names in Cyrillic are transliterated using the Library of Congress system without diacritics. For reasons of consistency, the same system of transliteration has been applied to names that already have a Romanised version, for example, I used ‘Dostoevskii’ and ‘Tarkovskii’ and not the more familiar ‘Dostoevsky’ and ‘Tarkovsky’. Exception was made for words starting with ‘ie’, hence Yeltsin and not Ieltsin, and Yekaterinburg and not Iekaterinburg. Similarly, in common words and names, apostrophe showing the soft consonant was dropped, hence Yeltsin and not Yel’tsin, and Gogol and not Gogol’. However, the names of scholars who publicly use a Romanised form of their names are presented using their own version, for example, Lipovetsky and not Lipovetskii. In the text, transliterations of the Russian original appear in square brackets, following the translation into English, for example, ‘the so-called “vertical of power” [vertikal’ vlasti]’. brackets have been used to indicate additions to quoted material. Original titles, in the transliterated form, of all the films cited in the text are provided in the filmography section of the book.

1  Aleksandr Sokurov, Taurus (2001)

2  Aleksandr Sokurov, Taurus (2001)

3  Aleksei Balabanov, Morphine (2008)

4  Andrei Zviagintsev, The Return (2003)

5  Andrei Zviagintsev, Elena (2010)

6  Andrei Zviagintsev, Elena (2010)

7  Andrei Zviagintsev, Elena (2010)

8  Aleksandr Veledinskii, Alive (2006)

9  Kirill Serebrennikov, St George’s Day (2008)

10  Kirill Serebrennikov, St George’s Day (2008)

11  Renata Litvinova, Goddess: How I Fell in Love (2004)

12  Renata Litvinova, Goddess: How I Fell in Love (2004)

13  Renata Litvinova, Goddess: How I Fell in Love (2004)

14  Igor’ Voloshin, Nirvana (2008)

15  Igor’ Voloshin, Nirvana (2008)

16  Aleksei Fedorchenko, Silent Souls (2010)

17  Aleksei Fedorchenko, Silent Souls (2010)

18  Aleksei Fedorchenko, Silent Souls (2010)

19  Mikhail Kalatozishvili, The Wild Field (2008)

20  Mikhail Kalatozishvili, The Wild Field (2008)

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21  Aleksandr Zel’dovich, The Target (2010)

22  Aleksandr Zel’dovich, The Target (2010)

23  Aleksandr Zel’dovich, The Target (2010)

24  Aleksandr Zel’dovich, The Target (2010)

Introduction

Conceptualising the Period: the Logic of Intemporality The period under analysis – ­the Putin era – ­started somewhat unexpectedly on 31 December 1999 when Boris Yeltsin, the first President of the Russian Federation, without prior notice, in a televised speech on New Year’s Eve, announced his resignation and appointed Vladimir Putin as his replacement. The period finished – i­n a more deliberate fashion – i­n December 2011 when, following elections to the Russian Parliament, a process which many Russian observers found flawed, protests erupted in Bolotnaia Square in Moscow and in other cities. The ensuing events – ­the re-election of Putin as president in March 2012, the Sochi Olympics in February 2014 and the annexation of Crimea in March 2014 – ­designate a new historical period for Russia and the Western world. The enacted succession of power from Yeltsin to Putin transformed the perception of recent history and, generally, of time, which suddenly emerged as something serendipitous, esoteric and lacking popular agency – ­something which, ten years later, the protestors in Bolotnaia Square wished to challenge. One of the ideological symbols of the decade had been the so-called ‘vertical of power’ [vertikal’ vlasti],1 or Putin’s attempt to exercise greater political and administrative control over the regions by disbanding local government elections. The federal government wished to use the ‘vertical of power’ as a metaphor for the country’s stability and as a projection of new, upward aspirations. However, the economic and financial crises of 2009 and 2014 completely invalidated such skyward trajectories. The ‘reversal’, this arcane zigzag, became, in my view, a marker of a completely new development.2 The first decade of the century can be characterised as a distinct period at the micro-level. For example, the Russian segment of the internet, the Runet, emerged as a new economic tool, and as a social and cultural practice, proclaiming the arrival of the post-industrial era in all

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its ­socioeconomic and cultural manifestations. In the cultural arena, the Putin era marked the victory of the society of spectacle when, to borrow from Viktor Pelevin’s novel Empire V (2006), ‘glamour and discourse’ dominated social and political life as well as cultural production. On the one hand, digitally enabled networks contributed to the promulgation of glamour as a government-sponsored ideology (Goscilo and Strukov 2010);3 on the other hand, the Runet became the locus of critical discussion and alternative cultural production, no longer constrained by geographical and political borders. As one of the hallmarks of the Putin era, the Runet encapsulated the mysterious drive for both political freedom and control, and provided the technological basis for social construction and cultural production. Numerous examples of change, both progressive and regressive, can be found at the micro-level; however, I propose thinking of the Putin era at the macro-level. In the historical perspective, the Putin era is the first period in Russian history when the country’s economy and social life is dominated by private capital, with Russia participating not only in global trade, but also in Western financial institutions such as investment banks. I find demarcations of the new geopolitical order in the history of Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). A Working Party was established in June 1993 as soon as the Russian Federation emerged as an independent power (coincidentally at exactly the same time, in Ukraine, the Crimean Constitution was adopted, granting the peninsula greater autonomy; the Constitution was later revoked by the Ukrainian government). On 22 August 2012, the WTO welcomed Russia as its 156th member, and in March 2014, following the ‘popular’ vote in Crimea, the first round of economic sanctions was imposed on Russian officials and banks. Since 2014, Western politicians and the Russian opposition have been forthright in their calls for regime change in Russia; however, no alternative vision for the country has yet been provided. In the popular Western imagination Russia maintains its status as the major exporter of two intertwined notions – ­‘revolution’ and ‘the society of control’ – w ­ hich it inherited, arguably through the medium of film, from its political predecessors. The French post-Marxist philosopher Alain Badiou starts his seminal work The Century (first published in French in 2005 and in English in 2007) with the assertion that the twentieth century was the Soviet century: ‘the century begins with the war of 1914–18 (a war that includes the revolution of October 1917) and comes to a close with the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War’ (2007b: 1). He goes on to distinguish between: (a) the totalitarian century (beginning with Lenin in 1917, or possibly with Robespierre in 1793, till Mao Tsetung’s death in 1976);

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intr o duc t io n 3 (b) the Soviet century; and (c) the liberal century (1970s till the present moment or till the 2008 crisis). The last is the shortest century, ‘the rump’ century, which expresses ‘the victory of the economy, in all senses of the term: the victory of Capital, economizing on the unreasonable passions of thought’ (Badiou 2007b: 3). Badiou does not supply the exact parameters of the Soviet century; however, by proxy he includes contemporary Russia in his ‘liberal century’. I argue that the Soviet century does not end in 1991 with the dissolution of the USSR, but, instead, in 1998 with the financial crisis and with Putin being appointed as prime minister exactly a year later. Henceforth, the Putin era is the first decade of the Russian century proper. This historical demarcation enables me to overcome the pitfalls of ‘transitology’, the study of the process of change from one political regime to another, mainly from authoritarian regimes to democratic ones. Over-represented in political science, economics, and international and comparative law, transitology over-emphasises elite attitudes and institutional frameworks and so far has failed to produce testable hypotheses (e.g., Rustow 1970; Stiglitz 1999). Unlike transitologists, Badiou is preoccupied with periods of ‘excitement and rupture’ (2007b: 6). In fact, Badiou uses Russian material to account for how ‘the century relates to itself’. He provides an extended analysis of Osip Mandelstam’s poem The Age (1922) and notes that: The question of the face-to-face is the heroic question of the century. Can one stand firmly in the face of historical time? . . . The problem of the poem, which is also the problem of the century, lies in the link between vitalism and voluntarism, between the evidence of time’s bestial power and the heroic norm of the face-to-face. (2007b: 15)

Badiou uses Russian material to formulate the main concerns of his philosophical enquiry: what is the relation of the subject to itself, that is, the dynamics of ‘face-to-face’; what is the fantasy of the ideal finality; how can one think about history in terms of negative discontinuity; is closure possible in relation to an undetermined future? By grounding his thinking in Mandelstam’s poem, Badiou emerges as a thinker of intemporality, discontinuity and rupture, whereby Russia provides him with an example of ‘a break far more radical than elsewhere’ (2007b: 13), enabling me to suggest that, at both the micro- and macro-levels, the Putin era is a moment of rupture, discontinuous ontology and zigzagged variation, and not an instance of transition or restoration.

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Overview of the Contemporary Russian Film Industry and its Institutions: a Cause for a New Wave? Similarly to the zigzagged developments in Russian social and political life, the evolution of the Russian cinema industry since the dissolution of the USSR can be visualised as a double curve. In the USSR film production peaked in the 1980s with an average of 150 films per annum. In 1996, production figures dropped to thirty-four full-length feature films. As Birgit Beumers (1999) and Nancy Condee (2009) point out in their extremely useful surveys of the Soviet and Russian film industries, finishing in 1999 and 2005, respectively, in the early 1980s an average film had an attendance of 40 million viewers, whereas in 1995 even the most successful film barely drew an audience of 300,000. I argue that the reasons for this rapid decline were multiple, and included: (a) the increasing availability of television sets and the expansion of programming for television; (b) the transfer of the political debate from the cinema screen to the television screen during Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika; (c) the hypercentralisation of film production which hindered innovation; (d) contradictory policies introduced by Yeltsin’s government; (e) the proliferation of video-recording equipment and later of digital networked technologies resulting in widespread piracy; (f) the power of the black market whereby private companies syphoned off money earmarked for film production; and (g) the growing interest of audiences in foreign films, especially in genres such as horror and film noir, which during the Soviet period had been labelled as denigrating and bourgeois and were banned from screening. Condee contends that the financial crisis of 1998 destroyed everything that had been left of the film industry: ‘In the waning years of the decade only the confirmed optimist would claim reasons to be encouraged by the contemporary state of the film industry’ (2009: 74). The crisis of 1998 and the ensuing near-death of the film industry signified the end of the Soviet era of film-making and start of something entirely new. The system failures that brought down the film industry in the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods were responsible for its rebirth and metamorphosis in the Putin era, leading to the success of Andrei Zviagintsev’s The Return at the Venice Film Festival in 2003, which is seen by many as a hallmark for contemporary Russian cinema. In the early Putin era, in the absence of sufficient government funding, television became the main source of financing for the film industry and its main channel of official distribution. As a more dynamic and cost-effective medium, television was able to re-structure fast in the post-crisis period. In the 1990s, television programming depended on the import of Western and South

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intr o duc t io n 5 American series (MacFadyen 2008); then, as audience tastes developed and the rouble crashed, television producers were compelled to invest in domestic production. For many film directors, television was an arena where they could obtain employment and receive recognition. In fact, both Zviagintsev and Timur Bekmambetov, a Kazakhstan-born, Russian film-maker with a successful career both in Moscow and Hollywood, had worked for television: the former directed a few episodes of The Black Room (2000) television series, whilst the latter made his name as the director of the Bank Imperial advertisements. In the pre-crisis period, television took on the leading role in the country’s public debate. Gorbachev’s policy of ‘glasnost’ [openness, transparency] translated into live-on-air programmes which critically investigated the Soviet past and contemporary life. By the end of the 1990s, television had emerged as the main arena of confrontation among newly created oligarchs such as Vladimir Gusinskii and Boris Berezovskii who owned their own television channels – ­NTV and ORT, respectively – ­and used them to influence Russian politics. The televised spectacle of the 1996 presidential elections, whereby public opinion was manipulated in favour of Yeltsin in spite of his near-zero approval ratings (Clem and Craumer 1996), reminded everyone, including the government, of the power of this medium. After his inauguration as president, Putin attempted to reshape Russian television fundamentally: some channels closed down and others changed hands until the government started to control – ­directly or indirectly – t­he major Russian networks. As a result, Russian television, along with the opposition, was politically neutered whilst critical attention diverted to film. In the 2000s, Russian directors produced the most critical accounts of Putin’s Russia, including shocking filmic interrogations such as Aleksei Balabanov’s Cargo 200 and Boris Khlebnikov’s A Long Happy Life. In the perestroika period the government attempted to deregulate the hyper-centralised film industry by repealing censorship laws and diminishing control over programming. Soon after the dissolution of the USSR and the start of the privatisation campaign, many an entrepreneur profiteered from the rampant sale of state-owned assets such as film equipment, studios and film stock. By the mid-1990s, it was common for a private company to own a film business, a bank and a spaghetti factory, which usually meant that they used their film studio not to make ‘Spaghetti Westerns’ but to launder money. If in the Soviet period the film industry suffered aesthetically from state control, in the post-Soviet period it was torn apart financially by private entrepreneurs. The government belatedly responded to the crisis by injecting some cash to support film production,

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but most of the money was stolen in the highly criminalised atmosphere of the 1990s. Russia’s Federal default in 1998 put the final nail into the coffin of the film industry. With the arrival of the Putin era in 2000, the new super-rich realised the financial potential of the domestic market: by investing in state-of-theart multiplexes and marketing film-going as a glamorous pastime, they managed to lure the young and the affluent back to the cinemas. In the early 2000s, cinemas in large cities were again bustling with life; however, they were more like leisure centres where one could go shopping, go bowling, enjoy a cocktail and watch the most recent Hollywood film – ­all new glamorous activities for the Russian economic elite. This new hybrid form of film entertainment was an outcome of the contradictory policies of the Yeltsin period and the dominant role of private capital, which was responsible for the near-death and rebirth of the film industry. Condee points out that by 2003 the film crisis was over; one such indicator was that Sony Pictures and Disney Production began building film factories on the outskirts of Moscow and St Petersburg (2009: 83). In the Putin era, the government attempted to regulate this burgeoning entertainment industry and make a return on its financial backing of film production by introducing new regulation and streamlining the system through which it awarded production contracts to film companies. If in the beginning the government was clearly motivated by financial concerns, since 2010 it has attempted to utilise the film industry to promote its own political agenda. As Norris (2012) notes, the government prioritised one segment of the market which was responsible for the production of ‘patriotic blockbusters’ and nostalgia-driven romantic comedies. Since the 2013 political crisis in Ukraine, under the pretence of protecting the interests of different social groups, the Putin government has attempted to exercise more political control over the film industry in an increasingly conservative environment. It has introduced new legislation banning the use of profanities in films, a law which was eventually softened, and attempted to interfere with film distribution schedules, a move directed not only at Russian film-makers, but also at Hollywood and other film industries. The contradictions in the current film legislation hint at the government’s inability to find common ground with cultural producers and different sections of the public. The government wishes to appease more conservative circles, but is wary of the liberal ones. In 2013–14, by staging a heated debate about the film industry and representations of Russia on screen, for example, in Zviagintsev’s Leviathan (2014) which was nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars, the government aimed to distract society from the pressing problems in the economy and financial sector. The persistent

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intr o duc t io n 7 public debate around Leviathan demonstrates tensions among Russian ruling elites. It also hints at the failure of the Russian state – i­n spite of all the patriotic bravura – t­o consolidate the country at a time of crisis. The government’s imperative to promote a positive self-image is not an attempt to censor directly, but an unambiguous invitation to self-censorship. Can the government block access to, or reduce the supply of, Russian and foreign-made films? This is highly unlikely, since the Russian film industry is privately owned and also because films circulate freely on the internet.4 It is not an exaggeration to suggest that many Russians view free downloads from the internet as their human right. On the one hand, being such a widespread phenomenon, piracy contributed to the near-death of cinema in the 1990s; on the other hand, especially in the Putin era, it emerged as a powerful tool to combat simultaneously both impinging government regulation and Hollywood dominance. The internet remains the main arena where Russian films, especially art-house films, can be viewed; some directors circumvent distribution frameworks by organising their film premiers online; for example, Eduard Chasovitin’s Khôra (2011) was first shown on Russian Torrents.5 In 2014–15, Zviagintsev’s producers utilised ‘unsanctioned leaks’ of Leviathan ahead of the film’s release in cinemas as a way of generating an unprecedented interest in Russian film among the public. The volatile period of the 1990s and the more prosperous Putin era contributed to the rise of new players in the industry. The film producer emerged as an entirely new occupation, with some producers exercising tremendous power over film production and distribution.6 Having a background in film and working primarily in television, producers such as Dmitrii Lesnevskii and Aleksandr Rodnianskii exemplify this tendency. The former – ­the owner of a television channel and associated film studio – ­catapulted Zviagintsev to international fame by promoting his first feature The Return. The latter was responsible for a number of important films, such as Zviagintsev’s Elena, Bondarchuk’s Stalingrad (2013) and Inhabited Island (2009), Aleksandr Mindadze’s Innocent Sunday (2011), Oksana Bychkova’s Piter FM (2006), and Pavel Chukhrai’s A Chauffeur for Vera (2004). Another important producer, based in St Petersburg, is Sergei Sel’ianov. Under his guidance the following films were made: Avdot’ia Smirnova’s Kokoko (2012); Balabanov’s The Stoker (2010), Morphine (2008), Cargo 200 (2007) and It Does not Hurt (2006); Igor’ Voloshin’s Nirvana (2008); Aleksandr Rogozhkin’s Transit (2006) and The Cuckoo (2002); and Filipp Iankovskii’s The Swordbearer (2006). This indicative list reveals that the most successful Russian films were produced with the assistance of non-state actors whilst being co-funded

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by the government through the Ministry of Culture, and that Russian producers collaborate on both art-house and blockbuster films, hence film-makers have to operate in a highly competitive environment where the rules of the market often dictate the rules of the game. As a result of these transformations in the industry, a new term denoting Russian films has emerged. By labelling his productions ‘unconventional films’ [neformatnye fil’my] (Beiker 2009), Nikolai Khomeriki shies away from the perceived elitism of art-house cinema. He considers his films neither experimental nor avant-garde since they do not challenge film genres or other types of aesthetic. Rather ‘unconventional films’ defy established conventions of taste and distribution preferences. If some may view art-house films as films that are not for everyone, ‘unconventional films’ are perhaps not for everyone who goes to Russian multiplexes and expects to see a dazzling, loud cinematic spectacle, hence, whilst having a limited release, these films are aimed aesthetically at the majority. Being in opposition to Hollywood and the political dictates of the Russian government is a huge challenge for Russian film-makers, with many of them focusing on small-scale, intimate productions. In the 2000s, this type of cinema was labelled the ‘new quiet cinema’ [novye tikhie]. Condee defines it as ‘laconic, visually-oriented film’ (2012), and also as a slow-paced style which ‘withholds judgment and conventional worldly values in favor of observation, regard, and attention to minute-by-minute perception’ (2014). The following extract from a KinoKultura review summarises the current debates about this type of cinema: The rising generation of Russian filmmakers – ­or ‘The New Quiet Ones’ (Novye tikhie) . . . has not connected with Russian moviegoers on a number of fronts. Although directors of this inchoate Russian ‘New Wave’ (e.g., Boris Khlebnikov, Aleksei Popogrebskii, Kirill Serebrennikov, and Vasilii Sigarev, as well as Bykov) exhibit varying cinematic styles and worldviews . . . their films characterized by a common ‘depressing nature’ . . . Daniil Dondurei contended that the films of the new guard exhibit a distrust of government institutions, particularly of the police. Khlebnikov, associated with the ‘New Wave’, argued that directors have not been aggressive enough in their cinematic confrontations with authority and, therefore, their films have not packed the necessary social wallop. Film critic Zara Abdullaeva dismissed the charge of depressiveness, instead criticizing the films for their artistic shortcomings, and complimenting Romanian New Wave directors for their success in crafting the very sort of compelling, self-reflexive, socially-oriented films she asserted the Russians have failed to generate. (McVey 2013)

The discussion suggests that whilst there must be a debate about a new Russian wave, such a wave has not been consolidated or recognised as a cultural institution and/or style, but instead exists as a sociocultural posi-

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intr o duc t io n 9 tion exhibited on screen.7 It is significant that this new cultural orientation emanates from a small number of studios, namely, Koktebel, REN-Film, STV and a few others. ‘The new quiet ones’ are a product of aesthetic innovation and an outcome of transformations in the film industry and the rise of new cultural entrepreneurs. Here I fully agree with Doru Pop, who, writing about the Romanian new wave (2014), maintains that, unlike the French new wave cinema or the Italian neorealism, the movement is not a national phenomenon and that ‘the films made by the new generation of film-makers in Romania were early on characterized by their international appreciation, and almost all the new movies representing this new generation of cinema-makers were screened for their first time abroad’ (Pop 2014: 7). However, whereas Pop does identify a common cinematic grammar in contemporary Romanian cinema – ­the mise-en-scène, types of lenses, the same actors, and a small number of topics and motifs (2014: 34)8 – ­such a common visual language cannot be found in contemporary Russian cinema.9 In fact, this study confirms there are enormous differences among the directors even when they consider similar subjects such as death, and even whilst working with the same actors or scriptwriters. Hence, the similarity is of a different nature, revealing itself not only in the modes of presentation, but also in the modes of thinking about the contemporary moment, which I aim to examine. As I show below, these have origins both in the experience of the radical social and political change and in the context of cultural continuity. Similarly, contributors to the volume on new Iranian cinema edited by A. A. Seyed-Gohrab and K. Talattof (2013)10 speak about contemporary cinema in Iran as a product of historical development, tracing its origins to the 1896 documentary produced by Russikhȃ n, an Anglo-Russian man living in Iran. In their study Iranian cinema emerges not as an outcome of a consolidated effort to produce a new cinematic language, but rather as a result of the change in perception, whereby Iranian film has been included in the Western cinematic discourse. Thus, the concept of the (new) wave partly defines a new cinematic phenomenon and partly refers to the changes in the perception of a different cultural tradition. In fact, Pop asserts that the Romanian new wave was, indeed, constructed externally, that is, outside the national framework of production and consumption. The Russian case is again different insofar as, whilst being drawn into the orbit of the global cinematic world, Russian film-makers maintain a clear focus on the domestic audiences. Moreover, high-profile international collaborations such as Bodrov’s Mongol,11 and the high visibility of Russian film-makers in the West, for example, Bekmambetov’s career in Hollywood, suggest that Russian cinema exists beyond the boundaries

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of the Federation as a worldwide contiguous space of Russian culture. Therefore, the comparison with the Romanian new wave or the Iranian new wave reveals not similarities in the aesthetic, function or structure of these movements, but the gaps in the knowledge in mainstream criticism and film theory about contemporary Russian cinema.

Critical Review of Scholarship on Contemporary Russian Film To date, there is no book-length study of contemporary Russian cinema (2000–present). The period receives some attention in books that take an historical approach to the study of Soviet and Russian cinema. Peter Rollberg’s Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Cinema (2009) and Beumers’ Directory of World Cinema: Russia (2011) introduce the reader to some key film-makers of the period and provide brief analyses of a handful of films. Beumers’ A History of Russian Cinema (2008) supplies a useful framework for historical conceptualisation of the transition from Soviet to Russian cinema. Kirill Razlogov’s Screen Culture: From Cinema to the Internet (2011) situates Russian film in relation to other screen-based forms of art, focusing on the process of mediation and re-mediation among different types of the moving image. Elena Stishova’s Russian Cinema in Search of Reality: The Eyewitness Testimony (2013) consists of film reviews and essays published between 1995 and 2011. The book combines critical analysis of films, examination of the relationship between the film industry and film festivals, and personal recollections, providing a reflective documentation of the post-Soviet period. Film as an important form of cultural production features in a number of publications that belong to the fields of Area and Cultural Studies. Scholars in this category are preoccupied with the notion of ‘Russianness’, Russian national and (post-)imperial identity and the relationship of Russia to its numerous others. For example, contributors to Mark Bassin’s and Catriona Kelly’s volume Soviet and Post-Soviet Identities (2012) reflect on the role of film in articulating the transition from Soviet to Russian cultural discourse. A number of publications view Russian cinema as a political project and they examine films from a particular ideological standpoint. Yana Hashamova’s Pride and Panic: Russian Imagination of the West in Post-Soviet Film (2007), and contributors to Russia and its Other(s) on Film: Screening Intercultural Dialogue (edited by Stephen Hutchings 2008), Postcommunist Film: Russia, Eastern Europe and World Culture: Moving Images of Postcommunism (edited by Lars Kristensen 2012), Iconic Turns: Nation and Religion in Eastern European Cinema since 1989

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intr o duc t io n 11 (edited by Liliia Berezhnaya and Christian Schmitt 2013), and Insiders and Outsiders in Russian Cinema (edited by Stephen M. Norris and Zara Torlone 2008), examine how films in the Russian language are utilised to produce the notion of the ‘Other’, which is conceived in ethnic, national, ideological and cultural terms. Condee’s The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema (2009) (The Imperial Trace hereafter) interrogates representations of the (post-)imperial legacy and constructions of (national) identity, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, provides an in-depth analysis of films made by six directors whose work spans the late Soviet, post-Soviet and Russian periods. The (post-)imperial lens enables Condee to survey and query the structure of the Russian empire both as a political project and as an area of cultural production. Other publications in the field of Area and Cultural Studies take a thematic approach to Soviet and Russian film. Denise Youngblood (2007) surveys pre-revolutionary, Soviet and post-Soviet films that portray war, ending her study with an analysis of recent films about the war in Chechnya. Natalia Bratova (2013) appraises films about St Petersburg as a site of specific cultural imagination. Contributors to Cinepaternity: Fathers and Sons in Soviet and Post-Soviet Film (edited by Helena Goscilo and Yana Hashamova 2010), investigate the father–son dynamic in postStalinist Soviet cinema and its Russian successor. They analyse patterns of identification, disavowal and displacement in films by predominantly Soviet directors such as Marlen Khutsiev, Vladimir Motyl’ and Andrei Tarkovskii. Several chapters focus on contemporary films by Aleksandr Sokurov, Balabanov, Valerii Todorovskii, Bekmambetov, Zviagintsev and Aleksei Popogrebskii, which redefine masculinity in a shifting political landscape. Stephen M. Norris’ Blockbuster History in the New Russia: Movies, Memory, and Patriotism (2012) brings the national and (post-) imperial discourses together. On one level, he examines a thematic strand – ­patriotism – ­in contemporary Russian cinema. On another, he interrogates the discourse about Russian national identity and the role of the state in promoting patriotism in the post-imperial, neonationalist context. Finally, he focuses on popular, mass-market cinema with its specific political and commercial agenda, and he puts forward the concept of the genre of patriotic cinema. Arguably, in its remit, apparatus and methodology, Norris’ book is first and foremost an important history of Russian patriotic sentiment with all its complex political and ideological connotations, but not actually a study of film as a medium or cultural institution. Whilst ideological discourse prevails in existing literature, the other dominant approach to Russian cinema is that of auteur cinema. Two contemporary film-makers – ­Kira Muratova and Sokurov – ­have received

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the majority of scholarly attention (for the former, see Abdullaeva 2008; Iampolski 2008; and for the latter, Arnaud 2005; Dietsch 2005; Arkus 2006; Beumers and Condee 2011; Szaniawski 2014; as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters). Condee’s The Imperial Trace belongs to this second strand insofar as it conceptualises the (post-)imperial discourse from the perspective of six individual directors, whereby each chapter of the book provides a hermeneutic reading of a director’s oeuvre. In spite of her focus on individual directors, Condee breaks away from the ‘Tarkovskii obsession’: that is, an imperative to construct a single Tarkovskii-inspired figure that would represent Russian cinema and enable the (often repetitive) discussion of repressive yet strangely enabling political culture. The ‘Tarkovskii obsession’ is informed by the concerns of the Western film market and academia.12 The former carefully protects the already saturated film market. The latter privileges the personality based approach because it perpetuates the ideologically framed discourse of the Romantic genius, the martyr and the dissident. A striking exception to this scholarly paradigm of Russian auteur/dissident cinema is Beumers’ book on Nikita Mikhalkov (2004b), a director who, from the very outset, has been bestowed with state privileges, benefited from Russia’s transition to capitalism and, most recently, through his ‘patriotic’ activities and support of the Kremlin, has participated in the redistribution of financial and cultural capital available to film-makers.13 To date, Western audiences and readership are largely familiar with Russian directors such as Zviagintsev and Popogrebskii who have been successful at international film festivals, or whose work has been ‘validated’ in professional circles. Their films stimulate the public’s interest in Russian auteur cinema, which, in Russia, aspiring directors often interpret as the Western demand for a particular style of cinema, thus completing the auteur circuit of intercultural exchange. Cultural institutions such as Academia Rossica’s London-based Russian film festival and the Pittsburgh Film Symposium have popularised contemporary Russian cinema by organising regular screenings.14 However, they continue to appeal to niche audiences of Russian-language speakers and Russian film admirers. In the Putin era, the success of one particular film-maker has undermined the established canon and circuit of Russian auteur cinema. Bekmambetov released two films, based on popular novels by Sergei Luk’ianenko,15 Night Watch (2004) and Day Watch (2006). The films tell a story about warring factions of light and dark forces, with dark forces roaming the streets of contemporary Moscow as vampires. The films have made Bekmambetov the most commercially successful Russian director

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intr o duc t io n 13 of the twenty-first century. They were purchased by Fox Searchlight for international release, whilst Universal Pictures invited Bekmambetov to direct Wanted (2008), a crime and fantasy film based on a comic story by Mark Millar, and starring James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman. Bekmambetov continues to work both in Hollywood and Moscow, which makes his transnational success unprecedented. Bekmambetov’s story challenges existing preconceptions about Russian cinema inasmuch as it introduces the public to commercial and arguably ideologically disengaged Russian cinema. However, critics would argue that, in spite of their international success, in the English-speaking West, Bekmambetov’s films belong to the niche genre of ‘World Cinema’ and so are inescapably framed as auteur cinema. Finally, Bekmambetov’s case illustrates the transnational domain of contemporary Russian cinema; born a Kazakh, educated in Russia, and working in the United States and the Russian Federation, Bekmambetov transcends the perceived national boundaries of Russian culture, in general, and Russian cinema, in particular. While film as a medium and art form continues to gain interest and respect in Russia, the critical and especially scholarly discourse about cinema remains limited. For instance, unlike in the West, Film Studies is not a common academic discipline. With a few notable exceptions, such as the University of St Petersburg and the Higher School of Economics (Moscow), universities do not normally offer degree programmes in Film Studies. At the same time, students enrol in institutions that provide specialised training in film, television, animation and other screenbased arts. The most prestigious institutions are the St Petersburg State Institute of Film and Television, the Moscow State Institute of Arts and Culture, the Film School of the Sverdlovsk Film Studios (Yekaterinburg), and, of course, the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK, Moscow). The last, along with the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and the American Film Institute, competes for the title of the oldest film school in the world. As a result of the existing structures of knowledge, research on film often takes the form of film criticism and can be found in specialised journals such as Seans and The Art of Cinema [Iskusstvo kino], as well as in the more popular journals such as Afisha, Ogonek and others. Many prominent film scholars, such as Anton Dolin, Evgenii Margolit, Andrei Plakhov, Elena Stishova, Nina Tsyrkun and others, publish their work in the form of film reviews and interviews with film directors. The convergence of popular media and scholarly research enables the production of unorthodox histories of Russian cinema. One such alternative interpretation of recent cinema is

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the Afisha special issue of January 2014, listing the 100 most important Russian films made between 1992 and 2013 (issue 24: 360). Labelled as ‘the imprint of the collective unconsciousness’ [slepok kollektivnogo bessoznatel’nogo], the Afisha history includes short film synopses, film stills and interviews with film-makers. The list comprises popular films such as Pavel Lungin’s The Island (2006), Valerii Todorovskii’s The Hipsters (2008) and Nikolai Lebedev’s Legend Number 17 (2013), and more niche films such as Sergei Loban’s Dust (2005), Vasilii Sigarev’s Wolfy (2009) and Aleksei Popogrebskii’s How I Ended This Summer (2010). The Afisha history brings together popular and authoritative views on Russian film and functions as a creditable guide for the journal’s sophisticated readership. The Afisha history and Stishova’s Russian Cinema in Search of Reality share a common concern: they document the cinematographic process by focusing on the filmic text as the primary locus of cinematic production and consumption.16 Sociology of Russian cinema, including audience studies, is still an undeveloped field of inquiry; however, some work is being done in this direction in the Higher School of Economics and other universities. Whilst Russian-language studies of contemporary Russian cinema provide us with a lot of factual data and a myriad of brilliant ideas, what they lack is perhaps consistent theorisation of film as an aesthetic form and of cinema as a cultural institution.

Contextualising the Present Study: Scope, Objectives and Methods This book aims to speak at once to two types of audience, namely, scholars of Russian culture and scholars of film, aiming to break the existing methodological and disciplinary deadlock. In its scope and approach, it is different from existing publications on contemporary Russian cinema. It differs from the historical paradigm (Beumers 2008, 2011; Rollberg 2009; Stishova 2013) insofar as its focus is on films released after 2000 and provides a non-chronological analysis of film material. It diverges from the psychoanalytical paradigm which treats post-Soviet cinema of the 1990s as a deviation from the societal norm and ‘adolescent impulses’, that is, matching the stages of childhood, adulthood and maturity (Hashamova 2007: 98). Instead, I analyse films as the enunciation of a specific subjectivity which is not derived from psychoanalytical theory, but from the philosophical tradition. Most importantly, this study breaks away from the patterns and concerns of Area and Cultural Studies with their preoccupation with the issues of power, nationhood, imperial disintegration, patriotism and identity construction (Condee 2009; Goscilo

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intr o duc t io n 15 and Hashamova 2010; Norris 2012). In place of the ideological reading of cinema, the book offers an exploration of film in the symbolic mode and puts forward theoretical concepts such as posthumous subjectivity, abandoned being, non-knowledge and so forth, which can be utilised in the field of Cultural Studies but do not emanate from it. The book traces the symbolic mode in the work of established and well-known directors such as Sokurov, Aleksandr Proshkin, Balabanov and Zviagintsev, and at the same time introduces a new cohort of film-makers who have come to prominence under Putin such as Khomeriki, Renata Litvinova, Igor’ Voloshin, Aleksei Fedorchenko and others. The study is based on the analysis of 320 feature films produced in the Russian Federation in the Russian language between 2000 and 2015. These films were analysed against the wider background of early Russian, Soviet, post-Soviet cinema and world cinema available to us. The films were selected in the process of following cinema releases and monitoring film festivals and film-related publications. These include Kinotavr, also known as the Sochi Open Russian Film Festival, which is the largest film festival in Russia; the Moscow Film Festival; and ‘Cine-shock’ in Anapa [Kinoshok]. The following journals and websites have been useful in obtaining information: Seans, The Art of Cinema, Afisha, KinoKultura, kino-teatr.ru and kinopoisk.ru. I am grateful to the staff of the University College London Library (the Bain–Graffy Russian Film Collection) and the Russian National Film Archive (‘Belye stolby’) for enabling access to their collections. The processes of obtaining, viewing and cataloguing films often coincided with the process of background reading and preliminary analysis, creating a dynamic model for my understanding of contemporary Russian cinema. Although my idea of the symbolic mode first emerged circa 2004, I gestated it for a number of years until it emerged as a developed concept in the early 2010s. For this purpose, my study is not structured as an historical or thematic survey of current trends in Russian cinema, or as a study of genre or type of film; equally it does not privilege a particular film-maker, nor does it seek to consider a few film-makers as a distinct group, school or wave. My objective is to capture the emergence of a new cinematic sensibility and provide a relevant interpretative and theoretical framework: the symbolic mode. Hence, the concept of the symbolic mode supplies a methodological apparatus, conceptual categories and aesthetic and philosophical configurations. Finally, my purpose is not to put forward a set of sociopolitical reasons for the emergence of the symbolic mode, but to account for its aesthetic dimensions and interpretative potential. The discussion is presented in twelve stages, or chapters, each of which

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introduces a new aspect of the symbolic mode, and together they provide an holistic interrogation of Russian film. The chapters are organised around particular theoretical concepts which are based on my analysis of the collected corpus of films. For example, Chapter 1 introduces the concept of posthumous subjectivity and its perceptual apparatus; Chapter 2 discusses the relationship between film and the senses; Chapter 3 inquires whether it is possible to move beyond the senses and introduces the concept of non-knowledge; Chapter 4 explores the process of ‘visualisation’ (Zviagintsev et al. 2014), or striving for an abstraction as a means to stage the symbolic mode; Chapter 5 pays special attention to the cinematic concept of non-knowledge, etc. In order to avoid the pitfalls of the film survey approach with its descriptive passages, inevitable when a great deal of new cinematic and cultural material must be introduced, and in order to focus on the film analysis to showcase the symbolic mode at work, I limited the selection of films to twelve which are analysed in the broad context of contemporary Russian cinema. I picked films that are artistically daring; however, my goal is not to judge ‘artistic achievements’, but to trace the symbolic mode across a wide range of films, which, although sharing some common concerns, are absolutely different in their stylistics and directorial approaches. Everywhere in the book I deliberately refrain from critical commentary and verdict-like pronouncements; I do not aim to (re-/de-)construct the canon of Russian cinema, but to advance new ways of engaging analytically and philosophically with film. While each chapter examines a new aspect of the symbolic mode, it also introduces a new director and a new film. I start with Sokurov, who is well known to my readership, and I use his Taurus (2001) to problematise existing approaches to contemporary Russian cinema. I continue with a chapter on Proshkin’s The Miracle (2009), which establishes a continuity with the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods insofar as its focus is on de-Stalinisation which, as the film proves, is not a finite matter for Russian culture. In Chapters 3 and 4, I analyse films by Balabanov and Zviagintsev, arguably the most daring film-makers of the period, whose work will have a lasting effect on the aesthetic of Russian film and Russian cinema as a sociocultural institution in the global era. Thus, readers may wish to consider the book as a linear progression of the investigation; they are also invited to consider other concepts that form the basis of my study. For example, from the historical perspective, Chapter 1 deals with a film about Lenin and his relationship with Stalin, Chapter 2 introduces a film with Khrushchev as one of the characters, forming a single historical narrative, whereas the film analysed in the final chapter looks into the future. The films take readers to different locations in the Russian Federation and

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intr o duc t io n 17 beyond, surveying different areas and realms of cultural production. To facilitate such iterative reading, I provide cross-references both in the text and the notes, which, I hope, will enable readers to trace those multiple connections. Whilst twelve films are under scrutiny, multiple references to and analyses of other relevant films are supplied where possible. In my selection of films, I utilised the following criteria. The book introduces films and directors who, whilst highly acclaimed in Russia for their artistic merit, are largely unknown to Western audiences. As my goal is to capture the cinematic sensibility of the Putin era, it was important for me to ensure that the films’ distribution over the period is historically and statistically valid. The films are fully representative of variables such as gender, age and ethnicity, and, from the perspective of film studies, of the directors’ career development. For example, my selection represents the preponderance of debut films which is characteristic of the 2000s when a large number of new directors came on stage, making the Putin period the era of directorial debuts. To complement my analysis and enable the readers’ ‘entry’ into another cultural space, I supply a list of all films cited directly in this study. The last chapter, albeit devoted to the analysis of Aleksandr Zel’dovich’s The Target, also provides a summation to the book’s main argument as a dynamic model. Contemporary Russian cinema presides somewhat uncomfortably and precariously over its multiple predecessors – ­early Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet cinemas – m ­ aking production of a convincing singular cultural narrative and national lineage rather problematic. For example, the issue of how one should integrate and narrate the contribution of directors from nationality republics who worked in the imperial centre such as Larisa Shepitko (1938–79) from Ukraine and Otar Ioseliani (b. 1934) from Georgia (later a national of France) is entirely unresolved in Russophone and Anglophone literature. Someone like Sergei Paradjanov (1924–90) makes the cause even more complicated: born in Tiflis, Georgia, and taking advantage of his Armenian background, he worked in Ukraine, contributing to Ukrainian nationality cinema, yet claiming he was always an Armenian director (First 2014). Paradjanov exemplifies complex cultural exchanges during the Soviet era, where, on the one hand, one was constrained by the dogmas of the ideological discourse, and, on the other hand, benefited from the cultural riches of the vast socialist world. Condee contributes to this polemic by focusing on the imperial trace: the presence of the imperial discourse in the nationality period post-1991. In my view, the multicultural, multilingual and multiconfessional structure of the Russian Federation resists the nationality discourse, whereas a polycentric paradigm would perhaps yield greater results. Moreover, the

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unprecedented exposure to world cinema in the 1980s–90s, facilitated by the greater mobility of citizens, pervasive fascination with foreign cultures and widespread piracy, arguably makes contemporary Russian cinema more connected to its North American, European and Asian counterparts than to its own geopolitical predecessors. The Putin period provides filmmakers with an opportunity to re-visit these debates and to articulate their own agenda in the era of globalisation. Indeed, like Putin’s Russia itself, Russian cinema exhibits both an outward-looking globalising gaze and an inward-looking isolationist gaze, the latter being preoccupied with its own grandeur, and rooted in a limited and carefully selected range of events such as the Second World War.17 My purpose is neither to construct a history of national cinema nor to provide a survey of Russian cinema in the era of globalisation, with multiple centres of production emerging and contributing to what one may call contemporary Russian cinema. On the most basic level, co-productions such as Zel’dovich’s The Target (Chapter 12) and Bekmambetov’s career challenge the national cinema paradigm. Instead, I am interested in a new cinematic sensibility that, I argue, has roots in many cultures (e.g., Swedish and Japanese culture; see Chapters 5 and 8, respectively), and looks critically at the preceding cultural discourse by staging exploratory historical interventions (Chapters 1–3, 7 and 12) and portraying an ahistorical subjectivity through the exploration of trauma (Chapter 9), fabrication (Chapter 10) and doubling (Chapters 6 and 7) whereby the subject emerges always in relation to the other and to the self, conceived as the other, and always vibrating and escaping determination. My rationale is bifocal insofar as I wish to capture the emergence of a new cinematic sensibility and provide a relevant interpretative framework, which I define as the symbolic mode. This approach ought to reveal the very tensions and dilemmas of the Putin era, namely, the imperative to produce new political and social agendas and supply new interpretative systems in order to enable the populace to relate to such agendas.18 However, by purposefully eschewing transitology paradigms, I shift my study away from ideological schemas; instead, I am concerned with the examination of aesthetic development in the new millennium, which, I contend, stems from previous aesthetic experiments and yet aims to break away from the dominant paradigms of the past. To paraphrase, my aim is not to produce a nonideological study of Russian cinema, but to produce a study of cinema and not of Russian ideology which is available through the lens of cinema.

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Theorising Contemporary Russian Cinema: the Symbolic Mode Early Soviet scholarship privileged a binary framework: films were frequently divided into two groups: those that reflected and promoted the socialist ideological agenda (socialist realist cinema); and those that hindered and opposed it (the latter was known as bourgeois cinema with its attributes of ‘decadence, imperialism and militarism’). In the Cold War era, a structuralist framework dominated the ideological discourse, according to which films were divided into those that adhered to the canon of socialist realism and those that diverged from it stylistically – t­he socalled ‘poetic’ cinema. Whether the difference was, indeed, purely stylistic or/and ideological should be the subject matter of another debate; what is paramount for this discussion is the fact that the Soviet system – a­ t the level of both production and cultural and critical perception – ­allowed, albeit under control, multiple nodes of innovation, both within the canon of socialist realism and outside it,19 with the two enriching each other through negation or/and appropriation and re-tooling for its own purposes. In literature, the term ‘poetic cinema’ had been loosely applied to a whole range of films that did not conform – ­at least on the surface – ­to the canon of socialist realism.20 The term was used as a misnomer for Soviet aesthetic experimentation, avant-garde and modernism. ‘Poetic cinema’ also became a generic term for films that did not fit into the established genre system and/or delivered a highly subjective, personified, ‘auteur’ type of cinema such as that by Tarkovskii, Shepitko, Paradjanov and many others. In the post-Soviet era, in the absence of the ideological regime, the grand style of socialist realist cinema became a subject matter of critical interrogation (e.g., films by Karen Shakhnazarov exhibit a critical trajectory of exploring socialist realism from within, combating it from a different perspective, displaying a nostalgic preoccupation with socialist realism and making a return to some of its ideological concerns, all in the span of thirty years).21 Socialist realist style also became the object of postmodernist parody and play, for instance, in the work of Petr Lutsik and Aleksei Samoriadov, whose The Periphery (1998) I analyse in Chapter 11, and in films scripted by Vladimir Sorokin, the grandmaster of Russian postmodernist literature, such as Moscow (2001) and The Target, both directed by Zel’dovich (Chapter 12), 4 (2004) and Dau (2010), both directed by Il’ia Khrzhanovskii, and finally, The Kopeck (2002), directed by Ivan Dykhovichnyi. Loban continues the postmodernist strand in his Dust and Chapiteau-Show (2011), which attack postmodernist films of the

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previous era such as Sergei Solov’ev’s ASSA (1987), creating a ‘post-postmodernist’ discourse, with its interest in ‘deep’ and ‘serious’ emotions and connections. ‘New sincerity’ had entered Russian cinema through theatrical practice. Known as New Drama and formed around the Teatr.doc theatre in Moscow, the movement places emphasis on hyper-naturalism derived from the practice of British ‘In Yer Face Theatre’, the Theatre of the Absurd, which brings violence on stage, and Danish Dogme. New Drama resists the aesthetics of glamour characteristic of the Putin era and yet it displays scepticism about truth and pathos. In New Drama violence is intrinsically linked to sexuality as a ‘life-enhancing vitality and energy, a thirst for life and love . . . Documentary theatre, which is an important component of New Drama, creates above all the image of multiple reality – ­or realities existing next to each other, without noticing or understanding each other’ (Beumers and Lipovetsky 2009: 38). New Drama has provided aesthetic impetus for a new generation of playwrights and stage directors such as Ivan Vyrypaev and the brothers Vladimir and Oleg Presniakov. The aesthetic achievements of New Drama are traceable in the films by Kirill Serebrennikov, who works closely with the Presniakov brothers (Chapter 6), Vyrypaev’s Euphoria (2006) and Oxygen (2009), Pavel Kostomarov and Aleksandr Rastorguev (e.g., their experimental documentary cinema such as I Love You (2010)); Andrei Zaitsev’s My House (2000) and Gleb (2002), Igor’ Voloshin’s The Bitch (2001), Valeriia Gai Germanika’s Everybody Dies But Me (2008), and many others. While valuing authenticity, spontaneity, natural harshness and uncompromising attitudes, the directors often create and operate within abstract environments in which to explore social concerns in the symbolic mode (Chapter 6). The postmodern and new sincerity styles are linked to an earlier aesthetic experiment known as chernukha (black stuff), or the Dark Wave. Seth Graham contends that ‘chernukha can productively be viewed as a sort of naturalistic inversion of the melodramatic impulse in which concentrated emotionality is supplanted by concentrated physicality’ (2000). Eliot Borenstein describes chernukha as ‘the pessimistic, naturalistic depiction of and obsession with bodily functions, sexuality (usually separate from love), and often sadistic violence, all against the backdrop of poverty, broken families and unrelenting cynicism’ (2008). These themes and modes of representation had been largely absent from socialist realist cinema, and their introduction into mainstream film in the late 1980s and early 1990s was meant to shock viewers and help them to relinquish their links with Soviet ideology and aesthetics. Whilst challenging the

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intr o duc t io n 21 grand narratives of late socialism, chernukha revealed anxieties about the ongoing social and political processes that had led to the disintegration of the USSR and the economic hardships of the 1990s. Chernukha was also an early instance of Russian engagement with Western popular culture, access to which had been controlled by Soviet authorities. As Condee points out, ‘chernukha was not a historically isolated phenomenon but coexisted in economic circulation with the wave of US B movies that colonized Soviet cinemas in the late 1980s and early 1990s’ (2009: 64). In fact, one of the most successful chernukha films of the period, Petr Todorovskii’s Intergirl (1989) tells the story of a Leningrad woman called Tania Zaitseva (Elena Iakovleva) who works as a nurse – ­Soviet law dictated that everyone must have a job – ­but who actually makes an income as a prostitute targeting foreigners. After marrying one of her clients, Tania emigrates to Sweden where she quickly becomes disappointed with ‘the West’. Tania’s mother, a secondary school teacher, learns from the Soviet authorities about her daughter’s actual occupation; unable to accept the truth, she commits suicide at the same time as Tania dies in a car accident on her way to the airport. Death, disintegration and morbidity were also a preoccupation of a Leningrad art collective known as necrorealism, or Dead Cinema. In the 1980s, the movement’s founder, the artist and independent film-maker, Evgenii Iufit, along with other artists such as Vladimir Kustov, Sergei Serp, Valerii Morozov, Igor’ Bezrukov and others, produced a series of photographs of men in zombie-like makeup, fighting and chasing each other in woods, abandoned construction sites and other desolate environments. Iufit, who was also Sokurov’s associate, set up the first experimental film studio called ‘Mzhalalafilm’, which provided independent film-makers with an artistic platform. Necrorealist films were born out of black humour, absurdism, social protest and keen interest in forensic medicine such as in Eduard von Hoffman’s book The Atlas of Legal Medicine which came to the artists’ attention in the mid-1980s. The phantasmagorical film experiments of necrorealists such as their Silver Heads (1998) produced equally bizarre discourse: ‘The scientists strive in a paranoid delirium towards their ideal: the hybridization of Homo sapiens and the tree. Their goal is the creation of dendroids. Their instrument is their own bodies. Their method is sacrificial self-destruction. They are heroes’ (Turkina and Mazin 2001). These suggest a transfer to a different form of representation and being as such. Berry and Miller-Pogacer see in necrorealism a new way of working with the body and subjectivity: ‘In necrofilms, the social is not represented outside its inscription on bodies – ­the site through which relations of power and resistance are played out . . . the

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post-abject necrosubject does not “live” but persists like a slow wasting disease or a de-composing object, and, in embracing this “impossible” state of living death, achieves a molecule of freedom’ (quoted in Alaniz and Graham 2001: 10). Necrorealists queried the modernists’ notions of life, its purpose and expediency by concentrating, as did the chernukha film-makers, on the body and exploring it not at its limits, as the chernukha film-makers would do, but beyond the horizon of what constitutes life and body per se. The scholar of necrorealism, Olesia Turkina, contends: ‘As the object of their aesthetic research, Necrorealists study the offset behavior of a person doomed to death. The artists aim to represent the unrepresentable – d ­ eath. Paradoxically, the very title “Necrorealism” combines two opposites, life and death: realism – ­living, and necro – ­dead’ (2011). The contrasting notions of necrorealism reveal its limits and the impossibility of continuing aesthetically beyond the period of political and social disintegration. In the contemporary environment where earlier major visual modes such as realism, socialist realism, naturalism (chernukha), postmodernism, necrorealism, new sincerity and glamour have been exhausted and/or devalued, and competition with the spectacularity of Hollywood, which dominates the cinema market, is challenging, film-makers continue their search for new means of expression. The new style is characterised by the use of highly abstracted concepts and symbolically charged visual language. For example, on one level, Zviagintsev’s The Return is a story of a father coming home after twelve years of absence and reuniting with his sons.22 On another level, it is an eschatological exploration of the story of Christ, antiquity myths and native folklore. The effect is achieved thanks to painterly allusions, composition, use of music and so on. Whilst such use of symbolisation is common in world cinema, in the Russian context, it refers to a complex philosophical framework which includes such concepts as posthumous subjectivity, abandoned being, multiplicity, doubling, disintegration and so on (Strukov 2007). The symbolic mode defines simultaneously a particular visual style, philosophical system and sensibility. In its concerns, purpose and orientation, the symbolic mode differs from the associated terms ‘symbol’, ‘the symbolic’ and ‘symbolism’. René Alleau contends: ‘A symbol does not mean something predetermined for someone. It is simultaneously a centre of accumulation and concentration of images and their affective and emotional charges; a vector of the analogical orientation of intuition; and a field of magnetization of the anthropological, cosmological, and theological similitudes evoked’ (2009 (1976): 47). As Albert Dauzat reminds us in his Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue française, the term ‘symbol’ is derived from the Christian

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intr o duc t io n 23 Latin symbolum (mark, sign), originating from the Greek sumbolon (sign) and from the verb sumballein (to assemble, to throw together). In Pausanias (VIII, 54) the word is used in the topological sense, meaning ‘the assembly of the waters’, that is, where the waters ‘flow together’. In the Greek legal system, the term was used in the context of establishing patterns of legal responsibility whereby symbolaion (contract) was employed to denote an assembly of witnesses or jurors who would evidence a legal transaction. As such the word started to mean ‘connecting’ and ‘comparing’; and later Plato used it in the sense of ‘explaining a prediction’, while for Aristotle it meant ‘interpreting an oracle’. As with earlier uses, the term designates an active performance and engagement with divine powers with the purpose of obtaining and legitimising knowledge. This epistemological and functional doubling, and, eventually, multiplication of symbol produces a later understanding of the word ‘symbol’ as a sign of ‘recognition formed by two halves of a broken object that are re-joined; later, some sign, token, seal, insignia, watchword’ (Lalande 1926: 8). In this regard, symbol is understood as a conventional sign, possessing a specific meaning, as well as an analogical sign, evoking a relationship between a concrete thing or image and an abstract idea. It is in this tradition of rationalising signs and symbols that I find Ferdinand de Saussure’s assertion that studies of the role of signs as part of social life will emerge as a science. ‘It would form part of social psychology, and hence of general psychology. I shall call it semiology (from the Greek sémeîon, “sign”).23 It would investigate the nature of signs and the laws governing them’ (1986: 15). For Saussure, the sign is not merely one thing substituting another; rather, it is a matter of a link and a relationship of unity between them, elucidating the linear character of the sign as well as its arbitrariness. The anthropological tradition situates symbols in the realm of culture. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963) declared the need to situate the specificity of language as a system of signs and codes in a particular historical and cultural setting. The structuralist concern – ­in its post-Saussure and post-Lévi-Strauss versions – h ­ ad been to rationalise and departmentalise the sociocultural logos, an internalised exercise in which mythical, mystical and symbolic meaning is subsumed by the selected and selective criteria of language. Ultimately, the task had been to decipher cultural codes for the nonparticipating other, privileging the subject and establishing structures of dominance, a job that would eventually become the object of critique for Jacques Derrida and other deconstructionists who demonstrated that semiology could not resolve the problem of symbol and symbolisation because the former viewed symbol as a closed and finite system, and therefore, explored (and produced) the causes, conditions and rules of such

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closing. By contrast, poststructuralism has demonstrated that symbols are not pronouncements and abbreviations of discourse, but rather some global enunciations, requiring and including, expressing and displaying, performing and seeing bigger entities of meaning, emanating from culture understood as the whole of human activity, belief and perception. Whilst cognizant of the structuralist polemic about symbols, the symbolic mode focuses on significative resemblances (appearing) that suggest a particular orientation of the consciousness (subjectivity) required to re-actualise the presence of appearing in the current world. As I demonstrate in Chapter 3, the origins of the symbolic mode are not in semiology but in semiotics: Umberto Eco (1984) claims that the symbolic mode is not characteristic of a specific historical period or cultural setting and that it occurs in different epochs: that is, the symbolic mode is a type of working with discursive ontology and not a type of representation. I persist in claiming that the symbolic mode is neither a semiological taxonomy of codes nor a system of conventions (figures) or genres. Dudley Andrew proposed a reading of film that would incorporate and challenge the system of genre and narration. Andrew defined his approach as a turn towards Cultural Studies with the purpose of inclusion and greater appreciation of film aesthetics as part of the general study of rhetoric, seeking an integrated study of cinema: ‘The study of figures, not codes, must be paramount in an examination of cultural artefacts . . . A semiotic of film hoped to specify the meaning of its elements. A rhetoric of film hopes to point to its figural moments and initiates an interpretative process which may go on for as long as it is fruitful’ (1983: 134, 139). Andrew said so in recognition that, in his own words, ‘meaning in film comes largely by way of conventions which began as figures’ (1983: 134), whereby conventions are established by way of repetition and by the intertwining of distinct scenes in film in their relation to patterns of culture. Film narrative is constructed as a result of secondary patterns which are presented following a certain logic; hence, narration is conceived as a means of organising time with the help of patterns of imagery. Andrew, however, argues that not all imagery follows the same pattern and that some figures fall out of the identified path of narration. These presentational clashes are part of ‘complex detours’ that facilitate the production of meaning (1983: 135). I argue that such detours are more than an application of the logic of metonymy as a ‘midpoint between force and signification’ (Andrew 1983: 135). Rather, they are elements of enunciation: not a datum of classification, but drives of signification as they engage with ontology. Deleuze produced a-signifying, discursive semiotics by focusing on experience as a multidimensional ontology that includes ‘a draft, a wind,

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intr o duc t io n 25 a day, a time of day, a stream, a place, a battle, an illness’ (quoted in Parr 2010: 92), yet his experiential event is subjectless but consisting of relations. Deleuze insists difference is an ontological category, ‘the noumenon closest to phenomenon’, resulting in the production of ‘transcendental empiricism’. For Deleuze (2013), symbols are operations of time and he understands the cinematic image as the changing being. It is no longer necessary to inquire about the meaning of images because meaning means difference. This is not a difference between the object and representation, or between film and reality, because for Deleuze a factual object is an understanding subject, and vice versa. He obliterates the distinction and the dichotomy and produces a new kind of ontology, which, I argue, is grounded in the notions of discourse as reiterative forms of being of such object–subjects, and these forms produce signification which should be conceived in symbolic terms as abstractions of the subject–object. Deleuze produces a system of the ‘Whole’; according to him, cinematic images are metaphysical images of movement. Image is material because it stands for matter and enables time as movement. In his production of the ‘totality of image’, Deleuze evokes the Romanticist debates about allegory and symbol whereby, as Coleridge notes, the faculty of imagination is to view the analogy of all being in symbolic terms: ‘that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the Reason in Images of the Sense, and organising (as it were) the flux of the Senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the Reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths, of which they are the conductors’ (1972: 29). Coleridge provides imagination with a capacity to instil a symbolic perception of reality in a limitless way: it is unlimited in scope, duration and purpose. Symbol potentially encompasses the subject itself because symbolic knowledge reaches out to everything the subject knows or may ever know. The symbolic mode resists totalities such as Romanticist, Symbolist or, in fact, psychoanalytical regimes. Lacan developed his concept of the symbolic in response to the publication of Lévi-Strauss’ Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949). Lacan’s Symbolic order covers a wide range of universal concepts, including the imposition of the form via the phallic function and its personification in the figure of the father (without the father, man would be ‘informe’).24 It is also a marker of loss, or symbolic castration, which relates man to the primal father as categorised in Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913). It opens the world of intersubjective relations and warrants the knowledge of societal and ideological conventions through the acceptance of the law, or the ‘big Other’, and/or through language. In his later scholarship, Lacan considers the Symbolic

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in relation to two other orders, the Imaginary and the Real, as a means to explore and transcend boundaries between states to the extent that both the Imaginary and the Symbolic could be viewed as superimpositions of each other. Lacan’s theory has informed debates in Film Studies and deconstruction, resulting in a vast corpus of literature which continually reinterprets the three key concepts in order to produce a psychoanalytical critique of the image. The symbolic mode draws on Lacan’s Symbolic insofar as the latter is a procedure, henceforth the former charters the process of knowledge production. As I demonstrate in Chapter 2, such knowledge production occurs at the point of lack. For Lacan this is the inclusion of this lacking object into the frame of ‘reality’ which causes psychosis. In the symbolic mode, I consider this lack in the broader framework of the void which does not always originate in the psyche of the subject, but rather in the subject’s relation to an event, whereby both can be conceived in terms of the world. In film, being is apprehended simultaneously in the sense of openness within which ideas emerge, and in the noumenal sense of the world, or of entities separated in the world from the temporal perspective – ­vibrations of time and culture. The symbolic mode suggests a move away from identity representations towards subjectivity construction. Maksim Gorkii’s account of early film points to a moment in time when the subject has no access to mental imagery to process internal concepts: When the lights go out in the room in which Lumière’s invention is shown, there suddenly appears a large grey picture, ‘ Street in Paris’ – ­shadows of a bad engraving. As you gaze at it, you see carriages, buildings and people in various poses, all frozen into immobility. All this in grey, and the sky above is also grey – ­you anticipate nothing new in this all too familiar scene, for you have seen pictures of Paris streets more than once. But suddenly a strange flicker passes through the screen and the pictures spring to life. (1960: 407)

The novelist notes a transition from one medium to another: from the still photograph projected on the screen to the moving image. Gorkii points out the dichotomy between still life and moving image, between a banal representation of Paris and the world-building opportunities granted to the viewer by the new medium of film. Laura Mulvey defines these two instances as stillness and movement: Stillness may evoke a ‘before’ for the moving image as filmstrip, as a reference back to photography or to its own original moment of registration. Although the projector reconciles the opposition and the still frames come to life, this underlying stillness provides cinema with a secret, with a hidden past that might or might not find its way to the surface. (2006: 67)

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intr o duc t io n 27 In this context, Mulvey views the difference between the two modes primarily as a technical one: the oppositions are resolved thanks to the projector that converts one type of representation into another. Her emphasis on the mechanical aspect of cinema foreshadows the operations in the human mind, which assembles and processes the visual information. In the experience documented by Gorkii, the ‘secret’ of the cinema is, in fact, revealed and it points to an existence beyond the mechanics of representation, to an essence concealed not in the apparatus of cinema, but in the working of the human mind and culture. In Gorkii’s perception, the transition is not merely from stillness to movement, but from one convention to another. This latter convention is framed not by the familiarity of the setting – ­it is the same Parisian street – ­but by the familiarity of the depicted world. Gorkii’s observation of cinema continues with a description of a colourless and silent world of shadows, ghosts and ashes. As he castigates the immorality of the venue and the likely pornographic future of the cinema, Gorkii establishes the role of cinema as a machine for dreaming: ‘You are forgetting where you are. Strange imaginings invade your mind and your consciousness begins to wane and grow dim . . .’ (1960: 408). At such a moment the representational drive of cinema is dissolved in favour of the suprarepresentational: while maintaining its mimetic basis, the cinema captures ‘that which lies beyond the formal likeness’ (or what in the Chinese pictorial tradition is known as ‘hsing-ssu’ in its opposition to ‘chý-yün’, or ‘breath-resonance’).25 In fact, one does not exclude the other; or, in terms of Derridean deconstruction, functions not as ‘neither . . . nor’, but rather as ‘at once’, revealing the logic of differànce. It speaks to the effects of alienation that Gorkii records. The result is a sense of loss, and mourning over it, when the gaze exceeds the subjectivity and evokes the possibility of an interiorisation of what can never be interiorised. Derrida points out that this type of gaze is the look that is ‘in us’ but is not ‘ours’; he writes: ‘Ghosts: the concepts of the other in the same . . . the completely other, dead, living in me’ (2001: 41–2). Hovering between recognisable and repeatable, the Derridean gaze accounts for the origins of film as a medium in its capacity to instil otherness in the work of the subject as its ghostly performance. From the perspective of cognitive systems, Gorkii’s story denotes a moment in time when the subject has no access to mental imagery to process internal concepts. The effect of the lack is an anti-representational mode, which creates a sense of otherworldliness. Whether directed towards a mystical world, or even towards an afterlife, the experience defines an emergence of a specific mindscape which escapes previous representational modus operandi. Since film

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offers a dynamic model of cognition, it provides a glimpse of the suprarepresentational system, that is, ‘possessing a kind of complexity and subtlety of behaviour such that representational explanatory frameworks are in general inadequate to the explanatory task’ (Gelder 1997: 261). In the pre-cognitive aesthetic systems before Kant, metaphysics assumed two types of identity, subjectivity and substantiality, with permanence being the defining factor in articulating identity. In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant questions this type of subjectivity and supplants the substantial permanence with an ideal permanence, or what he calls transcendental permanence. This shift opens up the possibility of experience which is not experienced directly. This correlates – t­ o some extent – w ­ ith the notions of identity registered in Latin: idem and ipse, the repetitive identity of the same, and the identity under construction. The doubling of identity enables historicisation and narrativisation, with the subject always being incomplete. The connection between the two or many forms of identities is inscribed in the symbolic mode since it functions simultaneously as sameness and construction. In aesthetic terms, the two actualise resemblance and difference, delaying and even eschewing mimesis. The discourse of realism in cinema goes back to the modern presupposition that the world can be possessed as an object, as a panorama or as a scene that is entirely visible for an ideal or absolute spectator, a presupposition that has been critiqued by many, including Jean-Luc Nancy. He proposed that we should view the world as ‘a milieu in which we find ourselves, and which we can only apprehend from inside. We are in a world, not in front of it’ (2004: 77). From the theoretical perspective, my concept of the symbolic mode contributes to the current debates concerning non-representational theories (e.g., Thrift 1996; Dewsbury 2000, 2003; Dewsbury et al. 2002; Harman 2004, 2010; Clough and Halley 2005; Lorimer 2005, 2008; Harrison 2007, 2008; Vannini 2014) insofar as it conceives itself not as an actual theory, but something like a style of thinking which privileges the analysis of moments and spaces of concentrations of meaning. Like nonrepresentation theory in its treatment of ‘shared experiences, everyday routines, fleeting encounters, embodied movements, precognitive triggers, practical skills, affective intensities, enduring urges, unexceptional interactions and sensuous dispositions’ (Lorimer 2005: 84), I consider film as an encapsulation of these practices and flows of meaning – fi ­ lm as thought – r­ ather than pure mediation, whereby the focus is not on the value of representation, but on the emergence of meaning through event in a constructed world; I postulate and trace these emergences through the concept of nonknowledge, which corresponds to Thrift’s understanding of the precogni-

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intr o duc t io n 29 tive as ‘something more than an addendum to the cognitive’ (2007: 6) and his focus on the ‘rolling mass of nerve volleys [which] prepare the body for action in such a way that intentions or decisions are made before the conscious self is even aware of them’ (Thrift 2008: 7). To be precise, my goal is to analyse the ways in which film-makers engage with these intentions and decisions – ­intentionality – ­and to document the relationship of the body to the world it occupies. However, the concept of the symbolic mode diverges from the non-representational theories with their radical rejection of subjectivity in its focus on the subject as a critical encounter between the self and the world, both constructed as events. I understand non-representational theory’s project of getting ‘in touch with the full range of registers of thought by stressing affect and sensation’ (Thrift 2008: 12) as a procedure of figuration which reinterprets the body beyond the paradigm of senses and affects. My concept of the symbolic mode extends beyond theories of affect (e.g., Williams 1991; Gormley 2005; Abel 2007; Cartwright 2008; Plantinga 2009; Gregg and Seigworth 2010; Brinkema 2014; Singh 2014). These theories investigate the bodily, affective relationship between film and its spectator. For example, Vivian Sobchak (2000b) is interested in the somatic effects of cinema as a form of critique of the theories of reception, which provide specular considerations regarding the mediation of the body in the language of the film. She suggests that ‘A phenomenology of the cinesthetic subject having and making sense of the movies reveals to us the chiasmatic function of the lived body – ­as both carnal and conscious, sensible and sentient – ­and how it is we can apprehend the sense of the screen both figurally and literally’ (2000b). She welcomes the possibility of developing a cine-/kinaesthetic theory of the viewing experience where the spectator is conceived of as an intersection of literal and figural meanings and the lived body both supplies sense and makes sense. Sobchak turns film theory towards the spectator as participant in presentation which is manifested through ‘haptic visuality’. Laura Marks (2002) puts forward the concept of haptic visuality as a tactile way of seeing and knowing – ­when the eyes function as organs of touch – ­which points to the limits of sight and sound, and the failure of representation to engage the viewer in an intimate, embodied and multisensory viewing. Haptic visuality constructs the camera as an apparatus that can both ‘gaze’ and ‘graze’ over surfaces, appreciating their textures and spaces, and bringing them closer to sensuous memories of touch and movement. In this new deployment of the gaze as a haptic process, I am concerned with the relationship between vision and touch in their ability to produce meaning, or as Richard Shiff puts it: ‘The reciprocity or shifting ­produced by

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c­ atachresis undermines any polarization of subject and object, self and other, deviation and norm, touch and vision . . . touch and vision are caught in reciprocal figuration: it is touch that is figuring vision, and vision that is figuring touch’ (1991: 86–7). Hence, I wish to enquire about the process of figuring out the vision–touch relationship and about how a particular type of subjectivity is constructed to relay these processes cinematically. I also wish to explore how the body is conceived in film in the post-affect period, whereby contemporary film-makers defy the pathos concerning the sensual body and the body as a series of affect. Whilst affect theories breakdown the thinking about film as illusionary – ­‘a world out there’ – ­or as reflective of the subject’s (psychological) other, thus productively building a hermeneutically open space and disbanding the textuality of the filmic text, they also disregard the return of the nonverbal mediation of the statement back on screen as a new type of statement and a rhetorical construction, which I encode as ex-cribing in the book chapters. This study also polemicises with the discourse of realism and other mimetic traditions (e.g., Hill 1986; Hallam and Marshment 2000; Cardullo 2007; Coleman 2011; Nelson 2013; Campora 2014; Mazierska and Goddard 2014). For example, Lucia Nagib (2011) formulates her understanding of cinematic realism as a combination of two tendencies. The first is aesthetic and ideological, ‘a revolt against previous conventions’ (Nagib 2011: 8), which, arguably, is characteristic of all artistic movements, known as the concept of artistic avant-garde (MacDonald 1993; Scheunemann 2000; Sitney 2002; Verrone 2012; Osterweil 2014). The second tendency relates to a ‘physical, therefore expositional and exhibitionist cinema, which rejects a priori truths in order to make room for risk, chance, the historical contingent and the unpredictable real, regardless of whether they are popular or art, fiction or documentary, narrative or avant-garde films’ (Nagib 2011: 8). Indeed, the imperative to disregard stylistic registers, genre conventions, epistemological positions and narratological perspectives is incredibly useful, since it allows us to focus on the moving image per se. However, in her affirmation of history and chance – c­ onceived as an unpredictable interrogation of ‘reality’ – ­Nagib subscribes to the familiar logic of historicisation and narrativisation, which is determined by the politics of identity and relays us back to the discourse of representation. To circumvent this contradiction, Nagib proposes the category of ethics, which she conceives of by supplying a cinematic example. She alludes to a much quoted phrase in film criticism – ­‘The tracking shot is a question of morals’, which she attributes to Godard – ­and sums up her position as follows: ‘The immediate attraction of this formulation resides in the way it attaches ethical value to the index elicited by the continuous, uninter-

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intr o duc t io n 31 rupted camera movement across objective reality’ (2011: 11). Nagib’s allusion and elicitation reveal a position typical of the realist discourse: the ethics of realism emerges primarily and predominantly as a taxonomy of filmic devices, suppositions and correlations between the directorial and spectatorial roles. Nagib insists on cataloguing the complex and confusing relationship between events, which she understands as actions that have taken place in ‘reality’, and presentation, or the appearance of these actions in the mediated form. For example, she uses four films that depict running as a way to consider ‘physical realism’, whereby physicality is a mode of production that relies on the notion of the index as a ‘bond between sign and referent’ (2011: 23–5). While Nagib’s study produces an extremely valuable taxonomy of different ethics of presentation – ­beauty, desire, history, taboo, and so on – i­t elides the main question about the nature of the image and how it generates meaning and produces subjectivities. This is due to her return to structuralism with its emphasis on the signifier and the signified, and its lack of interest in what actually constitutes chance and how it may help construct new forms of being. In this study I categorise these instances of rupture in signification as non-knowledge and I trace them in different filmic contexts irrespective of whether these caesuras are predestined, or, indeed, volatile. Unlike in the realist tradition, my purpose is not to provide a set of sociopolitical reasons for the symbolic mode to emerge, but rather to account for its aesthetic dimensions and interpretative potential. I do so by engaging with some key concepts of Badiou’s philosophy of rupture and finitude. Badiou has written on the subject of film in the form of articles and reviews which were translated into English by Susan Spitzer and published as a volume in 2013. Badiou conceives film as a shared experience which determines it as a site of negotiation and as a form of knowledge production, or what he calls ‘truth’. Badiou privileges film’s capacity to evolve in time, which provides him with an opportunity to explore the philosophical effect of film, or ‘the thinking of the thought that it itself is’ (2013: 4). Cinema emerges as a specific mode of thinking that challenges philosophy insofar as it moves beyond dichotomies of constructed time and pure duration, continuity and discontinuity. Cinema stages an attack on the possibility of discourse and the probability of being by contesting and affirming the infinite. Badiou is frequently, and erroneously, thought of as someone who supplants Deleuze in thinking about film. This misconception has to do with the order in which knowledge about the philosophers’ writing on film has become available – fi ­ rst Deleuze and later Badiou – b­ ut not with the actual genealogy, substance or, in fact, ambition of their work. Neither

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of them offers a theory of film: a prescriptive and normative system of ­generalisations that seeks to account for isolated elements of enquiry such as genre, technique, production process and so forth. Instead, they offer provocative ways of thinking about the existing and possible relation between film and philosophy, or even thinking ‘film-philosophy’ per se. Badiou pays homage to Deleuze’s concept of film-philosophy as a creative force and focuses on those stages in the process of knowledge-production where there are significant lacks in the explanatory system. Badiou examines ruptures since he believes that truth is not a rule, but an exception that emerges from an event in a world constructed from this event and persisting in its affirmation of being. In film terms, Badiou aims to interrogate the spaces between the elements in montage whereby all sequences are events that correspond to and challenge the world of the whole artifice. In this regard, Badiou moves beyond the two dominant discourses in film theory – t­ hat of language and body (or senses) – b­ y acknowledging that in the void there may be exceptions that the subject can apprehend through truth-procedures, namely, science, art, politics and love. These four ‘conditions’, as Badiou calls them, link us to realms beyond language and body, and beyond structure/mimesis and affect. In his introduction to Badiou’s philosophy (2013), Alex Ling contends that, according to Badiou, ‘if the concept of truth is to be of any real significance it is only inasmuch as it can be shown to radically affect knowledge and (it amounts to the same thing) power structures: far from being a qualification of knowledge or an intuition of the intelligible, a truth is precisely that which bores a hole in knowledge’ (2011: 7). Ling reiterates Badiou’s main concerns by highlighting that ‘truths must be radically singular (they are wholly un-known), epistemologically affective (they disrupt economies of knowledge), constructed (they emerge ex post facto and require militant support), infinite (they are structurally incompletable), immanent (they are material constructions taking place in a world)’ (2011: 7). In my study I do not aim to produce ‘an active theory of truth’ as Ling defines his objective, but to interrogate epistemological, filmic constructions of truth and knowledge production in the symbolic mode where my focus is not on manufacturing ‘universal truths’ (Ling 2011), but on tracing the operations of subjectivity in world events and presenting the ontology of posthumous subjectivity embracing its own post-evental condition through the enterprise of non-knowledge. Therefore, my thinking is informed both by Badiou’s writing on film and by his broader corpus of philosophical enquiry, particularly his magnum opus Logic of Worlds: Being and Event, 2 (2009). In the book, in each chapter, I gradually introduce, interrogate and

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intr o duc t io n 33 contest Badiou’s concepts in the wider context of philosophical enquiry about subjectivity in the symbolic mode, particularly by Derrida and Nancy, which forms a wider philosophical basis for my theoretical intervention. Finally, my interest in Badiou is grounded in his writing on film and on Russia: as I demonstrated at the start of the Introduction, Badiou is both a philosopher of the void and a theorist of Russian and Soviet political culture. Thus, on one level, I hope to bring Badiou’s thought to the attention of scholars working in the Russian field, and, on another level, I hope to advance the understanding of Badiou’s writing on film by querying it in the context of contemporary Russian cinema and by substantiating the symbolic mode as a new form of film sensibility as well as a new interpretative system.

Notes   1. On symbolism of the regime change in Russia, see Gill (2013).   2. I am grateful to Paul Cooke, Julian Graffy, Sarah Hudspith and Thea Pitman for their helpful comments on various drafts of the Introduction.  3. The following is an indicative list of films that critically explore glamorisation of Russian life under Putin: Filipp Iankovskii’ s In Motion (2002); Iurii Moroz’s The Spot (2005); Rezo Gigineishvili’s Heat (2006); Andrei Konchalovskii’s Glamour (2007); Dmitrii Meskhiev’s Seven Cubicles (2007); and Roman Prygunov’s Soulless (2011).   4. For example, in spring 2015, following Russian authorities’ critique of Daniel Espinosa’s 2015 Child 55, Russian distributor Central Partnership cancelled planned screenings in Russian cinemas. The film appeared on the Runet almost instantaneously and is available for free downloads.   5. Torrents is an online file sharing system.   6. At the same time it is not uncommon for Russian film-makers to take on other responsibilities when working on their films; for example, Roman Karimov was a scriptwriter, composer, director, actor and producer on his Inadequate People (2010). This is often due to financial constraints.  7. To reiterate, this position is neither political nor ideological; in fact, the directors, whose films have been selected for close analysis, exhibit opposing views on the current political regime, which, however, are not the focus of my study.  8. Pop’s cinematic taxonomy – ­‘we must add a narrative dimension to the interpretation of the cinematic “grammar”, one which will allow a narrative analysis, of themes specific to the young Romanian filmmakers’ (2014: 35) – c­ ontradicts my objective of speaking about Russian cinema without producing a catalogue of motifs.   9. Pop notes that the Romanian new wave generated ‘newer waves’ (2014: 15), thus implying that the structure of this new phenomenon is uneven, and in

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the Russian case, it is also centripetal and temporarily zigzagged, with different directors entering the new cultural space at different speeds. 10. Dominique Masta (2013) takes a similar approach to contemporary Romanian cinema: she views it in the historical context of Romania’s transition from communism to democracy. 11. In 2014, Russia and China signed a memorandum that aims to boost coproductions (Kozlov 2014). 12. In his study of contemporary Romanian cinema, Doru Pop calls this type of cross-cultural predisposition a ‘Tarkovskianism’ (2014: 45). 13. In 2014, exploiting the anti-Western sentiment, Mikhalkov and his brother Andrei Konchalovskii pitched a chain of fast-food restaurants to replace Western chains such as McDonald’s. The proposal was rejected by the government. 14. The former is organised by Svetlana Adjoubei, Alissa Timoshkina, Katia Zemtsova and others. The latter is organised by Volodia Padunov, Nancy Condee and their colleagues and students in the University of Pittsburgh. 15. Since 1999 Luk’ianenko has released over eight novels and authored other texts such as comic books that constitute the world of the Watches. 16. Anna Lawton’s Imaging Russia 2000: Film and Facts (2004) is similar in its inclusion of industry information, film analysis and personal recollections. 17. Norris identifies these two types of the gaze as a combination of Russian patriotic sentiment with Hollywood techniques in the representation of themes drawn from Russian history. 18. Arguably, the contradictions between the two frameworks account for the series of political and social crises in the 2000s. Since 2010, by exporting these crises in the form of confrontation with/in Ukraine, the Putin government has managed to consolidate the populace in the Federation. 19. Neither of these fields of production was a homogeneous space, instead revealing a whole range of practices and perspectives. 20. Elsewhere in my analysis of Tarkovskii’s Solaris, I demonstrate how it was both informed by and contradicted the ideologies of socialist realism (Strukov 2008). 21. These include The Courier (1986), Dreams (1993), The American Daughter (1995), The Vanished Empire (2008) and its re-make/sequel Love in the USSR (2012), and White Tiger (2012). 22. The parent–child relationship is a dominant theme in contemporary Russian cinema, whereby the father–son dimension of the conflict (for a discussion, see Goscilo and Hashamova 2010) is eventually replaced by the mother–child vector as in Konstantin Lopushanskii’s Ugly Swans (2006), Sergei Snezhkin’s Bury Me behind the Baseboard (2008), Vasillii Sigarev’s Wolfy (2009) and Living (2011), and Anna Melikian’s Mermaid (2007). These films complicate the cultural–psychoanalytical paradigm of the father–son relationship provided by the authors of the volume edited by Goscilo and Hashamova (2010), since the parent–child relationship is no longer exclusively a reflection on the

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intr o duc t io n 35 ideological, political and financial power struggles in contemporary Russia. Instead, these films, as well as films focusing on the orphan child such as Andrei Kravchuk’s The Italian (2005) and Aleksandr Strizhenov’s Little Iulia (2009), emphasise the abstracted, symbolic and cosmogonic concerns of generational change in a mystical, post-apocalyptic context. 23. Film semiology is associated with the work of Christian Metz (1974a & b), who argued that cinema is structured like a language. Adopting Saussure’s models of structuralism, Metz made the distinction between ‘langue’, ‘a language system’ and ‘language’, a less clearly defined system of recognisable conventions. Metz argues the shot is neither symbolic nor arbitrary but iconic and so it is laden with specific meaning. 24. These suppositions have been contested in literature, see, for example, Fink (1997). 25. For a discussion of Chinese pictorial modes, see Fong (1987).

C HA PT E R 1

Abstracted Subjectivity and Knowledge-Worlds: Aleksandr Sokurov’s Taurus (2001)

Film as a form of art constructs particular forms of subjectivity and relates them to the discourse of intelligence – ­cinema as a metaphor for thought.1 Badiou sees the purpose of cinema in questioning the image on the basis of the image itself, ‘in the direction of the foundational beyond’ (2013: 201). Aleksandr Sokurov’s cinema has often been described as a ‘visual experiment’, ‘non-narrative’ and as a way to ‘challenge that cinema conceived as a method either to capture reality or narrate reality’ (Beumers and Condee 2011: 1). I argue that this is because Sokurov (b. 1951, Irkutsk region) is concerned with different types of reality. One is invisible, and it is a matter of transcendental evocation, guessing and anticipation. The other is visible, but only to the subject itself in the ultimate act of internalising knowledge and experiencing it as a knowledge-world. Badiou gives a description of such knowledge-worlds at the end of Logic of Worlds: ‘Three operations effectively suffice for all the types of appearing or all the possibilities of differentiation (and identity) in a determinate world: minimality, conjunction and the envelope. Or the inapparent, co-appearance and infinite synthesis’ (2009: 452). Badiou outlines the logic which determines a world irrespective of any subject, a knowledge-world in my terminology: ‘The transcendental that is at stake in this book is altogether anterior to every subjective constitution, for it is an immanent given of any situation whatsoever’ (2009: 101). Such a knowledge-world may exist when the subject is turned into an object of ‘the transcendental indexing’ (Badiou 2009: 101), in the ultimate attempt to differentiate between ontology and appearance. Sokurov’s interest in the issue of transcendental ontology is evidenced in his citing Caspar David Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea (1808–10) as a source of inspiration for his 1997 Mother and Son and other films, whereby the painting ‘in the vein of a metaphysics of absence, effectively lets man in his insignificance vanish in front of the grandness and immeasurability of nature’ (Hänsgen 2011: 51). Sokurov often demonstrates his preoccupation with these concerns when he works with a subjectivity appearing

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abstracted s ubje ct ivity and kno w l e dg e - wo r l ds 37 in a world constructed of its own ontology. Sokurov never reduces one to another and instead engages in the retroactive act of re-assembling knowledge-worlds as matters of relation and intentionality. His worlds are infinite in their composition, yet limited by the subject’s temporality and change. As a result, the worlds of Sokurov are always political in that they contradict the laws of being, and particularly the politics of spectatorship. His subjects are ‘registers of experience’ (hence, phenomenological readings of his films), or ‘ideological fiction’ (those following Althusser). However, what interests me is his films as a category of mor(t)ality (Kant) whereby subjects are subtracted from their immediate ontology and resurrected in a world full of (un)intelligible resonances. In other words, it is a subject shifting from a matheme to a formula as a whole, or as Badiou puts it: ‘It is a formula in which a divided (and new) body becomes . . . something like the active unconscious of a trace of the event – a­ n activity which, by exploring the consequences of what has happened, engenders the expansion of the present and exposes, fragment by fragment, a truth’ (2009: 53). In Sokurov’s case, it is always the subject whose authority is contested in one way or another, and in this chapter I aim to explore a film about a figure who personifies the ultimate failure of subjectivity to relate to any truth or even its possibility. As Nancy Condee contends, ‘there is no more complex topic for contemporary Russian cinema than Lenin’ (2009: 172). Indeed, the figure of Lenin has been contested and re-imagined in a wide variety of cultural texts. Coincidentally, while I was concluding my work on this chapter, the Russian State Historical Museum opened a major exhibition titled ‘The Myth of the Beloved Leader’ [Mif o liubimom vozhde]. Curated by Tat’iana Koloskova, the show is the first major exhibition of artefacts related to Lenin and Stalin since this section of the museum was closed in 1993. One of the reasons for the organisation of the exhibition was the ninetieth anniversary of Lenin’s death in January 2014. Critics have claimed that the exhibition aims to explore the legacy of totalitarianism while at the same time it speaks to revisionist tendencies in contemporary Russia. In the context of the enlarged Russian Federation in the aftermath of the Ukrainian political crisis, it may be viewed as an installation of the neo-Soviet aspirations of the Russian ruling elite. With his mummified body still on display in Red Square,2 Lenin remains a controversial topic for Russian policymakers, cultural producers and the general public. The title of the film is derived from the sign of the zodiac – ­Lenin was a Taurus – a­ nd is a symbolic evocation of the meaning of the sign. Taurus as a sign of zodiac is meant to convey tactile communication, which is evident in Sokurov’s attention to the sensual qualities of the film, placing

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emphasis on the gaze as touch that leaves marks on Lenin’s skin and leaves traces on other objects. Sokurov utilises non-rational forms of knowledge to demonstrate the collapse of the rationality that Lenin symbolises as a champion of dialectical materialism. The film is based on a script produced by Iurii Arabov, whose cooperation with Sokurov goes back to 1978 when they produced The Lonely Human Voice (released in 1987). Arabov wrote scripts for Sokurov’s Days of the Eclipse (1988), Moloch (1999), Faust (2011) and other films.3 Taurus4 is the second instalment in Sokurov’s so-called ‘power tetralogy’. Moloch is about Hitler and his wartime associates, The Sun (2005) is about Hirohito who is trapped in his own palace and leaves it only to meet General MacArthur to discuss the terms of the Japanese surrender, and finally Faust is a retelling of Goethe’s tragedy.5 The first three films explore three types of totalitarianism, and when put together they paint the canvas of the first half of the twentieth century, that is, before the start of the Cold War. (In Badiou’s terms, this is the totalitarian century.) The centrality of Taurus is evident not only in the chronology of producing this part of the tetralogy, but also in the temporal transfiguration: Sokurov investigates an earlier period, as if looking at the origins of totalitarianism per se. Faust has no particular relevance to historical figures or contemporary events in the world; instead, it shows human instincts and schemes in the lust for power in the most abstracted, symbolic form. In many respects, Taurus and Faust frame the historical period I am interested in – ­the first decade of Putinism – a­ nd Sokurov’s power tetralogy showcases the proliferation and intensification of the symbolic mode with its emphasis on abstracted, mythological and esoteric flows of intelligence, leading to a construction of particular types of knowledge-worlds and finding expression in complex, contradictory subjectivities. However, as my major concern in this book is to demonstrate the symbolic mode at work in films by several directors, I deliberately refrain from focusing exclusively on Sokurov’s films, especially as I fear that such an attempt would result in yet another taxonomy of Sokurov’s oeuvre which would be in conflict with the main purpose of this study.6 Instead, I use Taurus to express my main aesthetic premise: this chapter does not aim to produce a definitive analysis of the film, but rather to set the agenda for further investigation, hence I formulate some of my points in the form of questions. The ultimate purpose of the chapter is to set the precedent for the analysis of film in the symbolic mode. On one level, Taurus captures the essence of totalitarianism and speaks to Sokurov’s long-standing preoccupation with post-apocalyptic subjectivity which surpasses any particular style or imagery. In fact, it overturns the opposition between two types of film in Sokurov’s oeuvre – ­the

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abstracted s ubje ct ivity and kno w l e dg e - wo r l ds 39 classification was proposed by Edwin Carels and has been celebrated by Condee – t­he films that are ‘mannered, deliberately cluttered, eclectic, ornamentalist, fussy’, and those that are ‘severe, minimalist, ascetic, elegiac, and stern’ (2009: 166). I argue that a particular type of subjectivity emerges in all Sokurov’s films of the period, and, in fact, in films by other Russian directors, irrespective of their individual style, and, in Sokurov’s case, irrespective of whether his work veers towards figuration or nonfigurative art (or, as in Russian, ‘non/objective’, that is, an excess of things or lack thereof). This is because both are products, or rather place-tags, in a world produced by this subjectivity and they correspond to the states of knowledge and non-knowledge, concepts that are presented below and in other chapters of the book. On another level, Taurus showcases the symbolic mode in the way in which it employs the concepts of intentionality and subjectivity. For example, in relation to the two styles identified by Carels and Condee, the question is not so much a matter of presence or absence of something, but rather of what this something is, or, in Husserl’s terms, a difference between the meaning of the object and the object as such, or the degrees of subjectivity. These two dimensions account for the corporeal and reflective ways of experiencing objects and situations, whereas intentionality connotes self-referential processes, or the thought-thinking about itself. This concern shows a connection to Bergson’s (1911) ideas about direct image objects, that is, a rejection of the need to recreate objects as representations, and instead a direct givenness of transcendent objects to different modes of consciousness. The misconfiguration between the horizon of the object and the horizon of knowledge causes the terror of the knowledge of all other possibilities of knowledge, or, to paraphrase Tom Gunning, the construction of astonishment (1989).7 In fact, in another study of Sokurov’s films (2011), Condee argues for an allegorical interpretation of the director’s oeuvre, with an emphasis on the synchronic and diachronic constructions of narrative/ allegory. She speaks of objectification as an incident of subjectivation when she notes that by ‘retarding the movement of structure through time, Sokurov’s later films often make extensive use of the photograph as a kind of motionless, commemorative object (2011: 193). Condee acknowledges Sokurov’s aim in suspending time: ‘a reprieve from the secular regime of historical narration, that profane linear flow of time that constitutes plot’ (2011: 193). In other words, Condee registers the symbolic mode at work without naming it this way; she considers Sokurov’s preference for stasis and co-presence as a matter of his films’ relation to other arts, and she indicates the possibility for the multidirectional i­ nterpretation of his films

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stemming from the intentionality of the spectator. As regards Sokurov’s 2007 Alexandra, she notes that it is possible to read the film ‘in either direction, recognizing . . . sovereign self-determination as an adolescent maturation tale’ (2011: 196). Condee ends – ­somewhat disappointingly – ­by stating her indifference to the debate (2011: 195–6). Yet she seems to lay the foundation for something effectively bigger: an interpretation of Sokurov’s films in the symbolic mode. For example, in relation to his The Second Circle she reads the presence of the corpse on screen as follows: ‘The corpse is not merely the unwanted corpse; it carries the entire weight of the hero’s history in its dead organs, the history that produced the hero’ (2011: 197). As I mentioned above, this is an instance of the retroactive act of re-assembling knowledge-worlds as intentionality. In my study, I aim to unpack the significance of the corpse as a symbol of subjectivity continuing life after death, and, more broadly, to showcase how postapocalyptic, posthumous subjectivity is constructed in order to articulate non-knowledge as transcendence through possibilities of differentiation. If Condee is interested in Sokurov’s instauration of death, my focus is on death as the production of posthumous subjectivity. Sokurov always speaks of death as a past anterior, a catastrophe that has already occurred, whereby his own cinematography points to the mortality of the subject and conceives itself as the very catastrophe, thus the self emerges as the other.8 This process is pertinent to photography as a form of art: Derrida (2001), echoing Barthes, bestows photography with spectral qualities.9 The ability of photography to present the self as the other allows Derrida to speak of the structure of the posthumous self as the multiple selves: ‘the plurality of deaths’ (2001: 285). In cinema, ‘the plurality of deaths’ corresponds to the multiple workings of the gaze and particularly to its capacity to look at the screen as well as off the screen, into darkness, and at the onlookers themselves. Derrida equates death with photography and vice versa as a type of temporality – t­ he ‘having-been’ (‘l’avoir-été’) which he distinguishes from the ‘having been there’ (‘avoir-été-là’) – ­an ‘hallucinating metonymy: it is something else, a piece from the other (from the referent) that finds itself in me’ (2001: 292). He continues to account for how the other appears in the self – h ­ is concepts of the punctum and stadium, or what I call rupture – ­and contaminates the dichotomy of life/ death. This is the force of ‘pluralisation’, of turning the self into the multiple others, and the possibility of ‘seeing a photograph in a photograph’ as a deconstruction of narration and mimesis, a process that Derrida labels as ‘phantasmimetism’ (2001). Derrida’s ‘spectral writing’ corresponds to Sokurov’s concerns, especially his focus on being between deaths and being as dis/appearing. He shifts from the posthumous narration, which

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abstracted s ubje ct ivity and kno w l e dg e - wo r l ds 41 has been the focus of existing studies,10 to the construction and exploration of posthumous subjectivity. The last interests us as a form of philosophical enquiry. In Taurus Sokurov demonstrates such possibilities by capturing the moment of transition of power from Lenin to Stalin around the time of Lenin’s death in 1924. This very moment, that is, the ultimate rupture – ­the gliding of subjectivity across the planes of living and dying, ultimate power and powerlessness, and signification and non-knowledge – ­provides the film with possibilities of transcendental indexing and of examining anteriority as interiority.11 Taurus depicts a day in the life of Lenin (Leonid Mozgovoi), who has been debilitated by a series of strokes. He is living at his dacha outside Moscow, completely cut off from the central government and, generally, from any event taking place in the outside world. He is looked after by a doctor (Lev Eliseev), with whom Lenin converses in German, as well as his wife Nadezhda Krupskaia (Mariia Kuznetsova) and sister Mariia Ul’ianova (Natal’ia Nikulenko). Lenin’s last day includes a few seemingly insignificant events such as bathing, going for a picnic and meeting with Stalin, who comes for a brief visit.12 Lenin fails to recognise Stalin – ­or pretends so – ­and, in fact, neither Stalin nor Lenin is referred to as such in the film. Lenin’s family and associates address him by the diminutive form of his first name, Volodia, or as Leader [vozhd’], depending on their relationship with him. Lenin undergoes the process of objectification while he remains inaccessible in spite of the ontology of materialism. Thus, Sokurov de-personalises Lenin and Stalin, turning them into ahistorical agents of power and corruption, and into presentations free of representation. As Condee puts it, ‘if for Sokurov there are no political leaders, but merely a demotic transfer, rendering collective power to an utterly mortal person, then his . . . tetralogy sets out to reverse this operation: to revert Hitler, Lenin, and Hirohito to their ordinary status’ (2009: 181).13 The lack of conventional events helps Sokurov to concentrate on the main event: Lenin’s death (in ensuing chapters I will categorise this difference as a distinction between non-events and post-evental subjectivity).14 Following other scholars, especially Iampolski,15 Condee maintains that death is the most prominent theme of Sokurov’s films, his ‘most life-affirming preoccupation’ (2009: 167). The director develops it in virtually all his works: death is figured as murder, autopsy, funeral service, communication with a corpse, a ghost and a long-deceased person, and so on.16 Iampolski (1997b) views death in Sokurov’s films in representational terms – ­as a physical experience of death and as the spectator’s obligation to learn about death by means of looking at it and never looking away.

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Iampolski speaks of the haptic dimension of death in The Second Circle [Krug vtoroi] (1990), which he distinguishes from melancholia because of its engagement with ritual.17 Condee interprets Sokurov’s interest in death – h ­ is ‘visual necrophilia’ – i­n post-colonial/post-imperial terms as an element in the ‘death–empire–culture’ nexus (2009: 168). Condee notes that death is used as a means to differentiate between politics and art: ‘the political leader has been powerful but not immortal; art, by contrast, powerless in the politics that produced it, may reasonably aspire to immortality’ (2009: 168). Jeremi Szaniawski considers the trope of death in relation to Sokurov’s oeuvre as an attempt to ‘produce a universe of its own – ­circular, perhaps cyclical, self-contained, autonomous, yet deeply in dialogue with its time: to conquer death by an over-determined account of death’ (2014: 91). Nevertheless, the scholars do not provide an analysis of death as self-consciousness, that is, a condition of duration, memory and subjectivation based on differences in degree or intensity. As I demonstrate below, Taurus investigates differences between space and duration, matter and memory, present and past, and it does so in the symbolic mode by advancing the concept of death as difference by indentation of decomposing the composites given in experience and the actual being, and going beyond the ‘turn’, or death itself. Taurus demonstrates that space and matter are a difference in degree outside itself and for the subject. For posthumous subjectivity there is no longer any dualism between nature and degrees of difference. Sokurov shows how all mental states and all the degrees of subjectivity co-exist in some single metaphysical ecosystem, which is conceived as the moment of monism: all the degrees co-exist in a single time, a single temporal realm, which is nature in itself. (I return to the concept of monism and of the monad – ­the One – i­n the final chapter of the book. The remaining chapters map posthumous subjectivity in the symbolic mode in order to reveal their relationship to ontology and intentionality.)18 Taurus presents life as expansion and contraction, co-existing in a single time and forming a totality; but this total ‘whole’ is only potentiality rather than actuality. With its focus on duration and on the figure of Lenin, Taurus inevitably raises the question of history and historical time. Denise Youngblood identifies Taurus – ­as well as the other instalments in Sokurov’s power tetralogy – a­ s postmodern historical/­historiographical cinema: ‘traditional (“modern”) history presents historic events and people; postmodern history represents events and people, that is, it engages in selfconscious representation with a full awareness that history is a process of cultural construction not the retrieval of “reality”’ (2011: 123). Indeed, Sokurov is interested in de-mystifying history and in demonstrating its constructedness, which, in turn, he uses to construct his own myths about

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abstracted s ubje ct ivity and kno w l e dg e - wo r l ds 43 history. All these strategies are particularly evident in the tetralogy as well as his Russian Ark, which presents a panoply of histories in the maze-like setting of the Hermitage. In her assessment of Taurus, Youngblood registers historical inconsistencies and breaks in the assumed chronology of the events. For example, she notes that the depicted events would make a long day that would be physically challenging for someone as ill as Lenin. What is more important, she argues, is that it is uncertain when the events take place – ­before Lenin’s third stroke or after the first one – l­eading the scholar to assume that Sokurov ‘deliberately muddled or compressed the time frame for artistic/symbolic, as well as for historical/philosophical reasons’ (2011: 129). What remains unclarified in Youngblood’s discussion is what effects such a compressed time-frame produces and particularly what such symbolic and philosophical reasons and messages might be.19 Equally, if Sokurov eschews the conventions of ‘traditional historical’ time, the question remains about what the director proposes instead. Stephen Hutchings gives a partial response to this question. He views Taurus through the philosophical prism of alienation, a concept derived from Hegel rather than Marx, and having a strong affinity to the Russian metaphysical strand of philosophy found in the works of Pavel Florenskii, Aleksei Losev and others.20 Hutchings contends that ‘alienation – o­f the individual from bodily existence, of the self from the other, of the human being from the world of matter – ­provides an interpretative key to the tetralogy’ (2011: 147). Just like Youngblood, Hutchings notes that the mode of alienation results in an abstracted, ‘metaphoric’ reading of the  film: ‘the inclusion of voyeurism and cameras within the diegesis, clearly designed to achieve this effect, is, in Taurus supplemented by the semi-metaphorisation of the hero as a part of the animal world’ (2011: 147). Such ‘metaphorisation’ results in the emphasis on duration which is characteristic of Sokurov’s oeuvre at large. Both Youngblood and Hutchings agree that Sokurov’s film illustrates a point from Bergson’s theory of duration in that it replaces narration with a flow of imagery. Hutchings interprets the final scene of the film – L ­ enin mumbling incoherently before the final shot of the sky – ­as a ‘symbol of an unattainable plane of meaning’ and ‘the eternal time of Bergson’s “privileged moment”’ (2011: 148). In his Matter and Memory,21 Bergson discusses duration and knowledge as follows: We will assume for the moment that we know nothing of theories of matter and theories of spirit, nothing of the discussions as to the reality or ideality of the external world. Here I am in the presence of images, in the vaguest sense of the word, images perceived when my senses are opened to them, unperceived when they are closed. All these images act and react upon one another in all their elementary parts

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a­ ccording to constant laws which I call laws of nature, and, as a perfect knowledge of these laws would probably allow us to calculate and to foresee what will happen in each of these images, the future of the images must be contained in their present and will add to them nothing new. (1911: 1)

Bergson relates imagery to experience and knowledge and constitutes a sensory event in the context of the unfolding matter (‘laws of nature’).22 Human agency is perceived in terms of a subjectivity burdened with different kinds of knowledge and yet lacking Knowledge in the metaphysical sense. Bergson wishes to free the subject from such a burden in order to actualise being as ‘indetermination’, as a form of ambiguity stemming from the instability of signification per se. Bergson draws our attention to the moment when non-knowledge is transformed into knowledge. Sokurov is concerned with the reverse strategy – w ­ ith exploring the origins and purpose of non-knowledge and with disentangling the subject from the constraints of judgement (shifting from reality (something) to idea (nothing); and in fact, aiming to present the/an idea by means of reality and multiplicity). Sokurov shows how failure in one procedure produces success in the other: Lenin struggles to multiply 17 × 22 – a­ seemingly random task set by his physician – a­ nd so he fails to quantify, measure and mathematicise reality by means of the operations of consciousness,23 thus enabling the multiplicity of ontology by combining differences as interconnectedness. (This mathematical task, along with Lenin’s semi-vegetative state, corresponds to the concepts of body/ animality in Deleuze and matheme in Badiou.) Lenin’s life is effectively a leap into a system of interconnectedness, which can be illustrated by the concept of the cone. In his critique of Bergson, via Foucault, Deleuze suggests that subjectivity is a product of subjectivation, that is, a series of processes that ‘allow a relation to oneself to emerge, and constitute an inside that is hollowed out and develops its own unique dimension: “enkretia”, the relation to oneself that is self-mastery’ (1988: 100). This is ‘the inside as an operation of the outside’ (Deleuze 1988: 97).24 For Deleuze, there is a cultural difference in how the subject is construed by means of folding and unfolding: in the West, it is unfolding, or being towards death, whereas in the East, it is a continuous folding and refolding, which constitutes memory, or, to be precise, ‘“absolute memory” which doubles the present’ (1988: 107). By contrasting the two, Deleuze puts forward an idea about how subjectivation produces a space of the infinite within the finite, or a folding-in of the universe. In Bergson’s terms, it is the whole of the past, which permits reconstituting Delueze’s fold as Bergson’s cone of memory whereby inside and outside are conceived in terms of the void and boundary. The super-

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abstracted s ubje ct ivity and kno w l e dg e - wo r l ds 45 imposition of the fold and the cone produces a loop: a repetitive cycle of subjectivation that aims to overcome the infinite–finite split as a matter of otherness, and, in fact, ‘otherworldedness’, which is not, of course, a symptom of the fantastic, but rather a reference to a different realm of existence. In cinematic terms, the questions Sokurov poses are as follows. Is film the medium of posthumous subjectivity? Does film always show the emptiness of the subject’s ontology? Is duration in film a process of folding memory (Deleuze)? In philosophical terms, is the figure of Lenin a subjectivity bereft of memory, or a subjectivity that collapses on itself due to the weight of knowledge, that is, a situation when memory exceeds the subject? In sociocultural terms, how does one bring an historical figure from oblivion when this figure has been subjected to extensive mythologising, with mystification and fantasy having replaced and outweighed actuality? Does the truth matter in afterlife? In geometrical terms – ­and playing with the English translation of the film title – ­is the cone of memory stable, or does it rotate to enable folds? And if it does rotate, does it create a torus – p ­ ronounced in the same way as Taurus­– a­ s the distance to the axis of revolution decreases, the ring torus becomes a horn torus, then a spindle torus, and finally degenerates into a sphere (see the final chapter of the book on the role of amplification in the symbolic world). The torus illustrates how the finite merges with the infinite and the subject collapses. Iampolski suggests that Sokurov resolves these issues by employing epiphany as a cine-ontological device: ‘these are moments of capturing the movement of ontology towards visibility/presence, and of movement of the face towards representation, that is, showing how the loss of the face occurs, the fixation of the un-representable/un-imaginable moment’ (2006: 380).25 To paraphrase, Sokurov focuses on moments – ­events – ­that permit the transformation of the body into a post-evental body, or, in Badiou’s terms, into a singular body in which truth appears: ‘The most significant stake of Logics of the Worlds is without doubt that of producing a new definition of bodies, understood as bodies-of-truth, or subjectivizable bodies’ (2009: 35). Iampolski and Badiou provide a similar argument concerning the body and moments of epiphany as moments of undoing the body and instances of enunciation [nevoobrazimyi moment]:26 ‘As an image of God, the body of man was a resemblance to and a manifestation of the creative power in persona, the radiance of its beauty, the temple and the song of its glory. With the death of God, we have lost this glorious body, this sublime body: this real symbol of his sovereign mastery, this microcosm of his immense work, and finally the visibility of the invisible, this mimesis of the inimitable’ (Badiou 1999: 191). Sokurov applies a reverse logic in his exploration of the capability of cinema to speak

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of matters that are indemonstrable and can be related to as part of the symbolic mode.27 For example, he delays the introduction of the figure of Lenin, and in this deferral he abstracts Lenin and focuses on Lenin’s fear of, and longing for, death as an interminable attempt to comprehend the infinite via the desire to see and experience it in the sensuous. (In Chapter 2, I demonstrate how cinematic objectification of the senses enables an entry into the subject-world.) Taurus opens with a series of scenes that show other characters, leaving the spectator guessing about the ‘identity’ of Lenin for an extended period of time. The film shows a man smoking outside the estate, two women conversing about their nightmares, and another man wandering in fog, thus marking the boundaries of the physical world that the film occupies, as well as querying the status of Lenin. Are all these people mourning his death, or are they simply waking up to endure, or enjoy, another day with him? Lenin is shown lying silently in bed; his caretaker, wearing a military uniform, tries to free a newspaper from Lenin’s clenched fist. Why is Lenin resisting? Is this because rigor mortis has set in and the carer now has to release Lenin’s grip? Why does Lenin keep quiet? Suddenly, Lenin lets the newspaper go and the spectator hears him speak; he asks for a glass of water in a clear, well-articulated manner. The spectator is confused about the status of Lenin and his actions. The camera cuts back to the two women: they laugh and go back to sleep. The camera shows a nocturnal landscape with a strong wind blowing through the trees. The relationship of the landscape is ambivalent: whether it is a recollection or a dream is uncertain, and if this is some actual landscape, where is it and who is seeing it? A voice-over is heard; it is a man’s voice addressing himself and wondering about his own recollection of the dream. He is interested in knowing what music he heard in his sleep during the thunderstorm. He notes that perhaps it was the angels’ singing, an experience that, as he claims, is normally available only to children. Then he contradicts himself by saying that the thunderstorm has its origins in the electrical currents in the sky and that angels do not exist. The spectator assumes that this is the voice of Lenin who, through an inner monologue, aims to resolve the nature of knowledge, and in particular, those forms of knowledge that do not stem from actuality. Sleeping and dreaming is a recurrent state that Lenin, his wife and sister experience. During one of these states Lenin converses with his deceased mother.28 The dream scene follows the scene in which Lenin is pacified after an outburst of anger. His carers throw blankets over him and their weight takes Lenin down. Before the mother addresses Lenin she removes the blankets from his face in a gesture referring to the uncovering of the body of Christ and the inspection of

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abstracted s ubje ct ivity and kno w l e dg e - wo r l ds 47 the shroud. Lenin is shown from above: his composure and the angle of the shot are reminiscent of the view of Lenin’s body in the mausoleum. Here Sokurov engages in a complex play with the status of Lenin and his body and with the visual strategies of representation of the undead. The mother calls Lenin into afterlife and accuses him of spreading terror in the aftermath of the Revolution; she functions as a personification of Lenin’s conscience and guilt that can be actualised in dream only. Ultimately, in this scene Sokurov shows the difference between metaphysical and epistemic possibilities of internality. In the voice-over comment, Lenin contrasts two forms of knowledge – s­cience and intuition – b­ oth of which had paramount significance for Bergson in his theory of duration. If, as Badiou claims, science demands metaphysics, then film as a medium requires the symbolic mode to relate to actuality. Bergson examines this problem by means of multiplicity, that is, duration as multiplicity. He proposes two major types of multiplicity: on the one hand, discrete and discontinuous, and, on the other hand, continuous. They correspond to the spatial one and the temporal one. Duration generates new thoughts and feelings in the present – ­it is knowledge in the making, which corresponds to what I call ‘non-knowledge’, or experience which is lacking, or experience that the subject fails to ­interpret – c­onsciously or subconsciously – b­ ut of which presence the subject is fully aware, for example, aware of death as non-knowledge. Lenin demands that his doctor let him know whether intelligence remains after the death of the body (in the scene in which Lenin helps the doctor to take off his gown). On one level, this is an eerie presupposition about the vitality of thought in a body that was never buried, at least in the conventional sense, and so remains undead. On another level, Lenin enquires about pure intelligence, which shifts the presentation in the film from the corporeal to metaphysical investigation. In response, the doctor tells Lenin a story about a man who lived despite having a nail stuck in his head; when the nail was removed, the man died. The parable offers a critique of the social revolution instigated by Lenin and his associates: the removal of the nail and the death of the patient can be compared with the political transformation of 1905–17. Historical, social and personal events are encoded as iterations about the essence of knowledge and non-knowledge and their relation to the subject’s intentionality. Equally, the parable may be interpreted as a metaphor for human existence as such, with the subject appearing in constant iteration with the forms of authority which appear external but are, in fact, violent projections of the self. As the scene develops, the camera shows the back of the man, as he slowly rises from his bed and walks around the room; he looks at the

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camera and enquires: ‘Who is it out there?’. The camera shows how a doctor peeps into the room and greets Lenin. This sequence sets out the possibilities for multidirectional reading of the film, and it examines understanding of knowledge by manipulating perspectives and patterns (subjectivities): what is presented is perhaps a dream, a nightmare seen by one of the women, or perhaps it is Lenin’s own nightmare, or a ‘real’ situation in which the spectator hears Lenin’s monologue, or perhaps Lenin is dead and what the spectator sees is a ghostly reconstruction. These questions propose different readings. Unlike in other films where the posthumous status of the narrator is acknowledged,29 in Taurus Sokurov explores the possibilities of engaging with the tradition of the Greek tragedy of the speaking dead who assume the consciousness and bear the characteristic traits of the deceased subject. Equally, Sokurov is interested in death itself and he frames his interest as a series of questions. Does death signify the death of Lenin’s consciousness? Is it his political death? Is it the death of the myth of Lenin? And in the context of film as a medium: what is the purpose of the film? Does the film show the life of a subject who is unaware of his own imminent death, or does the film constitute a cinematic ritual of ablution, following the subject’s death? 30 Does the film show the journey of the newly departed soul, or, on the contrary, is the soul about to be released and so the camera focuses on the constraints of earthly living? Furthermore, is Lenin aware of his death, and so is he a conscious narrator or is he oblivious of his own status, a puzzled narrator? The film gradually disengages from the function of the voice-over; it makes Lenin speak for himself in order to underscore his posthumous condition. The film is not a fulfilment fantasy insofar as it does not desire death, but rather an inquiry into the modes of being after death. Lenin himself is obsessed with events after his death: he keeps torturing his wife by asking whether she intends to continue living after his death and what it is going to be like. In other words, the film is concerned with constructing a posthumous subjectivity that responds to the imperatives to foresee, envisage and narrate life after death in order to facilitate such a death. Lenin is to become an undead subject, a ghost, in order to actualise the symbolic world after his own ‘physical’ death. Such subjectivity eschews clear divisions between and awareness of the live and the dead states, which, through contrast, allow reflection and reassessment. Instead, such subjectivity is interested in transient states and finds no fault in continuing in invariably the same way forever. It is as if contemporaneity offers no ultimate redemption, and so afterlife becomes a playground for alternative lives. Taurus poses questions about the nature of death and life whereby the two are indistinguishable from one another. They are presented as the

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abstracted s ubje ct ivity and kno w l e dg e - wo r l ds 49 memory work of the subject which sometimes fades away and then suddenly becomes clear and bright again, appears and disappears. This is manifested in the colour orchestration of the film: the flickering of light and shifts from sepia to full colour, and to black and white images, symbolise the failing memory of the subject and its vision being obscured by its own dreams, nightmares and images. One of the main technical features and optical tropes in the film is that of the dissolve shot which emphasises the blurring of boundaries between different types of knowledge, and which encodes subjectivity in terms of transience and transcendence. Lenin speaks of his own death as the process of dissolving, too. He talks to his doctor about how the latter will use his brain for medical research. In this context, the film performs a visual autopsy on the living body of Lenin: the desire of the doctor to see Lenin’s brain symbolises the drive to knowledge while discounting non-knowledge, that is, Lenin’s current existence. At dinner Lenin talks about his food and informs other people at the table that he has found his own finger in the soup: his subjectivity captures how the body is dismantled and consumed, and how it becomes a matter of intellectual enquiry. (The vision of Lenin as a cannibal and particularly as an eater of his own flesh has a particular historical resonance – ­the atrocities of the revolution – a­ s well as philosophical underpinnings: the endless circulation of matter and thought that contradicts the notions of progress sustained in dialectical materialism that Lenin personifies.) On the one hand, Sokurov depicts a decomposition of the body, and, on the other hand, he demonstrates the construction of subjectivity.31 These two processes are accompanied by the change in Lenin’s mental abilities: on the one hand, his speech is often reduced to animalistic screams and groans, and, on the other hand, he is still capable of conversing about politics and philosophy in German. Lenin talks about the ‘detachment of the flesh’ [otlipanie miasa] – ­this process aims to complete the construction of posthumous subjectivity which is there to haunt the self by means of filmic presentation. Taurus, through the figure of Lenin, recalls Nietzsche’s posthumous subject as a discontinuous existence: ‘I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous – a­ crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite’ (2004: 228). In observing its own self-presence, the subject is involved in the process of de-realisation, no longer occupying a particular chronology or narrativisation. Each present moment that the subject refers to is a caesura, or a rupture, which denotes the impossibility of the event in its glaring ­totality. Or, as Badiou puts it in his treatise on transitory ontology, ‘it is when you

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decide upon what exists that you bind your thought to Being. That is precisely when, unconscious of it all, you are under the imperative of an orientation’ (2006: 57). In the symbolic mode, the subject cross-cuts two conceptual realms – ­the sensuous realm and the metaphysical realm – i­n their complex symmetry to reveal and comprehend its transitory ontology. The subject’s choice endows the movement across time with properties whereby the One is either in subtraction, as in Taurus, or in excess, as in The Target (Chapter 12). Badiou’s metaphysical numerations and multiplications are a means to speak of ‘being after’, or the posthumous, postapocalyptic subjectivity. In the ensuing chapters I explore the presence of posthumous subjectivity – ­as a scar, trace, doubling and vibration – ­in order to demonstrate how the symbolic mode actualises the transcendence of being of the multiple. I start, in Chapter 2, by examining the assumed immediacy of film and associated illusion of nowness, or the sensuous. I contend that film is about a specific manner of seeing when there is never pure ‘seeing’ and instead the spectator is confronted with utopias of presentation embodied in the film senses, memories and associations, regulated by abstracted, almost mathematical, subjectivity within an ecology of its own self-presence or, what I call, ‘knowledge-world’.

Notes   1. I am grateful to Julian Graffy for his helpful comments on the first draft of this chapter.  2. Paradoxically, the presence of Lenin’s body disables the elevation of his status to that of god since god cannot have a corporeal form.   3. Arabov is also the author of Proshkin’s The Miracle and Serebrennikov’s St George’s Day discussed in this book in Chapters 2 and 6.   4. The film – ­lasting 104 minutes – ­consists of two parts: the first was finished in 2000 and the second in 2001.   5. The film premiered in competition at the sixty-eighth Venice International Film Festival and won the Golden Lion.  6. Sokurov’s oeuvre is vast and diverse, and so is research concerning the film-maker. In fact, the majority of publications aim to produce a classification of Sokurov’s cinematic output or define his individual style in relation to the Russian and world tradition of auteur cinema. See, for example, Iampolski (1997a); Aronson (2003); Arnaud (2005); Dietsch (2005); Jameson (2006); Condee (2009); Strukov (2009); Bjorling (2010); Grakhanov (2009); Nisnevich (2010); Arkus (2011); Beumers and Condee (2011); Efird (2011); Uvarov (2011).   7. See Chapter 6 on Serebrennikov’s St George’s Day and on the possibilities of the symbolic mode in terms of knowledge construction.

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abstracted s ubje ct ivity and kno w l e dg e - wo r l ds 51   8. This transposition corresponds to Badiou’s concept of One as Two that I discuss in the following chapters of the book.   9. See Chapter 6 for the discussion of Sobchak’s concepts of photography and visuality. 10. For example, Szaniawski defines Sokurov’s films as visions of distortions: as if ‘these anamorphic representations were a perception of the world of the living seen from a ghostly perspective, perhaps from beyond the grave’ (2014: 14). 11. See the discussion of the narrator’s ‘inner visions’ in Sokurov’s Soviet elegies in Binder (2011). 12. Arguably, the picnic outing is the main event of the first part of Taurus, while Stalin’s visit is that of the second. 13. Vadim Abdrashitov’s Magnetic Storms (2003) supplies a similar ahistorisation of history by presenting the event – ­fist-fights between two gangs of factory workers – f­ rom an extreme close up when causality is replaced with ultimate physicality. 14. In relation to Sokurov’s The Second Circle, Szaniawski writes about ‘the temporal regime of the cadaver’ (2014: 89). 15. See, for example, his early essay ‘Death in the Cinema’ (1997b), in which he explores the trope of death. 16. For example, Ian Christie describes Sokurov’s Mother and Son as an ‘inverted pietà when the son carries his dying mother through the garden in his arms, which is also their last communion with nature’ (1998). Sabine Hänsgen defines Sokurov’s notion of death as ‘a transition from a state of physical objectivity into a sphere of optical illusion’ (2011: 52). 17. John MacKay develops a Cultural Studies reading of Sokurov’s preoccupation with death in the film as a symbol of the absolute silence imposed by the Soviet regime with regard to the millions of victims of totalitarianism (cited in Szaniawski 2014). 18. In the introduction to his volume on Sokurov, Szaniawski, following Fredric Jameson, contends that Sokurov has devised ‘a time which is at the same time finite and infinite: where chronos becomes aeon, the time of pure event, the time of idea, of eternity, yet which at the same time remains a historic time, somehow’ (2014: 10). It is unfortunate Szaniawski, like Condee, does not develop this train of thought and instead focuses on the chronology-driven interpretation of Sokurov’s films. 19. In Sokurov’s work compression of time results in stillness of the image which reveals its painterly characteristics. In fact, all Sokurov’s films have been compared with paintings (see, e.g., Condee 2009; Beumers and Condee 2011). Therefore, unlike in other chapters in this book, in this chapter I pay less attention to the relationship between film and art. This is because Taurus does not contain instances of enunciation of art (painting), but itself is entirely a work of art (painting). 20. They were leading Orthodox theologians, philosophers and scientists of the twentieth century.

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21. Especially in the chapter entitled ‘Of the Selection of Images for Conscious Presentation. What Our Body Means and Does’. 22. Sokurov utilises a similar device at the start of Russian Ark when the voiceover – ­Sokurov himself – ­announces that his eyes are open but they see nothing. What follows is a continuous flow of imagery which illustrates the relation between the subject and the cultural tradition. 23. The task may be a sceptical reference to Lacan’s statement that ‘mathematization alone reaches a real’ (1999: 131). 24. For Deleuze, Greek philosophers invented the fold: ‘They folded force, even though it still remained a force. They made it relate back to itself. Far from ignoring interiority, individuality, or subjectivity they invented the subject, but only as a derivative or the product of a “subjectivation”. They discovered the “aesthetic existence” – t­ he doubling or relation with oneself, the facultative rule of the free man’ (1988: 100–1). 25. [Muchitel’nost’ mnogikh fil’mov Sokurova osnovyvaetsia na etom oshchushchenii bessiliia kino dostich’ sushchnostnogo v cheloveke. Momenty zhe epifanii, otkroveniia – ­daiutsia imenno kak momenty fiksatsii dvizheniia bytiia k vidimosti, litsa k ego izobrazheniiu, to est’ fiksatsiia utraty litsa kak takovogo. V fiksatsii etikh nevoobrazimykh momentov kinematograf Sokurova dostigaet vysochaishei tochki.] 26. Iampolski’s notion of the ‘nevoobrazimyi moment’ is noteworthy in the discussion of Zviagintsev’s concept of visualisation (Chapter 4). 27. Szaniawski hints at the possibility of such a predisposition when he writes about Sokurov’s ‘negative’ sublime: ‘Sokurov always refuses beauty, drowning it systematically in layers of mist, haze, and muted pallets’ and miracles happen ‘in between shots, and in the interplay of images with his pointedly whimsical soundtrack’ (2014: 73). Here Szaniawski critiques Sokurov’s cinema from the angle of the established, mundane perspective of beauty – ­beauty as a lack – w ­ hereas in my view, Sokurov offers an alternative concept of beauty as such, or presence. 28. This is a transposition of posthumous subjectivity which I analyse using other films in the following chapters. 29. For example, in Nikolai Lebedev’s The Star (2002), the captain who sent the titular scout unit to their deaths narrates the result of their sacrifice at the end of the film. Then he mentions that he also died later in the war. In Russian Ark, Sokurov takes us on a posthumous tour of the Hermitage whereby the gaze of the camera is permanently attached to the disembodied voice of the narrator, the director himself. He starts by alluding to a cosmological disaster – ­the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 – ­and by confirming his own posthumous status: ‘I open my eye and I see nothing.’ 30. Critics have noticed that the film consists of many un-events – L ­ enin’s bathing, dressing, Krupskaia clipping Lenin’s unkempt toenails, etc. – ­a feature that has been interpreted as a means to de-politicise Lenin (see, e.g., Youngblood 2011) as well as to show intimacy between Lenin and Krupskaia

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abstracted s ubje ct ivity and kno w l e dg e - wo r l ds 53 (see, e.g., Hutchings 2011). I argue that these ‘non-events’ are, in fact, metaphysical gestures, rituals, and their purpose is to prepare Lenin for a life in a different realm. Similarly, if one assumes that the film is not about Lenin but rather about the Soviet myth about Lenin, then such events counteract the stasis of the perfectly preserved body of Lenin in the mausoleum in Red Square. In Sokurov’s Soviet Elegy (1989), the effect of an ecclesiastic litany for the deceased is provided by means of the inclusion of a monotonous series of images of the Soviet Politburo and the accompanying name recital. See Binder (2011) for further discussion. 31. Lenin’s frail body is contrasted to the idealised body of the classical sculpture visible in the background during the dinner scene. The two types of body convey two types of knowledge: finite and infinite, knowledge and non-knowledge.

C HA PT E R 2

The Lacking Sense of Cinema: Aleksandr Proshkin’s The Miracle (2009)

Film has an overpowering illusion of immediacy. It is only when the spectators are engrossed in the content of cinematic presentation that they start to experience an illusion of nowness, ongoing contemporaneity; otherwise they always remain aware of the sources of the audio information as well as the pre-recorded, reconstructed nature of the visual information, and they perceive both as unfolding in time, subject to historisation. Arguably, it is the work of imagination that creates an impression of reality, and not the apparatus of cinema itself. What is at the core of the problem here is the imperative to provide a set of conventions that enable such illusions. The history of film as a medium is a history of technical innovation: from black and white images to colour photography; monophonic sound gives way to stereophonic; and panoramic and 3D films emerge. It has been suggested that each stage in film development gives a sense of a more immersive experience of cinema, serving the primary imagination. While in general the cinematic image remains transparent, its ability to affirm the ontology of the object fully depends on the conceptual progress of epistemology, with the binds between the image and its referent being increasingly loose, unless, of course, the system of referents is viewed as texts rather than objects.1 In this study, I examine the epistemology of film, but only insofar as its capacity to produce signification. I am interested in modes of discourse, and to a lesser extent in the structural critique of film as a form of art. While I showcase how the symbolic mode operates on the level of composition, my main purpose is to elaborate on the meaning which the symbolic mode enables. This book is not about (a classification) of figurative devices, but about a field of meaning they enable; hence, my focus is on the imaginative rather than rhetorical account of the symbolic mode. To put it differently, the book is about a specific manner of seeing, about identifying how through the visible the subject renders the invisible, the emanation and the overtone of truth. I put myself in the position of the

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t he la c king s e ns e o f ci n e m a 55 viewer who – ­in the mode of co-creation – ­mediates on the cinematic image. My attention is drawn to how film-makers imbue the cinematic image with significances, whereby the very organisation of the image and its relation to other images within and outside the film, in their full duration, is a ‘seeing as’ rather than merely ‘seeing’. I argue there is never pure ‘seeing’ (just as there is never pure image, or pure effect that would create a sense of authenticity or ‘realism’). Pure seeing is a utopia because seeing is always engaged in interpretation, seeing is about responding to and engaging with the image, and establishing links among different subjectivities, embodied in the film senses, memories and associations. The cinematic image offers scope for imaginative manipulation, and my focus is on how a new synthesis is produced, on how cinema converts ‘seeing as’ into subjectivities, and how the senses of cinema emerge not as sites of perception, but as sites of meaning construction. In his Lectures on Aesthetics (1975), as a metaphor for the birth of subjectivity, Hegel utilised an Ancient Egyptian sacred statue, which, every sunset, as if by a miracle, produced a deeply reverberating sound. He showed how art distinguishes between the silent scream and the vibrating tone, or, to be precise, the exact moment when the silent scream resonates. In fact, the true object-voice is always mute – ­it is stuck in the throat, awaiting its moment to resound (this is a corporeal appearance of non-knowledge). What produces the sound – o­ r in our terms the vibrations of culture – ­is the void: the lament for the lost object. The lost object – ­whether voice, memory or senses – ­is the ultimate terror because it reveals the uncanny voids in discourse.2 The symbolic mode provides a platform for the interpretation of events in film as an allegory of the political and social as well as a reflection on the nature of cultural memory that obliterates concrete details while utilising myths in order to complete its historical distancing. Film directors employ all senses of cinema in order to evoke the lacking sense – ­the one that functions as a site for enunciation and intentionality – ­as a means to actualise systems of reference and deferral whereby gaps in discourse are presented figuratively as the malfunctioning of the senses. Aleksandr Proshkin’s The Miracle explores the possibilities of sensing gaps in the temporal past. The film recounts mysterious events that took place in 1956 in a provincial Soviet town. An impiously irreverent young woman freezes in mid-step on New Year’s Eve and remains standing until she is revived at Easter. This happens just before Nikita Khrushchev’s speech at the twentieth Congress of the Communist Party, in which he forges an attack against Stalin’s cult of personality, starting the period of liberalisation known as the Thaw. The film provides a transcendental

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account of the change in the political regime in the USSR. In spite of the investment in historical plausibility, Proshkin eschews the conventions of the genre of historical drama in favour of cultural myth-making and exploration of the validity of such myths for our understanding of the past. The director interprets the historical events as transcendental occurrences that inform our understanding of Russian culture in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. Ultimately, the film provides a critical sensory framework for the post-war Soviet experience. In addition, by examining one sense at a time, Proshkin queries the validity of the film-sense apparatus (see, e.g., Elsaesser 2010), and he challenges the foundations of the mimetic theory and various appeals to realism,3 whilst keeping focus on temporal constructions of subjectivity. The Miracle centres on a transitional period in Soviet history as well as transient periods in human life, presented as liminal experiences whereby the characters are suspended between life and death, or, in fact, they operate as posthumous subjectivities. As a result, the medium of film is conceived in liminal form as a sensory discourse that constructs non-knowledge in non-representational terms. Proshkin (b. 1940, Leningrad) came to prominence with his 1987 The Cold Summer of ’53, the first film to examine the fate of the gulag returnees and the wave of crime, both real and imagined, that flooded the country after their release, following Stalin’s death in March of that year. The film combines elements of historical drama and Western (for further discussion of the film genre, see Dobson 2009), being the director’s first attempt to address significant historical and political concerns through popular genres.4 As is evident from his body of work, Proshkin is preoccupied with historical and biographical genres and literary adaptation. He is particularly interested in the late Stalinist era and Khrushchev’s Thaw, and he returns to explore these periods in his most recent productions, Live and Remember (2009, based on a short story by Valentin Rasputin) and Atonement (2012, based on the novel by Fridrikh Gorenshtein). Proshkin’s style is characterised by his heroes functioning in ambivalent ethical situations and by the director’s reluctance to draw the dividing line between good and evil, as well as by the employment of extended cinematic metaphors. For example, in Trio (2002) the road is used as the bonding agent in a travelogue about three characters who reveal their nomadic dispositions and existential pursuit of the self. ‘The heat of the summer steppes points to the sensual exhilaration that forms the bond among the archetypically priapic Aleksei, the stoic Nikolai, and the candid Marina . . . The film also possesses the strong hermeneutic energy of a conspiracy thriller and of a romance whose outcome is unclear’ (Strukov 2004). The Miracle was scripted by Iurii Arabov, who is also the author

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t he la c king s e ns e o f ci n e m a 57 of Serebrennikov’s St George’s Day and Sokurov’s films, including Taurus. As director and scriptwriter, Proshkin and Arabov previously collaborated on two television series, Doctor Zhivago (2005) and Nikolai Vavilov (1990), and they evidently share an interest in the biopic and the traumatic experiences of the past. As if following the logic of a television series, The Miracle consists of five parts, each of which is a mini-film that puts into the spotlight its own set of characters and philosophical issues. The director uses intertitles5 in order to switch from one part to another and to signpost temporal transfers – m ­ arked as transitions from one month to another in an annual cycle – ­in this case from January to May. (A similar technique is used in Andrei Zviagintsev’s The Return – ­where the development of the narrative is marked with the help of intertitles naming the days of the week; these temporal markers advance the metaphysical connotations of the film as they enable the comparison of the events to Biblical story.) January introduces Tatiana (Mariia Burova Jr), her family and circle of friends. Tatiana is a young woman who works at a local factory and lives with her mother, a middle-aged, superstitious woman. They live in the provincial town of Grechansk; from the film advertising campaign, the viewer knows that Grechansk represents Samara where the alleged historical events had taken place. Tatiana is organising a party, hoping that her lover Nikolai (Konstantin Khabenskii),6 a journalist from a central newspaper, will attend the gathering. As part of the preparations and because of an argument with her mother, Tatiana removes a few icons from the wall. As a member of the Komsomol, she finds them embarrassing; however, it is evident that removing the icons follows not an ideological but a familial cause. The act signifies Tatiana’s rebellion against the authority of her mother, who symbolises local tradition that regulates the behaviour of young women in the community. Taking down the icons is a sign of Tatiana’s sexual liberation as well as a loss of ethical orientation, because not only does she remove the icons she also expels her mother from the house for the duration of the party. The woman is forced to wait outside where she stays warm by keeping a log fire. Her mother convinces Tatiana to keep the icon of Nicholas-The-Miracle-Maker [Nikolai Ugodnik] on the wall, and she gives other icons to the local priest. When the party begins, Tatiana is frustrated because her lover never arrives; her friends soon make couples and engage in amorous activities. Left without a suitable partner, Tatiana turns her eye to the icon and announces that since Nikolai is not available she will dance with Nicholas.7 As soon as she takes it down and starts dancing with the icon of St Nicholas in her hands, she is struck, perhaps by lightning, or electrical charge or digitus Dei est hic. In panic

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the ­party-goers abandon the house, and Tatiana’s paralysis, or, as it is called in the film, her solitary ‘standing’, begins. This part of the film demonstrates Tatiana’s rebellion and also the loss of familial and cultural tradition. The viewer learns that Tatiana’s grandmother had passed over the icons to her daughter, but never taught her how to pray. She also gave her a book that provides a set of interpretations to various mysterious events. Tatiana’s mother uses the book to explain the symbolism of an earlier incident when a pigeon flew into the house and died. While the mother believes that the pigeon’s entry had uncanny connotations, Tatiana gives a simple account: the hungry bird wanted to taste her mother’s cooking. The film makes a reference to three generations of women and three stages of the degradation of belief in Soviet Russia: the grandmother was religious, the mother is superstitious and Tatiana is agnostic. In the absence of the male figure, religion is meant to provide the women with moral guidance. By using icons – ­visualisations of god’s presence in the Orthodox tradition – ­and focusing on a single saint – ­St Nicholas – t­he film demonstrates how the figure of god functions as a symbolic husband to the mother and a symbolic father to the daughter. By removing the icons and replacing Nikolai with Nicholas, Tatiana challenges the authority of (the Orthodox) god and also commits incest with her (symbolic) father. The Miracle introduces a new tonality into the exploration of the relationship between man and god in Russian cinema by focusing on women. In contrast to the majority of other films, The Miracle explores the parent–child relationship8 by showing that Tatiana’s desire is not a form of adulation of Christ, but rather primordial lust of a pagan goddess.9 The first part of the film establishes the film’s style, a unique combination of mock socialist realism, melodrama and horror.10 The Miracle finds itself at the intersection of Soviet, post-Soviet and classical Hollywood cinematic traditions; and the combination of these styles creates a peculiar sense of the absurd that oscillates between comic and tragic notes and produces an effect of symbolisation. For example, the local KGB officer orders a handyman to cut a hole in the wooden floor to free Tatiana; his axe breaks as he attempts to do so. This scene is both comic and tragic because it shows the total submission of people to Soviet authority. While doctors helplessly prick the dumbstruck Tatiana with needles, her mother becomes insane and, screaming hysterically, leaves the house, never to be seen again. The Miracle presents an inverted version of the Oedipus story in that it is the parent and not the child who is forced into exile. Overall, the film combines two myths – o­ f Oedipus and Galatea – i­ n its exploration of the Khrushchev era, whereby the mythological narrative underpins

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t he la c king s e ns e o f ci n e m a 59 Christian symbolism. In other words, previous cinematic styles serve as regimes of enunciation, with which The Miracle advances its own aesthetic concerns that bridge the gaps in presentation by exploiting the spectator’s viewing experience. The next three parts of the film – F ­ ebruary, March and April – f­ocus on different types of authorities in their attempts to release Tatiana from her spell. The second part, February, shows Tatiana’s lover, Nikolai, a Pravda journalist and also a poet.11 The third centres on the philosophical debate between the priest and the city anti-religion representative and also a colonel of the KGB, Mikhail Kondrashov (Sergei Makovetskii),12 who is versed in Kant and other philosophers included in the canon of dialectical materialism.13 The fourth part shows an intervention of the highest state authority, the General Secretary of the Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev (Aleksandr Potapov). In other words, Tatiana’s case is investigated from the point of view of four types of knowledge and agency: art, faith, philosophy and statehood/ideology.14 Doctors make the final attempt – T ­ atiana is taken to a psychiatric clinic for an examination in the part called May – ­but their attempts fail as well. Thus, Tatiana has reconfigured the relationship between different forms of knowledge: the power of non-knowledge is established and the spectator has evidenced the unrepresentable transcendence of connotation. Tatiana’s standing has an enormous impact on the system: it is an allegory of the regime before its entry into a new political era of liberalisation, hence the metaphor of seasons which allows for a basic interpretation of transition from oppression to freedom. The transition is marked as an investigatory process propelled by the miracle of Tatiana. The Pravda editor sends Nikolai to Grechansk to investigate the incident and to write a satirical essay about it. When he returns, he explains Tatiana’s predicament as ‘macro-scale sensory stupor’ [krupnomashtabnyi sensornyi stupor]. From the point of view of Cultural Studies, the stupor defines the political and social condition in the USSR; it also signifies the failure of rational knowledge since the Khrushchev era is known primarily for the first flight of man in space and the use of atomic energy. From the point of view of the symbolic mode, the film is concerned with the nature of knowledge and forms of knowledge transmission: icons, the fortune-telling book, rumours, painting, the newspaper, sheet music, records, television and so on. The Miracle shows how all these media fail to account for Tatiana’s experience, that is, to represent it when confronted with its presentation. However, just like St George’s Day, this film is not concerned with the representation of the miracle. Rather, it aims to explore the senses of cinema in relation to other mixed-media arts such as sculpture and performance.

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In other words, in The Miracle transcendence occurs in embodied terms whereby the mechanised work of the human body is suspended – ­frozen – ­in order to reveal the working of non-knowledge and the inner structure of being.15 Tatiana’s standing should be comprehended as a relation to the self: she is both a referent and a referral. She is the one that differs, that is, she maintains the mark of alterity and simultaneously retains a relation to it. In its etymology, reference (from Greek ‘phéro’ and Latin ‘fero’) contains both ‘férance’ (carrying) and ‘referent’ (what carries back to), thus becoming the transport, or mediation. In language, the connection between the signifier and the signified is not fixed; in film, images share something with the objects they denote; these, however, are not exact copies, but rather ‘traces’, ‘analogues’, ‘doubles’ or ‘imprints’ (Wollen 1969). In fact, a whole lexicon of terms has been used to account for the relationship between reality and its filmic presentation, including such terms as ‘iconic’ and ‘indexical’. All describe the assumed capacity of the cinema to ‘capture reality’. For example, Andre Bazin compares photography, in its mechanical reproduction of reality, to other automated processes such as the moulding of death masks, and goes on to remark that: ‘one might consider photography in this sense as a moulding, the taking of an impression, by the manipulation of light’ (1967: 12). I have no space here to engage with either Bazin’s concept of cinema or its multiple critiques; instead, I would like to point out that in this particular instance Bazin conceptualises film as a form that exists outside established conventions of art, social norm and cultural practice. His concept is not an expression of an ideal form of art, but rather a confused notion of human activity placed outside cultural tradition, imperatives of discourse and, most ironically, the viewer’s ability to perceive critically not only filmic images but reality itself, that is, Bazin reduces the viewer to an automaton whose job is to recognise instances of depicted reality, as if no other form of engagement with the world around us exists. Indeed, Bazin ignores the cultural practice surrounding the production of death masks – ­it goes without saying that the purpose of the death mask is not to capture the intricacies of dead flesh, but to maintain an image of the living person. Hence, a death mask is not about taking an impression, but about retaining a memory, and in doing so it alludes not to the dead body but to the living person, and in this function the practice is both highly conventional and symbolic. Bazin’s death mask is not about the presence of some reality but, conversely, about the absence thereof. It illuminates the gap in the process of signification, the gap, which, in its turn, opens the possibility for producing alternative readings of the past and of alternative worlds as such. The mask is not a mirror on reality, but a window to a different

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t he la c king s e ns e o f ci n e m a 61 world16 – ­a symbol of the life of the deceased, of the time past and of memories being eradicated in the course of history. The death mask can be used to produce a different image – a­ sculptural representation of the dead person; however, it will never equate the original as it will always remain a substitution for the loss, an imprecise impression of the lived experience.   In his summation of Badiou’s philosophy of film, Alex Ling provides a similar critique of Bazin’s sentiment: Cinema is not in fact an ontological art, rather cinema is a logical art . . . cinema is not an essential art, an art of essences. Rather . . . cinema is an art of appearances. Because . . . appearance is for Badiou one and the same as logic . . . what appears is nothing other than a logical determination of what it is. Meaning what is peculiar to cinema is its ability to stage the complex interplay between being and being-there . . . between what is and what appears, by way of the fiction of appearance. Cinema is then finally an onto-logical art – ­or to be absolutely precise, a logically onto-logical art – ­the art which best dramatizes the relations between being and appearing. (Ling 2013: 55–6)

Here Ling alludes to one of the key concepts of Badiou’s philosophy: the reciprocity of being and the self as a retroactive action (in ensuing chapters I demonstrate how the work of the camera – ­the so-called retroactive gaze – ­fulfils Badiou’s promise of the return to the self). Appearing is not an outright negation of being because being is never one, but rather multiple, or as one sees in Proshkin’s film, the multiple without one. The absence, the void, simultaneously affirms and seeks to go beyond by means of iteration, whereby the desire for authenticity – ­oneness – ­remains as a phantom of consistency. As I pointed out above, the void is not materialisation, but rather a transport for multiplicity of determination – t­ he mediation and the reference. As noted above, Tatiana’s standing materialises senses through symbolisation of art. Her whole body, the living sculpture, suggests the presence of another world that the spectator can only refer to. Through her relationship to that world, she transposes signification, whereby meaning is always about mediation. Proshkin accentuates this idea by re-mediating her story in the stories of other characters. For example, the priest’s son, Sasha (Dima Opanasenko), like Tatiana with her mother, challenges his father by pointing out that he is not respected in the community. Sasha is bullied because he is the son of a cleric in an atheist society. Father Andrei resolves the conflict by reminding Sasha of his grandfather’s suffering in Stalin’s gulag. Tatiana’s standing destroys his faith and so Father Andrei abandons his family: like Tatiana’s mother, he is seen walking away, never to come back. The departure of the parent signifies the failure of discourse – C ­ hristian and pagan – ­as a mode of signification. (This being

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the second instance of the parent abandoning the child, the action emerges as a repetition of the reverse action where meaning is constructed through erasure, the gap.) Similarly, if Father Andrei questions the authority of god, Khrushchev stages a revolt against the ultimate political authority, the father of all nations, Stalin, who, unlike in Sokurov’s Taurus, never appears, even in mediated form. As part of de-Stalinisation, Khrushchev orders the removal of Stalin’s portraits and sculptures, and indeed, the Grechansk town square loses its statue of Stalin. In what used to be a dual statue of Lenin and Stalin, Lenin is now on his own, whereby the void left by the statue of Stalin reminds us of his legacy more vividly than his actual statue would have done. The film suggests that while statues of gods – w ­ hether Christian or Soviet – h ­ ave been removed, the cultural memory and practice of their adulation continues. The mythology of being is constructed in sculptural forms: the edifice of the state takes on a supernatural function of the kingdom of gods. The Miracle employs the parent–child relationship as a metaphor for societal struggles. Proshkin does not consider filial conflict as a male prerogative; instead, he depicts groups of characters, both men and women, who undergo a similar process. Whereas Zviagintsev’s The Return, Bekmambetov’s Night Watch and other films examine the concept of the absent father and his subsequent return, The Miracle is concerned with the moment of the parent’s departure – t­he familial rupture – w ­ hich signifies the moment when historical time is dissolved and the emergence of continuities is suspended, because the child is ineffective in introducing new orders. The filial connection is transformed into a mode of mediation of the cultural tradition; the last is appended, and the monumental forms of time – t­he living sculpture – ­denote the transgression of meaning. The Miracle presents a panoply of media and art forms that embody the past and against which the characters stage their revolt. Tatiana gets rid of the icons, Father Andrei ignores the photograph of his friends and mentors from the Orthodox seminary,17 Khrushchev orders the removal of all representations of Stalin, and Nikolai escapes the constraints of his job in Pravda. Proshkin empowers media with an ability to retain the past and, as a consequence, to induce emotional responses. While Bazin views photography as a type of death mask, media are used as environments in which discourse is present in sensory terms. For example, Nikolai’s wife is a concert pianist and she plays a lot of classical music; her repertoire reflects Nikolai’s emotional disarray. At the party Tatiana’s friends play a record, which is actually a recording made on an X-ray sheet, a traditional way to bypass official laws regulating the production and dissemination of music in the USSR. Naturally, the X-ray shows the bones of a person, and

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t he la c king s e ns e o f ci n e m a 63 so the ‘record’ is a piece of pictorial and simultaneously an audio-presentation.18 It is the essence of cinema, especially in its celluloid era, which is apparent in the use of Tatiana as an uncanny reference to herself: she is neither alive nor dead, neither a person nor a statue, and in this liminal state she is cognizant of self-presence. In his study of the use of gesture in Sokurov’s films, Iampolski notes: ‘An X-ray of the father’s chest that father and son study can be seen as an allegory of total proximity. This image of absolute penetration,19 of absolute transparency, unveils the source of death lurking in a healthy and beautiful body’ (Iampolski 2011: 120). In The Miracle, Tatiana looks at an X-ray of someone else’s body which has been appropriated for a completely different use: the X-ray is no longer ‘an allegory of total proximity’, but rather of distance and an invocation of the future appropriation of Tatiana’s body for cinematic experiments in the same way as the representation of the anonymous body has been borrowed to reproduce music (this is another instance of the image–sound convergence). Unlike other statues in the film, the paralysed Tatiana is not a symbol of state authority, but rather of transcendental experience. Her existence in the liminal space is evident in the visual orchestration of the film. For example, at the end of his visit Nikolai insists on identifying her condition (he perhaps knew her most intimately) and so a piece of glass is brought to her mouth (it is glass in a framed photograph); it registers condensation which indicates that Tatiana is still alive. The camera shows Nikolai walking away from Tatiana’s house. It is snowing and Nikolai, other people and objects in the street appear as if seen through fogged glass. The movement of the camera and falling snow enhance the instability of perception, subjectivity and being. The falling snow signifies the suspension of time and the isolation of the senses from the distractions of the outer world (Ronnberg et al. 2010: 78). The tinted images, demonstrated by means of photography, reveal the director’s scepticism about the indexical nature of photography and film: as the vision is always obscured, my attention turns to the outer layer of the image, one which is also used as a surface for another image. In its concerns with perception and, more generally, with senses of memory, media and cinema, The Miracle administers a few scenes where various senses are explored in their relation to the metaphysics of experience. They range from the comical to the sinister. For example, in January Tatiana is portrayed as a sensual, lecherous woman: the camera is fixated on her naked body, and the skin (the denominator of continuity, with touch being a symbol of rupture) becomes the chief medium for communicating Tatiana’s desires. Her carnal, libidinous nature is also revealed in her consuming food20 (she is shown continuously eating or speaking about

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food) as well as in her vocabulary (it is raw and corporeal). Her attempt to dance with the icon is perceived as a threat to consume and devour god both vaginally and orally. When she is in the mental institution (May), the doctor examines Tatiana’s mouth while she is lying stark naked on the operating table; it is as if the doctor is searching for god’s presence in Tatiana’s orifices. Her inability to speak (the lack of the voice as a signifier of non-knowledge) should be interpreted as the silence/presence of gods. In February, with its emphasis on smell, Nikolai, an alcoholic, eats garlic to deceive his boss; the characters exchange several jokes that compare the smell of garlic on Nikolai’s breath to the stench of the Soviet regime.21 After Nikolai visits the dumbstruck Tatiana, he returns home and acts as if he is heavily intoxicated; however, his wife is unable to detect the smell of alcohol, which suggests that the Soviet stench has disappeared and that Nikolai has been ‘purified’ whilst observing Tatiana’s standing. In March, with its emphasis on touch, the priest’s wife is excited about the prospect of meeting Colonel Kondrashev and so she applies makeup; Father Andrei reprimands her and he violently washes her face in a bathtub filled with soaking washing. By removing the lipstick from his wife’s face, Father Andrei wishes to remove all sensuality from his righteous life (in Bazin’s terms, to restore the original meaning of photography as a true copy of life, which is doomed to fail); however, he succumbs to his sense of life after his encounter with ‘standing’ Tatiana: having lost all sense of life and his service to god, he gulps large quantities of beer spiked with vodka. The fourth part of the film – A ­ pril – ­attacks vision in its ability to comprehend and represent the event. When speaking to Kondrashov, Khrushchev notices that there is something wrong with his eyes; it turns out that he had lost one eye during the Second World War and as a result he has to use a prosthetic eye.22 This is a metaphor for Kondrashov’s blurred vision, his inability to demystify Tatiana’s standing and his confusion with regard to Soviet ideology and its position on religion. During his conversation with the Soviet leader, Kondrashov’s eye falls out onto the ground and rolls away; the colonel picks it up, cleans it and puts it back. This is a painfully sad and also hilarious scene as neither Khrushchev nor the other officials notice the incident. Kondrashov’s split vision symbolises his internal division; in fact, his disability is a symbol of his allegiance with the devil (e.g., in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (1967) the devil’s eyes are different colours, and other demons’ vision is blurred as well, e.g., by a broken pince-nez). In The Miracle all senses fail the subject in the process of apprehending reality and the production of mimetic knowledge. The malfunctioning of

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t he la c king s e ns e o f ci n e m a 65 the senses indicates the presence of non-knowledge insofar as its power cannot be conceived or communicated by means of the senses. Such failures produce anxiety: the cinematic subject is destabilised because of the ruptured sensory experience. Nikolai’s wife is obsessed with her health: she is terrified of contracting a venereal disease and signs up to see an oncologist as she believes she has cancer. Her hypochondria is a symbol of the Soviet regime23 and its inability to provide a believable plan of action for its own people. The defective senses and hypochondria are symptoms of neurosis, which is conceived in The Miracle in political, social and artistic terms. The film portrays the neurosis of cinema in its relationship to the visual organs, optical apparatuses and concepts of gaze.24 Moreover, Proshkin views cinema as an art form and social institution in terms of the intrusion of the profane into the mystical, sacred world. The last is evident in Kondrashov’s decision to turn Father Andrei’s church into a cinema. On the one hand, this move is a basic illustration of the Soviet anti-religion campaign; on the other hand, it conveys the relationship of cinema, as a modern form of art, to other forms of knowledge. In their political decisions, social relations and strategies of signification, the characters and the spectator have to rely on their intuition: the sixth sense, faith and transcendence, and the ability to acquire knowledge without rational inference and shift to acquiring non-knowledge, and the mechanism of providing us with beliefs. The word ‘intuition’ comes from the Latin word ‘intueri’ and is usually translated as ‘looking inside’. Indeed, the miracle in Proshkin’s film opens the door to the characters’ interior worlds, and it also constructs the interiority of the gaze and the film as a form of art that is always looking inside, always looking back in its struggle to convey the outside world. The introspective quality of Proshkin’s cinema construes historical experience as theurgy (from Greek θεουργία); the term describes the ritual that is performed with the intention of evoking the presence and actions of god, and having a transformative effect on the subject. Ultimately, The Miracle conceptualises non-knowledge as the lacking voice, which, in its turn, frames the gaze as the voice. While the gaze entices, scrutinises and captivates, the voice hypnotises, seduces and defuses. The lacking voice instantiates the gaze in that the gaze acquires the bodily parameters of the voice with its vibrations, rhythms and temporal deferral. Cinema’s multisensory, synergetic apparatus enables an affective relationship between the viewer and the historical past. Sound is particularly responsible for forging such an emotional bond in the viewers as, on the one hand, it is used to recreate the actual sound of a lost era, and, on the other hand, it leads the viewer on their journey of (re-)discovery of the

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f­orgotten past, whereby the sound, and especially musical performances, are informed by the sensibility of the viewers and not by the historical subjects represented. In his overview of the cinematic legacy of Chapaev (directed by the Vasil’iev brothers, 1934), Julian Graffy refers to Osip Mandelshtam’s response to experiencing the film, which at that time was one of the first Soviet sound productions. Mandelshtam wrote a few poems, including ‘It was a Five-Headed Day’ [Den stoial o piati golovakh] (1935), in which he connects ‘his impressions of the film to his memory of the train journey to his initial place of exile, Cherdyn, on the upper reaches of the Kama river in the Urals, closer to the area where Chapaev is set’ (2010: 80–1): The train was going to the Urals. Into our open mouths The talking Chapaev was galloping from a sound film . . .25

Here the effects of the sound cinema ignite an emotional response in the poet, who recollects his own journey to the Urals. It is the combination of the technology of sound and the visual presentation of the familiar landscape that provokes a specific reading of space as both historical and personal. Mandelshtam also registers a discrepancy of perception – ­‘Into our open mouths . . .’ – a­ s the poet seems to apprehend the sound of the film with his mouth rather than with his ears. As mentioned above, in The Miracle the senses are misplaced;26 the doctor searches for meaning by examining Tatiana’s mouth. In this regard, the mouth – ­or the womb – ­is a birthplace not only for the voice, but also for the gaze. It is an uncanny voice because it does not speak but can be ‘heard’, or rather, sensed, thanks to the capacities of the symbolic mode.27 In the psychoanalytical paradigm, Mary Ann Doane defines the sound as the ‘sonorous envelope’ of cinema, whereby sound functions as the voice of the mother before birth – ­through the skin and walls of the womb – ­that enfolds and encloses the viewer (Doane 1985: 567). Kaja Silverman demonstrates that sound in classical cinema is used in a hierarchal way that is similar to the gender logic identified by Laura Mulvey in relation to the visual structures of the look and gaze (Silverman 1988). In the final stages of his life, Lacan suffered severe aphasia and so was unable to speak. As a result, the twenty-sixth seminar of 1978–9 remains ‘silent’, demonstrating the main point of his theory: the idea that there should be the figure of a voice that cannot and, indeed, must not speak. Therefore, from the perspective of the symbolic mode, the use of the voice in The Miracle – ­the cinematic gaze as the voice – ­is symptomatic of aphonia, the inability to produce voice, which is perceived as a stop, stuttering

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t he la c king s e ns e of c i n e m a 67 in discourse, a type of vibration, which leads to the conceptualisation of non-knowledge. The director disconnects the voice and language, turning the former into a malfunctioning object, because, as Žižek argues, the gaze and voice are objects, that is, they do not belong on the side of the looking/seeing subject, but on the side of what the subject sees or hears (Žižek 1996: 90). When Tatiana is brought back to life, she is incapable of speaking. The reasons for her muteness are not explained; and, in fact, it is not clear whether it is muteness or mutism. The former is a physical condition that prevents the subject from speaking, and the latter is a psychological disorder with no physical damage to organs. (Tatiana’s silence [nemota] is exploited by the director as an aesthetic reference to silent cinema, in Russian and Latin known as ‘mute cinema’ [nemoe kino]. In Balabanov’s Morphine (see Chapter 3), the ‘muteness’ of cinema is employed as a metaphor for a subject digressing into historical oblivion and speech being replaced with incomprehensible laughter which makes the body and discourse shudder and vibrate.) By failing to provide a medical or rational explanation, the film encourages a symbolic interpretation of Tatiana’s paralysis. It should be perceived as part of the religious miracle, and her suffering and silence are comparable to those of Christ: Jesus is silent during the first thirty years of his life; he keeps silence until his calling as a way to teach obedience; and he is also silent on the cross as a sign of his triumph as God. His exterior silence signifies internal peace. The film also offers a political interpretation of Tatiana’s silence. When she is released from the spell, her paralysed, frozen body ‘thaws’; it becomes flexible again. This is a performative emblem of Khrushchev’s policy of liberalisation which superseded Stalin’s winter (winter as silence). Although Tatiana can move, she cannot speak, which signifies the lack of real freedom in Khrushchev’s Russia and the ensuing silencing of his political opponents, for example, his attack on Boris Pasternak after the publication of Doctor Zhivago. Tatiana is placed in a mental institution, a form of political abuse of psychiatry that, as a method of eliminating political opponents, became common in the Brezhnev era. The political connotation of Tatiana’s silence also refers to the late Soviet and postSoviet periods when, in spite of Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika and the economic and cultural freedom in contemporary Russia, the story of Zoia’s ‘standing’ in Samara has been silenced – ­or perhaps just ignored – ­until it emerged recently. Ol’ga Artem’eva calls this practice ‘nonglasnost’ [neglasnost’] (Artem’eva 2009), and, in my view, it denotes not a negation of discourse, but rather discursive ruptures, or a form of nonspeaking or non-knowledge. In this regard, Tatiana’s silence symbolises

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not so much political action, but rather the traumatic subject that is unable to speak and overcome the trauma.28 Miracle and trauma are linked in that both belong to another, transcendental world, beyond the limits of understanding. Trauma opens an ethical space, and in Proshkin’s film trauma turns Tatiana’s experience into a social and cultural destiny and does not merely frame it as a representation of the extraordinary. Eventually trauma moves beyond language and representation, that is, the materiality of the signifier, which accounts for the break in the narrative when Tatiana is released, but her future and the future of other characters remains uncertain. In sociocultural terms, trauma is characterised by repetitive action and by cultural loops of silencing, or amnesia. The film presents the viewer, that is, the post-Soviet subject, as post-traumatic: this subject lacks its own voice and requires a vocal substitution – ­the use of other media – ­in order to articulate the subject’s desires. In its interpretation of trauma, The Miracle creates a collective tale of individual mourning and redemption. In its reading of history – ­whether national or personal – i­t does not represent nostalgic yearning as a refuge from the turbulent present. Therefore, the connection with the past is not reactionary, but rather exploratory as a form of cultural transition and appropriation of the past.29 In other words, the film’s narrative is about transmission and not inscription, and in that sense it is not canonical but rather apocryphal. The Miracle is about cultural memory and ideological distortions, and, in their ambition, these are revelatory and utopian. The Miracle depicts extraordinary events taking place in the cynical Soviet Union: when the Pravda editor enquires about Nikolai’s attitudes to religion, he replies, ‘Kak vse’ (‘like everyone else’), which suggests a common concept of post-religious societies ‘to believe but not to belong’. However, the conformity of opinion does not guarantee the uniformity of practice; quite the opposite, The Miracle demonstrates religious practice in the USSR, and, what is more important, it reflects on the metaphysical experience in agnostic environments. The Miracle is concerned with the examination of (political) authority and, generally, power. Soviet power is present in its ultimate manifestation thanks to the appearance of Khrushchev. This is explained by the emergency landing of the aircraft in which he has been travelling. Khrushchev’s ‘falling out of the sky’ symbolises the intervention of the highest authority as well as the ‘earthing’ of his character: he is shown as a common down-to-earth ruler who is concerned with the everyday well-being of his subjects. Note, for example, the scene in which Khrushchev kills bedbugs in the Grechansk hotel. A similar strategy is used in Sokurov’s Taurus whereby ‘earthing’ is a strategy to de-politicise discourse.

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t he la c king s e ns e of c i n e m a 69 The Miracle documents the introduction of the symbolic into the real by means of sensing the lack, or, in Lacan’s terms, the lack-of-being. In the film, being is conceived simultaneously in the ontological sense of openness within which ideas emerge, and being in the noumenal sense of the world, or of entities separated in the world from the temporal ­perspective – t­he vibrations of time and culture. In this context, the symbolic is the ontological horizon of Being whereas its anterior is the lack-of-being, that is, the there-of-Being (Dasein) lacks its place in the order of reality. It cannot be reduced to an entity within the world because it is the place of the very openness of the world. In terms of the symbolic mode, what transpires in The Miracle is the spectator’s awareness that something is always excluded and sacrificed from the plane of representation, or that something in it is missing at its own place: the voice that is not heard, but sensed. The symbolic mode is characterised by the minimal gap between its elements and places they occupy: as Lacan (1977) notes, in order for the gap between elements to occur, something has to be fundamentally excluded. What happens in psychosis – ­and in The Miracle – ­is precisely the inclusion of this lacking object into the frame of ‘reality’. It appears within the constructed world as the hallucinated, or imagined or mystified object: the voice, which in this case equals the gaze, haunts the cultural discourse as paranoiac, moving on the loop and always stumbling and stuttering, and always gazing at the void. In his paraphrase of Lacan’s ‘lack-of-being’, Badiou concludes that the subject is identified only at the point of lack, as void (2007b: 100). This leads him to assert that the subject is never an essence, that is, what it is, but rather a relation to an event – ­of what happens (in Chapter 6, I analyse the relationship between the world and event). Badiou warns us against privileging the event as something that exceeds the subject because such thinking may result in ‘the idea that the individual can be sacrificed to a historical cause that exceeds him’ (2007b: 100). As the reader will see in Chapter 3, the disposition of the self and the event conceived as history (or equally as realism, desire or any other forms of totality) is destructive in that it threatens the subject as a site of meaning production.

Notes   1. See Chapter 6 on the role of digital technologies in the transformation of the visual image.  2. See Chapter 6 for further discussion of the significance of terror in the ­symbolic mode.   3. See for example, Aitken (2006); Peucker (2007); Nagib (2011).  4. This stylistic strand is manifest in the director’s later productions, for

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example, Russian Revolt, which is a 2000 adaptation of Aleksandr Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter (1836), and Trio, as well as in his engagement with the medium of television (Mikhailo Lomonosov, Nikolai Vavilov), and the adaptation of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.   5. Litvinova in Goddess (Chapter 7) and Balabanov in Morphine (Chapter 2) utilise intertitles to construct multiple and fluid subjectivities, respectively.  6. Khabenskii is one of the stars of contemporary Russian cinema; he has appeared in a number of successful productions including Bekmambetov’s Night Watch and Litvinova’s Goddess (Chapter 7).  7. For cultural information on Russian icons, see Steinberg and Coleman (2007).   8. For example, Khlebnikov’s and Popogrebskii’s Koktebel’, Zviagintsev’s The Return, Bekmambetov’s Night Watch, and many others.   9. Tatiana’s appearance is similar to that of Tatiana in Fedorchenko’s Silent Souls, a film about pagan rituals and folk culture in which the female body is conceived as a locus of tradition (see Chapter 10). 10. The film exploits cinematic and cultural clichés that enhance its stylistic repertoire and create the atmosphere of the absurd. For example, Nikolai’s family is portrayed as typical members of the Soviet intelligentsia, living in a communal flat and dreaming of a better life, denying and simultaneously practising ‘poshlost’’ (Nikolai sarcastically exclaims, ‘I did not get a degree in literature to cheat on my wife in Greshansk?!’ [Konchit’ filfak, chtoby izmeniat’ zhene v Grechanske?!]). Nikolai’s arrival on a secret mission to Grechansk is a reference to Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector (1836). Khabenskii previously played Pavel Chichikov in Pavel Lungin’s 2005 television adaptation of Gogol’s Dead Souls (the series is called The Case of ‘Dead Souls’), a fact that makes the association even more prominent. In fact, the similarity is also perhaps due to Arabov writing the script of both the television series and The Miracle. In his visual orchestration of horror, Proshkin borrows ironically from Alfred Hitchcock. This enriches the film with some chic naiveté (e.g., lightening that casts shadows during Khrushchev’s polemic with his aide). 11. The name of the newspaper – ­Pravda [Truth] – i­s used ironically; it symbolises the dishonesty of the regime and equivocation of its ideology. It also represents the inability of Soviet citizens to embrace the miracle. 12. He is one of the superstars of post-Soviet theatre and cinema; he appeared in Balabanov’s Of Freaks and Men, Proshkin’s Russian Revolt, Sergei Ursuliak’s Liquidation, and many others. 13. This is similar to using the figure of Lenin to symbolise dialectical materialism in Sokurov’s film (Chapter 1). 14. The first man to solve Tatiana’s riddle is, of course, the handyman charged with the task of cutting her loose from the floor. He is referred to as ‘the carpenter’, and so a parallel with the Bible is established from the outset. 15. See Chapter 8 for the discussion of the role of the body in the symbolic mode.

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16. In Chapter 12, I analyse Zel’dovich’s The Target to demonstrate the role of masks and masking in the symbolic mode. 17. Ironically, the photograph is organised as a vignette, in its style similar to Soviet official photography of the period. 18. See Chapter 8 on the concept of ex-scribing and the construction of subjectivity in Voloshin’s Nirvana. 19. Compare with the imagery of penetration in The Wild Field discussed in Chapter 11. 20. Balabanov’s It does not Hurt has a character of Alia (Inga Oboldina); she is an awkward unappealing woman who is only interested in food. Her compulsive ingestion of food is a gesture of corporeal protest insofar as it manifests her desire to consume and consummate independently from men. 21. A similar parallel between bad smell, moral degradation and society is established in Dostoevskii’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880), including the character of Stinking Lisaveta [Lizaveta Smerdiachshaia]. 22. The idea of the introverted gaze, symbolised by the prosthetic eye, is also present in Voloshin’s Nirvana discussed in Chapter 8. 23. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn employs the symbolism of cancer in the depiction of Soviet regime in his 1967 novel Cancer Ward. 24. This is an ironic reference to Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Eye (1924) and his idea of the centrality of vision as a mechanised procedure of meaning-making. 25. [Poezd shel na Ural. V raskrytye rty nam / Govoriashii Chapaev s kartiny skakal zvukovoi . . .] The translation of this stanza is by G. Freidin (1987: 246). For the Russian text of the poem, see Mandelshtam (1990: 214–15). 26. See Chapter 11 for a discussion of displacement and subjectivity in Kalatozishvili’s The Wild Field. 27. The voice and the gaze are the two objects added by Lacan to Freud’s list of the so-called ‘partial objects’ such as breasts, faeces and phallus. The distinction is in that they are not on the side of the looking or hearing subject, but on the side of what the subject sees or hears, that is, the extended realm of subjectivity. 28. On the role of the traumatic subject in the symbolic mode, see Chapter 9. 29. Literature on Russian nostalgia is vast, see, for example, Boym (2001) and Kalinina (2014).

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C HA PT E R 3

Gatekeepers of (Non-)Knowledge: Aleksei Balabanov’s Morphine (2008)

In this chapter I explore the origins of the term ‘the symbolic mode’ by analysing Umberto Eco’s work on the process of signification. To address the issue of subjectivity as a significative node I expand Eco’s notion of the symbolic mode by employing Badiou’s concept of ‘becoming without determination’, whereby the subject has access to the ‘beyond’, or nonknowledge. I demonstrate how these processes inform our understanding of Balabanov’s Morphine and its rhetorical distinctions between truth and Truth as knowledge and non-knowledge. Umberto Eco’s study of systems of signification suggests a shift from semiology to semiotics with particular reference to visual culture. His etymological account of the term ‘symbol’ elucidates some of the chief concerns of this study. In his Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, Eco writes: What is a symbol? Etymologically speaking, the word δ ύμβoλoν comes from σνμβάλλω, to throw-with, to make something coincide with something else: a symbol was originally an identification mark made up of two halves of a coin or of a medal . . . In the semiotic dialectics between signifier and signified, expression and content, or name and thing, such a rejoining is always deferred, the first half of the couple being always interpreted by our substitution of another first half of another couple, and so on in infinitum, so that the initial gap between signans and signatum grows more and more. On the contrary, in the original concept of the symbol, there is the suggestion of a final recomposition . . . What is frequently appreciated in many so-called symbols is exactly their vagueness, their openness, their fruitful ineffectiveness to express a ‘final’ meaning, so that with symbols and by symbols one indicates what is always beyond one’s reach. (1984: 130)

Eco identifies three ‘complementary critical moves’: (1) symbols are a meta-category for different types of signs; however, there is an asymmetry of application since the sign is always an unmarked element in the opposition ‘sign/symbol’; (2) symbols express meanings that cannot be expressed by signs; and (3) symbols are a ‘semantico-pragmatic phenom-

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g ate ke e p e r s o f (no n- )kno w l e dg e 73 enon’ (1984: 132–4). It is the last critical move that interests me, that is, symbols as a type of ontology, and, conversely, experience as a ‘symbolic mode’ which relies on textual strategies in order to produce interpretations in a specific manner. Eco finds traces of the symbolic mode in the aesthetic and cultural theories of Hegel and Jung, as well as in the Christian and Kabbalistic traditions of interpreting signs. In relation to Hegel, Eco notes that the symbolic mode arises as a form of pre-art1 when man, in his attempt to comprehend nature, spiritualises it, and, as a result, produces universal and fantastic concepts. (Eco’s ‘pre-art’ is a means to codify non-­knowledge in ‘aesthetic terms’.) Eco refers to Hegel’s phases of symbolic activity – u ­ nconscious symbolism, symbolism of the sublime and conscious symbolism of the comparative type of art – ­in order to emphasise that for Hegel ‘the symbol always displays a certain disproportion, a tension, an ambiguity, an analogical precariousness’ (1984: 144). The symbolic mode is evoked as soon as signification moves to a higher form of rhetorical expression, that is, art. For Eco, Hegel’s refusal to bring together the symbolic and the aesthetic as a specific semiotic phenomenon is the most problematic part of his philosophy of art. In relation to Jung’s theory of symbols, Eco notes that the theory opposes the individual and the collective unconsciousnesses. The latter, according to Jung (1970), represents innate layers of the human psyche and defines similar behaviour in different individuals in different historical periods. These layers are known as archetypes and universal images, which include lunar, solar, meteorological and other imagery evident in myths and mythological contexts as well as in visions and dreams. Eco points out that for Jung these symbols are neither signs nor allegories. ‘They are genuine symbols precisely because they are ambiguous, full of half-glimpsed meanings, and in the last resort inexhaustible . . . If the archetypes are indescribable and infinitely interpretable, their experience cannot be but amorphous, undetermined, and unarticulated’ (Eco 1984: 145). To resolve the dilemma of archetypes and signification, Eco introduces the figure of the mystic,2 a figure that, on the one hand, continues tradition by using existing symbols, and, on the other hand, interrupts tradition by filling the symbols with new meanings. By bringing into the discussion the figure of the mystic, Eco addresses the complex issue of agency in the symbolic mode. He assigns the mystic the task of negotiating meaning production in the diachronic perspective: the mystic is a type of agency that narrativises and historicises the symbolic mode. The mystic is an authority in that he or she translates the experiences across fields of signification; he or she helps to hold the meaning together and at the same

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time permits the interchangeability of signification in the symbolic mode: ‘In the mystical experience, symbols must be tamed exactly because they are exaggeratedly “open” – ­and their force must be controlled’ (Eco 1984: 146). By identifying the mystic as a figure of authority, Eco empowers symbols themselves with the capacity to generate and control meaning. Because of the paradoxical nature of symbols – b­ eing full of meaning and simultaneously empty of specific significance – t­he mystic has to operate on the edge of sanity: the liminal position of the mystic correlates with the open-endedness of discourse.3 Eco rejects the positivist stance of Jung and his followers because, in his view, no one, even the mystic, can assign to symbols a final truth; the Truth becomes apparent not in the intentions of the mystic but in discourse. In fact, Eco claims that the symbolic mode is not characteristic of a specific historical period or cultural setting, but rather it occurs in different epochs; the symbolic mode is a type of working with discursive ontology and not a type of representation. Eco draws on pagan poets, philosophers of Antiquity, early Christian theology, Kabbalistic tradition, medieval exegesis4 and other regimes to ascertain the non-historical nature of the symbolic mode. Eco concludes his overview of symbolic regimes by asserting that the symbolic mode is not only a mode of producing a text, but also a mode of interpreting every text: ‘This pragmatic decision produces at the semantic level a new signification, by associating new content – s­ o far as it is possible, undetermined and vague – ­to expression already correlated to a coded content. The main characteristic of the symbolic mode is that the text, when this mode is not realized interpretively, remains endowed with sense – ­at its literal or figural level’ (Eco 1984: 163). In Eco’s consideration of the symbolic mode, one problem remains unresolved. Eco is hesitant to define the agency in the process of symbolic production. Although he evokes the figure of the mystic in his discussion of Jung’s theory of symbols, he refrains from articulating the parameters and imperatives of symbolisation. He speaks of the ‘legitimating theology’, a somewhat precarious category since it includes ‘atheistic theology of unlimited semiosis or of hermeneutics as deconstruction’ (Eco 1984: 163). (Eventually Eco makes a return to the structuralist paradigm of conceptualisation by supplying a catalogue of phenomena, institutions and genres that convey such ‘legitimating theology’, namely, dictionaries, cryptology, grammars, genetics and other rational types of encoding meaning.) Eco warns against the conflation of the semiotic mode and the symbolic one since, in the first instance, each element of discourse speaks indirectly and is open to multiple interpretations. He attacks the deconstructive practice because of its alleged determination to read every text beyond

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g ate ke e p e r s o f (no n- )kno w l e dg e 75 its conventional meaning. This seems to be a simplified understanding of deconstruction (or, in fact, a fear and an impossibility to separate his own method from deconstruction) since, according to Eco, deconstruction is a way to read texts no matter whether they are coded according to the principles of the ‘conventional’ or symbolic mode. Eco makes use of artistic movements that explicitly engaged with symbols as a mode of cultural production. He surveys works by Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Joyce and Eliot to account for ‘a specific semiotic strategy’ of producing symbols intra-textually. His concept of ‘textual implicature’ implies a transformation in the structure and delivery of the text, an employment of a rhetorical gesture;5 however, the switch in the mode of presentation does not account for the instantiation of symbolisation whereby a surplus of signification is evident and is deployed to articulate the added value of experience. In other words, the symbolic mode is not only a rhetorical machine – a­ lthough, indeed, it utilises particular rhetorical strategies – b­ ut a type of subjectivity that requires symbolic production as an interchange of abstractions necessary to articulate some metaphysical condition. I would like to reiterate that although I utilise Eco’s term ‘the symbolic mode’, my project is not semiological insofar as I am not concerned with grammatical or iconistic surfaces of signification and their application to film segmentation. Instead, I am concerned with iterations of culture found in film as discursive strategies of figuration. To clarify, Eco meant to transform iconicity into representational analogy: it is as if features of ‘reality’ would translate into ‘representation’ as part of narration, and not as a particular cognitive activity. In this regard, the triadic understanding of sign in semiosis entails a factor of logical interpretation. If, for Eco, the transfer among systems is a matter of reinterpretation, for me such a transfer opens the possibility of meaning-making in discourse. Eco uses the terms ‘code’ and ‘mode’ to suggest ways to organise transition from one system to another – ­he proposes indexes of such translations. I use the term ‘mode’ in the meaning of ‘regime’, that is, a particular engagement with discourse producing alternate (unstructured) clusters of signification. Eco allows for the possibility of the ‘pre-semiotic’ reality, which is nondifferential by definition, and so Eco’s concept of perception functions as a means to introduce difference and meaning and to impose order. For me, perception is more about ‘de-realisation’, that is, responding to discourse using the currency of the discourse. Hence, I prioritise sign-relation and not sign-function in working with the symbolic mode. For Eco, the subject’s engagement with text is a matter of attribution; to me it is more than a function, or motivation. It is a relation that has no clear position

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and requires work in order to advance signification, which – ­unlike in semiology – c­ an never be completed because cultural arbitrariness is not a destabiliser of, but a catalyst for the expansion of meaning. Similarly, Badiou sees the incompleteness of discourse as an opportunity to investigate the void, that is, ruptures in intentionality and subjectivity. In Being and Event, he conceives fidelity as faith, and in Logics of Worlds as the Idea: ‘the secret of the pure present’ (2009: 514). The latter defines existence in a world where the horizon of knowledge is always disappearing and is never available to us in its integrity, whereby the subject is barred from the infinite. In fact, being is perceived as gliding from one world to another in its inconsistent multiplicity. Badiou sees signification not as a relation of the finite to the infinite (Hegel), but rather as a production of meaning from within the world itself. In other words, Badiou shifts from the assumption that one knows the truth, but does not have the opportunity to experience it, to the assumption that production of truth without any knowledge of it is ongoing. This idea can be translated into a form of subjectivity that remains static in one realm, but continues to glide in another. These different directions and speeds of movement generate the transcendental subject insofar as the subject is in relation to the variations of the lived. One such state implies a continuum, or becoming without determination, whilst the other refers to the imperative to construct knowledge out of the elements of the continuum. Such assemblages, rituals and rites allow the subject to access the ‘beyond’, a different realm, where the elements of the past are positioned towards the future. The transcendence of the subject is coded as an unstoppable flow of imagery – f­ or example, an hallucination6 – ­divided into sequences by reiterations and references: an introspective vision produces not selforganisation but self-destruction as the subject becomes aware of its own infiniteness. In this chapter, I interrogate the construction of subjectivity as a system of organisation of cultural iterations. The de-historicising imperative is aimed at such organisations and communities of production, and time opens up like a world and turns into the time of nothing. I showcase how Balabanov’s Morphine captures the brutality of such openings, ruptures and the self-annihilating impact of nothingness.7 Aleksei Balabanov (b. in Novosibirsk, 1959–2013) has been described as one of the most important film-makers of the post-Soviet era. He has been the most influential critic of the post-Soviet and Russian periods, and, particularly, of the recurrent nostalgia for the Soviet past in the Putin era. His films are brutal in their depiction of the working of the Soviet regime (Cargo 200), the Russian mafia state (The Stoker and Blind Man’s Bluff), as well as Russian youth finding its way in the new globalised world (It

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g ate ke e p e r s o f (no n- )kno w l e dg e 77 does not Hurt), Brother and Brother 2. His films have been celebrated by critics – ­albeit occasionally criticised for the representation of xenophobia and nationalism – a­ nd popular with audiences, gaining Balabanov a special place in the history of Russian cinema.8 In fact, Condee completes her study of recent Russian cinema with a chapter on Balabanov. For her, the director’s oeuvre concludes the tradition started by the late Soviet generation such as Sokurov, Muratova, Mikhalkov and, I would argue, Proshkin, too, and Balabanov begins a new tradition of the post-Soviet Russian cinema. Condee focuses on Balabanov’s earlier films which were set in Russia’s major cities: ‘An unstoppable machine, a magnetized instrument, Balabanov’s city in Brother and elsewhere operates as a collection of moving parts in a larger relentless modernity’ (2009: 221). In this chapter, I explore one of Balabanov’s later films which is set in the Russian provinces: the distancing effect is achieved not only by means of moving the action outside the metropolis (particularly, St Petersburg, the director’s favourite city), but also by means of detaching it temporarily (the events take place early in the twentieth century at the brink of the Russian revolution). This creates an abstracted vision of being in a context where space and time are artificially suspended in order to examine the structure of subjectivity and to evoke the inner visions of individuals with the help of externalised constructs. (Morphine has been compared with Balabanov’s 1998 Of Freaks and Men because both display an interest in Russian Silver Age culture. However, the affinity is grounded not in the main concerns of the films per se, but rather in the particular decadent aesthetic, which is period-specific. In my view Morphine is different from Of Freaks and Men insofar as the director is less interested in stylisation, but rather in the construction of subjectivity.) Balabanov worked with the cinematographer Aleksandr Simonov (III), with whom he collaborated on Cargo 200 and The Stoker, and who also filmed Pavel Lungin’s The Director (2012) and the second instalment of Petr Buslov’s Bimmer (2005). The film was produced by Sergei Sel’ianov, one of the founders of the powerful STV studio.9 The script of the film was authored by Sergei Bodrov Jr (1971–2002). He was the son of the Russian playwright, actor, director and producer Sergei Bodrov. As an actor, Sergei Bodrov Jr first appeared in his father’s productions, including The Prisoner of the Mountains (1996). He gained popularity and critical acclaim after playing Danila Bagrov in Balabanov’s Brother and Brother 2. Bodrov was also a television presenter on the Channel One programme The View [Vzgliad], which played an important role in promoting perestroika in the 1980s and advancing investigative journalism in the 1990s. He was killed in the Kolka-Karmadon rock ice slide after finishing the second

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day of shooting of his film The Messenger. Balabanov filmed Morphine as a tribute to Bodrov whom he considered ‘a blood brother’ [narechennyi brat]. According to Mikhail Ratgauz, Morphine was planned as a story of death as well as of an unfulfilled promise (2008).10 I argue that the film is a cinematic requiem for a deceased friend and for a short-lived era, and it aims to explore posthumous subjectivity in the extra-textual context. The script is based on a collection of autobiographical stories titled Notes of a Young Doctor [Zapiski iunogo vracha] (1925–6), as well as the story called Morphine [Morfii] (1926), authored by Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940), a famous Russian playwright and novelist, born and educated in Kiev, whose The Master and Margarita is one of the key texts documenting Soviet totalitarian culture.11 Although written in the mid1920s, the short stories cover the period before the Russian revolution of 1917 when Bulgakov was a doctor in a remote part of Russia and was addicted to morphine, a habit he overcame when he moved to Moscow. The origins and making of Balabanov’s Morphine refer to a complex web of literary, cultural and personal allusions that constitute the variegated history of Russian culture in its pre-revolutionary and post-Soviet phases, hence, drawing our attention to the discursive ruptures and frames of what Badiou calls the Soviet century (2007a). Balabanov emerges as a filmmaker of the apocalypse as he repeatedly presents an exploration of being in the void, which he perceives in abstracted terms as the end of history. Film adaptations – b­ y virtue of their intermedial position12 – h ­ ave the ability to connect to other forms of discourse, including political, historical, sociological, economic and so on. I am concerned with the cultural dimension, whereby discourse is understood primarily as an element of cultural memory supported by official doctrine and performed in the popular imaginary. This is particularly true in relation to Bulgakov, who in his oeuvre was aware of the constraints of the official dogma of his time and worked deliberately to deconstruct it. Cultural memory may take the form of a structured narrative, or canon, or an elusive trace of concurrences. Ihab Hassan (1982) takes Orphic dismemberment and regeneration as his metaphor for a crisis in art and language, culture and consciousness, which prefigures postmodern literature. Hassan calls for a reconsideration of the cultural tradition and he uses the myth of Orpheus13 as a metaphor for the transformation of the literary canon.14 Balabanov engages with the myth of Orpheus by selecting a script that makes multiple references to the preceding cultural tradition, and he uses it in order to ‘dismember’, re-tell and re-work the pivotal moment in Russian history – ­the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 – ­and to show his lack of interest in tradition/continuity and instead focus on ruptures.

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g ate ke e p e r s o f (no n- )kno w l e dg e 79 The film tells the story of a young inexperienced doctor, Mikhail Alekseevich Poliakov15 (Leonid Bichevin), who arrives in a village in a remote province where he is put in charge of a local hospital (the previous doctor, a German,16 who was much admired in the hospital, had fled the village at the start of the First World War). There, together with Anatolii Dem’ianenko (Andrei Panin), a paramedic, and Anna Nikolaevna (Ingebora Dapkunaite), a nurse, he treats local peasants and the petite bourgeoisie. The former come with injuries, complications of pregnancy and life-threatening infections such as diphtheria, whilst the latter require attention because of venereal diseases and other ‘more noble’ malaises. After he uses the mouth-to-mouth method to resuscitate a patient with diphtheria, the doctor injects himself with morphine as it is believed to work as a form of immunisation. The injection helps the doctor to combat the infection, but he also becomes addicted to opium. Anna Nikolaevna, who administers the first few injections, eventually becomes his associate. Her addiction is framed as a sacrificial act: unable to help Poliakov, whom she loves, she decides to share his fate. Poliakov becomes aware that other doctors in the region are addicted to morphine, too; at the estate of the local landlord Vasilii Soborevskii (Sergei Garmash), Poliakov meets Lev Gorenburg (Iurii Gertsman), a paramedic in another district, who is also an opium user. They meet again at the very end of the film. Poliakov escapes from a hospital in the district centre where he has been in rehabilitation, and steals morphine. Gorenburg, now an avid supporter of the Bolshevik regime, chases Poliakov in the street.17 As Gorenburg threatens Poliakov with a gun, in self-defence Poliakov shoots Gorenburg and gives his morphine to Anna Nikolaevna, who happens to be a witness to the attack. Afterwards Poliakov, who seems to have lost his position, money and any sense of purpose, walks into a cinema where he starts watching a silent black and white comedy. While watching the film, he shoots himself in the head. The film ends with the camera focusing on the screen in the cinema; the projected image announces the end of the screening, and by extension, the end of the era. The society portrayed in Morphine includes a cosmopolitan elite (the film evokes such cultural identities as Russian, German,18 Jewish and others19) and a culturally more homogeneous peasantry. The gap between the two is striking: while the former converse about politics and entertain themselves with the early twentieth century version of ‘sex & drugs & rock-n-roll’; the latter are ignorant and superstitious and, just like the other class, are prone to sex and violence. Through this somewhat stereotypical portrayal of the Russian society at the brink of the Revolution and through exploitation of some conspiracy theories concerning the causes

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of the revolution (the German conspiracy, the Jewish conspiracy, etc.), Balabanov demonstrates that he is interested not in the historical accuracy of representation, but in the possibilities of constructing an abstract environment in which to examine subjectivity in crisis. Balabanov’s chief preoccupation is the self-destruction of an individuality, which he demonstrates without moralising. He eschews the didactic imperatives of the mimetic parable in favour of the neutral zone of the symbolic mode. Moreover, Balabanov demonstrates the very impossibility of historicising subjectivity. His main characters are incapable of occupying an actual historical time: they never converse about the revolution unfolding in Petrograd, or, in fact, about the war with Germany; to them these events are a distant echo of some metaphysical catastrophe which is far greater than their own condition and with which they choose to deal by becoming opium users. The morphine-induced delirium is a symbol of the opaqueness of history, of the dense impenetrable cloud of memory that obscures our understanding of the past and the present condition which I read as a transition from historicism/mimeticism to the symbolic mode.20 This delirium is a form of non-time, intemporality in the sense that it does not follow the logic of linear time and instead produces folds of multiple temporalities. Morphine does not contain an actual scene of drug-induced emergency, the narcotic ‘trip’, as other films on the subject of drug abuse do.21 Instead, Morphine conceives of the actual ontology of the subject as a continuing ‘trip’, a psychedelic crisis, which may not have any other resolution but the permanent transfer of the subject into the realm of a permanent ‘trip’, or death. The transfer – ­or the transcendental construction of the subject – ­is reflective of the unresolved tensions triggered during the course of the experience whereby the trip is a form of non-knowledge with all its ‘psychoactive compounds’, which lead to psychosis. On the one hand, the trip is a nightmare of the traumatised subjectivity that struggles to keep its grip on ‘reality’, and, on the other hand, it is a promise of the possibility of living beyond the constraints of historical actuality, in a world of visionary constructs. For Sokurov, such possibilities are provided by art – a­ supposition that has its origins in the Russian Symbolist movement of the turn of the twentieth century; and for Proshkin, in the sensuous apparatus of cinema. Balabanov captures the final days of the Symbolist era before the arrival of the avant-garde and industrial modernity. Balabanov makes use of the aural constructions in the film, especially the disembodied voice of a cabaret singer, Aleksandr Vertinskii (1889–1957), who made a profound impact on Russian singing culture. His ‘Snow Lullaby’ [Snezhnaia kolybel’naia] (1916), ‘Opium User’ [Kokainetka] (1916) and ‘Magnolia

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g ate ke e p e r s o f (no n- )kno w l e dg e 81 Tango’ [Tango magnoli’ia] (1931)22 are mannerist vocal performances which in the Russian cultural imaginary symbolise the glamour and decadence of late Tsarist Russia. ‘Opium User’ foreshadows the fate of Anna Nikolaevna who ‘will die like in a nightmare, and darkness will envelope her little purple corpse’.23 The music is heard when Poliakov performs operations in the surgery, signalling his transitory position between the world of rationality and the world of hallucinations. From time to time the music on the old gramophone gets jammed and its repetitive, cyclical recitals symbolise the shivering of the body deprived of an opium injection, and, more widely, the verbose vibrations of culture. The music and Poliakov’s aching body create an effect of the delayed reflex, and of culture as an asthenic syndrome, which transfigures Poliakov’s story as the eternal return of the feverish and fantasising subjectivity, occupying an ahistorical, atemporal plane. The use of the music/voice and body/pain in Morphine is similar to the body of abject created in Voloshin’s Nirvana. The repetitive musical performance and the trembling of the body create a particular movement – ­vibration – ­that, along with the zigzag, rotation and mirroring, constitutes the anti-representational movement of the symbolic mode that I explore in the remaining chapters of the book. The ahistorical drive of Morphine is evident not only in the deliberate diversion of attention from the significant historical events, but also in the deconstruction of time itself, in the splicing of time as a philosophical concept and the engine of mimetic narrativisation. The film is divided into ‘chapters’ of varying lengths – ­lasting from two minutes to eleven minutes – ­each of which is introduced with the help of intertitles, or chapter ‘headings’ such as ‘The First Injection’, ‘The Wolves’ or ‘Gorenburg’, and telling its own story.24 The conventional explanation of the use of intertitles is period stylisation – M ­ orphine mimics silent cinema – a­ s well as a tribute to Bulgakov’s oeuvre: the original short stories form a cycle, a doctor’s ‘Decameron’, where the focus, just as in the film, is not on the progression of the narrative, but on compulsive fixations of the character of the doctor which bring about a debilitating effect in the reader/­ spectator, too. These cinematic chapters are brought together by the figure of Poliakov; however, the order in which these chapters appear is random: presented in a different order, they would still tell the story of an individual in decline.25 The rhythmic organisation of each of the chapters is different: some chapters are dynamic whilst others are more static. On one level, the difference in the perceived temporality is ascribed to medical practice: in bad weather the medics are idle as they have no callers, and when the weather improves, or harvesting is finished, the number of peasants requiring medical attention increases. The personal time of Poliakov

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and other medics is structured according to the ancient rites of farming and husbandry and not the age of the machines, which would perhaps be the case in the imperial centres of St Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev and Warsaw. On another level, the fluctuations in activity and the pace of cinematic presentation reflect the contradictions between knowledge and non-knowledge since the two unfold at different paces. At the beginning of this chapter I defined this type of movement as gliding from one world to another in its inconsistent multiplicity, whereby existence in a world where the horizon of knowledge is always disappearing and is never available to us in its integrity results in the production of meaning from within the world itself. Moreover, while some sections display an obvious link (e.g., the arrival of the doctor in the village and him observing the death in the hospital), others are conceived as individual stories (e.g., the doctor being pursued at night by a pack of wolves), thus further problematising the possibility of historicisation and narrativisation. This particular story evokes Aleksandr Pushkin’s short stories,26 actualising not only a specific experience but the whole cultural canon. As a result, each of these chapters gains the status of an abstracted, symbolic presentation which is in competition with other stories, versions and possibilities, framing the cultural canon not as a unified linear progression of cultural forms, but as competing, disconnected and dismembered instances of cultural signification. In its final appeal – ­in the suicide scene – ­Balabanov explicitly questions the possibility of (re-)constructing the cultural canon by means of cinematic representation: cinema is not a means of cultural continuation, but rather of cultural death, with gaps in discourse and discontinuations in tradition being the outcome of subjectivation. This idea is also presented on the metaphorical level in the imagery of the surgery room where the dismemberment of Orpheus – i­n Russian, the name of the Greek god sounds similar to the word meaning ‘morphine’ [orfei & morfii] – ­takes place as a routine procedure, as a never-ending autopsy. In the metaphysical triangulation of non-knowledge – t­he formless, the painful and the ­terrifying – B ­ alabanov places emphasis on the middle element, whereby pain requires a surgical or narcotic transcendence. In the surgery room Poliakov and his team perform a number of complex procedures, including amputations (a woman has been trapped in a mower), tracheotomy (on a peasant girl suffering from diphtheria), fixing foetus malposition (in the end a woman gives birth to a child), treating skin burns (Soborevskii sustains horrendous burns as a result of a suspected arson attack), and so on. Chloroform is used to anaesthetise the patients; however, Balabanov does little to ease the pain of the viewers.

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g ate ke e p e r s o f (no n- )kno w l e dg e 83 His camera reveals a disturbing fixation on human tissue, blood, bones, scars, wounds, etc. In the amputation scene, the spectator is exposed to the full close view of a young woman’s legs that had been squashed in the mower. Poliakov manages to save the left leg (the camera shows how he treats and sews the wounds and cuts), but he has to amputate the right leg (the camera shows how Poliakov painstakingly divides the tissue, removes integument and mucous membrane and saws off the bone). The camera lingers over surgical clips clasping the main blood vessels and follows the amputated limb on its way into the metal washbasin reserved for unwanted human tissue. In its extraordinary sensualism the scene is meant to evoke in the viewer ‘real’ physical pain and revulsion. Indeed, gushing blood, exposed bones and human ‘meat’ visible in the primitive, by modern standards, operating theatre illuminated only by gas light, is a striking victory of the exploration of human suffering. The soundtrack delivers a cacophony of sounds – ­dribbling, dropping, milling, filing, moaning, screaming, etc. – w ­ hich enhances the gruesome effect of the scene. However, when such naturalistic fascination is employed repeatedly in Morphine (and elsewhere in Balabanov’s films: for example, in Cargo 200 scenes of rape and torture in a room where there is a rotting corpse; and in The Stoker, killings and the disposal of dead bodies in an industrial boiler room, evoking the gas chambers of fascist death camps), it provides the film with a certain sense of theatricality and abstractedness. This is particularly evident in that Balabanov borrows his aesthetic not from horror, zombie movies or any other Hollywood gore,27 but rather from the European renaissance tradition which has been credited with the invention of the ‘realist’ representation. Figure 3 illustrates the amputation scene, which is orchestrated in a manner reminiscent of Andrea Mantegna’s The Lamentation of Christ (c. 1480): the position of the camera/viewer is in front of the body, with the legs stretched towards the viewer; the two figures – ­lamenting women in the original painting and female nurses in Balabanov’s film – ­to the side of the pedestal-like bed/operating table where the body is placed; the folds of the drapery are replicated in the robes of the nurses and the medical sheet; the mirroring of the detailed representation of Christ’s thorax in how the tissue and blood vessels of the woman’s leg are shown; and finally, the warm ochre and dark brown colours in both images.28 The visual allusion affirms the function of the young woman not as an object of the dissecting gaze of the camera,29 but as the subject of redemption, which combines the violent and gentle sides of faith, or what in his overview of medieval exegesis – ­as I pointed out in the introduction to this chapter – ­Eco ascertains as the non-historical nature of the symbolic

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mode. The fifteenth-century viewers desired to see the presence of Christ: the brutalism of representation ascertained the truthfulness of the church and validated Christ as their saviour. The effect produced by the scene in Morphine is diametrically opposite: it abstracts the image from the naturalist detail, hinting at a mannerist, theatrical reconstruction, which, in turn, problematises the function of the image – i­ts ambiguity is evident in its relational quality – ­and of the spectator, who is meant to respond to the queries about intentionality rather than the gore of naturalism. In its brutal theatricality, the operating room in the hospital is reminiscent of a medieval torture chamber. In the Middle Ages torture and painful measures were applied in the process of interrogation in order to obtain a confession. In Morphine medical ‘tortures’ outline the cultural anxieties prevalent in pre-revolutionary Russia as well as in Putin’s Russia: anxieties about conquest, imperial disintegration, the uniformity of political doctrine, language, the law and the legitimacy of the current rule, which is not presented but is rather assumed, borrowing from the knowledge of the spectator.30 The torture chamber is a stage where the conflicts between the secular and ecclesiastic authorities were performed. Torture was part of the hermeneutic legal quest for truth and forensic and ecclesiastic rhetoric, whereby enactment, interpretation and performance of torture was an integral component in the search for Truth. In Morphine, these are conflicts between different forms of knowledge: rational knowledge symbolised by science and medicine, on the one hand, and esoteric, traditional, local knowledge, on the other hand. Balabanov is critical of both forms of knowledge – h ­ e shows how the peasants’ ignorance inflicts suffering and even results in death, as well as how the arrogant rationality of the revolutionaries leads to one of the most irremediable catastrophes of the twentieth century – ­the Bolshevik regime. In other words, for Balabanov the difference is in scale and in variation but not in substance, and he provides his own alternative in the form of art and drugs as a type of non-knowledge. Ultimately, Balabanov is eager to explore the aesthetic potential of the production of (cinematic) truth, which is often interpreted in terms of dramatic semblance, character and catharsis. However, he views the truth as a rhetoricised performance, that is, as the spectacularity of discourse. What Balabanov derives from the medieval practice of torture is not only a political statement about the cruelty and barbarism of the Russian empire, but also a claim about the persuasive probabilities of cinema and its assumed authority to reveal ‘truth’. Here filmic enunciation yields elliptical rhetorical ‘truths’, whereby transcendental interference is an outcome of the ­probabilities that compose the province of discourse. Balabanov’s cinema is a violence of the constructed and abstracted

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g ate ke e p e r s o f (no n- )kno w l e dg e 85 truth whereby visualisations and performances are required to authorise and deliver such discoveries. The symbolic mode places an emphasis on invention, memory and supposition, and truth relies on performance, violence and the ‘sensualisation’ of discourse. Ultimately, Balabanov moves away from the imperatives of mimetic theory: Aristotle considered pain, mimesis and catharsis as mutually dependent elements in his theory of representation when he wrote that ‘we enjoy looking at accurate likeness of things which are themselves painful to see, obscene beasts, for instance, and corpses’ (Poetics 1448b); and for Plato, the concept of law violence and its perception by onlookers are inseparable from the cathartic enterprise per se: ‘when men are investigating the subject of laws their investigation deals almost entirely with pleasures and pains, whether in States or in individuals’ (Law, I, 636d). Certainly, Foucault developed a modern theory linking violence, transgression, discipline and punishment (e.g., in Madness and Civilization (1961)). For Balabanov, the violence of imagery registers the failure of the law as he perceives the Russian revolution not as a liberating moment, but as the end of civilisation.31 Correspondingly, violence, mutilation and torture are manifestations of non-knowledge: a function of a performing subject who is burdened by the knowledge of its own constructedness as the locus of violence.32 Balabanov’s concern with the pre-eminence of non-knowledge is apparent in how he relates Poliakov’s practice/violence to knowledge/alchemy, whereby alchemy is conceived as a metaphor of non-knowledge. To be precise, Poliakov shares the role of the alchemist with Anna Nikolaevna, who looks after the pharmacy but who requires Poliakov’s authorisation to acquire drugs. The film includes a few scenes that take place in the hospital’s pharmacy. To the contemporary spectator the rows of bottles with old-fashioned paper labels, listing peculiar substances, refer not so much to the (perceived) rationality of modern science, but to the esoteric knowledge of alchemy. Finally, the film contains a scene showing the birth of the homunculus. When the woman with the diagnosed malposition of the foetus gives birth, the camera shows her malformed child. A prosthetic was used to represent the new-born baby; its ‘plastic’ texture and unnaturally deep purple colour indicate some supernatural source. As the woman is unable to deliver on her own, the doctor takes charge and the woman’s body becomes his enormous alchemist’s retort. The association with alchemy provides Balabanov with the possibility to map the terrain of knowledge. Alchemy and the alchemic body contain the promise of transmutation, with the doctor being the gatekeeper to the secrets of humanity.33 These are the sites of symbolic knowledge that maintain the incommensurability of finite compositions of the continuum. Here

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knowledge is not only an abstraction (in the Aristotelian tradition), but also something arrived at by intellectual illumination (in the Augustinian tradition). Furthermore, Balabanov’s alchemist corresponds to Derrida’s ‘pharmakon’, a category of flickering, twitching and disorienting play in conceptual oppositions such as remedy and poison. (This is also evident in the musical performance and movement discussed above.) Pharmakon designates writing as preceding binaries and, in our terms, as equivalent to non-knowledge, a concept that goes back to Plato’s Phaedrus, in which the Egyptian god of writing, Theuth or Thoth, offers King Thamus writing as a remedy that can help memory. Thamus refuses the gift because he believes it will create forgetfulness: for him, it is not a remedy for memory itself, but simply a way of reminding. The ambivalence of pharmakon constitutes its mediality whereby non-knowledge appears as the movement, the locus and the play, and, finally, as production of difference in the post-apocalyptic world. If Sokurov’s Taurus asks about life after death without recourse to post-mortem physiology – ­except Lenin’s ‘self-autopsy’ – ­Balabanov’s Morphine constructs life as a post-mortem performance: the inwardlooking gaze of the posthumous subjectivity transcends time and exposes its inner mechanism through reiteration and reference. Similarly, the inward-looking gaze of cinema bares the constructedness of the filmic enterprise, which is evident in the final scene of Morphine conceived as a film within a film, with Poliakov’s pistol aiming at himself as well as – ­by extension – a­ t the spectator, a movement that Morphine shares with Litvinova’s Goddess (Balabanov originally planned that Litvinova should take the role of Anna Nikolaevna). Balabanov juxtaposes different types of knowledge, with the knowledge of the morphine addict occupying the central position. For example, in one scene Anna Nikolaevna appears in the centre of the shot: to her left is an Orthodox icon, symbolising faith, whilst to her right is a chart of a human body representing science. The alchemist as a transcendental figure is the keeper of knowledge as well as time: in place of a Christian cross round her neck, Anna Nikolaevna is wearing a chain with a watch. In this context, Poliakov’s suicide should be perceived as disassociation, or an escape when there is no escape. Psychiatry has described such experience as compartmentalisation ‘when overwhelming experiences cannot be integrated into a unitary sense of self’ (Schwartz 2013: 47). The experience that triggers Poliakov’s dissociation is his murder of Gorenburg: it is a double crisis of humanity since Poliakov fails as a human being and also as a doctor. The experience activates protective or destructive altered states of consciousness, which help the subject to deal with trauma. In

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g ate ke e p e r s o f (no n- )kno w l e dg e 87 this process the subject emerges as multiple, incapable of sustaining its own perceived unitary form and suffering from the instability of the self (in Chapters 7–10, I relate such instabilities to Badiou’s concept of One as  Two). Poliakov’s trauma finds release in repetitive action (repetitive injections of morphine which is in sync with repetition as vibration and body tremor; see Chapter 8) and re-enactment (his miming of what he sees on screen in the cinema), and, finally, in a cinematic flashback/ annihilation of the self. The comparison with the Bulgakov’s original story reveals that, as Dmitrii Bykov puts it, for Bulgakov morphine addiction is a weakness and a crime, whereas for Balabanov it is ‘metaphysical suicide’ and ‘a transformation into an ignorant one’ who cannot be helped (Bykov 2008). While other subjects examined in this study dissolve (Lenin in Sokurov’s Taurus), cross the threshold and come back (Faina in Litvinova’s Goddess, Chapter 7), are re-animated in the memory of other people (Fedorchenko’s Silent Souls, Chapter 10), or are resurrected (Mitia in Kalatozishvili’s The Wild Field, Chapter 11), Poliakov does, indeed, die. However, he continues to exist as an echo on the screen in the cinema (it carries on the presentation after Poliakov’s suicidal gunshot). His subjectivity enters the psyche of the spectator as a fragment of an emotional experience, an unexpressed body movement, and a trace of recollection. The concluding scene suggests an inversion of the gaze in the symbolic mode: in the mimetic tradition the gaze is outward-looking, in the symbolic mode it becomes inward-looking even when it is seemingly oriented outwards. The screen – ­as a metaphor of flatness – ­provides the symbolic mode with an ontological structure and a topological relation which I aim to explore in Chapter 4.

Notes   1. This corresponds to Derrida’s concepts of pre-language (Hobson 1998: 267).   2. For further discussion, see Chapter 7 on Litvinova’s Goddess.   3. One sees it, for example, at the level of individual characters – ­Lenin, Elena, Faina and so on – ­who finally move beyond the horizon of knowledge.   4. The medieval tradition provides us with an important distinction with the current symbolic mode. In the Middle Ages every visible entity had an allegorical meaning and the visible world was defined not in terms of physical, empirical properties of the entities, but their allegorical function, that is, as a means to outline their relationship with the divine content they are meant to represent. The medieval representational encyclopaedia assigns to allegories contradictory meanings, and in doing so enables multiple readings of the same category, thus maintaining the precarious position of human kind in its relation to Christ and celestial figures. The flexibility of signification stands

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for the anxiety of living. ‘In this way the allegorical mode is inextricably and ambiguously intertwined with the symbolic one: the medieval mind is a divided one, rent by the conflict between confidence in an indisputable truth (repeated by every world and every fact) and the feeling that words and facts must be continually reinterpreted in order to go further and further, beyond their acknowledged sense, since the whole universe is quasi liber scriptus digito Dei, but in the book aliud dicitur, aliud demonstratur’ (Eco 1984: 152).   5. See Chapters 7 and 8 for affective uses of gesture.   6. I define hallucination as persistent vision, uninterrupted by rational interventions and yet incongruent with rational seeing in that it perceives itself as distant from the seen.  7. In Chapter 2 on Proshkin’s The Miracle, I identified such openings as moments of exclusions from the plane of presentation: the voice that never speaks and is not heard but sensed.   8. Balabanov’s alleged xenophobia is a highly contested issue, which is outside the scope of this study. For a critical discussion see, for example, Bykov (2008); Kichin (2008); Condee (2009); Salazkina (2009).  9. Voloshin’s Nirvana, discussed in Chapter 8, was produced at this studio as well. 10. [‘Morfiem’ Balabanov kak by vypolniaet odno iz obeshchanii Bodrova, stavit tochku v odnom iz ostavshikhsia posle smerti mnogotochii]. 11. Screen adaptations of Bulgakov’s novels and novellas include Vladimir Bortko’s The Heart of a Dog (1988); Aleksandr Dzekun’s and Eduard Kol’bus’ The Master and Margarita (1989); Iurii Kara’s The Master and Margarita (1994; premiered 2011); Sergei Lomkin’s The Fatal Eggs (1995); Vladimir Bortko’s The Master and Margarita (2005) and many others. 12. In the previous chapter I ascertained how meaning in film emerges in relation to other mixed-media arts such as sculpture and performance. I demonstrated how in The Miracle transcendence occurs in embodied terms whereby the mechanised work of the human body is suspended to reveal the working of non-knowledge. Reference thus becomes the transport, or mediation. 13. According to Ovid, Ciconian women, followers of Dionysus, were rejected by Orpheus and they threw stones at him while he played. However, his music was so beautiful that the rocks could not hit him. Enraged, the women tore Orpheus to pieces: his head and lyre, still singing mournful songs, floated down the river to the Mediterranean shore. 14. The history of canon formation is outside the scope of our study. However, the following comparisons with the West are noteworthy. In the West, the discourse around canon formation is dominated by distinctions between low and high cultures; in Russia, the discussion is framed by the notions of official and unofficial, or private and public cultures. In the West, reconfigurations of the canon aim to provide communities that had previously been unrepresented with their share of the cultural arena; in Russia, the work focuses on including dissident texts into the mainstream, which expands the ideological

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field of cultural production, but does not always populate it with new voices and instead merely shifts the boundary in the binary constructions of the official and dissident discourse. In the West, the crisis of the cultural canon signifies the weakness of the nation-state and necessitates the inclusion of cultural material from the imperial peripheries; in Russia, in the absence of an effective nation-state and national identity, canon formation replaces the task of nation-building and it functions not through inclusion, but rather through exclusion as voices from the peripheries are lost because of the loss of the imperial territories. For a discussion concerning the (dis-)forming of the American canon, see Judy (1993). 15. His first and patronymic names self-consciously evoke Bulgakov’s names: Mikhail Afanas’evich. 16. This is a self-reflexive reference to a German character from Balabanov’s Brother. 17. In spite of Balabanov insisting that the scene has no political undertones (Likhtentul 2009), it is possible to read it as a metaphor of the proletariat chasing the bourgeoisie. 18. While the German doctor flees the village at the start of the First World War, the German nurse, Anna Nikolaevna, remains. There is nothing in the film to suggest that she is being discriminated against. 19. For example, the surname of the doctor – ­Poliakov – ­suggests that he may be of Polish origin. On ethnic politics at play, see Chapter 11. 20. The film contains multiple historical inaccuracies and distortions that challenge the canons of perception. For example, the scene on the estate of Soborevskii features Vladimir Favorksii, a Russian artist, who at that time was at the front during the First World War and as a result could not have been present at parties in the Russian provinces as the film implies. This is similar to how Sokurov works with history in Taurus (Chapter 1). 21. For example, Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996). 22. I am grateful to Lilya Yaschenko for helping me to date these songs. 23. [I kogda vy umrete na etoi skameike, koshmarnaia / Vash sirenevyi trupik okutaet savanom t’ma . . .]. 24. Such structuring of the narrative is used in Proshkin’s The Miracle, Chapter 2, and Litvinova’s Goddess, Chapter 7. 25. Such organisation of the filmic text – c­ hronoschisms (Hesse 1997) – i­ s similar to postmodern literature, for example, Cort’azar’s Hopscotch (1963) and Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars (1984). 26. For example, his Blizzard [Metel’] (1830–1). 27. For example, Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal (2013) contains a scene in which Hannibal serves his victim a dinner made of the victim’s own leg. Thanks to Pedro Hernandez for providing this detail. 28. Mantegna used the distemper technique (binding pigments in animal fat) which produces a softer, less glossy effect than oil-based paints; Balabanov used filters to produce a particular image which was enhanced in post-production.

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29. Note how the camera cuts the extremities of the woman’s body – ­her feet and her head in the ensuing shot – t­ his reveals a somewhat pornographic quality of Balabanov’s films in that the camera dissects and objectifies both the living and the dead bodies. This strategy is present in Balabanov’s earlier films, especially Cargo 200. 30. On the relationship between torture and race, see Tracy (2012). 31. In this regard, Balabanov is in tune with Sokurov who, in Russian Ark, frames the Russian revolution as an apocalyptic event. 32. See Beumers and Lipovetsky (2009) on representation of violence and theatrical experiments in contemporary Russia. 33. See the discussion of Tatiana’s standing and the role of the figure of the doctor in Chapter 2. A similar approach is taken in Kalatozishvili’s The Wild Field, discussed in Chapter 11.

C H A PT E R 4

Symbolic Folds and Flattened Discourse: Andrei Zviagintsev’s Elena (2010)

In his theory of cinema, Deleuze (2013) critiques cinematic ‘codes’ as part of his attack on the Saussurean, structuralist roots of semiology. Deleuze places emphasis on the ‘Image’ as a cinematic object, while refusing to work with the ‘Order’, which, for him, is a burden of semiology. He views the Order in purely linguistic terms as a way to structure knowledge using the system of differences. He does not consider the Order as a transcendental object whilst he presents his movement as such. Deleuze’s singular image, containing in itself movement – w ­ ays of changing – i­s juxtaposed to the semiological image that always finds itself in a relationship of differences to other images, whether paradigmatically or syntagmatically. A way of dealing with this dichotomy is to privilege image/visuality over representation (the ‘real’ of the narration versus the ‘reality’ of the image), since the spectator ought to assume that somehow the image is never subsumed into narration. Cinema shows things as appearing and being ‘now’; however, I argue that such things are records, a work of memory, creating a gap in terms of temporal association. If cinematic time is a linguistic construct (the extra-orientation), one inevitably arrives at the semiologic fragmentation of time. If cinematic time is an experience (the intra-orientation), one ends up with hermeneutic narratology. If cinematic time is presentation of experience (the outer-orientation), one is buried under the weight of multiple reincarnations of ‘realism’ theories. These contradictions necessitate a series of related questions. What if time exists only as meaning and not as physicality, hence, it lacks the texture of multidimensionality and privileges flatness? Does this open the possibility of thinking of time by means of revealing and concealing? Does non-limitation of time produce a sense of possibility, an opening and a gap? Is film time a way to think of unlimited processes of relations and references? Does film provide a transition from non-knowledge to knowledge, and vice versa? Deleuze turns to Bergson in order to unravel the mystery of (filmic) time, and he introduces two concepts: time and temporality, or movement.

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He focuses on the cinematic image understood as the changing being; as a result, it is no longer necessary to inquire about the meaning of images because meaning means difference. This is not a difference between the object and representation, or between film and reality, because for Deleuze a factual object is an understanding subject, and vice versa. He obliterates the distinction and the dichotomy and produces a new kind of ontology, which, I argue, is grounded in the notions of discourse as reiterative forms of being of this subject–object, and these forms produce signification which should be conceived in symbolic terms as abstractions of the subject–object. Deleuze produces a system of the ‘Whole’ which is kept in place thanks to the energies of the symbolic mode: according to him, cinematic images are metaphysical images of movement. In this regard, Deleuze works with Bergson’s concept of image whereby images are not mental entities – ­they are the universe as it presents itself at the interface of being, and so they are a matter of (ontological) relation, and not of (mimetic) correspondence. In Foucault (1988) and The Fold: Leibnitz and the Baroque (1992), Deleuze evokes the concept of the fold as the fundamental ontological structure: ‘if the inside is constituted by the folding of the outside, between them there is a topological relation: the relation to oneself is homologous to the relation with the outside and the two are in contact, through the intermediary of the strata which are relatively external environments (and therefore relatively internal)’ (1992: 119). In this conceptualisation, the fold appears in the form of self-fashioning, or continuous modification of the self, as well as in the form of possibility of when the present is open to the future and subjectivity as such. This is when the self is figured by the doubling of the outside; the last carries different names in Deleuzian thought – ­‘absolute memory’ (1992: 99), ‘chance’ (1992: 117)1 and the ‘unthought’ (1992: 118) – ­all of which correspond to the regimes of knowledge, including non-knowledge. He conceives of being as ‘life within the folds’ (1992: 123), as the reflexive activity of the subjects and the very process of constitution of the subject. Here for Deleuze being is simply postulated: he never brings the ontology of the subject into question and, on the contrary, aims to trace everywhere the appearance of the self in its multiple guises. Working with Delueze’s concept of film, Badiou (2013) postulates that being originates not from a pure formalisation, but from a void: ruptures within knowledge compel the subject to redefine itself by means of determination. For Badiou multiplication has no other substance than presentation itself (whilst the Deleuzian multiple evokes representation in its belief in the absolute beginning). This predisposition leads to flattening of the

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sy mbol ic f o l ds and f l a t t e ned di s c o u r s e 93 discourse: Badiou uses mathematical symbols – m ­ ath-emes – ­to emphasise the flatness of subject production. The void is the empty beyond which the subject has to cross in pursuit of infinity. Ultimately, the void is not characteristic of nature, but of thinking as being. Jean-Jacques Lecercle notes the difference between Deleuze and Badiou in that the latter ‘clings to a concept of a subject, albeit not the subject traditionally conceived as a unitary centre of consciousness or action. And it is ‘superseded in two ways or two directions: in the multiplicity and ontological mixture or rather “flatness” of the collective assemblage of enunciation; and in the individuation of an a-personal, a-subjective, pre-individual haecceity’ (2010: 129; emphasis added). If for Badiou flatness is an operational matter, for Zviagintsev it is symbolic: the director conceives it in haptic terms, that is, as the quality of the visual image. In his study of Sokurov’s cinema, Szaniawski evokes Iampolski’s psychoanalytical concept of flatness, which has its origins in Foucault’s study of the Western penal system (1995), as the distortion and womb-like enfolding: ‘Sokurov’s space is often distorted and flattened. Distortions serve to better embed figures in space; frequently they are not shown as freely moving in a neutral three-dimensional volume, but – ­thanks to a mutual distortion of figures and their surroundings – t­hey are inscribed into space as if onto a surface’ (Iampolski 2011: 114). Both Iampolski and Szaniawski understand flatness somewhat literally as a relation of figures to the space they occupy: ‘such treatment transforms space into a kind of womb that keeps figures wrapped in its folds’ (Iampolski 2011: 115). Szaniawski speaks of the totality of Sokurov’s films by way of enfolding: he identifies Sokurov’s interest in the ‘whole other world’, but does not account for its ontology except to mention that Sokurov’s worlds are perceptible in the open-ended, unfinished dimension of his films (2014: 12–13). I apply the notion of flatness to Zviagintsev’s film not as a category of dimensionality, but of intentionality. Flatness is not only the quality of the visual image, but also of the subjectivity that is always in relation to this image. Conversely, in his film philosophy Zviagintsev develops the idea of flatness as a particular way of presenting visuality. He articulates these ideas after the release of his third feature film Elena in his diaries and directorial notes published as a book (Zviagintsev et al. 2014). If in his previous award-winning films The Return and Banishment (2007),2 Zviagintsev (b. 1964 in Novosibirsk) explores the nature of the image in mythical and religious terms, in Elena he dwells upon the nature of visuality and the concept of life as transcendence by setting the film in a more recognisable and historically determined context whilst maintaining a high level of abstraction.

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Elena ends with a shot in which the camera focuses on a nameless toddler sleeping on bed. It is the second grandson of Elena (Nadezhda Markina), a woman in late middle age who lives with her rich husband Vladimir (Andrei Smirnov). Elena and Vladimir, who were married only two years earlier, keep their corresponding families apart, and their separation is marked geographically: Elena’s feckless son, Sergei (Aleksei Rozin) and his brood live in a suburban development in a Soviet-style apartment;3 and Vladimir’s emancipated and childless daughter Katerina (Elena Liadova) has her own space somewhere in Moscow. Her home is never shown, which suggests her nomadic character, or that she occupies an abstract non-space, in contrast to the sensual world of Elena’s family.4 Elena often crosses the vistas of the capital when she visits her family in order to give them some cash – u ­ sually her own state pension, which suggests that she lives on Vladimir’s allowances. When at Sergei’s, she sometimes plays with her grandchild: he is the only male offspring who does not ignore her.5 In the quoted scene the toddler is actually lying on the bed where Elena’s husband, Vladimir, died a few days ago. The child on Vladimir’s bed symbolises continuation of life: in the absence of a direct biological male heir, Elena’s grandson replaces Vladimir’s bloodline. In fact, the child provides a solution to the characters’ predicament. First, Vladimir gets an heir; he always brings up the subject when he is with his daughter (the meaning of his name is ‘the ruler of the world’). Although Vladimir’s fortune requires an heir, he rejects Elena’s grandson Sasha (Igor’ Ogurtsov) because he has a different bloodline and also because he will squander the money. Secondly, Katerina gets total freedom; she is not interested in having children and considers biological reproduction an unethical ‘pointless affair’; her father is her only anchor in the mundane world. Graffy describes Katia as ‘tough-minded, mocking, intelligent, eloquent . . . fertile only in the area of language’ (2012). In an interview, Zviagintsev calls Katia ‘Cordelia’, the true loyal daughter (2014: 176). Thirdly, Elena’s family gets better living conditions, which also promises transition up the social ladder now that they can live in the centre of the city rather than in one of its gruesome industrial neighbourhoods. (Earlier in the film, when Sasha plays a computer game he complains about being unable to move to the next level.) Finally, Elena finds peace of mind as she no longer needs to beg Vladimir for money or worry about the well-being of Sergei’s family. It is perhaps the first time that she does not feel humiliated by her own son and her own husband, allegiances between whom she is constantly compelled to navigate. However, the solution is only an illusion because the viewer knows that the space for the child was freed

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sy mbol ic f o l ds and f l a t t e ned di s c o u r s e 95 by Elena herself: she killed Vladimir by secretly mixing Viagra into the medicine which he had to take while recovering from a heart attack (here the materiality of being – ­Elena – ­takes over metaphysics – ­Vladimir). The film, hence, presents a set of ethical problems: corruption by power and wealth, and the struggle between instincts and social norms. While signposting these conflicts, Zviagintsev refuses to provide a determinate explanatory system: many aspects of Elena’s and Vladimir’s arrangement remain unclear, similarly the occupations of Katia and Sergei are never disclosed (see the discussion of Katia’s possible occupation below). The director shifts his attention from the portrayal of the social context to the exploration of the visual plane of the film: causality turns into a symbolic correlation. In fact, in his published diaries Zviagintsev refers to the characters as ‘figures’, or ‘symbolic subjects’ [figury, liudi-smysly] (2014: 83). The director goes as far as to reject the ‘authenticity’ [podlinnost’] of his characters in favour of ‘social constructs’ [sotsial’nye obobshcheniia] (2014: 83), thus substantiating the deployment of the symbolic mode. In Elena the camera confuses the spectator by portraying a happy child in a new home and also presenting him as a symbolic murderer of his step-grandfather. The camera turns the spectators into the judge of what is going on by providing a view from above. It is the only time this type of shot is used in the film – t­ he majority are close-ups and mid-range shots, documenting the actions of the characters and surveying the interiors of their living spaces. The so-called ‘god shot’ secures the position of the spectator as a distanced, uninvolved atomiser of social conflict. Framed as a murder mystery, Elena, in fact, supplies the viewer with a political and philosophical critique of the Putin era. The effect is achieved thanks to the alienating (estrangement) position of the camera. A baby in a new house is a ubiquitous and even somewhat banal metaphor of a new generation supplanting an old one, and of how new blood is injected into a decaying family.6 However, by choosing the god shot the director enables the spectator to observe not only the toddler, but also the bed on which he is lying, hence the position of the camera reveals the director’s intentionality. This bed is one of the key elements of interior décor in Zviagintsev’s film. It first appears at the very beginning when Elena comes to Vladimir’s bedroom to wake him in the morning, and the camera captures a glimpse of a black and white bedspread while Elena draws the curtains to let in bleak late winter light. The bed is one of the key tropes in Zviagintsev’s oeuvre. For example, in The Return the bed in which the father sleeps is compared with the ceremonial pedestal on which the body of the dead Christ was rested. In Banishment, the bed is a locus of marital life as well as murder/suicide. So it is to this black and white bedspread that

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the spectator’s attention is drawn to at the end of Elena. Made of some luxurious fabric, the bedspread features black background against which a silver-white pattern is picked up. The bedspread is laid out perfectly flat, enabling the spectator to appreciate the abstract, symmetrical pattern in the form of an equilateral cross, with its four arms bent at 90 degrees, a pattern better known as the swastika. The unexpected introduction of the swastika suggests a discursive rupture, or metaphysical intermittency, in Elena’s overall monde atone, a type of being that Andrew Gibson, in his discussion of the concept of reason in Badiou’s philosophy, defines as ‘inertia, obscurity, flatness, nondescript, eventless mundanity, non-value’ (2012: 54).7 The swastika vibrates as a mystical ornament, which has a complex and troublesome history in European and world culture. A symmetrical image, positioned somewhere between a star and a spiral, the swastika and its variations have been found by archaeologists everywhere in the world, suggesting that it is a global symbol of rebirth. The swastika remains widely used in Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism, primarily as a tantric symbol that invokes Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of prosperity and ­auspiciousness – ­the state the film’s characters aspire to attain. The word itself comes from the Sanskrit ‘svastika’ (‘su’ means ‘good’, ‘asti’ means ‘it is’). The symbol was in common use in Russian folk and religious culture as a symbol of Perun, the highest god of the pantheon and the god of thunder and lightning in Slavic cultures. The right-facing swastika stands for light, life, clarity and prosperity; the left-facing, for darkness, evil and death. In the film the primary function of the swastika is to reveal the structure of the image, and, generally, the aesthetic form: the flatness of the image is in contrast to the operations of signification enabled by it. In the use of the swastika the director demonstrates the transition from symbolic folds to discursive flatness. The four legs of the swastika symbolise the merger of four different paradigms of knowledge, namely, folklore, mythology, occultism and ideology. The swastika is a meta-symbol because it brings together and consolidates meaning thanks to its ability to embody multiple ideas at the same time.8 In European history, the swastika came to stand for Nazi atrocities. Its preceding connotation as a symbol of happiness and good luck was obliterated by the meanings it acquired in the 1930s and 1940s. The symbol epitomises a sudden and irreversible rupture in cultural tradition because of the political discourse about fascism. This notion of sudden rupture is given in the film in the form of Vladimir’s heart attack, which happens unexpectedly while he is exercising in the swimming pool. In his diaries Zviagintsev employs the notion of rupture/death as a metaphor for the

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sy mbol ic f o l ds and f l a t t e ned di s c o u r s e 97 end of the colonial regime (2014: 60). As a symbol, the swastika accounts for Elena’s transition from carer to murderess, or to super-being if considered from the perspective of her family. The prohibition on the use of the swastika in some countries also means that the symbol’s role is to articulate the unrepresentable, the tabooed. In this regard, in the symbolic mode, the function of the image is that of alienation and distancing of the spectator from the image and the production of non-knowledge. This contradicts the original intention of the Nazi symbol, which was to transform the alienation of the masses into self-knowledge. In Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1934) the mass emerges as a Volk because the swastika is used to establish a sense of national identity and self-celebration. In terms of Cultural Studies, the swastika accentuates Zviagintsev’s views on contemporary Russia: survival strategies might include a physical elimination of the other [Magistral’naia ideia novogo vremeni – ‘­vyzhivanie, spasenie sebia liuboi tsenoi’] (2014: 55). The process of signification and ascribing knowledge is compared with rituals and objects used to ascribe meaning. For example, the bedspread itself stands for the concepts of faith and death as conceived in the usage of the Russian word for ‘bedspread’ – ‘­pokryvalo’ – ­which additionally conveys the meaning of ‘altar cloth’ as well as ‘shroud’, hence presenting the bed as both tomb and altar, and the apartment as both a shrine and a church. Similarly, the child is an allusion to the famous statement by Dostoevskii in which he challenged revolutionary social reform and its negative impact on the child/beauty: here the child turns into the ultimate goal of social evolution which bears no compassion, or as Zviagintsev states it: ‘children validate anything’ [vse opravdanie v detiakh] (2014: 117). By extension, Elena’s murder of Vladimir should be interpreted as a sacrificial act in order to glorify new life and continuity.9 It is important to remember that Elena nursed Vladimir back to life ten years earlier when he was hospitalised for the first time. She is a life-giving agent and also a ruthless murderer who is blinded by her loyalty to her son and his family – a­ mystic. Similarly, the bond between Elena and her youngest grandson can be interpreted as either unconditional love for each other, or as complete domination. Even the weather is indeterminate: it can be either autumn or spring. The ‘reversibility’ of the seasons – ­and of the other situations and themes – ­has a specific emphasis: by making the markers of meaning transferable in their function, Zviagintsev detracts the attention of the spectator from the specific meaning of the sign towards its more general, abstract connotation, and so one shifts from semiology to semiotics.10 The director hence shifts the events to an even higher abstract level, and additionally he delegates the process of signification to the

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spectators, who make sense of what they see depending on intentionality. In other words, Zviagintsev flattens the symbolic folds (metaphors) in order to achieve a high degree of abstraction in the image construction (the symbolic mode). Such an aesthetic and philosophical predisposition is manifested in the work of the camera. In his diary, Zviagintsev reveals that, in the analysis of what he calls Elena’s ‘personal apocalypse’, he gives preference to the use of the camera – w ­ hat he calls ‘special optics’ – r­ ather than actors and extras (2014: 120). The dominant technique in Elena is focus-through, or racking focus – ­a change of the field in focus, taking the viewer from one object to another that was previously out of focus, or, from the technical point of view, changing the focus of the lens during the shot. This technique supplies a change in focus and perspective as is evident in the very first scene in the film. It shows a group of trees outside an apartment block. The focus is on the leafless branches and the bark of the trees, which appear absolutely lifeless.11 The tree represents family life, as a tree of generations. Then the focus changes and reveals that what initially appeared as a dark smudge in the background is actually a bird in the tree. It is a crow that produces a harsh caw which sets the macabre mood for the rest of the film. The crow has been traditionally used as a bad omen and a symbol of death; however, it is also an archetype of the trickster, epitomising intelligence, audaciousness and mischief.12 So the crow symbolises the contradictions of knowledge (the anti-representational system) rather than the binarism of meaning (representational system). In this scene, the change in focus provides a change in perspective which does not necessarily entail a linear reading, but rather a punctuated form of discourse whereby the movement of the camera and change in perspective can be reversed and a new juxtaposition actualised (as happens at the end of the film when the imagery of life/death is reversed). For Zviagintsev, these elements are not charged as either negative or positive. Their purpose is not to enforce a (moral) hierarchy, or Deleuzian Order, but to demonstrate their insuperable difference which, in fact, produces in a subject not tension but motion, hence the reference of the black-andwhite bedspread is not only to the rituals of rebirth and transformation, but also to the nature of cinema with its game of shadows on the screen, as a series of projectiles. Here the bedspread and the screen emerge as loci for flattening of discourse in the symbolic mode whereby flattening functions as a manner of visionary intentionality.13 The screen is one of the chief modes of signification and flattening. In the sections below I demonstrate how the energies of the symbolic mode are released thanks to the flattened, abstracted notions utilised in the film.

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sy mbol ic f o l ds and f l a t t e ned di s c o u r s e 99 In Elena the characters’ apartments are their habitus; the similarity is in the use of the (flat) screen of television sets which suggest the telepresence of a higher authority.14 Vladimir and Elena have separate bedrooms and each of them watches their own selection of programmes in solitude. (There seems to be a television set in each room in Sergei’s apartment, not all of those have a flat screen which is one of the markers of their lower level of consumption.) Graffy describes their viewing habits as follows: While Elena is preparing breakfast she watches programmes about food and healthy living, but she turns them off before Vladimir sits down at the table. His own taste runs to sports broadcasts, athletics and football, programmes to which he falls asleep while lying in bed. After he is dead Elena allows herself the luxury of watching while she eats, a report on a ‘konkurs kolbasy’, a competition to find the best sausage. It is surely part of her punishment that at the end Sergei has decided what they are to watch and Elena’s entire family sit in front of the screen in a harsh parody of family happiness. (2012)

‘The sausage competition’ is a reference to the late Soviet food shortages when such a basic brand of sausage as ‘doktorskaia’ was considered a delicacy. Through this reference the director actualises the ‘retro-gaze’ of Elena and the generation she represents. This televised performance is a nostalgic reincarnation of the past which is apolitical as well as ahistorical because ‘revived or retrofitted forms bring with them no history’ (Oushakine 2007: 453). Elena engages in the retrospective consideration from the comfort of her beautiful home where cappuccinos and baguettes have replaced the ‘doktorskaia’ sausage. In doing so, she actualises one of the functions of nostalgic renditions which is a response to a ‘striving for a recognized shape, for a set of automatized perceptions, and for a common repertoire of cultural references’ (Oushakine 2007: 482). The reference enables a construction of a rhetorical field in which, following the dynamic of the symbolic mode, signification is dispersed across a broad range of perceptions borrowed from the cultural past (the folds) and appropriated irrespectively of their historical connotations (the flatness). In addition to television screens, Elena demonstrates the screen of the game console that both Sasha and Sergei make use of during Elena’s visits. It is remarkable that in neither of the apartments do the families employ computers as a site of work. This is in stark contrast to the techno-cultural point Zviagintsev makes in the scene when Elena does some shopping in a local store. She is on her way to Sergei’s home to deliver more cash. In the store she buys food and she wishes to use a credit card to pay for her groceries; the shop assistant who is serving her – a­ middle-aged lady with a strong regional accent – c­ alls her colleague – a­ much younger woman

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– t­o complete the transaction because it is clear that she does not know how to use the credit card reader (since she has always dealt with cash). In Cultural Studies terms, this scene helps the director to represent social differences: the divide lies not along the lines of gender, age or education, but rather income, thus suggesting a completely new class structure in Russia that is not based on the binary antagonisms of the Soviet period, but on a more transient system of capital circulation of the Putin era. In the same category of interactive screens are the screens of the monitors in the hospital where Vladimir is treated after the heart attack. Technologically advanced and elaborate, they represent the penetrating gaze of the camera and its failure to reveal the workings of Vladimir’s inner self. In its reference to radiography, Elena establishes a connection with early cultural practices when at the end of the nineteenth century cinema and X-rays were often conflated because of their capacity to expand visual horizons.15 They were part of the ray/vision mania of the time, which helped the body to emerge as a transparent fragment intermixed with other forms of cultural exchange and of inscribing value. These function as a way of flattening, abstracting discourse which I also see in operation in Fedorchenko’s Silent Souls where such flattening is construed in terms of modelling. The idea of the penetrating gaze of the camera – fi ­ lm as a means to expand the horizon of vision and as an indication of non-knowledge – i­s developed further in the imagery of the (wind-)screen of a moving vehicle. In this category one finds various windscreens and windows in cars, buses and trains which the director makes elaborate use of when showing the characters moving from one place to another. In some instances, the only reason for the characters to be shown on their journey somewhere seems to be the opportunity to engage with the surface of the screen. For example, one day Vladimir drives to the gym and he nonchalantly hops channels on his radio, emitting a bizarre combination of music from all over the world. On his way he goes past a group of guest workers in fluorescent uniforms. The camera looks at the immigrants from inside the Audi, noting the unsympathetic look on Vladimir’s face reflected in the glass. In the counter-shot, the camera looks at Vladimir from outside the car, capturing reflections of the workers in the windscreen. As the car moves away, the reflected image changes; it now shows a reflection of a decorative panel on the house, which, in its mirrored, inverted form, appears like Arabic script. The windscreen is hence used as a means to project Vladimir’s anxieties about immigration and the controlling gaze of someone who is in charge of the vehicle. Zviagintsev generally uses screens as a means to introduce a parallel

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sy mbol ic f o l ds and f l a t t e ned di s c o u r s e 101 mode of cinematic presentation as in Banishment where the windscreen of the protagonist’s car becomes a vehicle for evoking memory, trauma and loneliness. Aleksandr (Konstantin Lavronenko) returns to the city after his wife Vera (Maria Bonnevie) dies during an abortion that he had organised against her will. He does not know yet that she has killed herself by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. As Aleksandr suspects her of infidelity – t­ he main reason why he wanted to get rid of the child – ­he comes back in order to avenge himself on the man, Robert (Dmitrii Ul’ianov), who he believes was his wife’s lover. Robert is out when Aleksandr arrives, so Aleksandr is compelled to wait for his nemesis in the car parked outside the house. While waiting Aleksandr falls asleep; the camera becomes mobile and moves around the car showing it from different angles. In one continuous take the camera moves almost 360 degrees around the car, showing what is in the background while maintaining focus on the car and Aleksandr’s face. Towards the end of the scene the camera shows the character’s face: Aleksandr is sleeping peacefully inside the car with the side window drawn up; the camera catches the reflection in the glass – t­he slow movement of the branches of a large tree. The scene ends on a tranquil note and the film continues to the next scene. The spectator, however, is left wondering about the tree: Aleksandr parked his car outside Robert’s house in an urban area with no vegetation visible anywhere. In the circular movement around the car, the camera confirms that there are no trees in the street and hence no such reflection is possible. In this scene Zviagintsev resorts to presenting rather than withholding as he does in The Return: the tree acquires a particular meaning not as an established symbol of life but, in the symbolic mode, as an apparatus of thinking, as imprint of our thought, as a trace of the rupture in discourse, whereby the void is perceptible between the visible and the divine, between knowledge and non-­knowledge, between subjectivity and signification. Although Zviagintsev shows a reflection of a tree, he does so in the anti-representational mode since there is no object to induce the reflection – t­ he image as pure immanence – a­ nd the reference is not to some ‘objective reality’, but to the realm of human signification (which can be interpreted as a dream, hallucination, aberration, incongruity, interference, etc.). To reiterate, here the purpose of the reflection is not to suggest representation, but to capture the very process of thinking in referential terms. This event catapults the story in Banishment to a different level of abstraction whereby the forces of the symbolic mode provide a different consideration of the material. Similarly, Elena employs screens as a locus and mode of meaningmaking and shifts from the use of screens as symbols of societal divisions, whereby the screens are not dividers but rather emblems of difference,

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to the use of screens as projectiles and trajectories in the transformation of subjectivity (in Balabanov’s Morphine screens are used to construct posthumous subjectivity operating in the symbolic mode). Every morning Elena combs her hair in front of an elaborate three-piece vanity mirror which reflects the blasé expression on her face. She is content with her marriage, or rather her ‘arrangement’ with Vladimir (Graffy 2012), which provides her with financial security in exchange for her care as a nurse, cook and sexual partner. By contrast, Katia epitomises a new type of woman who is independent – t­ hanks to her father’s money – a­ nd, according to her father, spends most of her time enjoying herself. Her refusal to have children is a sign of her rejection of the patriarchal order. Her language use and wit suggest that she is very well-educated and perhaps has an interesting job, or at least an occupation. In fact, in an earlier version of the script and in Zviagintsev’s diary the character of Katia is conceived in relation to a particular space in Moscow, the so-called Art-Play, an innovative exhibition centre where, for example, the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art takes place: ‘Katia’s space is a cold room in what used to be a mill, now re-purposed to house exhibitions of contemporary art’ (Zviagintsev et al. 2014: 96). Later on Zviagintsev decides to make Katia a translator: in a scene that was eventually cut, Katia is shown at a film screening in Art-Play where she delivers a translation of a film about Žižek (Zviagintsev et al. 2014: 114). One morning Elena conceives Vladimir’s murder while sitting in front of the mirror, in complete silence as if the world has come to a halt. She adjusts her hair, making sure it looks the same as ever, and stares in the mirror and then away from it, as if inviting a higher authority to intervene. One panel of the mirror is not straight and so it shows Elena’s face sideways, splitting her reflected image into two. To be precise, one of the images is her profile and the other a three-quarter image. In Russian pictorial tradition derived from Byzantium, the profile was reserved for the representation of Satan while the three-quarter image was used to represent sinners (Antonov and Maizul 2014: 44). (This is one of many references to Dostoevskii’s The Brothers Karamazov, in which Ivan suffers from a split personality and encounters his Doppelgänger. This allusion frames Elena as a philosophical investigation into the origins of evil; just like Dostoevskii in his novel, Zviagintsev compels the spectator to enquire about what and who actually kills Vladimir.) Through racking focus, the camera oscillates between different images of Elena: her sitting in front of the mirror and the two reflected images. The triadic structure of Elena’s image implicates her transitory position between the two families and the two worlds and her failure to build a world of her own independently

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sy mbol ic f o l ds and f l a t t e ned di s c o u r s e 103 from anyone else. This is a transitory position between knowledge and non-knowledge.16 A similar device is used in the scene in which Elena goes to church to light a candle and her face appears against the wall of icons. This image highlights the monstrosity of Elena’s subjectivity as illuminated by the imagery of hell: behind her an image of the devil with a baby on his lap is visible. In his diaries, Zviagintsev describes this scene/ concept in almost Nietzschean terms as a monster appearing as a comely person – t­he use of the Russian ‘blagoobraznyi’ containing the word ‘image’ is ­noteworthy – ­who, in church, gazes at his own idols (2014: 56).17 Elena’s visit to the church is another reference to The Brothers Karamazov in which the devil speaks about his wish to turn into a female merchant [kupchikha] lighting candles in the cathedral. Mirrors and screens belong to the semantic group of windows utilised frequently in the film. Elena opens with a shot filmed through the window in Vladimir’s apartment: the black contours of the tree and the slow pace of the camera draw the viewer’s attention to the aesthetic form:18 the opening scene suggests that the film is not just a story, but an artistic manifesto or, as the film cinematographer puts it: ‘the characters are “compelling” not because they “look like” real life but because they have undergone the process of “aesthetisation”’ (Zviagintsev et al. 2014: 138), or what I call in this study moving towards the symbolic mode; in other words, presenting them in ways that invite the construction of meaning rather than dictating it.19 The image of the tree is a pencil drawing whilst the window in the apartment is a frame of a painting:20 Zviagintsev is consistent in his preoccupation with the painterly qualities of his films and he uses windows to provide framed portraits of his characters – ­they eschew identities to emerge as ideas, subjectivities. By doing so, he distances them from the materiality of being as they become recollections and glimpses of beings long vanished – t­he posthumous subjectivity. In the scene when Katia visits her father in the hospital she appears standing in front of the window: the bright light obscures her features, turning her into a ghostly apparition, and emphasising her other-worldliness. Windows do, indeed, function as portals into other worlds: after the murder Elena travels by train; when the train suddenly stops she looks out of the window and sees a horse that has been knocked down by the train. In the book of Revelation one finds a similar description of an apocalyptic event: ‘I looked up and saw a white horse. Its rider carried a bow, and a crown was placed on his head. He rode out to win many battles and gain the victory’ (Revelation 6:2). Throughout history this has been interpreted as a passage referring to the Antichrist, and in the film the image of the white horse is used as a symbol of the arrival of the apocalypse. The evil is not personalised – ­this

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would be the job of representation – ­but rather abstracted and dispersed across the whole range of characters, creating a complex subjectivity yearning to decipher its own ethical failure. In pictorial terms, as in Vasnetsov’s image of the apocalypse that Elena cites, the mystery of the apocalypse is not in the visible plane – ­the four horsemen and the corpses in the foreground – ­but in the passions of the invisible world which are hinted at in the figures appearing in the background. The horsemen in Vasnetsov’s painting (1887) are presented as a group; however, the composition suggests that they appear as individual patterns rather than as a representational whole. This is comparable with Matisse’s painting with its flattened folds of meaning which I discuss below. It is what the image both reveals and conceals that is paramount to the construction of subjectivity in the symbolic mode; hence, below I pay special attention to the mechanisms of such pictorial revelation/concealment as a form of doubling/flattening of the discourse. The strategy of simultaneous revealing and concealing is evident in the imagery of decorative panels and retractable room partitions in Vladimir’s apartment. Graffy describes the interior of Vladimir’s apartment as ‘cool, sterile’ (2012), which, in my view, symbolises his heirless, infertile family. Indeed, there are very few objects in the apartment that could interrupt the penetrating, razor-sharp gaze of the camera. The austere interior of the apartment is evoked in the interiors of Vladimir’s gym, his lawyer’s office and even the funeral parlour. The world of the businessman is completely devoid of clutter where even books have a pragmatic purpose (Elena consults a medical encyclopaedia when contemplating Vladimir’s murder). The decluttered atmosphere of Vladimir’s world is contrasted to the sensuality of Sergei’s home where objects are piled on top of each other, creating a chaos of textures, colours and shapes. Mikhail Krichman, the cinematographer, notes that they used ‘abstract’ [abstraktnye] colour schemes for each scene as well as for costumes, interiors and even patterns on wallpaper so that the world of the film can be conceived in terms of its colour palette, patterns and textures and reveal its rhythmic structure (Zviagintsev et al. 2014: 133).21 However, just like Vladimir, Sergei and the rest of his family – ­perhaps with the exception of his wife who, like Elena, is compelled to function in an alien environment – ­are incapable of affection as their material interests prevail. The ‘cool, sterile’ atmosphere is achieved thanks to the specific design of Vladimir’s apartment: decorative panels are used to conceal household objects. These panels feature a pattern that imitates the structure of the wood (perhaps real wood was used creatively to reveal its beautiful texture): nature appears in its processed, transformed form, more like a still-life than an actual display, more an abstraction than an actuality.

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sy mbol ic f o l ds and f l a t t e ned di s c o u r s e 105 The flatness of the screens emphasises the flatness of discourse whereby the role of the characters is to participate in rituals, which seems to have no other purpose than waiting.22 Vladimir awaits his destiny peacefully: in most of the scenes he is shown lying on a bed, whether at home or in the hospital, or occupying other horizontal positions (swimming, lying in the coffin), which rhymes with the position/role of the child in the final scene. Vladimir’s position is contrasted to the frantic verticality of Sergei’s family: they live in a Soviet high-rise; they sit on stools with their backs straightened; his wife climbs on chairs to reach vodka from the kitchen shelf and she literally moves out of the shot and only her legs remain visible, and so on. In depicting Sergei’s family, the camera uses the technique of fragmentation, often dissecting the bodies of the characters whilst Vladimir and Katia are shown as wholesome subjects whose being is suspended (Katia appears as an apparition – ­once Vladimir exclaims ‘I can’t see you!’ – a­ nd in Vladimir’s death).23 Vladimir’s spacious apartment invites long uninterrupted shots that accentuate the abundance of air and light; Sergei’s cramped apartment disables the free movement of the camera between rooms: its movement is truncated, suggesting nervous interruptions of space and the suffocating agony of its occupants.24 The structure of the space compels a specific work of the camera which delays presentation – ­as Krichman puts it ‘the camera is always delaying’ [kamera vse vremia medlit] – t­ hus deferring construction of meaning, which occurs not only during sequences but also in the gaps between them: the flattening of discourse enables our perception of such gaps/ruptures. Krichman also compares the characters with dancers in a Matisse painting: the characters are ornaments in the general construction of space,25 with its ambiguities and play between the illusion of depth and acknowledgement of the flatness of the canvas/screen. Literary and painterly allusions26 indicate that the director requires that the attention of the spectator should continuously oscillate between the events shown and historical events, between the work of perception and the work of memory. This bifocal exercise of signification is mirrored in the use of the camera that slowly changes focus in order to provide the spectator with a temporal and semiotic gap in the process of signification. The racking focus of the camera is noticeable when contrasted to the frequent use of the static camera. The only time when the camera gets loose is in the scene of the gang attack when hand-held devices were used to depict Sasha’s anger and violence.27 The logic of flatness applies to the characters’ faces as well: Krichman speaks of their faces as masks, in other words, as surfaces.28 He notes that only three characters have faces that change in the film – E ­ lena, Katia and Vladimir – b­ ecause they

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belong to ‘the same metaphysical space’ (Zviagintsev et al. 2014: 141). Indeed, when Elena burns Vladimir’s will her face changes from being grave [seroe] to being diabolic. Her duality is signposted from the very beginning in that full-face she has features of a common woman whereas her profile is one of a Greek goddess. Similarly, Krichman compares Vladimir’s profile with that of Caesar (Zviagintsev et al. 2014: 142).29 Zviagintsev sees a parallel between the work of the film and the work of the X-ray machine in that they reveal invisible, unseen images (2014: 174). In their special attention to surfaces and patterns, Zviagintsev and Krichman elucidate a particular film philosophy that Krichman calls ‘visualisation’, or transference of meaning with the help of the symbolic mode: ‘the filmic material does not simply inform or copy . By using different images that are not always linked to the direct content, it can reveal and enhance the meaning of what is being said. To let the meaning be seen does not mean to illustrate or copy’ (Zviagintsev et al. 2014: 144). Here the symbolic mode instantiates a new plane of meaning, a surface/screen on which meaning is inscribed, which, while alluding to the materiality of being, is elusive in its metaphysical construction. Cinematically, while the camera looks in both directions, it glides above these surfaces and in doing so creates meaning; it is in the gap between surfaces that the meaning is actualised. Hence, Krichman and Zviagintsev discuss non-representational strategies which they call ‘visualisation’. Zviagintsev compares film with a ‘magical mirror’ that enables a two-directional mode of operation: while viewers watch films, the films watch the viewers (Zviagintsev et al. 2014: 170). For him, film offers both knowledge and non-knowledge – ­categories that we dwell on in Chapter 5. The latter – a­ more powerful stance, according to the director – p ­ rovides ‘freedom and emptiness’, that is, a temporal lack of signification, a void of meaning to be filled in the process of watching (2014: 178). Thus, Zviagintsev completes the process of flattening of the folds (representations), and begins to operate on the level of visualisation, or constructs that can be determined as a relationship between the world and the event that I analyse in Chapter 6.

Notes   1. See Chapter 6 on Serebrennikov’s St George’s Day for an analysis of such a predisposition.   2. The films received multiple international awards, including the Grand Prix at the Venice Film Festival in 2003 and the Best Actor Award at the Cannes

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sy mbol ic f o l ds and f l a t t e ned di s c o u r s e 107 Film Festival in 2007. In 2014, his fourth film Leviathan received the Best Script Award at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Oscars.   3. The dystopian element of Elena has to do with the perceived threat of the social underclass emanating from the urban sprawls: note a similar stance expressed by Vladimir Sorokin in relation to his film The Target discussed in Chapter 12. The suburbs [spal’nye raiony] are an architectural allegory for the new underclasses.   4. In Cultural Studies terms, this is a contrast between the intelligentsia and the working classes.   5. Some critics noted Elena was filmed from the conservative perspective, that is, as representing the interests of the ruling class (e.g., Kuvshinova 2011b).   6. For a discussion of Russian cinema and the concept of family and filial relations, see Goscilo and Hashamova (2010).   7. Zviagintsev’s use of the swastika is similar to that I find in the art of Sigmar Polke: simultaneously inquisitive and ironic.   8. This principle of compressing space is used in Veledinskii’s Alive (Chapter 9), where people and ghosts occupy the same place.  9. Denis Gorelov defined the conflict in Elena as a return to pre-Christian morality whereby marital links are sacrificed for the sake of the bloodline (2011). 10. In terms of the weather, the film shows not spring or autumn, but rather a season of rapid change; and the film does not distinguish between love or control, but rather focuses on a nexus of authority. 11. The image of the tree plays an important role in Khomeriki’s A Tale About Darkness (see Chapter 5). 12. On trickster in film, see Bassil-Morozow (2012); as an archetype in Russian culture, see Lipovetsky (2010). 13. Vitalii Manskii, an acclaimed Russian documentary film-maker, described the visual quality of Elena as ‘staged’ and ‘like a fairy-tale’ (Manskii 2011). 14. See Chapter 12 on the use of television shows in Zel’dovich’s The Target. 15. See Chapter 2 on the use of film image and X-ray image in Proshkin’s film. 16. In Balabanov’s Morphine discussed in Chapter 3, such a triangulation is used to contrast different types of knowledge. 17. [Monstr v oblike blagoobraznogo cheloveka, stoiashchii v poze greshnika pered litsom svoikh idolov v khrame, – ­chem ne obraz kontsa vremen?] 18. I am grateful to Andrei Shcherbenok for this idea. 19. [Estetizatsiia chrezvychaino vazhna. Ty mozhesh govorit’ o besformennom, no pri etom ty ne mozhesh byt’ besformennym sam. Ty mozhesh’ govorit’ o bessmyslii, no obiazan govorit’ chetko]. 20. Sokurov’s interest in the pictorial nature of the film image is well-­documented (Chapter 1). 21. [mir . . . fil’ma propisyvaetsia na predmet ego sozvuchnosti – t­svetovoi, fakturnoi]. 22. Waiting is a common motif in the films discussed in this book. It epitomises

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being in apocalyptic times when waiting is the only action characters can effectively perform as it structures their subjectivity. 23. Compare with the use of the pornographic aesthetic in Khomeriki’s A Tale About Darkness (Chapter 5). 24. Krichman calls it ‘sinkopicheskii ritm’ (Zviagintsev et al. 2014: 135). 25. [Kak i v ego ‘Tanste’, u nas geroi tozhe resheny ornamental’no, kak chast’ inter’era . . . u kazhdogo geroia . . . svoia statichnaia stsenka-pattern] (Zviagintsev et al. 2014: 137). 26. For example, Vladimir evokes the infamous Alena Ivanovna from Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment, a suspicious old pawnbroker who hoards money and is merciless to her patrons. This allusion provides us with the ‘inverted’ gender position in the film whereby the archaic law is represented by the male subject. In fact, Vladimir’s failure to produce the will stands for the lack of the written law which unleashes the struggle for power in the clan. The comparison with Dostoevskii’s novel underscores the main message of Elena – ­crime without retribution. 27. The attack takes place among apple trees, suggesting a reinterpretation of original sin as well as signposting Sasha’s habitus: the forest. In this regard, he is the new ‘cave man’ whose only function is aggression: he plays violent computer games and beats up young men. 28. Compare with the use of masks and surfaces in Zel’dovich’s The Target (Chapter 12). 29. Gorelov (2011) compares Elena with Greek tragedies such as Sophocles’ Antigone.

C H A PT E R 5

Non-Knowledge and the Symbolic Mode: Nikolai Khomeriki’s A Tale About Darkness (2009)

In this chapter I develop the concept of non-knowledge as a form of selfpresence. I start by analysing the use of allegory in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal [Det sjunde inseglet] (1957), and I problematise the hierarchies of allegories and symbols whilst calling for the exploration of the polyvalence of the symbolic mode. I continue to define the concept of non-knowledge by revisiting Bataille’s notion of non-knowledge and Badiou’s idea of inaesthetics. Finally, I focus on Khomeriki’s A Tale About Darkness to examine non-knowledge as a world of prefiguration. The Seventh Seal is a film about a medieval knight, Antonius Block (Max von Sydow), who is also a modern man, a soldier returning from a war. On his journey he meets M(ar)ia (Bibi Andersson), Jo(se)f (Nils Poppe) and their baby son, who are allegorical figures employed by the director to convey the events of the film as elements of an archetypal dramatic pattern. The overriding symbol of the film is the game of chess: at the beginning, the knight is shown playing chess with Death (Bengt Ekerot), which is an epitome of Antonius’ interior struggle. This symbol determines the development of the narrative and the use of dialogue, whereby the game of chess symbolises the interplay between geometrical order and control, on the one hand, and fear of chaos, on the other hand. (In the previous chapter I determined Delueze’s overfocus on the Order as a linguistic concept and his disregard of the Order as a transcendental object.) While producing an internal, intra-textual hierarchy of symbols, the film also makes use of external, outer-textual associations, which are incorporated in a similar hierarchic fashion. For example, The Seventh Seal refers to the famous Swedish mural Death Playing Chess with Man (Täby Parish Church, Uppland). The meaning of the reference is that death is man’s constant companion; the position of the reference in the system of visual allusions suggests that God is no longer the ultimate authority but a decorative figure, and the conversation with Death is more a conversation with the dead, with the knight

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standing at a border and looking at a world appearing in front of his eyes. The interplay of symbols – p ­ resented in a free or, in Bergman’s case, a hierarchic manner – ­aids a parallel construction of history, which, for Deleuze, is undergirded by a different understanding of time and events (2013). The symbol oscillates between the tasks of establishing continuity and providing contingency. The symbol equivocates a belief in the co-presence of all moments in time – ­a pre-set teleology – ­and a belief in the possibility of change, and, hence, history (the knight, Death and the dead in The Seventh Seal). For example, in the use of internal and external symbols Bergman ‘narrativises’ chance and extends affect in time. Bergman’s game of chess emphasises continuity by holding that the difference between past, present and future is a psychological effect, or that history will unfold according to a pre-existing design. (By contrast, Serebrennikov de-narrativises possibility/chance in St George’s Day.) The multidimensionality of the symbolic mode problematises historical agency and preordained timeline. By allowing both predetermination and open-endedness, symbols engage in a complex relationship with various elements of the (cinematic) text, simultaneously concealing and disavowing their conjunctures. Symbols do not rewrite history but generate resistance to the power of time. The symbolic mode is a symptom of subjectivity being overwhelmed by the ‘eventfulness’ of history and by the emptiness of the present: to paraphrase Bergman, in the symbolic mode the conversation with the dead changes into a conversation with Death, with the knight now looking beyond the temporal realms into a world of prefiguration and productive tensions. The eventuality of symbolic presentation interrogates the flat visuality of the screen: this is not only a reflective effect of glass and mirror, but also a world of shadows appearing on the surface.1 The chess pieces not only symbolise Antonius’ internal conflict, but also show its physicality. On the one hand, as symbols, they emphasise the dominance of the visual impression over the narrative employment. They supplant more immediate forms of knowledge such as language and writing because they stage a return to other forms of knowledge, in this case ludic and performative. Play is a way to suspend historical time, or at least to replace it with a different form of causality. Play prioritises synchronicity over diachronic constructions – i­t is in the ‘now’ that the knight converses with Death, and this ‘now’ unfolds in the eternal play of symbols. The symbolic mode is concerned with the two-dimensional surface of the screen – ­a concern derived from medieval pictorial practice and evident in modernist painting, for example, in Matisse’s work – a­ s well as with the imaginary, multi-

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n on -kno wl e dge a nd t he s ym b o l i c m o de 111 dimensional space of perception, which extends the cadency of the screen to include post-Renaissance illusions of depth. (I explore these concerns in Chapter 4 on Zviagintsev’s Elena where I argue that the camera looks in both directions: it glides above surfaces and in doing so creates meaning; it is in the gap between surfaces that the meaning is actualised.) In this configuration, the symbol is a physical object not just a concept. It maintains the viewer’s attention to make meaning, that is, to generate depth of signification. The symbol refocuses the viewer’s attention back onto the knight: his subjectivity calibrates the relationship between Death and the dead.2 In the Swedish mural evoked in The Seventh Seal, the gaze of Man and Death is directed at the game of chess as well as at the viewer: the players sit next to each other, facing the viewer, with the chess board separating their space from that of the viewer. Their position determines the role of the viewer who is involved in the game of chess as yet another player. The chess board functions as a map that predetermines the movement of the pieces and at the same time enables free play. The ludic atmosphere of the medieval mural defines the ludic nature of the symbolic mode: it is encoded and indeterminate. This duality of signification is emphasised in how the figures of Man and Death are incorporated in the visual space of the mural: the orderly black and white pattern of the chessboard is contrasted to the surrounding floral ornament. The latter signifies the flow of time whereby the symmetrical motif and the curves and loops of the decorum suggest different concepts of time in its historical, linear and cyclical, nonlinear deliveries. In The Seventh Seal, Bergman reworks the composition of the mural, which reflects the change in the role of the viewer. Antonius and Death are positioned against each other, sideways to the gaze of the viewer. They intently watch each other’s moves and their gazes seem to meet above the chessboard, which separates the space of Death from the space of the knight, hence suggesting that the viewer is in the role of the judge, offered the opportunity to maintain distance or to join either side. The black and white squares of the chessboard are barely visible. What enables the perception of the situation is knowing the principles of the game rather than observing it. The chess pieces are aligned in such a way that they create a rhythmical repetition of black and white motifs. It is on close scrutiny that the viewer realises that the chessboard is positioned sideways, that is, away from Death and the knight, and towards the viewer (as if playing the black pieces) and the invisible force on the other side of the board (as if playing the white pieces). This is a moment of cross-over between different types of knowledge. The symbolic imperative of the mise-en-scène reveals the presence of the unknown: from the medieval duality of life

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and death, the viewer is transposed to the modernist ontology of seeing, with the dark sky in the background foreshadowing the transcendental presence. While in the mural the figures of Man and Death form a cross, in the film they form a cup, both being symbols of sacrifice and eternity. The cup gives non-knowledge a perceptible shape and quality, and it destabilises the symmetry of patterns and the geometrical composition of the shot: its open-endedness contrasts to the preordained narrative of the mise-en-scène.3 In the film, the game of chess suspends historical and cosmological time: the viewer’s gaze is directed simultaneously at the players and at the sky in the background, trying to penetrate beyond the horizon of knowledge. Bergman reconstructs the two-dimensionality of the mural by using multiple sources of light: the faces of both Death and the knight are illuminated, and so is the sky in the background. As a result, the light seems to emanate from the subjects: against the celestial background, the figures in the foreground appear flattened and abstracted. At the same time, they relate to the space of the viewer, extending the space of perception by accentuating depth. The symbols in the mural and the film operate as spatial layers and border markers: they are oriented internally as well as externally, enabling signification and inviting transcendence by conflating different points in time – h ­ istorical, referential, ontological, experiential and ludic, each carrying an authoritative voice and causing a discursive displacement, and they establish a polyvalence of play and non-hierarchy of knowledge-making. To reiterate, the symbolic mode enables signification outside the realm of knowledge, and how symbols relate to non-knowledge. ‘Non-knowledge’ does not equate to ‘ignorance, or ‘irrationality’; instead, non-knowledge is an indication of the presence of other forms of knowing, infra-human or supra-human. In the symbolic mode meaning is a significative resemblance, which suggests a particular orientation of subjectivity required to re-actualise the presence of a different order of signification in the current world. In this process, systems of signification are expanded and they shift from the drives of narration to the drives of intentionality, while the symbolic mode remains the main tool of commemorative practice, reminding us of that initial encounter.4 Whilst this process may result in the transformation of one form of knowledge into another, the subject always remains aware of the fields of signification beyond the immediate horizon of rationalisation, and I refer to these fields as ‘non-knowledge’, which, of course, is not a negation of knowledge but an acknowledgement of the presence of the other. The concept of non-knowledge originally appears in the writing of Georges Bataille, who speaks of non-knowledge in metaphysical terms:

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n on -kno wl e dge a nd t he s ym b o l i c m o de 113 On entering into nonknowledge, I know I erase the figures from the blackboard. But the obscurity that falls in this way isn’t that of annihilation, it is not even the ‘night when all the cows are black.’ It is the enjoyment [jouissance] of the night. It is only slow death, death that it is possible to enjoy. And I am learning, slowly, that the death at work in me was not missing only from my knowledge, but also from the depths of my joy. (Bataille 1988: 204)

Bataille infers that the subject enters the transcendent whole and realises its own discontinuity. The subject wishes to identify with the entirety of being – a­s a will to know and possess – b­ ut can never satisfy this desire because this being is nowhere. Non-being is substituted by non-­ knowledge, which Bataille conceives of in metaphorical terms, as an image of the night and a return to what is there which is accompanied by the ‘feeling of complicity in: despair, madness, love, supplication. Inhuman, dishevelled joy of communication – ­for despair, madness, love. . . not a point in empty space which is not despair, madness, love and even more: laughter, dizziness, vertigo, nausea, loss of self to the point of death’ (Bataille 1988). If for Bataille, non-knowledge has the qualities of the singularity of the motif, for Badiou and Jacques Rancière non-knowledge has the potential of the multiplicity of aesthetics. In his essay ‘Aesthetics, Inaesthetics and Anti-Aesthetics’, Rancière develops Badiou’s idea of relation that is also a non-relation between two things whereby each of them relates to itself (non-relation as a category of logic) into the concept of aesthetics and inaesthetics (non-relation as a category of art). Rancière uses Badiou’s Manifesto for Philosophy (1999) to summate the philosophical attitudes towards art. In the first – a­ ssociated with Plato – ­Rancière defines art as a way of ‘putting forms of knowledge into practice via the imitation of models, and there are appearances, or simulacra of the arts’ (2004: 219). The second – a­ ssociated with Aristotle – ­‘identifies art in the air of mimesis/poeisis’: ‘these are arts withdrawn not only from the usual evaluation of artistic products according to their usefulness, but also from the legislation that truth exercises over discourses and images’ (2004: 219). Finally, the third – ­which Rancière calls simply ‘aesthetics’ and which is useful for my conceptualisation of the symbolic mode – ­identifies artistic products as ‘belonging to the mode of being of a sensible datum that differs from itself, a mode that has become identical with the way of thinking that also differs from itself’ (2004: 219). Rancière continues to define the three approaches to art as entities of ‘the made’, ‘the known’ and ‘the unknown’, or what he also calls ‘the willed’. His triangulation of thinking about art questions hierarchies of symbolisation as discussed above by placing emphasis on relation. Such anti-hierarchic triangulation corresponds, to some extent, to my concept of knowledge,

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non-knowledge and anti-knowledge, albeit I consider knowledge and nonknowledge as more general concepts that subsume art as well as philosophy of art insofar as they designate the very procedure of meaning-making irrespective of its means, and similarly, they denominate both the filmic/ artistic processes and the system of significations they produce. The concept of non-knowledge ascertains the capacity of the symbolic mode to provide a mechanism for the ‘turn towards objects’ (e.g., the ‘objectoriented ontology’ of Graham Harman – o­ riginally conceived in 1999 and elaborated in 2010) whilst retaining the subjectivist perspective of poststructuralism (the ‘correlationism’ of Quentin Meillassoux (2008)). In this paradigm, film emerges as an ecology of different types of agents and relations, as a form of vibration (for Badiou these agents – w ­ hether human or not – a­ re potential actants that constitute the new arena of the political). In this chapter, in my analysis of a film by Nikolai Khomeriki (b. 1975 in Moscow), I focus on the relationship between non-knowledge and representation, or the second type of thinking art as identified by Rancière. To be precise, I explore the concept of non-knowledge not as a matter of representation, but rather as a matter that transcends representation through the principle of relation. Representation is always partial, while non-knowledge is outside the limits of an individual’s horizon so its contours remain unknown. This is because representation makes claims about the truth, ‘realism’, which gives way to a totalitarian logos, or as Derrida pointed out, truth is always an end in itself, the destination, hence ‘truth’ is internalised as a belief (1984: 2). By contrast, non-knowledge is about the realisation of self-presence which denies the possibility of determining meaning, ‘truth’, and about revelation in place of representation. In fact, one of the critics of Khomeriki’s film defines it as a ‘nonquotidian, peripheral vision’ [vnebytovoe, periferiinoe zrenie Khomeriki] (Gusiatinskii 2009) because of its moving away towards the horizon of knowledge. A Tale About Darkness (also translated as A Tale in the Darkness [Skazka pro temnotu], hereafter A Tale) is Khomeriki’s second film,5 following his 2006 debut feature called 977. These and Heart’s Boomerang (2011) are concerned with knowledge conceived in philosophical and cinematic terms whereby knowledge as an apparatus of subjectivity (de)constructs the filmic image in its relation to ‘what is known’ and ‘what is seen’, or what I define as seeing and showing (see Chapter 2 on ‘seeing’ as a site of meaning production). In Khomeriki’s first film, the number 977 signifies the means of measurement of the most intense human emotion. Science with its traditional impetus towards experimentation is utilised in order to test this hypothesis and to reveal the boundaries of knowledge and

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n on -kno wl e dge a nd t he s ym b o l i c m o de 115 what constitutes its alternative form only to realise that some objects are impossible to quantify. (In Sokurov’s Taurus Lenin fails to use mathemes to produce knowledge and construct a subjectivity.) Heart’s Boomerang opens with the main character having an ultrasound scan which reveals the weakness of the heart and the possible imminent death of the protagonist.6 He keeps the information secret from his family and friends and the threat remains unacknowledged, or ‘un-knowledged’, as an indeterminate subjectivity rather than the monad, which underpins not only the protagonist’s life but also the very structure of the filmic edifice. In all his films, the director enquires about the possibility of making films about a person who is on the brink of death – ­physical, moral or intellectual – ­and such nuances of border ontology inform the slightly ironic, absurdist and deeply tragic tonality of Khomeriki’s films, which are ultimately about solitude and the economies of knowledge and non-knowledge. A Tale explores contradictory forms of subjectivity in the contemporary setting of Russia’s Far East. The events take places in the city of Vladivostok, and the film includes contrasting imagery of urban degradation and exquisite nature. The film is about a woman called Gelia, short for Angelina (Alisa Khazanova), which is a reference to her allegedly heavenly, angelic nature, masked under the drab police uniform. In her work, she combines the responsibilities of a social worker who aims to ensure the safety and welfare of children, and the responsibilities of the police who are called to intervene in emergency situations. On one occasion she takes part in a raid on a squat; the police transfer a little girl from her alcoholic mother to social services. On another occasion she spends a whole day with a boy who has been taken away from his parents.7 Gelia shares an office with another policewoman, and they spend their breaks in the company of other officers; their favourite spot is a staircase where they go for a smoke. Although Gelia spends a lot of her time with her colleagues, she does not seem to have a strong bond with any of them. Her societal difference is stressed in her use of language: while other police use a lot of profanities [mat],8 Gelia remains scrupulously polite. Her manner of both speaking and dressing is marked:9 she is always flawlessly and modestly dressed albeit in a somewhat dated fashion. The film makes a point about her clothes in the opening scene: Gelia is in her apartment getting ready to leave; the camera focuses on her uniform and on how she struggles to put in an earring, that is, to ‘wear’ her femininity. In her private life, Gelia remains equally aloof. Her loneliness is presented in both sociological and metaphysical terms. She lives on her own, she has neither a partner nor children. Once she speaks to her parents – ­in a dream – a­ nd it is not clear whether her monologue is addressed to her

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living parents or, in fact, is a recollection of a previous conversation with her parents who are now deceased, or a hallucination altogether.10 Gelia’s plain undemonstrative demeanour conceals her strong desire to find a partner; or rather, her search for a partner conceals the extreme feeling of anguish that the viewer perceives as some non-knowledge: ‘anguish is no less than intelligence, the means for knowing, and the extreme limit of the “possible”, in other respects, is no less life than knowledge’ (Bataille 1988: 39). Gelia wishes to proceed to the end of the self and she does so by communicating not only verbally but also corporeally, in two modes which define knowledge and non-knowledge. Evgenii Gusiatinskii notes that A Tale is not only about anguish-as-darkness but also about anguishas-silence: ‘This could be a silent film – ­words are needed only to break the silence, which the heroine inhabits like some kind of sound-proof room’ (2009). This idea is comparable with Bataille’s observation that ‘anguish assumes the desire to communicate – ­that is, to lose myself – ­but not complete resolve: anguish is my fear of communicating, of losing myself’ (1988: 53). To communicate/construct herself, Gelia joins a dance club where she learns how to dance the tango; she also frequents various public spaces where she converses with strangers. Eventually she meets two men: Bograt (Iurii Safarov) and Aleksandr (Aleksandr Doluda); the first is a young migrant worker11 who sells groceries at an improvised stall on the roadside, and the latter is a wealthy middle-aged Russian businessman, possibly with links to the mafia, who takes Gelia for a trip to a remote island on his private yacht where he and his men friends entertain themselves with a picnic and a shooting match. The two men supply the film with two contrasting male subjectivities, one – ­a transgressive figure, a trickster, and the other – r­ ooted in the local culture; a young novice and an experienced seducer; and, finally, a loner and a socialite. Both of them are involved in illegal trade and corruption: Bograt at a low level, perhaps operating without a licence and avoiding taxes; and Aleksandr at a high level, which is evident from his possessions as well as his shooting habits.12 They start to perceive Gelia as a threat as soon as they realise that she is a policewoman. The men provide Gelia with a link to nature (Bograt is a fruit seller and Aleksandr takes her on a picnic), which is symbolically encoded in affirmative, righteous ways and is presented as a locus for non-knowledge. She enjoys her time with the men – ­though up to a point when sex is imminent and she resists their importunate behaviour – ­and eventually it becomes clear that she prefers someone else. Dmitrii (Boris Kamorzin) is Gelia’s colleague, a police detective; he takes an interest in Gelia at the very beginning of the film. During one of

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n on -kno wl e dge a nd t he s ym b o l i c m o de 117 their cigarette breaks he suddenly gropes her in the presence of other colleagues (see the analysis of this scene below). Dmitrii’s aggressive action – ­how he thrusts his hand under Gelia’s shirt – i­s contrasted with the controlled movement of hands in ballroom dancing: the camera focuses on the hands of male dancers holding their partners firmly. On the one hand, the film demonstrates the politics and aesthetics of gesture and particularly male gesture by associating the hand with the male sexual organ.13 On the other hand, the film puts forward the idea of gesture and dance as a form of non-knowledge, or affective prefiguration. The juxtaposition of the two is a source of conflict in the film. Gelia constantly teases Dmitrii for being overweight; however, it is not his appearance that she finds unattractive but rather his manners. In the middle of the film Gelia comes to his office to have sex but his rudeness repels her. Hopeful of his transformation, Gelia convinces him to take dancing lessons, too. Although he is an awkward dancer, on one occasion he manages to dance a tango with Gelia, and so he moves closer to non-knowledge. The film ends with what appears to be a declaration of love, or a rupture between the fields of knowledge and non-knowledge: Gelia says ‘I love you’ and Dmitrii comes back with an abusive tirade.14 His obscene language still in place, Dmitrii’s transformation is almost complete: the beast has turned into the prince (as in the tale of Beauty and the Beast – s­ ee further discussion of the fairy tale below). His transformation is verified in that the film opens and ends with the same phrase. In the beginning, the phrase ‘I love you’ is written on the branches of a tree, as a permanent mark of emotion. The film finishes with Dmitrii using the same words to announce his feelings to Gelia.15 The cyclical structure of the film enables a comparison between the coarseness of Dmitrii’s language and the roughness of the tree bark. The focus on Dmitrii suggests that he undergoes a transformation whereas Gelia remains unchanged.16 To be precise, for Gelia the transformation is about her clothes and appearance – ­a dress instead of the police uniform (surface/flatness) – ­whereas for Dmitrii it is, indeed, an interior motif (depth/fold). However, neither accounts for the main transformation of the film – t­he concern about how darkness is transformed into light, and, in fact, whether darkness is an opposition to light, or a calibration of knowledge and non-knowledge. Hence, the use of light in A Tale is charged with symbolic meaning. Nature is full of light but it does not prevent abusive moments in Gelia’s life. Light also emanates from art but only to accentuate Gelia’s demeaned position. A candle lights up Gelia’s face in the most profound moment in the film when she talks to her (dead) parents. Gelia asks her mother about the time, about ‘how long darkness will go on’.17 Gelia experiences what, in Inner Experience,

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Bataille calls ‘non-knowledge’: ‘Forgetting of everything. Deep descent into the night of existence. Infinite ignorant pleading, to drown oneself in anguish. To slip over the abyss and in the completed darkness experience the horror of it’ (1988: 36). The film investigates the concept of darkness as non-knowledge, darkness as a condition of ambiguity and deferral that codifies subjectivities. A Tale searches for codified forms of experience of darkness, and it finds them in the tradition of the fairy tale which, on the one hand, often relies on knowing but, on the other hand, is in itself a symptom of nonknowledge. The location of the film – ­for the majority of Russian spectators Vladivostok is a far away kingdom; the fairy godmother – ­Gelia’s dance teacher (Larisa Belobrova); the ‘happy’ ending – ­the film ends with an awkward proposal of marriage; and the very title – ­‘skazka’ – ­all imply a folkloric, formulaic tradition with archetypal characters and prescribed situations. The original fairy tale, on which the film is based, suggests Beauty’s oedipal attachment to her father (she asks him for a rose, a symbol of passion, and always stays at home while her sisters enjoy men’s courtship). Beauty joins Beast out of love for her father and that is why she maintains a non-sexual relationship with him (such a relationship symbolises non-knowledge; as a metaphor of other forms of knowledge, particularly, non-human knowledge, Khomeriki’s film includes a scene with dolphins whose screams defy human language). In A Tale Gelia lures men into her orbit but refuses to have sex with them. To be precise, she refuses to have intercourse on their terms, that is, in the predetermined realm of knowledge. Similarly, in the professional arena she displays both the caring and punitive sides of her personality. While disciplining others, Gelia transgresses social norms that regulate women – a­ s those are conceived in a conservative society such as Russia – ­particularly in the realm of sex and language use. Language is presented as a realm where sexual fantasies are acted out without any fear; following Bakhtin (1988), language enables release from the constraints of the societal and professional order. The obscene language of A Tale refers to the lower parts of the body which represent carnal desires in Bakhtin’s theory of culture. In the folkloric tradition, this usage accounts for the imagery of reversal, celebrating the poor fool who becomes king, and in this case the beast who turns into the prince. Obscene language generates both horror and laughter, the dark and light sides of knowledge, discerning between different modes of discourse and disrupting the uniformity of thought. Gelia’s lack of a life partner – a­ husband – i­s seen as a punishment for her decision to inhabit an ambiguous zone where corruption meets pleasure. The film eschews the moralising stance of associating ugliness with evil as it has been pre-

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n on -kno wl e dge a nd t he s ym b o l i c m o de 119 sented in European culture since the publication of Aesthetic of Ugliness by Karl Rosenkrantz in 1853. ‘Rosenkrantz reverts to the traditional notion that ugliness is the opposite of beauty, a kind of possible error that beauty holds within itself, so that any aesthetic or science of beauty is also obliged to tackle the concept of ugliness’ (Eco 2007: 16). A Tale centres on Gelia’s fractured psychic apperception which points to the inextricability of desire and difference. The film utilises the aesthetics of pornography, particularly scenes of subjugation and entrapment, to juxtapose Gelia’s status as a powerful woman (she is a police officer) and a powerless woman (she is an outcast in her social circle and among her ‘lovers’). From the post-feminist perspective, Gelia is compelled to exercise two identities: the masculine one in the professional world, and the feminine one in the personal realm, each of which is conservative in its repertoire of gestures, subordination and appeal. However, when juxtaposed these identities challenge each other and they show how the identities are male-identified and female-identified and how they are regulatory in effect. The first shot of the film – ­a long static shot of a tree in a courtyard of a Soviet-period council estate, registering the bright light of early autumn – ­is followed shortly by a scene in the police building where the workers congregate on the staircase to enjoy a cigarette and share gossip. The camera shows about a dozen people, men and women, packed in a smokefilled space with uneven lighting produced by a swinging lamp. The men and women are dressed in similar police uniforms. A young woman flirts with a man: it is a close-up of her face, the face of the man is unseen. Another woman makes a rude comment, ‘if you’ve sucked Volodia’s cigarette, now you should suck his dick’. In response to the joke, the man performs fellatio on an imaginary penis. Everybody laughs. The camera shows the legs of the women. Another man slowly unbuttons a woman’s shirt and grabs her breast (their faces are not seen). Now the camera moves up and the spectator realises it is Dmitrii molesting Gelia.18 Everybody watches them intently. A humorous exclamation, ‘that’s a bloody cardiac massage’ [eto massazh serdsa, bliad’], sends everyone back to their offices. This is not the only scene of Gelia’s public humiliation. Later in the film, the boy who is travelling with her on a crowded bus calls her loudly ‘an old useless little cunt’. And in the middle of the film, when Gelia attends her school friend’s birthday party being held on the beach, one of the guests, a young man, throws Gelia into the water. This is both an act of public humiliation – ­he picks on Gelia because she is wearing a police uniform – ­and also a ritual, a type of baptism that Gelia needs to undergo in order to comprehend her complete isolation (see further discussion of this scene below).

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The scene in the police building exploits a few fantasies that have already become clichés – ­cigarettes with red lipstick marks, uniforms, group sex, sex in a confined space, etc. – a­ nd the sense of claustrophobia and darkness is produced because of the realisation that what the spectator sees is a cliché in the ‘real’ world of pornography. The created impression is that of ‘poshlost’’ – ­not a sense of anti-beauty,19 ugliness, but of devalued, clichéd and vulgar beauty (in the same way in which non-knowledge is not a negation of knowledge). Similarly, Bograt’s gift of fruit (in a plastic bag) is a brusque act of poshlost’, and Aleksandr’s courting – ­the ponytail, barbeque and shooting competition20 – ­is an extended performance of poshlost’.21 Paradoxically, Dmitrii’s unconcealed aggression and rudeness stand out as rather original and candid in this world of vulgarity and pretence. In A Tale beauty is ascribed to nature and art. The film includes mesmerising shots of the Amur bay, as well as a few allusions to famous paintings. For example, the scene with Gelia having her lunch – ­shot from the corridor, the side walls providing the scene with a frame,22 through which the spectator sees Gelia sitting at a table with a window on the left and chessboard-style tiling under her feet – ­is an obvious reference to Johannes Vermeer’s paintings of everyday life, including his Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid (c. 1670–1). Later in the film, Gelia’s rendezvous with Aleksandr at the beach replicates the composition of Pablo Picasso’s Acrobat on a Ball (1905). Gelia is standing on a rock with her arms fully stretched; Aleksandr is sitting with his legs protruding and torso turned sideways. The setting sun colours their nude bodies muted pink whilst the sea remains dark blue (an allusion to Picasso’s rose and blue periods). These are two of many painterly allusions in A Tale which yield two conclusions. First, the paintings referenced and the film are concerned with the use of light. In the former instance – t­he allusion to Vermeer’s p ­ ainting – ­Gelia presides over light and darkness symbolised by the white and black squares of the floor – ­as I demonstrated in the discussion of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, the game of chess symbolises the interplay between geometrical order and control, on the one hand, and fear of chaos, on the other hand. The cinematic allusion also raises a question of who Gelia is conversing with. In Bergman’s film it is the figure of death (and in Vermeer’s painting it is the maid – t­ he lady’s double – w ­ ho assists her in writing a letter, or in producing epistemology). As I pointed out above, the game of chess is a symbol of subjectivity being overwhelmed by the ‘eventfulness’ of history and by the emptiness of the present: the conversation with the dead – ­Gelia’s parents – ­changes into a conversation

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n on -kno wl e dge a nd t he s ym b o l i c m o de 121 with Death, with Gelia looking beyond the temporal realms into a world of prefiguration, tensions and vibrations. In the kitchen scene, Khomeriki underscores the lack of natural light: Gelia occupies the space of permanent darkness which symbolises her subjectivity. It is a period of intense introversion when the allure of the external world is delayed and projections of deficiency are attracted. Darkness is a permanent state; it is a mysterious galaxy of interiority, the looming riddle of the subject’s becoming. In the latter instance – ­the allusion to Picasso – ­the two figures are silhouetted while enjoying themselves on the seashore. The camera shows the sun sinking towards the horizon. The sun slips under the boundary of our perspective, outside the realm of knowledge. This is another form of non-knowledge/darkness-emptiness, that is, the void, which, as Evgenii Gusiatinskii notes, correlates with the ‘unused, idle space’ (2009).23 This void is a symptom of larger empty spaces that the camera does not show, in other words, non-knowledge rather than some epistemological gaps in knowledge. It leaves space for the imagination to reflect on the inescapable repetition of death and rebirth and the completion of the cycle. The light, available only in its reflected, projected form, as in Balabanov’s Morphine, evokes the descent into the timeless realm of sleep, which endorses a journey of transformation and rebirth. Indeed, the scene on the beach cedes to Gelia’s crossing of the channel on a barge and then to the dream scene. She reaches the end of time when the lengthening shadows indicate a possibility of a different order and of posthumous subjectivity. She is awoken again and orients herself to a new life. It is noteworthy that in Latin the word ‘oriens’ means ‘the rising’ and by choosing Vladivostok – ­in which ‘vostok’ also means ‘oriens’, ‘rising’ – ­as a location for his film, Khomeriki brings it as close as possible to the symbolic point on the map where days begin and light originates and non-knowledge appears.24 Secondly, the painterly references suggest that beauty and ugliness are not an innate quality of objects, but a result of seeing, a chosen perspective, and the spectator’s intentionality. (In fact, Aleksei Popogrebskii calls A Tale a poem in that ‘its meaning depends on the spectator’s intentionality’.25) Beauty and ugliness take their ultimate expression in the concepts of dance and uniform as emblems of motion and stasis, non-knowledge and knowledge. The former embodies movement, whereas the latter – ­controlled structures (however, ballroom dancing follows its own strict regime of tempo, precision and routine,26 and so it can be as prescriptive as the uniform); and these are contrasted as symbols of subjectivity and identity, notions that are at the core of the conflict in the film, both externally and internally. A Tale supplants the claims of realism imbedded in the notion of identity by its interest in transcendental subjectivity and

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signification in the symbolic mode. The juxtaposition of beauty and ugliness, subjectivity and identity is explored through contrasting sequences and contrasting organisation of the shots. For example, on her way home Gelia crosses a communal recreational area, a kind of stadium, at the same time as a woman in a bright yellow outfit jogs around the stadium with her dog. The two women epitomise two modes of movement – l­inear and cyclical – t­owards non-knowledge. Moreover, the women, their clothes, movement and direction of movement are contrasted to flag different ontologies brought together by their loneliness. The instability and ambiguity of these concepts is maintained in the tonality of the film: as many commentators have noted, the film combines elements of drama and comedy, horror and love story (see, e.g., Gusiatinskii 2009; Levkovich 2009; Stojanova 2009), as well as subtle irony that permeates the film at all levels.27 For example, the film includes a long single take of Gelia’s and Bograt’s romantic walk along what appears to be a promenade in Vladivostok (at the end of the scene it transpires they have been walking on the roof of a parking lot). During the walk Bograt enquires about Gelia’s personal circumstances. When he learns she is not married he laments her lack of a partner and points out knowingly ‘it is hard to find a husband because all Russians are either alcoholics or gay’. As they walk on an elevated boardwalk the camera captures – ­in the far distance – ­the sky and a mountain range coloured pink by the rays of the setting sun. The camera also shows – i­n mid-range – t­ he industrial landscape of the city in which a cooling tower dominates the city-scape. Its erectile position, with smoke escaping vertically from its top opening, asserts Bograt’s virility at the moment when he speaks contemptuously of Russian men. As Bograt and Gelia talk about the unimportance of money, the flow of imagery is interrupted with a view of expensive cars parked along the promenade. As Gelia and Bograt fall silent, the camera registers the bright blue roof of a café, the name of which is Cupid (in Russian, ‘kupidon’, which is a synonym of ‘amur’, also the name of the bay in Vladivostok and the name of the river farther north). The film provides an appreciation of the characters’ romanticism as well as an ironic deprecation of the sentiment whereby all affects are brought into question. The film challenges the authenticity of all structures of objectivity by focusing on performance as a conception of being or, in Badiou’s terms (2007), as acts, events and occurrences. Gelia’s ‘acts’ suggest an interruption of the state of being as it is, and/ or of things as they are. For example, Gelia refers to the boy she works with as her ‘sweet prince’, but his rude response indicates that perhaps her acts are determined by protocol/discourse rather than by her own feelings.28 Similarly, Dmitrii’s final phrase, ‘I don’t fucking need you’, is

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n on -kno wl e dge a nd t he s ym b o l i c m o de 123 both a negation of and a declaration of love. The purpose of his phrase is to destabilise ‘the state of being as it is’, to turn his love into an event and, in fact, to conceive of life as such as an occurrence, an interruption whereby such ruptures are indications of non-knowledge. Dmitrii’s verbal gesture is analogous to a protest/rupture conceived as an entirely interior movement: it is noteworthy that Dmitrii pronounces his concluding remark from within the privacy of his car, and that the car door and window provide a frame to his unconscious, intuitive knowledge. The frame stands for a mental prison that the characters – ­themselves police officers – ­occupy. Khomeriki presents a world in which the subject’s existence is restricted to a bare minimum by the transcendental imperative which disables their more active engagement, that is, existence as rupture. Such subjects continue to appear in a determined world: in the epistemology of rhetoric with its unmasking and mimetic aberrations. In the emphasis on such entrapment, or even self-entrapment, A Tale completes an extended allusion to a literary text. Aleksandr Ostrovskii’s drama The Storm (1859) is about a young married woman, Katerina, who commits suicide, throwing herself into the River Volga, because of the impossibility of her union with a man she loves in the conservative society of Russian merchants. In the film, the corresponding scene is that of Gelia’s humiliation at the birthday party when a man throws her into the sea – ­a social suicide for Gelia. And in the dream scene Gelia begs her parents, who symbolise patriarchal law/conservative custom, to release her from the darkness of her own being. Nikolai Dobroliubov, the nineteenth-century radical literary critic, in two articles published in 1859 and 1860, defined Katerina’s actions as a protest against the tsarist regime of ignorance and petty tyranny [samodurstvo]. He called Katerina ‘a ray of light in the kingdom of darkness’, and since then the phrase has entered wide usage in the Russian language as an expression of hope in the most desperate situation. According to Dobroliubov, the ‘kingdom of darkness’ causes ‘an external submissiveness and a dulled, concentrated grief’; it also encourages ‘a slave-like cunning, the most vile deception, and treachery without conscience’ (1970). It is important to remember that the play and Dobroliubov’s response to it were published before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Although the play depicts the life of a different social group – t­he merchants – i­t speaks of the perennial problem of internal enslavement of which the system of serfdom was one of many manifestations.29 Khomeriki’s A Tale draws a parallel between the nineteenth century and contemporary Russia, also controlled by merchants of all types (it is ironic that Bograt, a merchant himself, accuses all Russians of having only one desire – ­money). In this context, Gelia’s character ­demonstrates

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the same ‘dulled, concentrated grief’, except that nowadays, as a policewoman, she is fully integrated into the very system of ‘petty tyranny and treachery without consciousness’. The film ends on a pessimistic note – ­the black screen – ­as darkness prevails. In this context, the film provides a sociocultural understanding of the concept of non-knowledge as a lack of civilised codes of behaviour leading to a crisis of subjectivity. From the perspective of the symbolic mode, Katerina’s/Gelia’s exit is in sacrificing knowledge and embracing the numbness of non-knowledge in the act of suicide (see Chapter 7). Alternatively, the final shot of the film – t­ he dark screen – ­should be interpreted as a reference to the spectator who always remains in darkness (Chapter 3). In Veledinskii’s Alive (Chapter 9), the posthumous subjectivity on screen is used to construct the spectator’s posthumous subjectivity. In Khomeriki’s A Tale, subjectivities, grappling with non-knowledge, accentuate the position of the spectator which is always moving outside the realms of signification, beyond the horizon of knowledge. In the next chapter, I demonstrate how such movements are transformed into events and help build worlds in which subjectivities emerge in the post-evental condition.

Notes   1. See Chapter 4 for the discussion of flatness of discourse in Zviagintsev’s Elena; also see Chapter 9 for a discussion of the use of shadows in Veledinskii’s Alive.   2. This reversed movement is present in Litvinova’s Rita’s Last Tale (2011), in which Death arrives in a Moscow hospital to bid farewell to her friend.   3. In Serebrennikov’s St George’s Day, Chapter 6, the concept of the cup is used to convey the idea of multiplicity in the symbolic mode.  4. See Chapter 6 on the relationship between context and event, and also Chapter 12 on the return of the drives of intentions in posthumous subjectivity.   5. The film competed in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival.   6. In Chapter 2, I conceptualised X-ray imagery as a mode of extreme transparency, unveiling the source of death.   7. In portraying a single policewoman in search of true love, and particularly with its concerns about motherhood and children, A Tale evokes Litvinova’s Goddess (Chapter 7) and Ekaterina Shagalova’s Once Upon a Time in the Provinces (2008).   8. On 5 May 2014, the government ratified a new law prohibiting use of a particular set of profanities [mat] during public film screenings, thus effectively leading to a ban on many productions unless the directors agree to alter the soundtrack.

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n on -kno wl e dge a nd t he s ym b o l i c m o de 125   9. In fact, she uses the polite form of address ‘vy’ whereas all others exchange the more informal ‘ty’. 10. Such imagined conversations with dead parents are used in Aleksei German Jr’s Paper Soldier (2008) to evoke failures of knowledge and a move towards the symbolic mode. 11. His actual origins remain obscure: he might be from the Russian Federation proper or from abroad, but he is typecast as a ‘Transcaucasian’ man [litso kavkazskoi natsional’nosti]. 12. In A Tale the scene with the shooting party foretells a similar mise-en-scène in Zviagintsev’s Leviathan (2014). 13. See Chapter 7 on the aesthetics of gesture in Litvinova’s Goddess. 14. The director has expressed his bemusement at the interpretation of the gender divide in the final scene: ‘Many men perceive the ending of the film quite literally – “­ such a good lad no fucking need her” – f­ ailing to grasp this declaration of love is the only one Dmitrii is capable of’ (Levkovich 2009). 15. While A Tale explores the dynamics of a dysfunctional relationship through deconstruction of the verbal discourse and allusions to pornography as a meta-language, Aleksei Mizgirev’s Tambourine, Drum (2009) combines verbal and physical violence to test the parameters of love as non-event and murder as a form of non-knowledge. 16. The characterisation, storyline and especially the ending of the film, as well as its general concerns about non-knowledge are evoked with greater intensity in Angelina Novikova’s Twilight Portrait (2011). 17. [Mama, ia khochu uznat’, skol’ko eshche noch’ prodolzhaetsia]. 18. In a later scene, after a noisy argument, in contempt, Dmitrii spits in Gelia’s direction. When later Gelia lures Dmitrii and frustrates his sexual desire, Gelia’s actions might be interpreted as a form of retribution. 19. In the picnic scene, one of Aleksandr’s friends disembowels a fish: the camera centres on its repellent entrails and actualises the voyeuristic impulse behind the ugly and the horrible. 20. Also note that he takes Gelia to an island on his white yacht; however, she returns on a rusting old barge – ­whether he kicked her out or she escaped herself is not clear. 21. The impression of a clichéd reproduction and of vulgar déjà vu is created because of the film’s reference to Vladimir Men’shov’s Moscow Does not Believe in Tears (1979) where Gosha (Aleksei Batalov) takes Katia (Vera Alentova) on a picnic with his friends. This is an archetypical scene for Soviet and Russian cinema as is evident in its use in Marlen Khutsiev’s July Rain (1966) and Aleksei German’s Paper Soldier (2008). 22. The frame is a universal symbol of entrapment in the film: the police uniform ‘frames’ Gelia in a particular way, and so does the city: it ‘frames’ the characters’ desire which is released thanks to language and gesture. 23. [v ‘Skazke . . .’ mnogo pustogo i, bolee togo, neispol’zovannogo, prostaivaiushchego prostranstva].

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24. Note that Igor’ Voloshin uses an antipodal strategy by choosing St Petersburg as a locale for his film Nirvana (Chapter 8), which provides commentary on the scope, origins and direction of Russian culture conceived in cinematic terms. In Chapter 11, I discuss the process of symbolisation of the postimperial space with its logic of double displacement. 25. The director made the comment during the discussion of the film in Aleksandr Gordon’s Private View on Channel One (episode 43; 1 April 2011). 26. See Chapter 8 where dance is used to illuminate a different form of subjectivity. 27. See Chapter 6 on how in Serebrennikov’s St George’s Day such tonality is used in a different context. 28. In Zviagintsev’s Leviathan the performance of the protocol is presented literally as readings of the court verdict that, as counterbalance, require an interruption to advance being, demarcating the film as ‘willed art’ in Rancière’s terms. 29. On the wider cultural debate about Russia’s ‘internal colonisation’, see Etkind et al. (2012).

C H A PT E R 6

The World and the Event: Kirill Serebrennikov’s St George’s Day (2008)

The essential premise of my study is that digital technologies have transformed the ways in which film is produced, disseminated and appreciated.1 As I suggested in the Introduction, contemporary Russian cinema exists predominantly on the internet, forming a new visual environment. Academic literature exploring the impact of such a technological and aesthetic switchover is vast; for example, writing in 1994, Vivien Sobchak notes: We are all part of a moving-image culture and we live cinematic and electronic lives. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to claim that none of us can escape daily encounters – ­both direct and indirect – ­with the objective phenomena of motion picture, televisual, and computer technologies and the networks of communication they produce. Nor is it an exaggeration to suggest that, in the most profound, socially pervasive, and yet personal way, these objective encounters transform us as subjects. (2000a: 67)

Sobchak acknowledges the pervasive nature of visual culture at the turn of the century. While pointing out different technologies and building a genealogy of the technical revolution, the scholar describes an emergence of a new experience which transforms not only the subject matter of culture, but also us as subjects. Twenty years later, it is evident the quotidian experience of visuality has become even more pervasive and prevailing while contemporary subjects display not only technological proficiency, but also awareness as self-motivated agents promoting visuality. While recognising this transformation, I wish to focus on the more abstract means of conceptualising subjectivity that resist determination by the technological transfer. My concept of film as embodied intelligence encompasses contradictory discourses about film (and, by association, about photography) and particularly its ability to denote loss and nostalgia as well as the accumulation of experience and world-building. In the present era, film as embodied intelligence eschews the status of ‘mummification of reality’

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in that it is neither photographic nor cinematic (Sobchak 2000a: 78). Sobchak notes that ‘the electronic is phenomenologically experienced not as a discrete, intentional, and bodily centered projection in space but rather as simultaneous, dispersed, and insubstitutional transmission across a network’ (2000a: 79). In my interpretation, such networks are environments, or worlds, in which current subjectivities manifest their self-presence whereby film as a specific mode of being should be identified not so much in terms of the corporeal setting, but as of symbolic exigency. This approach offers the possibility of examining film in relation to even more complex and nuanced category of signification such as the event, without the need to reinterpret and redefine the technological base of cinema, hence the symbolic mode advocates the prevalence of culture as discourse rather than as a technological premise. In the earlier chapters, I demonstrated how subjectivity constantly moves between the position of the ontologist who knows of the existence of the transcendental (outside the mimetic structure) and the believer who can only accept such an existence as true (as pertaining to the affective, anti-representational mode). The context, or the ‘situatedness’, of each of them within the paradigm of their own beliefs simultaneously permits and prevents the comprehension of the transcendental in its totality/ finiteness. A solution to this problem is the introduction of the notion of ‘the world’ by means of signification in the symbolic mode. This world is always a concept in development, a construct that appears, or is imagined, in order to re-position the subject. In The Subject of Art, Badiou explains that the purpose of such a world is in placing the subject between an event and the world or, in fact, in claiming that the subject is the ‘consequence of an event in a world’ (2005a). According to Badiou, the subject is not reducible to the body so it is not part of the world, and at the same time it is not separable from it and so cannot be identified exclusively with the event. He contends: I demonstrate that the subject is identified by a type of marking, a post-evental effect, whose system of operation is infinite. In other words, subjective capacity really is infinite, once the subject is constituted under the mark of the event. Why? Because subjective capacity amounts for drawing the consequences of a change, of a new situation, and if this change is eventual [evenemential] then its consequences are infinite. (Badiou 2003: 132)

Badiou simultaneously describes the process of construction of the subject in relation to the event and also defines the state that follows the event, or what he elsewhere calls ‘the inexistent’, or a trace of the contingency of being-there or, in my terms, non-knowledge. This is the awareness that

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t he wo r l d and t he e ve n t 129 what appears could just as well not appear, or could appear in other circumstances. In this chapter, I demonstrate how the re-positioning of the subject between the world and the event propels temporal disturbances. In fact, I am concerned with how the event helps construct the world in which such an event may appear. I am also interested in how such a relation promotes a sense of distinctness and obscurity (codified in the stylistic tonality of seriousness and irony, respectively, which is a form of ethics that celebrates the existence within the pure past/memory itself). Badiou shows how events in a world result in relations between three levels: ‘the relation between being qua being (pure multiplicity), existence (multiplicity but in a world, here and now), and happening or event’ (2005a). For this purpose I use Serebrennikov’s St George’s Day, which analyses the transition of the subject from the event to pure multiplicity due to the advent of non-knowledge. Kirill Serebrennikov (b. 1969, Rostov-na-Donu) is an award-winning stage director, film-maker and television producer. Since 2012, he has been the artistic director of the Gogol Centre in Moscow. He is very wellknown as one of the practitioners of the so-called ‘New Drama’, a loose association of playwrights, including Nikolai Koliada, Aleksei Kazantsev, Elena Gremina, Ol’ga Mukhina, Maksim Kurochkin, the Presniakov brothers and others. The Moscow-based New Drama Festival made New Drama a brand name, and now includes two influential theatres, the Playwright and Director Centre (established in 1998) and Teatr. doc (2002).2 In their study of new drama and analysis of Serebrennikov’s stage productions, Beumers and Lipovetsky note that: ‘Serebrennikov underlines the ritualistic aspect in the everyday. The performance is set on a catwalk, on which the “acts” of violence are demonstrated. Again dwelling on the ritual, repetitive aspect that underlies every scene: in Serebrennikov’s staging violence and aggression form a never-ending cycle’ (2009: 288). I argue that the repetitiveness of violence – ­as geometrical idiom and value of abstraction – c­ reates the effect of distance and difference which work as disturbances. St George’s Day is based on a script written by Iurii Arabov, who has collaborated on many of Sokurov’s films (their Taurus is analysed in Chapter 1) and Proshkin’s The Miracle (Chapter 2). In Taurus, Arabov is concerned with temporality as the plurality of deaths and posthumous subjectivity as eternal return, which correspond to the multiple workings of the gaze, its capacity to look at the screen as well as off the screen, into darkness, and at the onlookers themselves. In The Miracle, Arabov presents a world in which historical temporalities are organised according to human senses; in other words, the scriptwriter conceives of time as ductile

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matter that can be used for the construction of worlds in architectural and sculptural forms. In St George’s Day, this function is delegated to voice, which emerges as a symbol of subjectivity – ­both singular and multiple – ­as well as the cohesive agent of the world which is there to express it.3 The logic of the voice – t­ he linear progression of a vocal performance – ­is compared with the capacity of film to construct simultaneous ontologies and multiple temporal instances in a particular space. As a symbol that dramatises such a consideration of multiple subjectivity, Arabov and Serebrennikov use the concept of the choir whereby individual vocal performances (events) create contexts (worlds) in which subjectivity appears as a consequence, or a deferral in itself, always following and reacting to the ruptures in discourse. St George’s Day atomises discourse as a number of incongruent events that relate to Russian history and contemporaneity, each of which is conceived as a memory of the troubled subject who is under pressure to reinvent its position in the world due to the interference of the event. The last is conceived in the form of chance, serendipity [sluchai, sud’ba] – ­an interruption and its effects, where place consists in destruction and abandoning, or leaving behind (see Chapter 11 on the concept of abandoned being). The events of the film take place in a town called Iur’ev-Pol’skii, situated to the north-east of Moscow.4 It was founded by George I of Rus (Iurii Dolgorukii) in 1158, and it received its accolade ‘Pol’skii’, meaning ‘in the field’, to distinguish it from other towns with the same name (including the Iur’ev, which eventually became Tartu). George I of Rus played the key role in the transition of power from Kiev to Suzdal’, which suggests the choice of the town for its rich historical associations, particularly the myths concerning Russia’s independence. (As the analysis below will show, the idea of the independence of Russia is inverted to signify independence from Russia presented in the symbolism of the characters’ emigration to the West.) Some of the events take place in the MichaelArchangel monastery which was founded in 1234 and rebuilt in the seventeenth century, suggesting an inverted temporality in St George’s Day (or expansions and contradictions of intemporalities, as I established in previous chapters). This is a temporal equivalent of the so-called inverted perspective of the Russian icon discussed below. The term ‘inverted perspective’ was introduced by Boris Raushenbakh in the 1980s to denote a specific organisation of space in in art. A theoretical physicist by training, Raushenbakh supports his aesthetic claims by the use of mathematical formulas – ­an approach that is extremely similar to Badiou’s practice of including calculations in his philosophical writing.5 The title of the film is both a topographic and an historical allusion. It

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t he wo r l d and t he e ve n t 131 is also a sociocultural allusion as it refers to St George’s Day [Iur’ev den’] (26 November), a short period in the medieval calendar when serfs were allowed to change their overlords. This practice was abolished in modern times; however, the memory of it has survived until the present day and is often used in Russian as a metaphor for a short spell of freedom, which I conceptualise as intermittency, a temporal gap. Such references are meant to draw the attention of the viewer to the temporal organisation of the film and interpret its events as abstractions. The film tells the story of Liubov’ (hereafter Liubov) (Kseniia Rappoport). She is an internationally acclaimed opera singer, who, together with her son Andrei (Roman Shmakov), arrives in Iur’ev-Pol’skii to say goodbye to her birthplace before emigration to Austria. Andrei refuses to comprehend his mother’s sentiment; however, she persists and he joins her on a short tour of the local sites on a foggy winter’s day. After a visit to the Michael-Archangel monastery, which is now a museum, Liubov falls asleep on a bench; when she wakes up she realises that her son has disappeared.6 Her attempts to find Andrei on the museum premises bring no result. She accepts an invitation from the museum curator Tat’iana (Evgeniia Kuznetsova) to stay in her apartment. By law, Liubov may report her missing son to the police only on the third day after disappearance, and so she is compelled to stay in Iur’ev for the duration of the investigation. This is a self-evident reference to Christ’s resurrection on the third day after his death. As I show below, Liubov’s search for her son may be interpreted as a search for Christ who fails to reappear.7 Christ as an internalised idea explains Liubov’s self-sacrificial behaviour at the end of the film. Alternatively, her troubles may be interpreted as confusion stemming from her inability to tell which of the three figures that have ‘resurrected’/appeared is actually the figure of God. At the police station she meets Mr Sergeev (Sergei Sosnovskii), a local detective, and together they try to find Andrei. Sergeev checks on all young men called Andrei who have been sighted in the region, and so he and Liubov visit a monastery and a prison hospital where inmates suffering from tuberculosis are treated. The film raises a series of societal concerns, including the degrading conditions in Russian correctional facilities, poverty, destruction of the cultural heritage and so on. While these concerns are central to the film, Serebrennikov addresses them at an abstract level whereby they are not symptoms of the failures of the Russian state, but rather symptoms of a particular metaphysical condition. For example, tuberculosis affects the lungs and breathing, which are the symbolic embodiment of the soul, and so is a symbol of moral corruption.8 In spite of all their efforts, Liubov and Sergeev fail to find what they search

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for, or so it seems. Due to the stress Liubov loses her voice: confused and distraught, she decides to stay in the town until her son is found. She takes on a job as a hospital cleaner, which provides her with unlimited access to the prison facilities where she starts looking after the inmates, eventually gaining their respect. It is uncertain how much time elapses, but Liubov eventually takes on the local identity. She dies her hair bright orange, as all the local women do, and swaps her stiletto boots for a pair of felt boots [valenki]. One day she walks into a church where the local choir is practising. She joins the women in singing a daily prayer: with her voice regained, but her son never found, Liubov looks forward to an unknown future. Existing interpretations of the film, informed by the mimetic predisposition, rely on the assumption that St George’s Day advances a linear construction of time.9 In this scheme, Liubov’s story is one of the rejection of her fame, wealth and status. The loss of her child compels her to abandon her individualism and join ‘a collectivist identity’ (Plakhov 2008), to ‘sacrifice herself for the sake of art and faith’ (Popov 2008), and to accept that loss is ‘a necessary foundation for existence’ (Lipovetsky 2008). In The Subject of Art, Badiou notes that: ‘the contemporary world is a war between enjoyment and sacrifice . . . What is common to enjoyment and sacrifice . . . is the power of death, the power of death as experimentations of the limits of the body on one side but experimentation of death as the means for a new life on the other side’ (2005a). I argue that the film’s temporal structure resists head-on mimetic interpretations. In fact, St George’s Day propels a contrary view that time is neither linear nor homogeneous. There are numerous clues to such a disposition. In the very beginning Liubov describes their visit to Iur’ev as a journey back in time. On one level, her comments refer, of course, to the gap in the development between the federal centre, Moscow, and Russia’s internal periphery, Iur’ev. On another level, the film maintains that Liubov goes back in time, perhaps to the moment when she left Iur’ev for Moscow and when Andrei had not been born yet. As Lipovetsky (2008) suggests, the film is about forgetting and loss,10 but it is also about remembering and inhabiting the past. In support of the latter view, I wish to point out that Liubov is far too young to be Andrei’s mother (she is in her early thirties and he is twenty years old). The striking discrepancy in their age evidences the co-existence of different temporal planes, and that Andrei can only occupy the space of the present moment, hence he ought to have disappeared if Liubov is to go back in time. The choice of the film’s title, with its connotations of a temporal suspension of societal rules, also indicates the film’s focus on disruption and splitting of temporal structures. The film presents

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t he wo r l d and t he e ve n t 133 a mix of temporalities, each of which is charged with symbolic meaning: the location as well as the cultural allusions that I discuss above suggest the formation of a time warp, an aberration, which imposes its own rules on the subject. This is similar to what, in his analysis of Alain Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad (1961), Alex Ling defines as something that ‘presents a temporal rupture, a spanning as much an instant as an eternity, and as such properly pre-subjective. For this rupture is inter-time of the event itself, the cut which intervenes between times, cleaving the old (the decaying past) from the new (the eternal present which is, properly speaking, the “truth” of the past’ (2013: 137). Finally, the subtle irony of the film does not permit a steadfast, moralistic interpretation of the events and Liubov’s character as viewed in the mimetic setting. There are numerous instances of ironic problematisation of the conflict. For example, the ultra-bright colour of Liubov’s hair which renders her every high-minded and honourable gesture simply ostentatious. Or when Liubov visits the priest, he is more preoccupied with the renovation of the church than with the meaning of faith.11 Liubov might have eschewed the superficiality of her own life, but she cannot help noticing that her car tyres have been stolen. I argue that the film puts forward the idea of heterogeneous temporalities and multiple subjectivities in a world which works via abstraction in the symbolic mode. Serebrennikov protests against the colourless degraded experience of life by providing multiple temporal ruptures and rhythms which are registered in the depth of the self and are objectified and externalised in the form of actions and performances. (In Chapter 4, I analyse such ruptures as metaphysical intermittency in monde atone, or inertia, obscurity, flatness, nondescript, eventless mundanity and non-value.) St George’s Day is about inhabiting different realms and about the impossibility of translating such experiences into the code of a secular, disenchanted and overwhelmingly historical time. Here I follow Badiou, who argues that ‘when something happens we are not only saying that it is a multiplicity – a­ pure multiplicity, and we are not only saying that it is something in a world – s­ omething that exists here and now. “Something happens” is something like a cut in the continuum of the world, something which is new, something also which disappears – ­which appears, but also disappears. Because happening is when appearing is the same thing as disappearing’ (2005a). Badiou’s ‘something happens’ defines the subject’s relationship to the world-event which produces asynchronous and asymmetrical recompositions of being qua being. Gazing at the void, the subject is cognizant of parallel trajectories and variable speeds of time whereby repetitions provide affective connections. To counteract the imperatives of historicity St George’s Day p ­ resents

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different versions of the past. The film dis-invests from singular sociological identities and instils multiple subjectivities in response to an epistemological crisis, which is the inversion and break up of time. The unexplained event, which is presented as an interference of the supernatural forces, changes the modality of the film: from the simple narrativisation of what did happen, it switches to the discursive examination of what could happen. In Difference and Repetition (2001), Deleuze calls this occurrence the plane of immanence, or life as it could be. In my terms, this is a shift from life after death to life as a possibility of death. To elucidate, multiplicity does not equate to collectivity, since the latter presumes an obliteration of identity whereas the former accentuates the presence of the self outside and in relation to the self. Similarly, in the linear framework of the mimetic reading, ‘loss is a fundamental truth, or rather a fundamental horror of Russian (and not only Russian) life’ (Lipovetsky 2008). In the nonlinear framework of the symbolic mode, horror, or rather ‘terror’, is a symptom of the realisation of the presence of multiple truths, and of the inability of the subject to withstand the pressure of the unfolding universe. While Liubov’s sociophysical world gradually contracts (she abandons the glamorous world of opera, the glitter of Moscow and, eventually, the space in which she operates diminishes to that of the prison cell where she cleans the floor), her cognitive and metaphysical world expands (these are matters of freedom, autonomy of the subject, social (in-)justice, immortality of the soul, existence of god and other sensuous intuitions). Through the figure of Liubov, St George’s Day eschews Aristotle’s definition of truth as correspondence, and instead introduces the Nietzschean concept of truth as an unattainable relation and irreducible play of idioms. This is evidenced in the insistence on the metaphysics of presence and the splitting of subjectivity (not in terms of the ‘knower’ and the ‘known’, but in terms of breaking up subjectivities into differences). For example, Serebrennikov employs the trope of the police investigation whereby knowledge as truth is replaced with knowledge as difference, variation and probability. He used this trope in his Playing the Victim (2006) where the main character Valentin (Iurii Chursin) plays the victims of crimes. As Oleg Sulkin writes: ‘He is a puppet, a mute extra; he’s a body, a physical mass that fills in the outlines of those who have been killed. His motions and manipulations are supervised by the stern captain-demiurge. At the same time, Valentin replays the reconstructed crimes in his soul, and this process can be read on his extremely expressive face’ (2006). The relationship between the staged materiality of crime and its abstracted presentations in the symbolic mode charges the investigation/police procedural with different metaphysical meanings, which I also find in other police

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t he wo r l d and t he e ve n t 135 procedurals such as Litvinova’s Goddess (see Chapter 7) and Zviagintsev’s Leviathan. In the former, police investigation is an emblem of the subject that realises its own self-presence through the process of doubling and multiplication. In the latter, police procedural is an emblem of the discursive powers of the state and the subject operating from the perspective of the discursive rupture. In St George’s Day, the self-performance of the subject is evident in the scene where Liubov walks by a house and as she looks from the street into the living room she sees herself performing on television. The scene attests the co-presence of subjectivities as pre-conscious sentience and how the subject is the ‘self-split-in-construction’ and in relation to the original trauma and loss. For my future discussion of the temporal and ethical topography of the film, I should note that in the nonlinear framework of the film, Liubov’s performance is not only a televised recording of who she used to be, but also – a­ s derived from the particular intentionality of the film – ­a mediated projection of who she will be or, to be precise, could be – h ­ erself as being outside herself, which is a pre-condition for Deleuze’s concept of the body without organs (see Chapter 8 for the discussion of this concept). By extension, the spectator is conceived as a subjectivity outside itself, occupying multiple realms of possibilities rather than being reduced to some (representational) totality and persistence of vision. Hence, I move away from the understanding of the gaze in relation to perception to the theorisation of the gaze, which is ‘impersonal and absolute’ and which ‘reaches the innocent and primordial thought-body, the invented or disclosed body . . . such a gaze belongs to no one’ (Badiou 2005b: 67). The modality of St George’s Day evidences a recurrence of the self without identification, whereby the subject is construed through self-relation rather than some (external) identification process. This concerns Liubov’s relation to herself on screen as well as to other selves that re-surface under different names and elide any identification (e.g., some villagers identify Liubov with a Lucia they used to know before; the spectator never learns who that other woman was, the film fails to ascertain whether it was Liubov herself before she moved out of the village; and the name fosters a particular relation of Liubov to herself, a relation she manifests in calling herself Liucia when speaking with the prisoners). The most striking example of the use of multiple subjectivity and transcendence is the figure of Andrei. A spoiled brat, he contradicts his mother in everything – c­ hoice of music, clothes and, ultimately, the very reason for visiting Iur’ev. It has been decided that he will emigrate with his mother (the ultimate rupture); however, it is not clear if this is s­ omething

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he actually wants (the intermittency of desire). In fact, when arguing with his mother about music, he accuses her of doing everything her way and never consulting him on any issue. This is an early indication that perhaps, unlike Liubov, Andrei does not require a nostalgic trip to Iur’ev because he has no plans to emigrate or, in fact, that he has no connection to the country/space his mother inhabits.12 In this system, his disappearance is not a rejection of the current status quo, but of an imposed structure of being. Moreover, his subjectivity is not fixed but is rather divided between different allegiances, which is symbolised, for example, by the fact that he is wearing two different shoes. When Liubov takes him to a shop to buy new footwear, he refuses to buy Chinese trainers and instead opts for a pair of rubber boots because to him they symbolise the true essence of the context. Along with the boots he buys a ‘vatnik’, a workman’s padded winter coat that was in wide use in Soviet Russia, which is also a reference to the clothing of prisoners and inmates in Stalin’s labour camps. The pre-disposition evokes the status of many monasteries in the USSR which were used as sites for penal colonies and prisons. Andrei’s disappearance in Iur’ev is an act of memory that reveals how the past becomes apparent in objects, elements of architecture and practices (e.g., the film shows Soviet slot machines, Soviet letter boxes, etc.). Clothes and objects are not conceived as markers of identity, but rather as loci of subjectivation: they enable the subject to position itself outside of the self as a difference. Ultimately, they are what appears on the edge of the void and promises encounters when being emerges as advent and appearance. Some of these objects and places have been completely lost (the house where Liubov’s grandfather lived has been demolished and a vodka bar [riumochnaia] built instead). The camera documents the slow disappearance of the past, a process symbolised by foggy weather which obscures vision and deforms imagery.13 The purpose of Liubov’s arrival in Iur’ev is twofold: on the macro-level she has come to say goodbye to her native town [malaia rodina] before her emigration to the West; and on the macro-level she has come to say goodbye to the country in which she was born and which has now disappeared [bol’shaia rodina], or migrated in time.14 The gaze of the camera is both forward-looking and retroactive in that it permits forgetting and remembering (on such directions of the gaze, see Chapter 4). This concept of the subject’s internalised migration corresponds to that of the imperial displacement identified by Condee. She writes that the post-Soviet situation in Russia is characterised by total displacement: the people have not migrated anywhere whereas their country has, and the current cultural landscape is that of ‘a demolition site’ (2009: 238).

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t he wo r l d and t he e ve n t 137 In such a displaced context with deformed temporalities, the events of St George’s Day are not about the contemporary moment. The film is not a cinematic reconstruction, but rather about the modality of probability: the film is a cinematic deconstruction of what could have happened. Such probabilities are embodied in the three ‘Andreis’, clearly inspired by the characters from Dostoevskii’s novels, and presented in the film: (1) Andrei, Liubov’s son; (2) Andrei, the monk; and (3) Andrei, the criminal. Correspondingly, Liubov has her own doubles: (1) Tania, the museum curator; (2) Dunia, the nurse in the TB clinic (Ekaterina Durova); and (3) the choir master (Tatiana Kuznetsova) – e­ ach of whom is the indeterminate probability of the event. In sociological terms the three Andreis represent the destiny of the post-Soviet youth that had been abandoned by their parents and the nation in the aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR. In my terms, Liubov’s loss of Andrei is a form of abandonment: as she moves to a different temporal realm she leaves her son behind.15 In visual terms, they are hypostatises and the name ‘Andrei’ is meant to allude to the most profound representation of the Trinity in Russian culture – ­Andrei Rublev’s icon. The icon is a masterpiece of Orthodox iconography. It depicts the Holy Trinity in the form of three angels, a concept which stems from the mysterious appearance of the Holy Trinity as three travellers to Abraham and Sarah under the oak of Mamre. The three angels symbolise the tri-unity and equality of all three Persons. In terms of the symbolic mode, the three figures are embodiments of multiple subjectivity – ­they are random variables, distributions and variances of the self, occupying multiple temporal zones. The transition to such a multiple realm is marked by border crossings: it is the crossing of the space between Moscow and Iur’ev, the crossing of the river in the town, and, particularly, the crossing of the spiritual boundaries such as Liubov’s operatic performance in the bell tower that awakens the spirits of the past. Such crossings are indices of what Badiou calls ‘the event as trans-being’: ‘to think that the event is a point of rupture with respect to being does not exonerate us from thinking the being of the event itself, of what I call “trans-being”’ (2004: 99). The liminal space of the characters and the film itself has been noted by the critics who identified the presence of the styles of drama and horror (see, e.g., Lipovetsky 2008). Indeed, St George’s Day makes an allusion to Christopher Gans’ Silent Hill (2006), which is an eerie film about a young mother who visits the deserted ghost town of Silent Hill in order to rescue her only child from oblivion, conceived as a psychiatric illness. Silent Hill, which is an alternative post-apocalyptic realm, is smothered by fog and inhabited by deformed beings and frequently taken over by

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a living darkness. The mother enters the world of Silent Hill after a car accident, hence her status as a posthumous subject is confirmed. Silent Hill is based on an eponymous computer game; as a result, the world of Silent Hill is constructed as a game-world where the ‘gametator’ (gamer + spectator) has an opportunity to re-live circumstances and therefore transience turns into a permanent state or, in Sobchak’s terms, as pervasive visual culture.16 The allusion to Silent Hill is particularly evident in the scene where Andrei walks away from his mother and almost disappears in the fog. He comes across a barrier, a type of a roadblock the police use to cordon off sections of traffic lanes; he opens the gate and releases the spirits of the past. A woman with fire-red hair appears from nowhere like a spectre; she is pushing a trolley, reincarnating the myth of Sisyphus.17 She is also a Valkyrie (from Old Norse valkyrja ‘chooser of the slain’) in that she decides the future of all in the battle between good and evil. In the symbolic mode such states of referral entail the overturning of hermeneutical perspectivalism18 in favour of multiplicity conceived as a network of consequences, or an ‘evental decision’ (Badiou 2004: 148). The film documents the gradual movement towards such an ‘evental decision’ by compelling the subject to confront itself as the generic multiple at the moment of encounter/rupture. Serebrennikov brings into focus instances of (non-)recognition when the subject shifts its investment from ontology into appearance: ‘beings are thought solely on the basis of their beingness’ (Badiou 2004: 169). Indeed, when Liubov comes to the monastery to meet Andrei, who she thinks is her lost son, the camera does not show his face until the very end of the scene, leaving the spectator wondering about the young man’s identity. The purpose of this suspense – t­ he evental rupture – ­is to defer the moment of (non-)recognition in order to divert the attention of the spectator and construe an entirely different plane of signification, focusing on non-knowledge. The camera lingers on Liubov, Sergeev and the priest, symbolising three types of knowledge – ­the family, state and church, respectively – ­and emphasising their nonexchangeability. In concealing Andrei, the camera reveals the transcendental which appears as a kind of alterity – love – or non-knowledge. For some time the spectator is hopeful that Liubov has found her son and is interested in knowing what it means to be a mother of a son. That is why the identity of the young man is finally revealed and the police officer encourages him to speak to Liubov; however, Andrei declines. He refuses to speak to Liubov by exclaiming ‘She is no mother of mine’ [Ona mne ne mat’] as opposed to ‘She is not my mother’ [Ona ne moia mat’], which, from the point of view of Russian grammar and pragmatics, would be more appropriate in such circumstances. The difference is that the latter

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t he wo r l d and t he e ve n t 139 phrase points to a mistaken identity, whereas the former rejects Liubov’s ontology entirely. Here, Badiou’s symmetry of the subject is inverted to reveal its asymmetry: choosing an event is transformed into being chosen by an event. On the one hand, this deprives the subject of the possibility of starting a truth procedure, and it dissolves the mimetic regime. On the other, it enables a transference to non-knowledge beyond the framework of belief and as a means to maintain relations. Correspondingly, Liubov writes a note for the policeman (she has lost her voice so she cannot speak): ‘This is not Andrei’ [Eto ne Andrei], rather than ‘This is not my son’ [Eto ne moi syn]: in doing so, she suggests that there is a possibility of this young man being her son, but that he is not the son she is looking for.19 (Superb acting enhances the ambivalent status of the characters in this scene.) The denunciation takes place at the moment when Andrei is standing on the left and Sergeev, the policeman, on the right, facing each other, with Liubov visible in the background.20 Here the film differentiates between belonging and including as pertaining to being qua being as inconsistent multiplicity. Hence, the event is what occurs not in the ‘now’, but in the ‘now-to-be’, and the subject is an evental site. The event may be an occurrence within the diegesis and also something emerging in the world of the spectator as infinite multiplicity. For example, in the scene under analysis the shot of the men and Liubov is a close-up of the men’s faces, with Liubov a murky tiny figure between them. In terms of the mise-en-scène and the organisation of the shot, the scene makes a reference to Rublev’s Trinity whereby the faces of the men form an outline of a cup in the same way as the figures of the angels form an outline of the sacrificial cup in the icon.21 Just as with Rublev’s icon, the symbolism of the scene is in the premonition of the future sacrificial act as well as in the apagogic use of signs that denote both material objects and ethereal notions, for example, Liubov’s name means ‘love’. St George’s Day is about the transposition of affective states and thinking about them as a form of inexistence/non-knowledge. Uplifted from the plane of ontology onto the plane of appearance, the events in the film suggest that Sergeev is not only Liubov’s lover, but also perhaps Andrei’s father. From the perspective of Cultural Studies, St George’s Day takes the father–son conflict to a whole new level by questioning not only paternity but also maternity, and advancing the notion of the new Russia as an orphan state. From the perspective of the symbolic mode, the subject emerges as an affective destination. The prison scene opens with a slow movement of the camera over a male body: it is a shot of one of the prisoners and his body appears as a type of landscape. This is because of the tattoos covering the body as well as a close focus of the camera that

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traces the earth-like texture of the body. From this unnamed individual the camera moves to other prisoners, all of whom are experiencing some agonising pain (the prisoners are, in fact, patients in a TB clinic where they are kept in inhuman conditions). The scene refers to the statement made earlier by one of the monks: ‘the world will come to an end when this realm will be like hell’ [Konets sveta – e­ to kogda v miru kak v adu]. This situation is extreme in its adherence to the concerns of Plato’s cosmogony where participation exceeds being. Furthermore, the scene affirms Liubov’s position as an onlooker in afterlife, or as posthumous subject whose job is to note heterogeneity. The spectator is free to assume that, in fact, Andrei had never disappeared, and instead Liubov has died and she is now searching for him in hell. In other words, her function is similar to that of Orpheus, the singing agent. Serebrennikov creates a hellish impression of the otherworld by using a particular style of imagery – ­blurry, murky unfocused camera – ­which emulates Sokurov’s camera in Taurus (Chapter 1). When Liubov comes to the prison to meet another Andrei, they engage in a conversation leading to Andrei’s proposition that Liubov should adopt him. The conversation between them reveals the work of nonrecognition and non-knowledge: Liubov: ‘That’s not him at all.’ Andrei: ‘Which one do you need?’ Liubov: ‘I need my son.’ Andrei: ‘I am a son, too.’ Liubov: ‘Not mine.’ Andrei: ‘Then you should adopt me, I am a good person.’22 Instead of adopting/recognising/including the young man, she starts looking after all the prisoners – ­she brings them food, changes their clothes and cleans the cell – ­choosing ‘the multiple-without-one’ over ‘the multiple-in-itself’ (Badiou 2007: 37). One day the prisoners attack Andrei with a knife, and Liubov cleans his wounds and washes the blood off his traumatised body in a scene that is reminiscent of the rite of ablution, washing the body with the purpose of purification and dedication. In Christianity, both baptism and foot washing are forms of ablution, and they refer to a number of rites that are symbolic of one’s union with the Church. The scene also refers to the practice of washing and shrouding a dead body, suggesting the events unfold in afterlife under the supervision of the posthumous subject. Serebrennikov borrows directly from Zviagintsev’s The Return when he opens the prison scene with the view of a male body seen from an unusual point of the feet. This is a reference to Mantegna’s Dead Christ. In Chapter 3, I demonstrated how in Morphine Balabanov uses the image to argue against the ‘realist’ drive in cinema due to the image being an abstraction of being. The spectator is meant to respond to the queries about the intentionality of the image rather than the gore of naturalism.

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t he wo r l d and t he e ve n t 141 In The Return, Zviagintsev entirely reconstructs Mantegna’s painting with the exception of the two mourning female figures whose absence, first, indicates the father’s/Christ’s solitude and the shift of the director’s attention towards the father’s relationship with his sons/Apostles, and, secondly, anticipates the scenes at the end of the film when Andrei and Ivan bend over the body of their now confirmedly dead father (here repetition is both confirmation and negation, enabling movement towards non-knowledge). Serebrennikov re-installs the concerns of Mantegna’s painting by reintroducing the female figure, that is, the mother (who is largely absent in The Return).23 However, unlike in the original painting, she is no longer the object of the gaze, but the gaze itself, thus, elevating the woman’s status to that of the omnipresent goddess or, to be precise, the divine mother of god. In fact, in a later scene Liubov nurses Andrei in a mise-en-scène reminiscent of the icons depicting Mary and the baby Jesus, which means that the film retreats even deeper in time, and its reverse logic secures the proposition of probability in relation to presented events. Liubov gets an opportunity to re-live the events of the past, and each section of the film shows a possible outcome – ­a different version of Andrei appears – ­depending on the context; hence, the finite–infinite relation is conceived in terms of singularity/multiplicity. By experiencing such probabilities (the world), Liubov regains her strength (the event) – ­the prisoners even give her a nickname ‘Liubov the fearless’ [Liusia nichego ne boiusia] – w ­ hich explains her success as an opera singer. Indeed, the film has the purpose of substantiating Liubov’s success beyond the realm of talent. (She is no longer defined in terms of substance.) Instead, it is the experience of suffering and sharing other people’s pain that secures her dominance as an opera singer. (Her subjectivity is conceived as a form of relation to the multiple.) Her voice and operatic performances in Iur’ev follow the general trajectory of the film’s nonlinear framework and its conceptualisation of the event as rupture. St George’s Day demonstrates how her voice is formed while singing in the church choir where she absorbs the power of other women’s voices. It is later in her career that she can use her voice to express the grief and pain of other people (as a phase in this process, in the televised performance Liubov is a soloist, leading a choir). To elucidate, Liubov’s existence is a movement from essence to abstracted subjectivity. The latter is conceived in terms of multiplicity that is imagined as inconsistent rather than as coherent, and one of vibration rather than of determination. Her subjectivity makes an appearance as an enunciation and as a trace, which stand between the world and the event. In its nonlinear drive, the film organises Liubov’s life as transference between

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the relations of happening or event, to existence (multiplicity but in a world, here and now) and, finally, ‘to the relation between being qua being (pure multiplicity)’ (Badiou 2005a). The body of the subject emerges as a post-evental body that is eager to participate rather than to consume and consummate; as Badiou puts it, ‘to live is to participate, point by point, in the organisation of a new body, in which a faithful subjective formalism comes to take root’ (2005a: 35). The subject in St George’s Day is presented as a figure of non-­knowledge that interacts with the infinite in the symbolic mode. These interactions, or relations, provide the subject with an existence in the world, and, in fact, they are responsible for the construction of the world in the first place. To reiterate, the subject comes into existence through and in response to an event, which, as St George’s Day demonstrates, is somewhere outside, it is external to the subject, as it comes from ‘somewhere’. The event causes a split of the subject which now occupies different temporal zones as a matter of transcendence. This subject is constituted according to the logic of deferral: the event in St George’s Day opens a gap through which the subject can undo itself as well as reconnect itself to metaphysical intensities. The process of subjectivation, and in fact, of signification in the symbolic mode, is oriented towards the intervention, the event as a rupture, which, on the one hand, calls the subject into being and, on the other hand, towards the context in which the subject is situated. (In Chapter 4, I demonstrate the multidimensionality of the symbolic mode in relation to the camera work. In Elena, the camera glides above surfaces and in doing so creates meaning; it is in the gap between the surfaces that the meaning is actualised. Zviagintsev denotes his own non-representational strategies as ‘visualisations’.) Subjectivity arises as a way of moving through the context and judging it from the perspective of the event. This leads to the production of other possible contexts with which the subject develops an affective relation. Such a process differs from the historical production of subjectivity which always looks backwards and aligns events according to its own agenda. In the symbolic mode, the subject is always distanced from knowledge by chance/rupture, and in St George’s Day the subject bridges the gap by engaging with the context and circumventing the event. This distancing results in the multiplication of subjectivity, which may take the form of doubling and intemporalities promoting transcendental states. I explore these strategies of doubling, repetition and repair in Chapter 7.

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Notes   1. I am grateful to Mark Lipovetsky and Elena Trubina for their helpful comments on the first draft of this chapter.   2. See Freedman (2010) for an overview of New Drama.   3. See Chapter 2 on The Miracle where I analyse the function of the voice and its loss. In Proshkin’s film muteness does not denote a negation of discourse, but rather discursive ruptures and a form of non-knowledge.   4. The filming took place in the actual town.   5. For more information, see Raushenbakh (1986).  6. The iterations between sleep and awakening are explored in Litvinova’s Goddess discussed in Chapter 7.   7. This is a concern in Zviagintsev’s The Return as well as in Pavel Lungin’s The Island (2006) and Tsar (2009).   8. This interpretation of the symbolism of tuberculosis is contextual, see, for example, Sontag (1978).   9. See, for example, Barabash (2008); Lipovetsky (2008); Plakhov (2008); Popov (2008); Shigareva (2008). 10. Oushakine (2009) defines this social experience as a ‘community of loss’. 11. Incidentally, he talks about the use of vinyl siding in the decoration of the building, which indicates the superficiality of his thoughts. Representation of faith, religion and clergy has been a common motif in Russian cinema since around 2005, for example, in films such as Pavel Lungin’s The Island (2006) and Tsar (2009), Vladimir Khotinenko’s The Muslim (1995) and The Priest (2009), and Andrei Zviagintsev’s Leviathan (2014). 12. From the point of view of Cultural Studies, this predisposition connotes a generational difference with Andrei having no memory of, or connection to, the USSR. 13. In Taurus, Sokurov uses a particular colour palette to indicate the transformations of memory and how they affect the subject’s interiority. 14. For an in-depth analysis of the issue of dislocation and subjectivity, see Chapter 11 on The Wild Field. 15. On being as abandonment, see Chapter 11 of this book. 16. On the convergence of film and gaming in Russian cinema, see the special issue of Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media, entitled ‘Cinegames: Convergent Media and the Aesthetic Turn’, guest edited by Stephen M. Norris and Vlad Strukov (2012). 17. The same woman appears at the end of the film as the choir master. See the discussion below. Also this character resonates with the figure of the mother in Sokurov’s Alexandra who comes from nowhere and keeps on pushing a bag-on-wheels, which is a reference to Mother Courage from Bertolt Brecht’s 1939 eponymous tragedy. 18. This is also a reference to Raushenbakh’s concerns about the symbolic status of different types of perspective.

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19. St George’s Day provides a new framework for the father–son relationship explored in Goscilo’s and Hashamova’s edited volume (2010). On the one hand, the film continues the confusion concerning parenthood evident in other Russian films of the first half of the 2000s, for example, Khlebnikov’s and Popogrebskii’s Koktebel’ (2003), Andrei Kravchuk’s The Italian (2005), Nikolai Dostal’’s Kolia (2005) and many others; on the other, it shifts my focus from the figure of the father to the figure of the mother. 20. A similar triangulation is used in Morphine (Chapter 3) and Elena (Chapter 4). 21. The perspectival structure of the icon is the subject of detailed investigation in Raushenbakh’s treatise. 22. [Liubov: Eto ne on sovsem. Andrei: A kakoi vam nuzhen? L.: Mne syn nuzhen. A.: Ia tozhe syn. L.: Ne moi. A.: A ty usonovi menia, ia khoroshii.] 23. See Strukov (2007) for further analysis of the film.

C H A PT E R 7

A Plea for the Dead (Self): Renata Litvinova’s Goddess: How I Fell in Love (2004)

While Khomeriki’s A Tale About Darkness and Serebrennikov’s St George’s Day are concerned with love as the ultimate event leading to infinity, Litvinova’s Goddess: How I Fell in Love explores love as multiplicity. In Badiou’s framework love has to do with Two. He privileges the dyad because the rhetoric of Two is uniquely efficacious in that it decentres the self while refuting mediation and mimetic relationships. Badiou decouples love and desire and insists that ‘every sexual unveiling of the body that is not amorous is strictly masturbatory’, since ‘it deals only with the interiority of a position’ (2012: 277). This is a situation predicated on mistaking the other for the (lost) part-object. He asserts that ‘desire is homosexual, regardless of sexuation’, whereas ‘love is principally heterosexual, however gay it may be’. As a result, love becomes a way to investigate ‘the sharing of the universe’ (2012: 277) and to construct a world. In his In Praise of Love (2012), Badiou equates the transcendence of desire with ‘the declaration of love’ because such a declaration invokes the void of the self-disjunction in the address to another person. In fact, Khomeriki’s film registers the transfer from Lacan’s to Badiou’s understanding of love and rupture. This is possible thanks to the figure of Dmitrii who undergoes the transition from masturbatory aggression to the revelation of his wish to share a world with Gelia. This transformation is the ultimate event that evidences the self-presence of the subject whereby Dmitrii’s declaration of love is an affirmation of disjunction in relation to a world, which in A Tale About Darkness is marked topologically as a space beyond experience. St George’s Day, on the other hand, acknowledges the existence of the subject in a world and constructs the subject through the event – ­the loss of the child as the moment of the opening of the void. Through the figure of Liubov, subjectivity arises as a way of being in the void, owing to an affective relation which is aimed at the other who, in its turn, is conceived as the multiple. The world appears as an evental site, divided into multiple zones of affect, and

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functioning as repetition via misapprehension (Andrei’s denunciation of Liubov as the beloved other). The configurations of Badiou’s anatomy of love are possible because of how natural analogy is used to relate affective states to spaces. In ancient mythology gods were located in special places, sacred groves, where they could be visited. In the post-mythological period, visitations could occur on the transcendental plane of dreaming during sleep. In Christianity and other monotheistic forms of faith, culture supplants nature as a prime location of deity: conventional surroundings are replaced by symbolic surroundings, and prescient visionary creates psychic locales, and, ultimately, the vision and the gaze itself becomes the locus of the transcendental. Film as a form of knowledge regains the discourse of the sacred place in that it operates from its own sacred grove of immanence. It alludes to the ‘external world’ by means of the exegetical tradition. The symbolic mode betrays the habit of thinking of mental and sensory events in terms of habitual places (the last is the task of allegorisation). Instead, it deals with cosmological states, or myths. Myths are often used in philosophy, or any other abstract investigation, because they provide narratives and contexts that resemble cognate themes. Within a framework of rationality, myths function as a way to highlight elements of a detailed rational argumentation. In art, on the other hand, the philosophical substrata remain veiled in order to realise the fictive intent and aesthetic concerns whereby intricate textures of storytelling do, in fact, form or relate to mythological structures. However, in their archaic form myths lack the aesthetic potential of allegorisation because they are not attributes of deity, but deity itself in its immediate presence and sensible opacity. Therefore, myths resist interpretation by means of allegory and fable; instead, they invite us to live and experience them, and, in this process, they are available for symbolic consumption since they are primarily repetitive rites and rituals. In my study, I occasionally identify the symbolic significance of the inclusion of mythical elements; however, the process of myth-making is largely outside my purview. Instead, I examine the process of world-building that is characteristic of the symbolic mode. Myth-making relies on narrative in order to present cosmic mysteries, whereas world-building encompasses and produces autonomous systems of meaning production which may occur irrespective of the intentions and constraints of the narrative. Mythmaking strives for creating closed systems because such organisation ensures their validity and cognitive premise. World-building facilitates the open-ended production of signification in the multimodal manner. For Badiou myth is a means to produce art, including the art of film:1 with the end of the regime of myth, philosophy and art are connected

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a p l e a f o r t he de a d (se l f ) 147 in their mutual mourning and desire – t­hey are the Two, a division that joins, or an opening-as-spacing. The problem is not the denying of the existence of god, nor is it the gesture of infinity, but rather – i­n the postmythological era – ­it is being in the word without god whereby god and self as subjectivities are posthumous. In fact, Frederiek Depoortere has convincingly demonstrated how it is possible to create a new theology on the basis of Badiou’s understanding of the absolute as an infinite being that is innumerable and ‘trans-mathematical’ (2009: 65). In relation to Sokurov’s Taurus, I noted that photography and film allow Derrida to speak of the structure of the posthumous self as the multiple selves: ‘the plurality of deaths’ (2001: 285). I showcased how in film, ‘the plurality of deaths’ corresponds to the multiple workings of the gaze and particularly to its capacity to look at the screen as well as off the screen, into darkness, and at the onlooker himself. Taurus investigates differences between space and duration by advancing the concept of death as difference by indentation of decomposing the composites given in experience and the actual being, and going beyond the ‘turn’, or death itself. Taurus demonstrates that for the posthumous subjectivity there is no longer any dualism between nature and degrees of difference. In this chapter, by using Renata Litvinova’s film Goddess: How I Fell in Love, I aim to explore a number of interrelated questions: as the figures of Two, how do repetition and repair enable the construction of a world in the lack of the event?; how may the self become an event?; how does film work with mathemes and ‘mythemes’ of being in spaces of otherness?; how does the multiplicity of the self translate into the multiplicity of god?; what is the role of posthumous subjectivity in viewing god as intemporality? While Goddess: How I Fell in Love (hereafter Goddess) is Litvinova’s debut feature film – L ­ itvinova is not only the film’s director but also scriptwriter – ­her presence on Russian screen is remarkable. Renata Litvinova (b. 1967, Moscow) has contributed to many of Kira Muratova’s films both as the scriptwriter and leading actress, including Passions (1994), Three Stories (1997), The Tuner (2004) and Eternal Homecoming (2012). She has collaborated with many other acclaimed directors, appearing in, for instance, Vera Storozheva’s The Sky, The Plane and the Girl (2002), Rustam Khamdamov’s Vocal Parallels (2005), Balabanov’s It does not Hurt (2006) and Marina Liubakova’s Cruelty (2007). She has authored and featured in a large number of television shows, leading to the creation of a unique audio-visual identity, characterised by stylised performances, retro glamour and cultural sophistication. Her celebrity status has been maintained thanks to her rumoured amorous involvement with Zemfira (born Zemfira Talgatovna Ramazanova 1976, Ufa), Russian female song

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writer and performer. Due to her unparalleled personal style, Litvinova is simultaneously one of the key figures of Russian glamour and its adamant critic.2 Litvinova’s media persona has an over-determined quality which often exceeds imagination. The film, with its references to Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942), has been situated within the ‘aesthetics and discourses of film noir – ­the post-traumatic deterioration of the family structure, interpersonal alienation, and the strangely deadly force of unpoliced female sexuality’ (Thorsen 2012). It has been acknowledged that the title of the film evokes Litvinova’s directorial debut, the documentary For Me There is No Death (2000), ‘in which she demonstrated an interest in a different type of deity: the screen goddess (the film is a series of interviews with leading Soviet actresses including Tat’iana Samoilova and Nonna Mordiukova)’ (Graham 2005). The title of the film – G ­ oddess: How I Fell in Love – c­ ontains a colon which signifies a divide between two states – ­permanence and becoming, and two subjectivities – ­the nameless god and the living subject. The use of the colon, instead of the more grammatically appropriate comma, suggests a peculiar discursive position: does the speaking subject wish to address god? Or does the subject aim to unpack the contents of the finite composite? The title also draws attention to ‘how’, which is an indication of the symbolic mode whereby the corporeal presentation of the living subject infers abstract categorisations in the film’s cosmology. As a result, the title brings forward the concerns of intentionality as discursive interruptions and draws the spectator’s attention to the film’s self-referential strategies. Goddess tells the story of a young woman called Faina (played by the director herself) who is a Moscow police detective, investigating the disappearance of a little girl and a few interconnected mysterious deaths. Viktor (Viktor Sukhorukov) lives in a Stalin-era apartment block; above his flat lives a childless couple, Pavel (Andrei Krasko) and Elena (Elena Rufanova), both doctors by profession. Pavel and Elena kidnap Viktor’s daughter, apparently in order to punish him for having killed their dog. After Faina resolves the mystery, the police prepare to ambush the couple; however, they escape by committing a double suicide. The film shows how Pavel and Elena are instantaneously transposed to a different realm – ­in a section set in a pine forest – w ­ here they declare eternal devotion to each other. As Faina continues her investigation, she visits Polosuev (Konstantin Khabenskii) who is a witness in another murder. He accuses Faina of being ‘very cold’ [ochen’ kholodnaia] and commits suicide by jumping out of the window. Faina realises that these crimes and other transgressions have a common cause – t­hey are crimes committed for

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a p l e a f o r t he de a d (se l f ) 149 the sake of love, a feeling Faina struggles to comprehend: when asked whether she is in love, she responds, ‘I know nothing of love’ [Ia nichego ne ponimaiu v lubvi]. Faina’s colleague Nikolai (Dmitrii Ul’ianov, also starring in Zviagintsev’s Banishment) is in love with Faina; however, she rejects him. In the course of her work Faina encounters a near-suicide, a suicide, an assisted suicide and a double suicide. These forms of transgression indicate different modes of transference from solitude (knowledge) to love (non-knowledge). Professor Mikhail Konstantinovich (Maksim Sukhanov, who is also in the leading role in Zel’dovich’s The Target), whom Faina befriends while investigating his case – h ­ e is mistakenly accused of drug dealing – ­offers Faina the ultimate solution to her predicament in her personal life as well as in her work. The professor uses specially formulated substances to induce states when visits to the realm of the dead become possible. The drug is injected into the palm of the hand, leaving permanent scarring – ­stigmata – ­which accentuates the primacy of writing, symbolised by the hand as opposed to the spoken word symbolised by the voice. To enter another realm, the professor and Faina also require antique mirrors with special properties, which the professor categorises in terms of human agency. He describes them as ‘kind’, ‘tired’, ‘imprecise’, and he finds them in the homes of people who are already dead. He finds one such mirror in Faina’s office, which implies that she already belongs to the other realm. Faina convinces the professor to provide her with the substance and arrange her own visit to the world of the dead. Faina is motivated by her desire to speak to her dead mother, who comes to visit the daughter in dreams, and by her suspicion that the deaths occurring in this world have a connection to, or even a cause, in the other realm. Before injecting the substance, Faina takes two drinks (one is for keeping her awake – ­see my discussion of the use of the pagan concept of the water of life and death below), and she looks into a mirror, from which her double appears. After a brief conversation with the double, Faina walks through the looking glass and disappears. The space of afterlife is conceptualised in the form of a stone-walled vortex, with a single window, and featuring two skies, above and below, a type of sacred grove, where Faina performs a ritualistic dance.3 She converses with a subject who appears as a drawing of a female face on a piece of paper, rendered with the help of digital animation. The drawn face is yet another incarnation of Faina’s subjectivity who speaks to her and convinces her to jump out of the window. Faina’s suicide in the other realm causes her death in this realm (and problematises the perception of afterlife where action and event are not possible). In her entry into afterlife, Faina follows her filial and professional instincts; Faina’s desire to reunite with her

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parent and to find offenders demonstrates the working of the death drive (German: Todestrieb), that is, the drive towards self-destruction and the return to the inorganic state, an idea originally proposed by Freud in 1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. If in Freud’s theory the death drive is opposed to Eros, the tendency towards survival, sex and life-producing drives, in Goddess the death drive takes the form of Thanatos, which, in Greek mythology, was the personification of death. Thanatos was associated with suffering and his role was to lead the subject to the dead and to be their guide. If the professor is Faina’s adviser in the ‘objective realm’, Faina’s mother is her chaperone in the world of dreams. Played by Svetlana Svetlichnaia, a legendary Soviet femme fatale from Leonid Gaidai’s comedy The Diamond Arm (1968), the mother comes back to Faina in her sleep.4 The film opens with a scene in which Faina’s dream is framed as her conversation with her mother’s ghost. They occupy the space of Faina’s bedroom – t­ he first type of the sacred grove – ­and while speaking to her daughter, the mother performs a ritualistic dance. She moves silently around the room and makes circular movements with her hands (Svetlichnaia does so in The Diamond Arm, thus suggesting a repetitive relationship through gesture to the past). The hands cast sharp shadows on the wall behind Faina, turning the shadows into the projectiles of Faina’s subconscious. In this allusion to German expressionism and Russian early cinema, particularly such films as Evgenii Bauer’s After Death (1915), Goddess establishes its own canon of phantasmagorical cinema by focusing on morbid aesthetics. In Faina’s dream, the mother wears a long red dress; this motif – b­ orrowed from Muratova’s Three Stories where Litvinova’s character, named Ofa, wears an identical dress – ­will be repeated later when Faina appears wearing the same dress, suggesting a merger between the two instances of subjectivity separated by time and death. (Arguably, the use of the same dress suggests Litvinova’s conversation with her cinematic mother, Muratova.) A similar technique is used in other films analysed in this book, for example, Nirvana and The Wild Field, where doubles and repetitive strategies are used to tell stories that emanate from different epochs, or different realms, in order to construct an intemporal subjectivity. The motif of a child conversing with the dead parent(s) is common in the cinema of the Putin era, for example, in Bekmambetov’s Night Watch (2003), Aleksei German’s Paper Soldier (2008), Vasilii Sigarev’s Wolfy (2009) and Living (2011), and Khomeriki’s A Tale About Darkness; however, in Goddess the dead mother is not pure immaterial desire, but rather an embodied mobile ghost, a revenant.5 The ghost is an intrusive, illegible visitor who contradicts the discursive legibility of this realm. Ghosts are truth-events, because, according to Badiou

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a p l e a f o r t he de a d (se l f ) 151 (2007a), their visits are events of singular disruptive force in the field of knowledge – ­ghosts as appearances of non-knowledge. The ghosts’ visits imply the suspension of the discursive meaning: the ghost is a particular inscription and a figure of the momentary transgressive breach in being. From Faina’s bedroom the action moves to a glass-walled cafeteria where a few women are enjoying their lunch. The woman in charge of the cafeteria wears a hairstyle reminiscent of Svetlichanaia’s hair in The Diamond Arm, a detail which completes the cycle of cinematic references and suggests an uncanny return of cultural disturbances in the legible world. The back wall of the cafeteria is decorated with posters from Vogue – ­some are real and others are fakes – w ­ hich contrasts idealised/ photoshopped and corporeal manifestations of femininity. The posters and the portraits of the women – ­the camera rolls alongside the wall and captures the posters while it frames the women’s faces as portraits – ­cause a rupture in consistent presentation, the order of things and subjectivities, and suggests that being is a multiplicity. The slow-moving, liquid work of the camera translates into the mythopoetic, fairy tale-like use of metaphors in the cafeteria scene. Just like other customers, the mother orders some soup and cognac. This is a productive use of pagan memory which ascribes supernatural properties to water – ‘­water of life’ and ‘water of death’ [zhivaia i mertvaia voda] – a­ s mechanisms of transcendence from one realm to another by means of consuming magical substances. In fact, the search for the water of life and death is the objective of the professor’s scientific experiments (as I will demonstrate below, Faina’s body is found in the ‘liquid space’ of the Moscow canal). Later in the film the cafeteria appears as a ‘real’ space: it is a café that Faina visits frequently with her colleagues. The problematisation concerning the distinction among different realms develops into the matter of spatialisation (another form of the sacred grove). In the café, Faina meets other women – s­ ome are alive, and others are already dead – ­for example, one of them reminiscences about her previous life and another describes the details of her will which highlights her imminent death not as a tragedy, but as an act of devotion towards her sister, the beneficiary. To elucidate, the scene in the dreamworld and in the cafeteria are not instances of Litvinova’s cinematic mannerisms, but rather indications of the radical breach of diegetic reality. The non-narrativity and non-discursivity of the ghost as the figure on the edge of the void indicates ontological disavowals and the ruptured nature of experience, culminating in the production of the ontology of nonknowledge as an event, act, happening and situation, which is the most conclusive form of the sacred grove, or the world/event in Badiou’s terms. The ruptured, syncopated composition of Goddess is evident in the

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use of intertitles that demarcate different realms. The very first scene is labelled as ‘Faina’s first dream; The fifth date’ [Pervyi son Fainy. Piatoe chislo]. The first part of the intertitle refers to Faina’s dream (her interior chronology), and the second to the date in a calendar (the anterior chronology). However, it is not clear which calendar is in use and why numbers are preferred to the names of the days [chislo vs. den’], which suggests these dreams are conceived as mathemes of visions. This gives the film an additional quality of constructedness and of false precision to be invalidated in the course of the action. The film moves from the matheme to the myth-eme by accentuating occurrences of being as performative choices and interweaving different modes into the multiple ontology of vision. Eventually the numbering of Faina’s dreams ceases and there are unaccountable gaps in the numbered sequences, too, which suggests that they are temporal ruptures leading to intemporality, or the temporality of the void which escapes knowledge. Such intemporalities characterise truthevents, which, in Badiou’s model, are figurations of potentiality (2007a) and intentionality through an evental site in the process of subjectivation. If in The Miracle and Morphine intertitles designate temporal transitions evidenced from the external perspective, in Goddess they assert Faina’s ownership of her own dreams as otherwise they could have been dreamed by anyone. This validates Faina’s subjectivity as an evental site, or the site of the sacrificial horror which defies mimesis as non-ritual. The spatialisation of subjectivity calls for performative gestures that can redouble ontology as corporeal metaphysics. Badiou’s mathematisations, drawn from the set theory of Georg Cantor and others,6 confirm the being of nothing, or what I call non-knowledge: in its immanent potentiality, Faina as a ghost figures as non-knowledge rather than the absence of knowing, and the void appears as pure immanence, the gate at which everything awaits. Badiou (2007a) calls multiplicity a situation that threatens to erupt and that exceeds the boundaries of the power of what is known. These are framed as relations that can be mythologised in the process of subjectivation. For example, Faina’s dreams are a reference to the four dreams of Vera Pavlovna from Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s novel What is to Be Done? [Chto delat’?] (1863), which had been viewed as the ultimate text of the Russian socialist utopia. The canonical status of Vera Pavlovna’s dreams and the novel itself was challenged by Viktor Pelevin in his short story The 9th Dream of Vera Pavlovna [Deviatyi son Very Pavlovny] (1991). If Pelevin uses the notion of the dream to question the legitimacy of the Soviet regime and account for the perestroika movement, for Litvinova it is an opportunity to explore the hallucinatory, delusional quality of the Putin era.

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a p l e a f o r t he de a d (se l f ) 153 The spatialisation of subjectivity is evident in the use of extreme closeups which, just as in Serebrennikov’s film, are perceived as a type of space (this is a type of the inverted sacred grove). Cinematic enlargement serves as a form of the uncanny in that it presents the familiar object/texture in a completely different way by disturbing the conventions of haptics, kinesics and chronemics. A close-up becomes an observation of the human use of space as a specialised elaboration of culture. It reconfigures the object – ­it is neither visible nor invisible – ­and reveals its formless nature which requires discursive ‘patching’, or concealment of the birthmark on the body of culture (see Chapter 8 on the concept of patching in Voloshin’s Nirvana). The close-up has a frame of its own – i­ t is its relation to the symbolic mode: the close-up is always an abstraction that implies the metaphysics of presence in the mind of the viewer. Looking at a closeup produces an effect of doubling, of separating the realms, of being in the process of meaning-making. To be precise, the close-up reveals its own materiality and simultaneously refers to the abstract realms of signification. The close-up is an eerie double because it compels the subject to observe itself from the outside. Goddess ends with Faina’s double arriving to greet her; the entry into afterlife is reversed in the film with the other realm spilling into this world and occupying it with its own concerns and aesthetics. Such a reversal connotes the polemics around non-knowledge. The final part of the film is a black and white sequence showing – ­one by one – ­the actors, members of the film crew, producers and ordinary people. Each of them provides a response to the question posed from the outset: ‘What is the meaning of life?’ [V chem smysl zhizni?]. They unanimously respond ‘Love’ [Liubov’]. The camera moves from side to side – ­as it did in the beginning when it showed the women in the cafeteria – ­providing an inherent circularity to the structure of the film. In its composition, the scene is a slide-show of images7 or what, in his analysis of Zviagintsev’s The Return, Philip Cavendish calls ‘a photo-film’ (2013: 46). In The Return the photofilm includes stills from the actual film as well as visuals that were never shown, highlighting the main concern of The Return: the issue of the authenticity of cinematic ‘reality’ (also an affective concern for Sobchak that I addressed in Chapter 6) and, more broadly, the transcendence of discourse. The fact that the viewer is invited to co-imagine the rest of the events becomes an event itself, breaking the constraints of linear narrativisation. Goddess advances the notion of the intemporality of the void and accentuates the multiple composition of subjectivity by staging performances by actors and other people who were involved in the production of the film. Their individual performances are brought together in

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the cinematic text, just as in Serebrennikov’s St George’s Day in the final scene with the choir performance, individual vocal performances (events) create contexts (worlds) in which subjectivity appears as a consequence, as a deferral in itself, always following and reacting to the ruptures in discourse. The photo-film is accompanied by Zemfira’s song, the lyrics of which summarise the main philosophical predisposition of the film: ‘Love as a chance death’ [Liubov’ kak sluchainaia smert’].8 Here, death is a place where the self appears aware of its self-presence: ‘death as the true subjectivity of the subject’ (Nancy 1993: 53). In death the subject appears as anterior to its own production; Nancy writes: ‘“I am God” means “I am dead” . . . It means that the self-constitution of the self-relation is identical to death, or that it does not occur except as a death . . .’ (1993: 54). In her use of the medium of film and Zemfira’s poetry, Litvinova is similar to Badiou, who uses mathematics and poetry to bridge and re-frame two registers. Both aim to link image and fiction to formula and matheme as a means to work with the event. Both conceive of the event as unpredictable (or ‘sudden and accidental’ in Litvinova’s/Zemfira’s terms), errant and indiscernible. As ‘Badiou points out, the possibility of speaking about the event takes place when “language loses its grip”, which is much like poetry, for it marks the moment when language begins to slip at the “limits of language”’ (Boer 2013: 97). In this system, film appears as both language and myth, and as something that perpetually foreshadows truth but ceases to articulate it because truth operates outside language as nonknowledge. Because death/god is a form of knowledge, in Goddess Faina’s death is presented as a multistage process which is always delayed to indicate the presence of non-knowledge. These processes of effacing are synchronised with the processes of mirroring. Whilst Faina explores the world of afterlife, her double wanders around the streets of Moscow. She is dressed in rags and carries bags of rubbish, making her appear as a kitsch copy of Faina. After Faina commits suicide, her double runs into the mirror and disappears. When this happens the camera shows the unconscious Faina lying on the floor. The voice-over – ­Litvinova – ­explains how Faina’s body was found at a specific location in Moscow and that she died because her heart had stopped [‘ot ostanovki serdtsa’]. Here both the death and the voice-over appear as non-diegetic interruptions in the world experienced by the characters and observed by the spectator. As indices of non-knowledge they demonstrate that the evental site has closed to the void and that being in the post-evental situation takes the form of repetition, a succession of non-events – t­he hall of mirrors – a­ type of movement characteristic of

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a p l e a f o r t he de a d (se l f ) 155 the symbolic mode. Litvinova implies suspension of contemporaneity whereby time appears as an historical reference which, in its turn, enables mythological interpretation. The place where Faina dies is the so-called River station [Rechnoi vokzal], an area in the north-west of Moscow. This is an historical landmark in the capital. Built as part of the Moscow Canal in 1937, it was the culmination of Stalin’s construction project that aimed to transform Moscow into the ‘port of five seas’. Faina’s death is an allusion to the thousands of people who perished during the construction of the canal in Stalin’s gulags. It is also an allusion to the River Styx, which, in Greek mythology, forms the boundary between earth and the underworld. In fact, Faina’s double spends most of her time on a bridge across the Moscow river; so she is like the ferryman Charon who transports the souls of the newly dead across the river into the underworld. Styx is also the name of the goddess of Styx who controls the underworld – ­Faina herself – w ­ hich the viewers comprehend as they see Faina’s face appearing in the digitally animated sequence in afterlife. (In the post-Christian neopagan framework, similar associations between water/river and death are established in Nirvana and Silent Souls.) Styx is also the place where the events of the myth of Orpheus take place, an association that is additionally supported by the name of Litvinova’s character in Muratova’s Three Stories – ­Ofa, which is a reference to both Ofelia and Orpheus. As the film moves towards the end, Litvinova’s voice is replaced by Zemfira’s singing the final song quoted above. It is in the aural realm that the voice of Faina (Litvinova) encounters the voice of the singing poet (Zemfira), with the Russian spectator being cognizant of the love relationship between the two artists. It is noteworthy that Zemfira almost always writes music for her own performances, but not in this case.9 In the mythological structure of the film, this fact asserts the status of Zemfira as a poet rather than as a composer, further developing the myth of Orpheus. In the myth, Orpheus’ task is to bring light out of darkness; it is to bring Eurydice into the daylight, and to make daylight more luminous through the visibility of Eurydice. While the task of Orpheus is to bring beauty out of darkness, he desires that Eurydice exists in darkness, as darkness, that is, as non-knowledge. This paradox is rendered in Goddess by means of mixing and re-assigning the functions and conflating the roles: is Faina Eurydice and is her mother Orpheus? Is Faina both Eurydice and Orpheus, and, if so, does she bring out into the light her own double? Or is Zemfira the Orpheus who looks back, loses Eurydice/Faina to the darkness and laments her love? From the Cultural Studies angle, the purpose of the myth of Orpheus is to underscore the ambiguity of gender roles, sociality and identity in

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order to celebrate art as the only form of being that sustains the autonomy of desire. In the symbolic mode, Faina’s life–death reveals the complex forms of multiple subjectivity, which account for Litvinova’s concept of art. Elsewhere, in my analysis of Sokurov’s Russian Ark, I argue that the story of Eurydice is the story of time, that is, history, because she gives back to the spectator’s gaze the non-coincidence, the endless interruption, which separates past and future (Strukov 2009). Her dying does not recede into the past; instead, she vanishes into a limitless temporality, interminable space of time – ­intemporality. Her disappearance causes the dismemberment of Orpheus.10 In singing lyrics he yields the sovereignty of ‘I’ and becomes a ‘he’: through his performative act, he abandons his authority of the explorer (in our case, of the police detective) and turns himself into the object of mirrored presentation (the double). The transition causes a crisis of subjectivity; in this film, the crisis is shown through the use of mirrors and animated sequences as they signify the obliteration of the corporeal figure of subjectivity in favour of subjectivity as a fluid dream (hence, I come across the transition from mimetic view to symbolic vision). The gaze in Goddess is that of detour, errancy and obliteration. Lacan suggests that one can attain a goal only by stepping into the light, into ­language; it is there that appearance – t­he self as other, as a symbolic connection – i­s forced into being (1977: 50–97). Rather than reached, the object of desire is always displaced (the concept of accidental death in Goddess). The invisibility is articulated as a gap, a signifier of loss within the framework of language and the poem of lament (Zemfira’s song). Lament is not mourning, but rather a dissolution repeated to the point of infinity/intemporality (see the discussion of the perspective below). Yet the gaze of Orpheus produces a continuity effect in a world lacking spatial and temporary continuity. It creates a path of motion through realms of dreaming and afterlife; it is a mental action that is separated from the movement of the body, presented as a separation of the voice from the body with a shift from mimetic representation to symbolic presentation. Litvinova uses a specific discursive practice to achieve the effect of decoupling the voice from the body. This is a technique she shares with Muratova: from time to time their characters pronounce the same phrase over and over again (sometimes as many as five times), each time using a different intonation and musical cadence to accentuate the phrase. In her analysis of Muratova’s Brief Encounters (1967), Helen Ferguson contends that the main character’s ‘repetition of the phrase emphasizes the absurdity of the situation’ (2005: 252). Katerina Clark earlier noted that such repetitive patterns are drawn from opera and indicate Muratova’s tiredness of

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a p l e a f o r t he de a d (se l f ) 157 language and Soviet discourse (1995: 17). The non-ideological interpretation of this discursive strategy suggests that for Litvinova repetition is a means to test discourse. Phrases are repeated like pagan incantations, like a form of sampling with the effect of the phrases appearing as if no longer belonging to the speaker but having been temporarily borrowed from other people. Such phrases become phases of enunciation and they indicate the vibration of discourse. Distancing is evident in the way in which the speakers appear to be surprised when they hear their own phrases and in the way in which they address themselves, emphasising the selfpresence of the subject. Litvinova provides such distancing with particular physicality, which I find in her performances in Muratova’s and her own films and in her numerous appearances on television. She accentuates repetitive phrases by using particular gesticulation. It involves the inward movement of the hands as if Litvinova is trying to bring matter closer to her body, and then the outward movement of her hands, away from her face and mouth, as if she is handing over the materialised utterances – a­ s objects of her thinking – t­o the spectator. The movement – ­inward and outward – ­breaks up in the middle and bounces back as does a ray of light when it comes across a reflective surface on its way. Such a reflective property is assigned to the subject itself, who functions as a mirror to produce reflections, repetitions and doubles. Faina speaks while she gazes at her own hands, which seem to be extensions of thought whereby her hands appear as both her own and someone else’s: the camera presents her body in such a way that only the face and the hands remain visible. In such instances, the film demonstrates how the discourse speaks through the subject, whose function is no longer to contain discourse but to provide its own commentary – ­meta-discourse. In the symbolic mode, Litvinova’s gesticulation is indicative of her engagement with non-knowledge whereby her repetitions are her responses to the ruptures in discourse. The movement of Litvinova’s hands is a haptic documentation of the visual path of the gaze.11 Were it possible to trace the movement of her hands with a marker, it would reveal that her hands draw figures in the air in the shape of a zigzag. The zigzag is a geometric idiom, a grapheme of Litvinova’s voice as embodied in her physical circumlocution. The zigzag is a visible phenomenon that interrupts the legibility of the narrative discourse and mimetic representation. (The main narrative event of the film – t­ he murder–suicide – i­ n all its multiple versions, is also a zigzag insofar as it disrupts continuity and depends on the repetitive return.) In his study of relation as ‘a minimal thing’, by employing Derrida’s notion of the zigzag as ‘a detour and a surprising turnabout’, Rodolphe Gasché asserts that the zigzag is ‘elicited by the fact that the movement beyond

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must constantly negotiate the text to be left behind. To the extent that the transition to a beyond is the effect of a traversal of the text, the passage in question commences an unending commerce between the text left behind and its beyond, which is all the more intimate since the possibility of the new text cannot usually be derived from the first’ (1999: 244). Such transitions and traversals enable the move beyond the text towards a new text which, I argue, may not necessarily be a text but will be available to us as a text, in the same way as non-knowledge may be apprehended as knowledge but will remain in the form that is not knowledge until it is zigzagged by the subject’s ontology that continues to erupt at moments of selfpresence. The uncanny replicative pattern of Litvinova’s gesticulation characterises the ghostly path of non-knowledge, which suggests a blurring or duplicity of subjectivity with the opaque apparitions of the voice and the gaze insofar as it makes nothing (air) into something (thing) as a sensory process and as a way of appearing/seeming. The resulting effect is a proposition that thought and signification are performances of languid and vaporous being. Their purpose is to translate the actual into the abstract and to indicate the presence of non-knowledge as the energy that overwhelms the subject and makes the body speak directly (see Chapter 8 on how such speaking is presented as dance). This is achieved thanks to the use of the direct appeal: characters speak directly to the camera, acknowledging the presence of the spectator, and establishing the regime of meta-reference in the symbolic mode. The body appears in the simultaneous role of the surface used for ex-scribing meaning as well as the ex-scriber of such a meaning. The resulting subjectivity is characterised by ambiguity and indeterminacy, causing and reacting to the ruptures of discourse. The doubling and multiplication of being inevitably results in transcendental states whereby the subject is compelled to question its own ontology and purpose. These suppositions are evident on all levels, including the ways in which Faina’s dreams are framed. If the first dream is introduced as just a dream, the subsequent dreams are referred to as ‘dream adaptations’ [ekranizatsiia sna]. The Russian term ‘ekranizatsiia’ (screenisation) implies the transfer of meaning onto a screen, and it normally designates an intermedial connection, for example, between a literary text and its screen version. As I noted above, it is a transition and traversal beyond the text towards a new ontology of meaning, non-knowledge. ‘Ekranizatsiia’ connotes a particular process of signification whereby meaning is produced by performing one state within/in relation to another state with the subsequent impact of doubling and meta-multiplication. In the psychoanalytical model, such performative aspects of presentation and associated multiplication of

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ontology are symptomatic of the uncanny, which, as Freud notes, is always about strange repetitiveness. For Freud, it has to do with the return of the repressed and the return of the dead, the ‘constant recurrence of the same thing’ (1985: 356), and ‘a compulsion to repeat’ (1985: 360). It is, indeed, this notion of recurrence that leads Freud to his theory of the death drive. In particular, he notes how the feeling of uncanniness lies in the uncertainty that, in its turn, opens onto the space of the demonic. Freud suggests the uncanny encompasses woman, silence and the desirability of death. Freud shows how the uncanny spells the demonic rhythm in the repetition of the same features and/or vicissitudes. In the symbolic mode this function is assigned to Faina’s mannerisms, gesticulation and speech patterns/detours whereby verbal performances/repetitions evoke the folding and vibrations of discourse. Through doubling and meta-doubling strategies, the film presents repetitive cycles of self-defeating behaviour. In Goddess different stories are stories of couples and individuals compelled to fight to the death and of pleasure in self-destruction via acts of self-sacrificial suicide, which is a form of post-apocalyptic longing. Death (drive) is inextricably linked with writing/performing and the selfpresence of the subject. In this respect, Litvinova’s characters are similar to Balabanov’s – i­n fact, Litvinova was originally planned for the female leading role in his Morphine. As pharmakons, they signify a category of flickering, twitching, doubling, multiplying and disorienting play in conceptual oppositions such as remedy and poison. Pharmakon designates writing as preceding knowledge whereby writing is a form of zigzagged thinking embodied in Litvinova’s gesticulation. The ambivalence of pharmakon constitutes its mediality whereby non-knowledge appears as the movement, the locus and the play, and, finally, as the production of difference in the post-apocalyptic world. The posthumous subjectivity inhabiting the post-apocalyptic world is characterised by events that I define as dyadic deaths, or ‘murder-suicides’. Here the dyad, or Badiou’s Two, is used to denote inter-subjectivity and not to denote symbiosis: it is about opening the human horizon to the reaches of intimacy – ­personal and transcendental. Goddess documents a fundamental dissociative split of the subject into many, into the multiple, which is symptomatic of the symbolic mode with its emphasis on discourse which is always vibrating and trembling, and living is framed as a series of transits and entrances. Nancy writes: The soul trembles to be the soul itself – ­and to be it through the other. That its determination occurs in trembling means that this determination is not imprinted on it by an alien force, but that it takes place only as the perturbance of substance by

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the other – w ­ hich is itself . . . The trembling, the trance, is also a vibration – a­ lmost a rhythm of the soul, a palpitation. This rhythm is nothing but the rhythm of its sleep, the beating of sensation in sleep and in the imminence of the passage to awakening. (Nancy 1993: 30)

Here sleep, or being in the other, reflected, zigzagged realm (and hallucination), produces signification of transcendence whereby the topology of affects – ­the zigzagged path of discourse embodied in the gesticulation of the multiple subject – a­ ppears as a cosmology of rhythms and vibrations of meaning, of states and events, in an environment in which the relationship between infinite and finite is incarnated in different entities in an entirely reciprocal, mirrored manner. The logic of repetition, doubling and repair, with its subliminal forces of mythological ontology, blurs the boundaries between states and events, including death/dreaming (when the gaze ‘shows itself’, according to the psychoanalytical model) and insomnia/lack of dreaming (when the gaze is locked in its own indeterminacy, in the symbolic mode) as modes of knowledge and non-knowledge. The two states differ in the same way as mourning differs from melancholia, whereby the melancholic displays a deficit of self-recognition. Insomnia provides persistency of vision in the absence of the object of the gaze, or mimesis. This transposition is outlined in the evoked myth of Orpheus. As Orpheus and Eurydice continue to switch positions, disappearances metamorphose into appearances, leading to new disappearances. For example, the scene of Faina’s death and the disappearance of her double is attended by a policewoman, which is a reference to the original rupture and filmic predisposition: Faina attending a death scene at the beginning of the film. This metamorphosis enables the transmutation of the visual paradigm: having followed Faina, her double and the policewoman, the camera now abandons the phantasmagorical spaces of Moscow and moves to a completely new location – a­ n undesignated section of a pine tree forest. The change is indicative of a hallucinatory trip that is present in Voloshin’s Nirvana and absent in Balabanov’s Morphine, hence I argue, in the latter case, the whole film attains the status of a hallucination, of an historical nightmare. In Goddess, the camera shows a man-made forest; the trees are perfectly aligned, providing a textbook illustration for the concept of linear perspective and linear time, only to be transposed, mirrored and zigzagged in the symbolic mode.12 The transposition – ­Faina’s running in the forest while constantly looking back at the camera, assuming that the spectator is a new double, or conversely that she is the spectator’s double – ­renders the forest as the ultimate void in which Faina makes her final (dis-)

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a p l e a f o r t he de a d (se l f ) 161 appearance. Although I say ‘Faina’, I must underscore that the spectator is not certain whether the appearing subject is Faina, her double, the new reincarnation (the policewoman) or, in fact, Litvinova herself just playing Litvinova. In the symbolic mode, such doubling produces the effect of multiplicity – L ­ itvinova playing Litvinova playing Litvinova – ­subjectivity appearing as the infinity mirror effect. In the forest, the spectator encounters the four horsemen of the apocalypse – ­they are presented as four figures dressed in black suits: male triplets and a woman whose looks resemble the singer Zemfira.13 After Faina’s death, the spectator meets them again, although this time one of the triplets is missing, thus, implying Faina’s own sycophantic dualistic position. Litvinova, the director, is preoccupied with the question of the relationship between cosmos and death. She problematises the association of the cosmic figure with the moral law by means of redefining the archetypical dimensions of the figure of god and nature. (Zviagintsev puts forward a similar proposition in The Return: the father reveals himself as a Christ-figure in an enchanted forest away from the main areas of the island where there are no signs of human visitation.) Litvinova, the actor, places herself in the discursive position of a goddess appealing to God: an ontological corrector of morality conceived as a system of abstracted, symbolised ideas. Such multiplications and the construction of non-knowledge as meta-multiplication speaks to the concerns of Voloshin’s Nirvana, which I analyse in the following chapter, whereby the meta-level is evident in the system of references and iterations.

Notes   1. At a first glance, reading myth in Badiou’s framework of truth may appear paradoxical. See Boer (2011) on how truth and myth are reconciled in Badiou’s modelling.   2. On Russian glamour and celebrity, see Goscilo and Strukov (2010).   3. See Chapter 8 for the analysis of dance and non-knowledge in the symbolic mode.   4. In Voloshin’s Nirvana, the function of parental guidance is assigned to the star of Soviet cinema Tat’iana Samoilova (Chapter 8). This suggests the imperative to reconnect with the parent/Soviet period as part of normalisation of Soviet discourse, which is characteristic of the Putin era.   5. In Cultural Studies terms, this return reveals the desire to comprehend the Soviet past.  6. Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor (1845–1918) was a German mathematician, inventor of set theory, which has become a fundamental theory in mathematics. Cantor worked out the importance of one-to-one

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c­ orrespondence between the members of two sets and defined infinite and well-ordered sets.   7. See Chapter 10, in which a similar slide-show is used as a discursive rupture.  8. [Zdravstviu, mama! / Plokhie novosti . . . / Geroi pogibnet / V nachale povesti . . . / I mne ostanutsia / Ego somneniia / Ia pishu o nem . . . stikhotvoreniie . . . / Liubov’ . . . kak sluchainaia smert’ . . . liubov’ . . . / Zdravstvui, mama . . . / Opiat’ ne ochen’ . . . / Tak slozhno byt’ . . . / Khoroshei docher’iu! / Tvoi otkrytki . . . / Ia poluchaiu . . . / Ty rasskazhi emu . . . kak ia skuchaiu . . . / Liubov’ kak sluchainaia smert’ . . . ].  9. Igor’ Vdovin wrote the music for this song as well as working on the soundtrack for other films, such as Aleksei German Jr’s Garpastum (2005), Filipp Iankovskii’s The Swordbearer (2005), Anna Melikian’s Mermaid (2007) and others. 10. In The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature, Ihab Hassan uses the dismemberment and regeneration of Orpheus as his metaphor for a radical crisis in art, culture and consciousness, which prefigures postmodern literature. He advances the metaphor to consider the changes in the cultural canon (Hassan 1982). I utilise the concept of the canon and body in Chapter 3 in my analysis of Balabanov’s Morphine. 11. A similar localisation of the ego and the death drive in the hand is used in Iankovskii’s Swordbearer. The film tells the story of a young man named Sasha (Artem Tkachenko) who makes use of a prosthetic sword that spontaneously grows out of his right hand in moments of rage. Sasha uses his sword for protection and retribution as he avenges members of his family and immediate social circle as well as complete strangers. The director exploits the psychoanalytical association of hands with male genitalia and sexuality (as with the hands of the Professor in Goddess), revealing them in a fragmented and fetishised form, with many images deconstructing and recomposing Sasha’s hand in evocative ways. Sasha’s hand is simultaneously an instrument of communication, a sexual organ, a weapon, a prosthetic and, finally, a physical wound – ­it is permanently bandaged – a­ nd psychological trauma. 12. This is similar to Raushenbakh’s consideration of the so-called inverted perspective; see Chapter 6. 13. Zviagintsev makes use of the four horsemen of the apocalypse in Elena, see Chapter 4.

C H A PT E R 8

Body in Crisis and Posthumous Subjectivity: Igor’ Voloshin’s Nirvana (2008)

In the previous chapter, I investigated the idea of doubling performance and zigzagged gesture as one that defines the ontology of posthumous subjectivity. In this chapter, I focus on the relation of posthumous subjectivity to an embodied experience through the connotations of ‘zigzagged’ dance as an affective state overwhelming the subject on its journey towards the intemporality.1 The trajectory connects to Badiou’s conceptualisation of subjectivity as an event, occurrence and situation, and I move towards such an understanding of subjectivity in film by revisiting the idea of the ‘body without organs’. It designates a state after or before existence, a stage in the finite–infinite relationship in the process of becoming without ever attaining that goal. Deleuze and Guattari use the idea to describe what they call the ‘plane of consistency of desire’. It is the field of immanence of desire, as opposed to its surfaces and stratifications, where a subject is born. The body without organs is a site of non-coded flows, like the full body of the earth, where the fusion of internal and external occurs. For Deleuze and Guattari, the body without organs is ‘not a notion or concept but a practice or set of practices’ (1988: 149–50). It becomes apparent through dismantling practices that include the hypochondriac body, the paranoid body, the schizophrenic body, the drugged body and the masochist body. They encourage us to see the body without organs as the body outside any determinate state, open to actualisation in the symbolic mode. Following Deleuze and Guattari, I aim to explore the possibility of conceiving the subject cinematically as a mode, as a system of gestures and affects: ‘waves and vibrations, migrations, thresholds and gradients, intensities produced in a given type of substance starting from a given matrix’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 153). In my view, the body without organs is first and foremost a performing body, a body that performs itself by means of itself, whereby the boundaries between internal and external structures are blurred and the body becomes a continuous act of inscribing meaning. An analogy can be found in the thought of the

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Japanese Mahayana Buddhists who realised the non-substantiality of their own person, the fact that the ego-self is a construct. They taught how to ‘see’ the non-substantiality, or non-knowledge, that pervades all being. In this act of ‘seeing’, they draw our attention to the void of subjectivity that finds its locus in the functions of the body. The void is indicative of the release of the subject from the state of suffering: while the cessation of suffering is described as complete peace, the movement of the self towards such a state is full of convulsions, revulsions and spasmodic reactions. In this chapter, I use Voloshin’s film to analyse how the performing body appears as a form of ‘seeing’ non-knowledge in the symbolic mode. Nirvana is the debut film of Igor’ Voloshin (b. 1974, Sevastopol). After graduating from VGIK in 2000 he directed short films at the Sverdlovsks film studio (Yekaterinburg). His documentary The Lips was shown at the Rotterdam Film Festival and the Hubert Balls Foundation awarded him a grant to create a film script. Nirvana is about Alisa (Ol’ga Sutulova), a young Muscovite, who moves to St Petersburg; the moment when she decides to leave Moscow is visually orchestrated as a dance in a night club. This is a discursive rupture, metaphysical intermittency, in the overall monde atone which celebrates inertia, obscurity, flatness, nondescript and eventless mundanity. In St Petersburg Alisa meets another young woman, Val (Mariia Shalaeva), and her boyfriend Valera (Artur Smol’ianinov), nicknamed Valera the Dead [Valera mertvyi]. The three of them rent rooms from a ghost-like landlady in a neglected period flat. Alisa works as a nurse in a local hospital and also privately looks after some elderly patients, including Margarita Ivanovna played by the fabulous Tat’iana Samoilova.2 Val works as a bartender in a glamorous nightclub where she regularly obtains drugs from a trusted dealer. Val and Valera share a needle, and eventually Val and Alisa start sharing Valera. He does not have an occupation and runs up impossible debts with Larus (Mikhail Evlanov), a local Mafioso.3 Larus abducts Valera, and Val and Alisa negotiate a deal to release him. In order to raise ransom money, the women turn to their female friends, including Margarita Ivanovna, nurses in the hospital and some prostitutes. When Valera is released, Alisa and Val bring him home; however, he soon runs away with all their savings. Devastated, Val commits suicide by taking an overdose of drugs. Alisa, who misses her friend, starts taking drugs because she hopes that in hallucinations she can be reunited with Val. Alisa’s actions are serendipitously similar to those of the professor in Litvinova’s Goddess who develops a special substance, injections of which let him spend time with his dead wife in afterlife. Nirvana has been praised for its extraordinary costumes, makeup, tattoos and its use of prosthetics. The costumes were created by

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bod y in cr is is a nd p o s t humo us s u b j e c t i v i t y 165 Nadezhda Vasil’eva, who also designed costumes for such films as Oleg Kovalov’s Dark Night (2001), Bortko’s The Master and Margarita (2005), Balabanov’s Cargo 200 (2007) and many others. She was Balabanov’s wife until his death in 2013. These elements of presentation constitute a meta-level of signification in the film and are part of the film’s strategy of externalisation of interiority – e­ x-scription – w ­ hich I discuss in detail below as well as in Chapter 9 on Veledinskii’s Alive, where I focus on the process of ex-scription in relation to trauma. These costumes and makeup – ­the masks4 – ­relate to the phantasmagorical architecture of St Petersburg, contributing to the myth of the city as the northern Atlantis. Nirvana, like many other films produced in the post-Soviet and Putin era, conceives of the city of St Petersburg as a discursive rupture, an intemporality (e.g., Sergei Sel’anov’s White Monday (1990), Iurii Mamin’s Window to Paris (1993), Balabanov’s Brother (1997) and Of Freaks and Men (1998), Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2003), Aleksei Uchitel’s The Stroll (2003), Oksana Bychkova’s Piter FM (2006)).5 Serebrennikov’s St George’s Day assigns the idea of intermittency to a single day/event – S ­ t George’s Day, a short period in the medieval calendar when serfs were allowed to change their overlords – ­Nirvana views contemporary ontology as continuous intemporality, as rebellious vibration. Uchitel’s The Stroll, which lasts ninety minutes and, with the exception of minor detours, takes place over the same time along the blazing summer streets of St Petersburg, maps intermittency as urban topology whereby the movement through the city depends on unforeseen events such as the incursions of passers-by, rendering film movement as post-evental ontology. Nirvana, like The Stroll, relies on circular and zigzagged movement as a means to counteract historicisation and mimetic representation. The use of masks reveals the multifocal status of subjectivities and also illuminates the ambiguity of St Petersburg as Russia’s cultural capital. Nirvana puts forward a carnivalised image of the city, whereby the storyline might be viewed as a fantasy or, in fact, an hallucination experienced by one of the characters.6 Hallucination as disturbance of subjectivity is utilised in Balabanov’s Morphine, and in our analysis of Goddess I demonstrated how the main character’s ownership of her own dreams validates her subjectivity as an evental site, or the site of the sacrificial horror which defies mimesis as non-ritual. In both Goddess and Nirvana the spatialisation of subjectivity in the dream-world calls for performative gestures which can redouble ontology as corporeal metaphysics. From the Cultural Studies angle, such a disposition permits transgressions of gender (evident in costumes and makeup), spaces and time, rendering

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them as a series of flows and folds. Nirvana underscores the baroque style of St Petersburg in its choice of interiors, costumes and soundtrack, whereby the baroque represents the grand style of Russian modernity. All the characters appear in full makeup throughout the whole film (with the exception of one scene analysed in detail below), implying that the time of the carnival has become the chief temporal plane and that travesty is the main cultural code. It is within these configurations that the symbolic mode of the film is actualised. The two female characters fluctuate between two types of subjectivity revealed through their relation to death. Each of them appears as a multiple subjectivity because it relates to Two rather than One (Badiou 2012). The women eschew the ethereal life – A ­ lisa moves to St Petersburg and Val belongs to the underworld of the northern capital – ­and in doing so they enter death as an impulse to live beyond social conventions and beyond life itself. Just as in Goddess, each woman performs a saintly sacrifice for the sake of her partner, which means that she stands for the type of death that comes with fully living out the passions of life and embracing non-being as a form of love, or non-knowledge. The storyline and characterisation, including the use of costumes and makeup, suggest that the pair of women should be viewed as doubles; however, unlike the traditional Doppelgänger, neither of them is malicious. The double characterises different stages in the life of the same person, for example, Val’s story is a ‘preview’ of Alisa future story when she will have become a drug addict. Similarly, Larus is the person Valera is yet to become in the future. This creates ahistorical transfigurations of time, or temporal folds. In Serebrennikov’s St George’s Day different characters are used to explore multiple subjectivity: the three figures of the main character, Liubov, and of her son, Andrei, are random variables, distributions and variances of the self, occupying multiple temporal zones. The transition to such a multiple realm is marked by border crossings: in St George’s Day it is the crossing of the space between Moscow and Iur’ev; in Nirvana between this world and hallucination. The purpose of the crossing is to come back, in zigzagged movement, because this world is rendered as a hallucination per se, evoking Badiou’s notion of ‘the event as trans-being’ (2004: 99). Alisa and Val are immersed in life, albeit in different ways, and each of them confronts mortality in her professional setting as well as living her life in a way that is somewhat lethal. Death is not simply the end of life, but an immersion into the pulsation of Life, symbolised by the waters of the Neva River and the bridge that connects two realms of existence. The notion of disappearance and fluidification along with the worship of rivers

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bod y in cr is is a nd p o s t humo us s u b j e c t i v i t y 167 and lakes is examined in Fedorchenko’s Silent Souls. In Chapter 1, I determined that in Sokurov’s Taurus Lenin’s consumption of his own body indicates the construction of posthumous subjectivity in self-presence when the subject is involved in the process of de-realisation, no longer occupying a particular chronology or narrative. Each present moment that the subject refers to is a caesura, or a rupture, which denotes the impossibility of the event in its glaring totality. Or, as Badiou puts it, ‘it is when you decide upon what exists that you bind your thought to Being. That is precisely when, unconscious of it all, you are under the imperative of an orientation’ (2006: 57). The imagery of the self as transitory ontology and the subject’s movement across time whereby One is either in subtraction, as in Taurus, in excess, as in The Target, or in mirrored duplication, as in Goddess, is present in the final scene of Nirvana. Val has committed suicide and Alisa has injected her first dose of heroin. (She obtains drugs from Larus, her chaperone in afterlife, in the same way as Faina seeks drugs from the Professor in Goddess.) The women meet on a bridge across the Neva; neither of them is wearing makeup since they have already shifted from the politics of identity to the ontology of subjectivity, which becomes possible only within the framework of hallucination, that is, the reversal of intentionality which ascribes transcendental meaning to the scenes in ‘real’ St Petersburg. The pulsation of life is depicted through vibrant images such as the vistas of the city as well as through audio-performances.7 In her death, Val is configured into cosmic, impersonal life substance, available to Alisa only in the form of the voice, as an acoustic hallucination.8 This is the disembodied voice, the inner voice in its materiality, the twofold voice (speech and song), the doubling voice (the zigzagged voice), which, as I discuss in other chapters, is the jouissance of the other appearing at the moment of self-presence, always existing in relation to something. In the following scene, Alisa enters Val’s room and picks up her friend’s favourite book – T ­ ove Jansson’s The Moomins (1945–93), which has cult status in Russia, apparent in the appropriation of the title in the name of an extremely popular late Soviet and Russian rock band Mumii Trol’.9 The allusion puts forward another reading of the system of characters in the film, that of a family, with Alisa looking back at her own childhood. The reversed gaze (the ‘in-relation-to-something’ gaze) suggests a transcendental view of events whereby transformations of subjectivity are a result of a change in intentionality, a rupture, which renders all notions ambiguous and, in the symbolic mode, focuses on being in the post-evental state. Hallucination produces signification in the transcendent realm whereby topology of affects is a cosmology of rhythms and vibrations of meaning

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in an environment in which the relationship between dream-like and actual, infinite and finite is enacted in reciprocal manner – ­the zigzag. The film shows a baroque patchwork of durations and textures that indicate a necessity to grasp the infinite by means of an ontological slowing down. (I explore the connection between baroque and body in the symbolic mode below.) The narrative as zigzagged introspection enables inversions and multiplicity. For example, in the scene of negotiations with Larus, he first rejects Val’s offer of ransom money to release Valera, and his motivation is to help Val who, in his view, is trapped in an abusive relationship with Valera. Larus recalls Valera’s nickname – ­the Dead – ­in order to accentuate the futility and fatality of Val’s choice and to bring into question Val’s and Valera’s status as the living dead.10 Their meeting takes place in a baroque palace where the walls are painted in pure white, a symbol of infinity. After they strike a deal, Larus takes the girls to a nightclub. The scene in the white palace and the scene in the dark space of the nightclub are separated by a sequence in which Larus performs a strange dance. He dances in a room which is designed like a stage: there is no furniture, only four screens at the back of the room. Strong light emanates through the ornamental slits in the screens, leaving undulating shadows on the floor. The inverted colour scheme – ­white shadows on the black floor – ­suggests that the dance takes place in a liminal space, a kind of purgatory, where the contrasting colours resonate with the emotional state of the characters: dark-haired Alisa and blonde Val symbolise these contrasting affective states. The straight rays of light – ­the yang – ­are juxtaposed with the rippling shadows – t­he yin; they denote dynamism and harmony between contrasting elements. (The Japanese equivalents are in and yo.) Fraleigh writes about the philosophical origins of contemporary Japanese dance: ‘It plays between emptiness and form, light and dark, beauty and ugliness in its cathartic transformation of the body, tendering the Eastern metaphysical origins of Zen’ (1999: 25).11 The room where Larus performs is like a shrine, housing Shinto, not religion but spirituality, not law but practice. He is wearing clothes in the form of traditional samurai armour, except for the headpiece, which has been replaced with an ‘Iro’, or Mohican, a punk hairstyle. The dance includes instances of tremor, convulsions, clawed movements of the hands and paralytic, tetanic poses, whereby near stasis is rapidly alternated by frenzy. Larus moves in a jagged, multidirectional way, gesturing at the impossibility of releasing fully the tension trapped inside the body with its limited neuromotor capacities. (The seizures of Larus’s body evoke the convulsions of the drug user when undergoing an opiate withdrawal. This is a theme repeated continuously throughout

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bod y in cr is is a nd p o s t humo us s u b j e c t i v i t y 169 the film.) In Larus’s dance the centre of gravity is low – ­it is connected to the earth, the feminine and the eternal – i­t is a lot lower than in European dance, which is influenced by ballet such as the Mariinskii School in St Petersburg. In its rejection of all form, and the excessive, twisted and dehumanising movements Larus’s dance is reminiscent of butoh. Butoh is a dance form that developed in post-war Japan when Japanese society and culture were in transition.12 It started as a reaction against enforced Americanisation and evolved as a form that rejects Eastern and Western conventions,13 expressing intense emotions through controlled and often distorted movements. It presents grotesque images of death, destruction and the dark side of the soul – ­it is a dance of darkness. In Khomeriki’s A Tale, the tango is the dance of light/knowledge, whereas in Nirvana butoh is the dance of darkness/non-knowledge. Influenced by German Expressionism, with its interest in the game of light and shadow (Litvinova has similar concerns in Goddess), butoh is about the exploration of the archetypal values and gestures of Japan. It often encompasses taboo topics, including homosexuality, extreme or absurd environments, and is traditionally performed in white body makeup, with or without an audience. Its origins have been attributed to the Japanese dance legends Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. Butoh arrived in France in the 1980s and became a prominent form of postmodern dance. It enunciated a style of surface and of bodily musculature, negating the philosophical depth and social critique associated with modernist dance. In Europe, butoh instigated a discourse about the notions of the nervous and the neuromuscular in dance and culture: the body emerges as an intense preoccupation with the body of muscles, tendons and fascia – ­the affective body. Published for the 1985 Butoh Festival in Paris, Baudrillard’s essay on butoh employs three main descriptors: ‘revulsion, convulsion and repulsion’ (2013: 52–9) and repetitions and repair signify being in the post-evental state. Following Baudrillard, I view butoh and its uses in Nirvana as a form of rhetoric, a series of material effects manifest in bodies, nerves and signification, whereby convulsions of the flesh refer to the vibrations of culture in the symbolic mode. The phallic, erectile hardening, or tetanisation of the body produces a spectacle of the revenant whereby pulsating light and rhythmic sound accentuate such bodily convulsions/cultural vibrations. Butoh reveals a neuromuscular arrangement of cultural material that performs through electrical shocks, originating from outside the body in the mystical outer realm. Larus’s butoh body shudders into action like Frankenstein’s monster, revealing layers of dried, burnt and cracked skin. The effect is achieved thanks to the use of heavy makeup and prosthetic eyes: the actor wears coloured lenses whereby the pupils have been

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replaced with slits in the shape of the cross. The prosthetic eyes accentuate Larus’s gaze: it is comparable with the upward gaze of butoh dancers (Fraleigh 1999: 5); and the notion of the prosthetic eye/constructed gaze, as in Proshkin’s The Miracle, denotes the shift from mimetic representation to symbolic abstractedness. Larus has the gaze of a monster, a monster in pain: in the preceding scene the spectator learns that Larus had been abducted by gangsters who locked him in his car and set it on fire. He miraculously survived the attack; however, his living status is brought into question when Alisa and Val inspect the car, which is now permanently installed in the middle of the baroque palace as a reminder of the attack and a monument to personal trauma and symbol of the subject’s death. (Similarly, when negotiating with Larus, Val enquires whether her boyfriend is still alive. Instead of using his name, she uses his nickname, ‘Valera the Dead’, or ‘Dead man’, which in Russian produces an oxymoron, ‘Mertvyi zhivoi?’ (Is the Dead man alive?), problematising the ontological status of his subjectivity as well as herself as the speaking subject, communicating across planes of existence.) The memorialisation of trauma is evident in how the burnt out car is displayed in Larus’s living space: set against the whitewashed walls of the room, it is like a centrepiece of an installation in a museum of contemporary art. It suggests the reduction of the contemporary condition to an artefact. It also relates the contemporary practice to the bigger museum, which is the city itself: like Sokurov’s Russian Ark, Nirvana shows subjectivity in relation to the wider context of Russian history symbolised by the city of St Petersburg. The cracks in the paint of the car are replicated in Larus’s scars; they do not produce an effect of mechanisation but rather of encapsulation, whereby the body is a formless entity with no traces of identity. It is a body of the dead that requires a supporting, externalised structure of tendons to sustain the self. Such defiance of structure, shape and form makes a gesture towards formlessness, liberating taboo desires. Larus desires Val; however, when he greets her he addresses her as his daughter, which implies symbolic incest. Another reading of Larus’s character is the confusion of the masculine and feminine principles, which is characteristic of butoh. His makeup and clothes suggest transgression of gender.14 ‘The dark feminine principle, subconscious spontaneous life, is the main metaphor for butoh, its aesthetic core’ (Fraleigh 1999: 58). Indeed, Larus displays some elements of such dark spontaneity – f­or example, his love of spectacle and decisions made on the spur of the moment which defy the rationality, symbolised by Alisa. The constellation of characters in Nirvana, and particularly the use of the prosthetic and facial perfor-

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bod y in cr is is a nd p o s t humo us s u b j e c t i v i t y 171 mance, can be traced back to the late Soviet film Mister Designer (1988, directed by Oleg Tepstov, script by Iurii Arabov), based on Aleksandr Grin’s novel Grey Automobile (1925). In the clear parallel with the story of Frankenstein, the film features an artist who works with a live model to create a mannequin, who eventually replaces the live woman. The doll outlives the model, who dies of tuberculosis. The evil mannequin pursues the model in a car, which symbolises the fear of modernisation and fear of creation. The face of the mannequin is a malformed mask; when the mannequin speaks through the mask, the facial expressions are similar to the prosthetic face of Larus. The similarity between the films is also found in the use of the Doppelgänger, entailing the phenomenon of multiple subjectivity and zigzagged, inverted ontologies. (The inversion of ontologies refers to the mythic deity of Japan, the Great Sun Goddess, Omikami Amaterasu, and ultimately defines the mystical atmosphere in the film with its internally tuned rhythms and vibrations.) Similarly, the butoh body on screen releases aesthetic urges by squashing organic life and supplanting it with abstract transcriptions of spasmodic movement. In Nirvana, the tensions inside the body are brought to the surface, where they are placed in the form of scars, prosthetics, tattoos and makeup. It is a way of displaying affects – ­in the post-mimetic regime – ­and the structure of the body with its muscles, nerves and tendons. It is a way of revealing the viscera to the audience, making the body a hollow cathedral, a vibrating cultural membrane. Baudrillard perceived within butoh ‘the beauty of écorchés’ – ­the cadaverous exposition of muscles, nerves and tendons (2013: 58). Indeed, in Jacques-Fabien Gautier d’Agoty’s anatomic illustrations, the body appears as an atlas of organs, whereby internal organs are inscribed onto the surface of the body, the skin, and perceived from multiple perspectives. The opened flesh is structured as waves, connecting muscular nodes, which is a symbol of knowledge emanating from intersections of cultural discourses. In Chapter 3, I demonstrate how Balabanov explores the aesthetic potential of meaning construction beyond dramatic semblance, character and catharsis. He views truth as a rhetoricised performance and the spectacularity of discourse. When presenting a fragmented body with open flesh, Balabanov derives from the medieval practice of torture not only a political statement, but also a claim about the persuasive probabilities of cinema to reveal ‘truth’. Here filmic enunciation yields elliptical rhetorical ‘truths’, whereby transcendental interference is an outcome of the probabilities that compose the province of discourse. Similarly, in Nirvana Larus’s body enables multiple readings due to the process of externalisation and affectation. His scars are emblems of ­traumatic

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experience; they are woven together in the same way as the flayed flesh in d’Agoty’s images, turning the film spectator into a member of the audience in an anatomic theatre.15 The dance is meant to evoke suffering as well as to provide release from pain.16 Fraleigh (1999) notes in butoh a particular style of inwardness that is manifested through gesture, that is, an external movement. In Nirvana, the movement of the dancer is similar to the movement of the speaker in Litvinova’s Goddess. Litvinova’s character accentuates repetitive phrases by using particular inward–outward gesticulation, which enables the subject to produce reflections, repetitions and doubles. In such instances, the film demonstrates how the discourse speaks through the subject, whose function is no longer to contain discourse but to provide its own commentary. In the symbolic mode, the opening of the body, the dance and Litvinova’s gesticulation is indicative of the engagement with non-knowledge whereby repetitions appear as responses to the ruptures in discourse. The dual, repetitive nature of butoh is in synch with hauntological repetition when the reverent disappears only to make a comeback.17 The butoh dance has the purpose of releasing the body’s formless energy: some dancers deliberately crash into sharp surfaces in order to release the pain and keep their body in place; others move in such a way that they reveal the inner structure of their body, particularly the skeleton, the emotional carcass of the body. In Nirvana, screens are used to demarcate the space of Larus’s pain, and his prosthetic eyes suggest an inverted, anguished gaze. Doubling appears as a form of dance in that repetitive movements are counteracted by variations. Alisa, like Larus, is also a car crash survivor. Alisa has scars on her back, along the vertebrae, which suggests suspension not of the gaze (Larus) but of subjectivity (Alisa), and also falling apart, multiplying (Alisa, Val, Valera and so on). The emptying and the inner instability of Alisa’s subjectivity demands that she has an external carcass – ­symbolised by her wearing a black dress, the lacing of which is reminiscent of an orthopaedic support. Alisa’s (feminine) story of surviving a car crash and requiring support for her spine is a reference to Frida Kahlo’s 1925 bus accident when the painter suffered injuries, including a broken spinal column and a metal handrail, which pierced her uterus, compromising her reproductive capacity. Nirvana evokes not only Kahlo’s story but also her paintings. For instance, the construction of Alisa’s dress calls to mind the composition of the painting entitled The Broken Column (1944), which Kahlo produced at the same time as butoh emerged in Japan. In the painting, a structure (a column) is inserted into the body to provide stasis and surgical bandages supply external support, whilst the body and the gaze commu-

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bod y in cr is is a nd p o s t humo us s u b j e c t i v i t y 173 nicate the subject’s anguish via movement. The tension between the two states results in ruptures: the split in the torso of the women in Khalo’s painting resembles an earthquake fissure and corresponds to the dissecting gaze of the anatomist/painter in d’Agoty’s images. To be precise, in Kahlo’s painting the opening in the body is echoed in the ravines cut into the earth behind the subject; their shape parallels the ‘waves’ of Larus’s scars and the flayed flesh of anatomic paintings, and reminds the viewer of the horror of surgical intervention. The white surgical bands in the painting correspond to the black lace of Alisa’s dress, whereas the function of internal structure is delegated to the metal bridge on which Alisa appears wearing this dress. It is a bridge across the Neva where Val and Alisa meet in afterlife. The women are wearing dresses revealing their unmarked, unhurt bodies: the release from suffering and trauma takes place in the arena of hallucination. The weight of their pain is taken by the structure of the bridge: it is a metal construction, the semi-circular shape of which reminds the spectator of the cervical curve, the zigzagged circularity of the uterus, as well as the shape of the rising sun. Its other function is to show how the weight of pain is lifted off the characters and is now supported not by their vertebrae, but by the metal bridge: trauma has been shifted from the individual onto the city, and generally onto modernity which is symbolised by this bridge. Earlier in the film, the deteriorating vertebrae are used as a phallic symbol, and allude to the exposed vertebrae in d’Agoty’s image as a stylised basis of an anatomic structure (this is the function of the burnt car in Larus’s palace – ­an exposed mechanical skeleton­– surrounded by the dynamic baroque lines of the interior walls). In Nirvana, the correlation between the inside and the outside is similar to the zigzagged gesticulation in Goddess, eschewing dichotomies of knowledge (stasis) and embracing non-knowledge (movement). The choreographic relationship between cultural stasis and the subject’s movement is established in an earlier scene in Nirvana. Alisa and Val get caught in a fire when a group of ‘bad’ gangsters ambushes a ‘good’ group. The women are threatened with rape; they escape only after they kill their attackers.18 In this scene Alisa and Val go through a near-death experience, on the one hand, and cause death, on the other. The existential confusion requires an intervention of the higher authority, and so the subsequent scene shows Alisa and Val going around St Isaac’s Cathedral. They are on Val’s bike and they make a full revolution around the cathedral, moving from right to left, or clockwise if viewed from above. The film depicts the cathedral as the axis, the symbolic vertebrae in the body of the city. The movement is filmed in one take lasting almost two minutes. The camera is positioned at the level of the bike’s wheel, showing the

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women’s faces and the dome of the cathedral from below. The camera, helmets and the dome of the cathedral are tied together along an axis about which the rotation takes place. Their journey signifies the completion of a cycle. Their movement leaves an invisible trace – ­a circular move, or the swirl symbol, one of the universal symbols that can be found from the Aztecs to Minoan Crete. Categorised as a symbol of life, it stands for the passage of time, fertility rites and rebirth. (In the final scene on the bridge such imagery is evoked again.) It reveals the collective unconscious as an embodiment of the community spirit, of the ensuing tradition and of life itself. It demonstrates the cyclical nature of time and also represents the physical outline of our galaxy. From the point of view of Christianity, Alisa’s and Val’s movement around the church should be interpreted as baptism and also as consummation of marriage. Although the women go round the cathedral, they never enter it: now that they are murderesses, the church and the Garden of Eden are forever closed to them. By comparison, Larus’s time is ahistorical: as a posthumous subject he occupies the world of intemporality that is similar to the position of the butoh dancer: ‘butoh exists in mythological time. It could be any time, because characterization never solidifies. There is a continual transmogrification of the image. Like meditational time, time in Butoh is always Now’ (Fraleigh 1999: 23). Butoh brings together mathemes and myth-emes of being through its repetitive, vibratory discourse, which the spectator also experiences as the film’s rhythm. The slow movement in the cathedral scene is in contrast to the fast pace of the preceding sequence, which involves shooting, physical abuse and the women’s escape. The scene on the bike is accompanied by a soundtrack taken from François Couperin’s ‘Leçons de ténèbres pour le mercredi saint’ (1714). Literally meaning ‘lessons of darkness’, it is an example of French baroque music. The ténèbrae service uses the text of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, deploring the Siege of Jerusalem. It references symbolically the three days of mourning for Christ between crucifixion and resurrection (Schweitzer and Eberhart 2012). The music functions here as an acoustic form of lament, with its visuals form – ­Pietà – ­being utilised in other films: Zviagintsev’s The Return, Balabanov’s Morphine and others. In Nirvana, music and movement lament the fall of Jerusalem and the desolation of St Petersburg, and individual perdition. The camera engages the characters in a visual ritual of relinquishing anguish while the whole scene is an apopemptic hymn to love, hope and faith. The music also prepares the spectator for the baroque interior of Larus’s palace and to the anatomical display of the body in the dance sequence. Music signifies the characters’ liminal position as posthumous subjects in relation to sin and

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bod y in cr is is a nd p o s t humo us s u b j e c t i v i t y 175 virtue, vitality and infinitude. Overall, the film creates the impression of a baroque body without boundaries or, to be precise, the shared, communal body whereby the main capsule is that of St Petersburg, which provides an experience of dreaming and hallucination as part of its myth. This is akin to how, in totemic tradition, symbols are used as a means to sustain an individual’s connection to Dreamtime (‘alcheringa’). In the aboriginal tradition, symbols of belonging to the clan are organised in sequences, and they sustain an individual’s connection to Dreamtime, which is different from mythical time insofar as it refers directly to the experience of dream, or, as I use for my analysis below, to the experience of vision or experience of the continuous presence of moving imagery. According to this logic, symbols are dynamic forms of subjectivity, existing on different planes of experience in the form of cenesthesia. Dreamtime, and by extension, symbols, designates not so much a connection to a different reality, but rather a higher intensity of perception of existence as such. To reiterate, symbols do not necessarily suggest the magical, or the unreal, but rather a more forceful engagement with life resulting in a more profound experiential order, and not exclusively the form of an abstract conception of the world as often happens in the Western analytical tradition. As a result, symbols display a polyvalent nature and a complex orientation. On the one hand, they imply an outward movement of the subject in its disposition to engage with a different order; on the other hand, they suggest an inward movement of the subject in its willingness to unlock a richer inner vision of the world. Similarly, symbols designate temporary fluctuations of new experiences, often leading to the redrafting of cosmic, social and spiritual orders, as well as permanent states of primordial splendour whereby the spectacle of the universe is evoked in its nascent state. Similarly, butoh provides an experience of body in its tightened, intense, affective form, or what Fraleigh calls the ‘Dreambody’ (1999: 43). For Fraleigh, the Dreambody is a combination of dance and somatic therapy, particularly when dealing with people with an experience of trauma. I argue that in Nirvana butoh stylistics is a matter of staging (traumatic) subjectivity and externalising its affective vortex. The concept of the Dreambody is connected to the concept of Dreamtime insofar as both characterise being in terms of their relationship to the metaphysical other, the union with which is both desired and feared. This yearning is accentuated in Nirvana by the use of splashes of colour and short blackouts, with a juxtaposition of meditative and action-packed scenes whereby the inner life of the characters is communicated through their costumes, environments and body movements, particularly facial ­expressions ­augmented

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by makeup. In butoh, this is evident in the dancer’s face normally being painted in white, thus creating the effect of a mask with its antiindividualistic stance: ‘the dancing face is the face of everyone. It assumes the aspect of a lucid mask, through which we are allowed to see our own face and to feel the fluctuation of our emotions’ (Fraleigh 1999: 47). The body, with its convulsions and pulsations, as well as the costumes and the makeup, are a method of etching emotions in space, of making emotions gesture-like and of giving them a sculptural, even architectural, quality. In comparison, in Kahlo’s painting and in d’Agoty’s images the body is presented like a cathedral, with its visible insides being a materialisation of the metaphysical interiority. The sense of the interior dimension is achieved by means of externalising strategies.19 In Nirvana, the internal essence of characters and their states of mind are communicated with the help of makeup, tattoos and costumes.20 These externalising strategies are used as elements of subjectivity construction and stages in the reflexive processes. They provide the camera with the materiality necessary for achieving a normalising, ‘realist’ effect. Rather than distorting the image, the director chooses to distort the ‘reality’, the world itself. The process of externalisation along with the need for faith, perception and signification, advances the mystery of embodiment – ­of things, spaces and forces. In Nirvana, the spirit can be sensed and perceived only in flesh, and the Cartesian divide between existence and transcendence is bridged in the realm of the visual. The film as a medium becomes a zone of transfer and co-existence: the gaze of the camera dissects and connects tissue at the same time. The film makes a point of the chasm between One and Two, between unity and division, by portraying characters in pairs, or even resorting to the use of twins and doubles. Such use affirms a view of all beings being immersed in the world at the same time. This idea of immersion, co-existence and multiplicity is evident in Val’s body. On the one hand, it is bruised because of the intravenous drug use, beatings and other abuse. On the other hand, it is covered in outfits that are superbly rich in colour and texture. The costumes are a form of reincarnation of the former self – t­ hey transfer it from knowledge to non-knowledge. Visually the life of the characters in St Petersburg is flattened21 – ­they appear against the background of beautiful tableaux rather than occupying a tangible space;22 the surface, however, is enriched with a new depth – ­it carries the marks of previous cultural production in the form of inscriptions, dirt, cracks, scars and other deformities. Following butoh, the characters’ performance of trauma is based on the display of seizures of the hystericised body whose dance of blood and

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bod y in cr is is a nd p o s t humo us s u b j e c t i v i t y 177 bone approaches death. The hysterical pathology makes the body available to cosmic forces (St Isaac’s Cathedral), and to aesthetic expression (costumes and makeup). The film charges surfaces – e­ specially coloured surfaces – w ­ ith particular meaning. For example, when Alisa first arrives in St Petersburg she is wearing black clothes – t­he only spots of bright colour are the baroque-themed buckles on her shoes – ­symbolising her power, sexuality and sophistication. Valera always wears blue and purple, representing his mysteriousness and anguish combined with depression. In its obsessive use of colours, Nirvana is similar to Andrei Belyi’s Petersburg.23 For example, in the novel, Sofia Petrovna returns home after the ball and realises that her husband has tried to commit suicide: Suddenly everything was illuminated. A rosy pink ripple of tiny clouds, like motherof-pearl web, floated by, a touch of light blue here and there. All was suffused with the timid, astonished question: ‘But how can this be? How?’ A tremor of light was barely perceptible on the windows and on the spires; on the spires was a ruby red shimmer. Voices whispered in her soul. Everything was illuminated. From the window fell a pale pink, pale red wedge of light. (Belyi 1978: 137)

In Goddess, the pink colour symbolises the transfer to afterlife – t­he ghost of the mother wears a red dress and so does Litvinova’s character. In Nirvana, while Val is preparing to take a lethal dose of drugs, she is wearing rosy pink shorts. Her black and white stripy shirt symbolises life and death, good and evil, love and hatred – t­ he yin and the yang. She picks up mother-of pearl sellotape and puts strips of it on the glass fitted in her bedroom door: this way she blocks the field of vision from the doorway as well as arranging the light in the room – ­it now emanates in pale pink wedges from the gaps in the glass, making the whole room appear in shades of rose pink (the slits in the taping evoke the slits in the screens placed in the room where Larus performs his dance of death; similarly, the slits in the tape are reminiscent of the cuttings on the body in d’Agoty’s images and the openings in the body in Kahlo’s painting). To finish the job, Val applies the red lipstick to the glass in the areas not covered by the sellotape. In both the novel and the film, pink is a waning of evil, it is an evocation of flesh and the anatomical procedure of externalising internal organs of culture by means of the scalpel-like cinematic gaze. The internalising and externalising strategies in the film correspond to the distinctive contrast in Japanese art between kyo (abstract) and jitsu (concrete), the tension between which is resolved by means of the symbolic mode. Fraleigh compares butoh dancing to Zen meditation: the similarity is in that ‘like Zen, dance is not about doing movement, but more about being moved’ (1999: 178). Equally, symbolisation is not

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about providing symbols as interruptions of the moving image, but rather opening the filmic production to pro-nomination, that is, meaning-making before all names and terms, as non-knowledge. This process is similar to ex-scription (from Latin ‘exscriptus’, meaning ‘a copy, a transcript’). According to Nancy, it means ‘that the thing’s name, by inscribing itself, inscribes its property as name outside itself’ (1993: 175), or what I called above strategies of externalisation, or self-presence. Here filmic work is about writing as ‘ex-scribing’, or working from another edge, or describing states while also pointing to another, metaphysical dimension, that of ex-scription. It produces a new relationship to time explored as an entirely novel phenomenon and as a gesture towards non-knowledge. Film becomes ‘time-in-the-making’ in the same way as butoh is a ‘dancein-the-making’: the butoh dancer Akane-sensei describes it as ‘being in the middle of the stream’ (Fraleigh 1999: 181). To paraphrase Fraleigh, dance, film and Zen ‘are of the essence of time and its incomprehensible partner, timelessness’ (1999: 181), or what Nancy problematised as infinite processes of finite history (1993). Such timelessness is a form of intemporality which I analyse in the following chapter in the context of the eternal return of the revenant.

Notes   1. I am grateful to Vera Zvereva for her helpful comments on the first draft of this chapter.   2. Like the character played by Svetlichania in Litvinova’s Goddess (Chapter 7), Samoilova’s character suggests a connection to Soviet discourse.   3. His name is possibly derived from the English ‘larus’, which is a name for a large genus of gulls present in the northern hemisphere. The birds are known as symbols of independent spirit and freedom.   4. See Chapter 12 on our analysis of masks in the symbolic mode.   5. For an overview of Russian films set in Petersburg, see Bratova (2013).   6. The film has been praised for critically developing the theme of youth culture and the dangers of drug abuse; a similar depiction can be found in Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996).   7. The soundtrack includes ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Any More’ performed by the Walker Brothers, ‘Thonk’ by Jan Carter and Adam Philips, ‘Moscow Daze’ by Flosi Bjarnason and many other pieces. In the early 1990s Voloshin was the leader of a punk group and, in the late 1990s, of a psychedelic jazz orchestra called ‘Delicatessen’, which might explain the rich soundtrack in the film.  8. Nirvana makes multiple references to the cinematic cyberpunk, including Slava Tsukerman’s Liquid Sky (1982).

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bod y in cr is is a nd p o s t humo us s u b j e c t i v i t y 179   9. Its principal performer, Il’ia Lagutenko, features in Bekmambetov’s Night Watch. 10. [U nee moglo byt’ vse, a ona vybrala mertvogo, zhivoi ei nafig ne nuzhen]. 11. If Larus’s dance has a familiar choreography of butoh, in Abdrashitov’s Magnetic Storms, the fist-fight suggests a choreography of a different type: it reveals the arrival of a new social order and not an emergence of a new sensibility. 12. For a discussion of butoh as a cultural practice, see Fraleigh (1999). She defines a number of types of butoh performance which are different in style, but similar in their philosophical orientation (1999: 38). 13. The cultural history of butoh in the USSR and Russia is outside the scope of this study; as an example of the butoh tradition, see performances by the In-Gesture [In-zhest] theatre (established in 1980 in the USSR and now based in Minsk, Belarus). 14. Possibly derived from the performances of Kazuo Ohno. 15. See Mylène Farmer’s stage costumes that utilise fabric and decoration that replicate the muscles and tendons of the human body. 16. In Innocent Sunday (2011), Aleksandr Mindadze examines the post-­ apocalyptic context of the Chernobyl disaster through the relationship between body and dance as configurations of the post-evental subjectivity. 17. In Chapter 9, I dwell upon hauntological repetitions in Veledinskii’s Alive. 18. Irina Makoveeva (2010) traces the history of the representation of womenavengers in Soviet and Russian film to suggest that contemporary Russian cinema depicts violence against women – ­the subject that was silenced during the Soviet era – h ­ owever, the image of a self-confident woman determined to protect her honour is still rare. 19. In his psychoanalytical theory, Freud noted that the transposition from the observer to the observed revolves around the image of the screen. The screen is conceived as both interior and exterior, which compels me to suggest that in Nirvana the body is utilised as a screen – ­as an internal cinema as well as an external memory device, which facilitates the process of ex-scribing. This process involves two directions of signification which roughly correspond to Kracauer’s concept of dreaming, presented in his Theory of Film (1960), as moving towards and into the object as well as away from the given image into subjective realms. Such a movement is comparable with the inward–outward gesture used in Litvinova’s Goddess. 20. By contrast, in Alive (Chapter 9) the inner life of the main character, his thoughts, memories and feelings are visualised as apparitions, whereby phantom pain is represented quite literally as phantoms. 21. See Chapter 4 on the flattening of discourse in Zviagintsev’s Elena. 22. In its use of costumes and makeup Nirvana is reminiscent of Noh, or Nogaku, a major form of classical Japanese musical drama that has been performed since the thirteenth century. In Noh characters are often masked, with men playing male and female roles. Traditionally, a Noh performance

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lasts all day and consists of five plays interspersed with shorter, humorous pieces. A similar structure is utilised in Nirvana where the development of the storyline is interrupted with scenes and sketches that break up the continuity and coherence of the established narrative. 23. Nirvana makes multiple references to the culture of the Silver Age. For example, Alisa’s ‘awakening’, or to be precise, living in the afterlife in the city is a filmic rendition of Aleksandr Blok’s 1912 poem, Night. Street. Street-lamp. Drugstore: ‘The night. The street. Street-lamp. Drugstore. / A meaningless dull light about. / You may live twenty-five years more; / All will still be there. No way out. / You die. You start again and all / Will be repeated as before: / The cold rippling of a canal. The night. The street. Street-lamp. Drugstore.’ [Umresh’ – n ­ achnesh’ opiat’ snachala / I povtoritsia vse, kak vstar’: / Noch’, ledianaia riab’ kanala, / Apteka, ulitsa, fonar’ (translated by Christopher Laws) (available at: http://culturedallroundman. com/2013/02/22/alexander-blok-night-street-street-light-drugstore-1912, last accessed 17 March 2014)]. This is a reference to the endless cycle of living and dying, whereby the drugstore was where opium was sold at the start of the twentieth century.

C H A PT E R 9

The Difficulty of Being Dead: Aleksandr Veledinskii’s Alive (2006)

Litvinova’s Goddess: How I Fell in Love presents a proposition of One existing as Two, which is the primordial fantasy of everyone being conceived as twins and born single.1 In his The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles, Hillel Schwartz contends that: We conceive of ourselves, from the start, as twins, then one disappears . . . The emergent legend of the vanishing twin makes of ourselves our own kin. Surrounded by forgeries and facsimiles, we look to that primitive twin for affidavits of faithfulness and apologies for faithlessness. In one body, at one and the same time, we may carry and confute our own nearest sister, closest brother. While vanished twinship assures us of a sempiternal human link, it affords us also the pathos of inexpressible loss. (Schwartz 1996: 19–21)

The self is both the I and the other I, or the twin who has disappeared but continues to appear as the I in the self as self-presence. Litvinova makes a transfer to the twin, the Two, to the posthumous subjectivity inhabiting the post-apocalyptic world which is possible thanks to dyadic deaths, or murder–suicides. The dyad, or Badiou’s Two, does not denote symbiosis, but rather evokes an opening of the human horizon to the reaches of transcendental intimacy, whereby being as Two implies a series of transits and entrances towards trembling, vibrating subjectivity in the symbolic mode. Kalatozishvili’s The Wild Field examines the inseparability of the I from the other I through a story of the Doppelgängers, the mirror-twisted twins who require a (symbolic) scalpel to be separated. In its imagery Kalatozishvili’s Doppelgänger evokes romantic terror and gothic horror whereby the subject is structured according to intervals, intemporalities, or what Derrida calls khôra, that is, asynchronised vibrations of discourse. Khôra accounts for the type of subjectivity that ‘always takes a place which is not his own, and that one can also call the place of death, he does not have either a proper place or a proper name’ (Derrida 2004: 161). Kalatozishvili’s Doppelgänger determines a type of ontology that

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privileges spacing as divergence, deviation and withdrawal. Dostoevskii’s Goliadkin from The Double (1845) writes letters to his Doppelgänger who is always in the now, in the contemporaneity of the moment, escaping the imperatives of representation and narrativisation, the evil incarnation of non-knowledge, to whom Goliadkin is fatally connected. Wishing to restore singularity and the wholeness – ­the One – ­as difference, Goliadkin writes: ‘Here is a man perishing; here is man losing sight of himself and unable to restrain himself’ (2009: 112). Serebrennikov’s St George’s Day and Voloshin’s Nirvana are about seeing double and seeing as double (and eventually as multiple) whereby re-enactment and repetition appear as a way to arrive at Truth, which immediately dissolves into truths. In these films, the self emerges as a postevental site where repetition negates mimesis and copying challenges representation. Instead, the self appears through discourse, which coheres in the transmission of rituals and routines as a world, and mis-­transcriptions affirm ex-scriptions as the exuberance of One in Many. In this environment the copy of the self is first an after-word and later an after-world, a statue of world-building. In passing from the matheme to the myth-eme, One as Two produces a new relationship to time as a gesture towards death/nonknowledge. In this chapter, I investigate the fragmentation and multiplication of the posthumous subject that constructs its own myth-emes in the world that can be conceived only as the after-world. The possibility of death determines the subject in relation to itself: ‘the-I-within-me’ versus ‘the-other-within-me’. Derrida had famously described this process as the anticipation of mourning. He views the failure to mourn – ­a rupture in my terminology – ­as a source of fantasy (Derrida 1986: 28). He inquires about the subject who cannot interiorise the other whereby the other is lodged within the subject as a secret, marking the refusal to mourn. Derrida calls this ‘incorporation’: it consists of the desire to keep the dead alive inside the subject. The balance of subjectivities relies on the process of de-metaphorisation (understanding literally what is meant figuratively), and on the process of objectivation (transferring the sense of loss from the self to the other). It is in the gaps between these processes that the spectre comes back. It occupies the empty space of signification, and writing emerges as a form of displacement. What returns to haunt is the remains of the possibility of the other. This is the moment when Derrida utilises metaphysics as a way to step outside metaphysics, a strategy that leads the subject inhabit the displacing because there is ultimately ‘no outside’ (1976: 19). In his critique of logocentricity, Derrida relies on the subject that is ultimately alive, that is, aware of its own discursive field. How can one chart the work of the

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the dif f ic ult y o f be ing de a d 183 subject who is dead? What terrain of knowledge does posthumous subjectivity occupy? How does subjectivity relate to the concept of the image as appearance? How do correspondences between ontologies translate into counterparts and doubles? And, ultimately, how does the subject’s imaginative activity inscribe posthumous subjectivity? How does it differentiate between the unthinkable and the unrepresentable? These are the key underlying concerns in this chapter. I aim to respond to them by analysing Veledinskii’s film Alive. Aleksandr Veledinskii (b. 1959, Nizhnii Novgorod) came to prominence after the release of his Russian Idea (2004). The film is based on a series of stories written by Eduard Limonov, a Soviet and Russian political dissident, and deals with growing up under the totalitarian regime in Kharkov. The film builds on Veledinskii’s 2002 work for television called The Law, in which he explores the relationship between social norm and identity. In all his productions Veledinskii demonstrates his interest in trauma and its impact on young individuals. Alive tells the story of three friends who take part in a war in a place that one assumes is Chechnya.2 From the genre perspective, Alive is a ‘buddy film’. It portrays friendship among three men in settings that enable the exploration of social background and cultural practice. As in classical buddy films, the characters have normative heterosexual interests, which, however, do not provide emotional satisfaction; instead, the film focuses on the emotional and intellectual partnership among same-sex friends. In her study of Russian buddy films, Dawn Seckler notes: The emergence of this genre in the post-Soviet film industry suggests a growing interest in micro- as opposed to macro-politics in definitions of identity, and, therefore, further differentiates it from the types of masculinity . . . that seek to link authoritarian and nationally recognized male icons (i.e., Reagan, Stalin, mafia bosses) and cinematic portrayals of masculine heroes. The buddy film reveals an explicit concern with the personal and private politics of everyday life and tends not to concentrate on grand political issues or renowned characters. (Seckler 2009: 4)

Contrary to Seckler, Julian Graffy (2014) believes films about soldiers, especially about a trio of friends, were common throughout the Soviet period; in those films the significance of their friendship exceeded the ‘private politics of everyday life’, and thus Alive is an alteration of an existing model rather than something entirely new. While micro in its political concerns and keen to maintain private focus, Alive utilises unrestricted visual strategies to portray social conflict and individual trauma.3 In the course of the film the spectator is compelled to believe that the characters are spectres. Here the spectre is not a mediation between

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life and death, but a mediation between death and death. This assertion ­resonates – i­ n its logic but not in its effect – ­with the concept of hauntology introduced by Derrida. In contradiction to Francis Fukuyama’s (1992) famous apocalyptic announcement of the death of history (which inferred the dissolution of the USSR and rhymed with Barthes’ proclamation of the death of the author as the death of subjectivity), Derrida responded by suggesting that our present is inhabited by ghosts of the past and future: ‘After the end of history, the spirit comes back by coming back’ (1994: 10). Alive engages both with Derrida’s proposal for ‘a politic of memory’ (1994: xix) as well as with a more personal critique of the memory war as an experience, which, as Homi Bhabha contends, relates ‘the traumatic ambivalence of a personal, psychic history to the wider disjunctions of political experience’ (1994: 11). While Derrida and Bhabha speak of the cultural aspect of memory and apparitions, I am concerned with the relationship between memory-as-experience and imagination, that is, the propensity to produce abstracted imagery as a means of signification in the symbolic mode. For this purpose, I focus on the analysis of Alive not as a film documenting post-traumatic situations, but as a film constructing its own posthumous subjectivity. Alive opens silently with a shot showing a section of a grey wall with cracks in the plaster. As the film credits continue to roll, implying yet another plane of signification, the static camera shows an electric light above the doorway; it is turned off; its cylinder-shaped glass case and electrical wiring, which runs on top of the plaster, cast sharp – i­n focus – ­shadows. Out of focus are the square shadows produced by the window frame, positioned on the opposite side of the room. The light is bleak, and it creates abstracts patterns made of shadows, intermixed with the cracks in the wall. Suddenly a male voice is heard, saying, ‘It’s a woman.’ Another voice contradicts him, ‘No, it doesn’t look like a woman.’ The first voice insists on the similarity between the shape on the wall, formed by the cracks in the plaster, and the shape of a woman’s body. The camera looks away from the wall. In a series of short portraiture-like shots, it shows a number of young male patients in a medical ward, with their heads, arms and necks in bandages and plaster. Each of them has a military tag, suggesting they are being treated for injuries sustained in combat. Pushing a trolley with medical supplies, an attractive young female nurse walks into the room. The camera switches to a ‘god shot’, revealing eight patients in the ward. As the nurse overhears their discussion, the soldiers laugh in embarrassment. The opening sequence lasting just over a minute comes to an end. In spite of the similarity in mise-en-scène, the affective environment in Alive differs from that in St George’s Day. In Serebrennikov’s

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the dif f ic ult y o f be ing de a d 185 film, the hospital scene opens with a slow movement of the camera over a male body: it is a shot of one of the prisoners and his body appears as a type of landscape. The corresponding moment in Alive is the moment when the soldiers – ­as disembodied voices – ­converse about the cracks in the plaster: on the one hand, they construct their multiple subjectivity as a visible landscape; and on the other hand, their articulations ascertain the presence of non-knowledge in the non-representational regime. In both the films, from an unnamed individual the camera moves to other patients where each of them is a projectile of the abstracted subjectivity constructed collaboratively as multiplicity. The scene reveals its adherence to the concerns of Plato’s cosmogony where participation exceeds being. Furthermore, the scene affirms the spectator’s position as an onlooker in afterlife, or as a posthumous subject whose job is to note heterogeneity. In both the films, the subject emerges as an affective destination. The humour of the opening scene celebrates the joy of living even in the most disconcerting circumstances. Unlike in St George’s Day, where the patients are also inmates and therefore are to remain in the hospital for a long time, in Alive the soldiers are waiting to be discharged; however, they are not released into the world of the living but into the world of dead, or, to be precise, into the world populated by subjects that exist as apparitions. Hence, the scene puts forward the agenda of the whole film – ­the imperative to endure pain and loss by continuing to exist in afterlife. In addition, the scene sets the film’s aesthetic parameters, particularly through its inclusion of imagined figures into the real-object presentation of life and conflict. The discussion about the cracks in the wall stimulates a debate about the visible, the invisible and the imaginary, which correspond to the categories of knowledge and non-knowledge. In fact, in the opening scene, one of the soldiers inquires about what the electric light on the wall represents in the imagined figure of a woman. In this observation a real object intervenes and corrupts presentation. Later the concerns of the film will develop in the opposite direction whereby imagined figures will intrude into everyday life and question the spectator’s perception of the real. The conversation among the soldiers reminds us of the dynamic of filmic presentation which encompasses multiple layers in its construction. In this case, the gaze of the soldiers discerns interiorised imagery between the images produced by the cracks and the shadows, between static and moving imagery, and between the projected, the observed and the known, or calibrations of knowledge and non-knowledge. Moreover, in their discussion the soldiers reveal their desire, which is directed at the imaginary figure on the wall, whereby the imagined contours of a woman correspond to the ‘real thing’ only in discourse. Seeing is contrasted to

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speaking in the same way as ‘the seen’ is contrasted to ‘the seeing’, which operate according to the principles of expansion and not substitution, and, as a result, meaning occurs in the form of iteration and questioning so that the process of signification refers to and envelops discourse as the relationship of the multiple to One. The notions of ‘the seen’ and ‘the seeing’ go back to Virginia Woolf’s essay on haunting and attention. For my purpose, I argue that intermediality and reference differ in terms of the types of attention they require and sustain. The former demands and conceives of attention as intervention, whereas the latter – ­as immersion. The former assumes a type of art that is directed at its observer whereas the latter assumes no observer exists, or, to be precise, that the observer has a movement of their own subjectivity and has disappeared into imaginary spaces rather than waiting in their body’s shell. Woolf describes this new mode of attention in an essay published in 1930, entitled ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’. This essay is about strolling through London and about ‘walking half across London between tea and dinner’, about the pleasure of ‘rambling the streets of London’ (1967: 155). As soon as the door closes behind her, she immerses herself in the ‘vast republican army of anonymous trampers’: ‘The shelllike covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye’ (1967: 155–6). In this passage, Woolf reflects on how body and identity disappear upon entering the urban stream of impressions and impulses. While in some these stimuli create a sensorial overload leading to neurasthenia, others have discovered new possibilities of perception. Everything she sees has ‘a certain look of unreality’ (1967: 156) because her gaze has actualised the symbolic mode: her attention to surfaces does not efface depth, but rather produces new realms of signification and a new understanding of the cityscape. She experiences imaginative absorption as a mental condition of reading; however, this is not some complete obliviousness bordering on unconsciousness, but rather elevation thanks to concentration on the subject matter. Reference is a state of mental curiosity/intentionality which does not conceptualise reason and passion, or intuition, as mutually exclusive. Reference is a condition of innerresonance derived from self-enclosure and self-presence in response to the display of non-knowledge. Woolf observes a mental state of absorption that denotes a transition in the understanding of the questions of meaning where ‘there are nothing but signs’ to be read (Derrida 1976: 50) to practice where signs and meaning are made. As Toby Miller and Robert Stam note: ‘images are

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the dif f ic ult y o f be ing de a d 187 about depicting and seeing: occasions of sight that are doubled, as filmmakers and spectators try to imagine each other’s point-of-view, one after another’ (2000: 85; emphasis added). The scholars evoke Wittgenstein’s ideas of a tripartite analysis of image: as objects in themselves versus the objects they depict, as well as referring to real objects versus the mental picture of them. The correlation among these three elements creates tensions that, in their turn, account for the regime of reference, or constant oscillation among multiple concepts embodied in the material essence of the knowledge of the world. In addition, the practice forms a specific type of experience that the spectator uses to construct meaning in the process of seeing. A distinction should be introduced here between ‘the seen’ and ‘the seeing’ as two conditions of meaning-making available to the spectators thanks to their own experience as interpreters of the filmic material, which, in terms of signification, differs as ‘seeing’ differs from ‘speaking’. In Veledinskii’s film, in talking about the imagined, abstract woman, the soldiers are united in their invocation of the gaze, which is directed at one area on the wall, and which fluctuates between the seeing and the seen. On the one hand, the soldiers are involved in the process of visual observation, or simply seeing, while on the other hand, they discuss their mental images and the correspondences of such images to the abstracted image of a woman, or simply imagining and perceiving, or the seen. As in Plato’s cave, their gaze is directed away from the source of light. It discerns patterns formed by projection (shadows) and inscription (cracks), both of which correspond to different modes of writing, representation and presentation, or knowledge and non-knowledge. In the previous chapter, in the analysis of Voloshin’s Nirvana, I ascertained that symbolisation is not about providing symbols as naive interruptions of the moving image, but rather about opening the filmic production to pro-nomination, that is, meaning-making before all names and terms, as non-knowledge. According to Nancy, it means ‘that the thing’s name, by inscribing itself, inscribes its property as name outside itself’ (1993: 175), or what I labelled as strategies of externalisation or self-presence. Film is about writing as ‘ex-scribing’, or working from another edge, or describing states while also pointing to another, metaphysical dimension, that of ex-scription. It produces a new relationship to time explored as an entirely novel phenomenon and as a gesture towards non-knowledge. Film becomes ‘time-in-the-making’ whereby timelessness appears as intemporality, or in the case of Veledinkii’s film, as the eternal return of the revenant. By contrast, in her Eternal Homecoming, Kira Muratova resolves the problem of ex-scription and non-knowledge by unravelling and staging the same story several times, each played out by several pairs of actors of different

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ages, looks and personalities. Actors duplicate one another as they play the same role, or the same actors may play the scenario out again, however, this time using a different visual style and affective tonality. The situations and phrases are repeated on many occasions, creating sequences appearing to recur infinitely – t­ he infinite mirror effect that the spectator encounters in Litvinova’s Goddess. Here the effect reconstructs the original meaning of the term ‘mise-en-abyme’, derived from heraldry, and literally meaning ‘placing into the abyss’, that is, the recursive occurrence, or the infinite reproduction of one’s image, the repetitive appearance of the revenant as non-knowledge. In Alive, the soldiers are subsumed by the logic of non-knowledge that constructs its own meaning without the need for a particular stimulus. Such collective construction of meaning – ­not spoken by one soldier but reconstructed in a dialogue – ­questions the role of memory in that it redirects meaning-making from the arena of experience to the arena of imagination. The phantoms reveal their presence in discourse no matter if it is articulated in language, or presented in the materiality of being or inscribed in codes of interaction. The body – ­and the speaking subject – ­is conceived as a phantom insofar as it exists only in relation to the imagined figure of being, pointing in the direction of reference as transfer or as the mystery of embodiment. The presentation of the subject’s interiority is achieved by means of externalising strategies. In Alive, the inner life of the main character, his thoughts, memories and feelings, are visualised as apparitions, whereby phantom pain is presented as phantoms. These externalising strategies are used as elements of subjectivity construction and stages in the reflexive processes. They provide the camera with the materiality necessary for achieving a normalising, ‘realist’ effect. Rather than distorting the image, the director chooses to distort the reality itself.4 The opening scene centres on Kir (Andrei Chadov), a soldier in the Russian army. Kir is an unusual name. It is derived from the Old Greek ‘Kiros’ (κύριος), meaning ‘lord’. In this meaning, the name of the character evokes the Lord in that he becomes the only judge of his own actions, which is comparable with Danila Bagrov’s predisposition in Balabanov’s Brother. The Greek name comes from the Persian name Kurush [‫شوروک‬ ‫]گرزب‬, meaning ‘like the sun’, thus affirming Kir’s status as god on his search for truth. Unlike the majority of soldiers, Kir was contracted [kontraktnik] rather than drafted [prizyvnik] into the Russian army, which yields a few suppositions. First, it was his free choice to join the army and thus the moral responsibility for all actions rests with him rather than with the government or the social system. This is a departure from mainstream representations of military personnel in Soviet and Russian cinema, who

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the dif f ic ult y o f be ing de a d 189 often participate in war against their will.5 Secondly, Kir receives payments from the government for his service, and so the war is conceived not as a matter of patriotism but rather as a commercial transaction.6 Alternatively, because of his disillusionment with warfare and negligent attitude to money, Kir’s decision to join the army appears, in retrospect, as a self-sacrificial act. By making Kir a ‘kontraktnik’, the director focuses on the study of war as an abstracted form of extreme ontology rather than the exploration of an actual war – ­as in the films of the 1990s that depicted the Chechen wars, for example, Sergei Bodrov’s The Prisoner of the Mountains (1996), Mikhail Ermolov’s and Aleksandr Nevzorov’s Purgatory (1997), Inna Vanina’s and Sergei Govorukhin’s The Damned and Forgotten (1997) and Aleksandr Rogozhkin’s Checkpoint (1998). The moral agenda of Alive includes the problem of choice, responsibility and sacrifice rather than that of violence, nationhood and regional politics. In fact, the film makes no references to the war in the north Caucasus and never shows Islamic insurgents, so the spectator may choose to assume that the action takes place in contemporary Chechnya, or somewhere else or may, in fact, choose to believe that the film explores war as a universal concept. I find a similar approach in Aleksei Uchitel’’s The Captive (2008), which tells the story of two Russian soldiers, Sergeant Rubakhin (Viacheslav Krikunov) and his younger comrade-in-arms, Vovka (Petr Logachev), who capture a local militant youngster named Dzhamal (Iraklii Mskhalaia), whom Rubakhin kills in self-defence when ambushed by the insurgents. The Captive, like the preceding The Prisoner of the Mountains, centres on one of the two Russian soldiers and maintains the principle of constructing the character as opposing subjectivities that the film-makers borrow from Tolstoi’s A Prisoner of the Caucasus (1872). Uchitel’’s The Captive provides a recognisable and yet abstract environment of the war in the Caucasus, created thanks to the mountainous landscape, restricted dialogue and emphasis on the symbolic use of detail, sound and music (Uchitel’ refrains from using music until the final credits), allowing the director to examine the symbolic categories of war, beauty, duty, honour, corruption, life and death (Strukov and Hudspith 2015). The abstract environment of Alive, just like The Captive, depends on a literary allusion. Kir has two friends, Nikich (Maksim Lagashkin) and Igor’ (Vladimir Epifantsev), and together they form a group that has a special spiritual bond, which is similar to that of Robert Lohkamp and his friends in Erich Maria Remarque’s Three Comrades (1936). Robert shares his horrifying experiences in the trenches of the First World War’s Franco-German front with Otto Köster and Gottfried Lenz, with whom

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he runs an auto-repair shop in late 1920s Berlin. With Nikich and Igor’, Kir shares his experiences of civil life after his release from the hospital where his leg has been amputated. The loss of the limb emphasises his new position in society as a disabled man, and also evokes another loss, the loss of his friends. Nikich and Igor’ died saving Kir’s life and they return as spectres with whom Kir is able to communicate and share the joy of living. In Sokurov’s Alexandra, a literary allusion to Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (1939) serves a similar function of abstracting presentation and constructing universal subjectivity in the symbolic mode. Mother Courage pulls a cart containing food and liquor that she sells to German soldiers, whereas Aleksandra (Galina Vishnevskaia) pulls a large shopping bag full of gifts for Russian soldiers. The play and the film explore the relationship between the mother, symbolising the country, and her son/children, or the people. Finally, the triangulation of the characters in Alive brings to mind the three knights [bogatyri] from Russian fairy tales. The association is strengthened in the very end when the three soldiers are shown walking in a field and their position in relation to each other evokes the Russian troika and numerous representations of the bogatyrs in nineteenth-century Russian art, for example, in Vasnetsov’s paintings. If the allusion to Remarque captures trauma in relation to the First World War, Kir’s amputated leg invites another literary allusion and a relation to the experience of the Second World War. Mares’ev was a Soviet pilot who lost both his feet and yet was able to fly again. The historical case was mythologised in Boris Polevoi’s novel A Story about a Real Man (1948). Lilya Kaganovsky offers a critique of the novel and the myth in relation to what constitutes ‘a real Soviet man’, whereby ‘the category of real changes its dimension away from merely genuine . . . to a terrifying portraits of the uncanny’ (2008: 143). It is significant the characters in Alive do not demonstrate their allegiance to the state or some imaginary fatherland as was done in the Soviet films that Kaganovsky writes about. In fact, Kir launches a deadly attack on the representative of the state, a corrupt army official who extorts bribes from returning soldiers. By contrast, the other representative of the state in the film – ­the female nurse – ­is revered by Kir; he knocks out another soldier when he tries to make fun of her. In this case the reference suggests the opposition between the beloved country and the hated state. Alive makes an addition to the discourse of modernity with its centring on the male body and the trauma of the nation. However, these concerns are not the purpose of my investigation. Similarly, my focus is not on the psychoanalytical reading of the film and the interpretation of trauma as a state of the nation in the post-Soviet era

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the dif f ic ult y o f be ing de a d 191 (for such interpretations see, e.g., Etkind 2009). Instead, my objective is to examine how the symbolic mode entices a specific notion of the body and how the spectre as embodied imagination refers to fragmented subjectivity. Ultimately, I am preoccupied with how the subject deals with the traumas of posthumous living rather than the trauma of death. Kir is haunted by the vision of his friends; like Alisa and Val in Voloshin’s Nirvana, Nikich and Igor are always shown together – t­hey form a symbolic pair, and in relation to Kir they function as a single entity, as the multiple One. They have the privilege of omnipresence insofar as they can see everyone around but no one can see them. (A reference to Andrei Rublev’s iconic representation of the Holy Trinity is self-evident.) Such a unidirectional gaze affirms seeing as speaking, and, in relation to the film spectator, it accounts for the position of the viewers, who see but cannot be seen and who exercise their presence through the power of their gaze, which serves as a connector between different worlds and different states of being. In doing this job, the gaze actualises non-knowledge: this happens when the flow of time is interrupted due to the transpositions of reality whereby space is broken down to numerous spaces and is simultaneously occupied by different subjects. Non-knowledge here is a relation between the speaking subject and the viewing one, which destabilises the relationship between the signifier and the signified. This is apparent in Kir’s own indeterminate status. On the one hand, he can interact with Nikich and Igor’, which implies that he may be dead himself; and, on the other hand, his impact on the ‘real’ world is clearly evident (e.g., he has sex with women). He functions as a mystic or a mediator between the world of the ghosts and the world of the living people. For example, at a dinner party, Nikich, who is unable to communicate with the living directly, re-routes his questions to the guests via Kir; in other words, Kir ‘translates’ messages sent from one world to another. In this process of mediation, a gap is opened, and it provides a delay in the process of signification as no action – ­verbal or physical – ­can take place in an uninterrupted manner. Hence, cinema, and discourse in general, emerge as the media of deferral that actualise the symbolic mode. At the same time, the spectator can observe the appearance of non-knowledge by noting the ruptures in communication. The film provides multiple explanations of Kir’s predicament, only to suspend them later when his being evolves. At the beginning, Kir is involved in a car accident: the camera shows him lying unconscious at the side of a motorway in provincial Russia. In the next shot he is conversing with his friends as the three of them sit around a bonfire. From the representational point of view, Kir has died and in his death he is able to

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bring back his friends. However, this explanation becomes invalid in the next scene where Kir speaks to a stranger, and so he appears as a living person. Did Kir survive the accident and can he now communicate with his friends in his imagination (the traumatic subject)? Did the collision result in Kir’s supernatural ability to communicate with ghosts (the transcendental subject)? Or, in the symbolic mode, did Kir emerge as an event whereby he dies and appears while communicating with and producing a world (the posthumous subject)? In the second part of the film the situation becomes even more complicated, because Kir inexplicably loses his friends and, as a result, he is compelled to continue his search for their graves in the belief that the graves will confirm or disprove their status as dead. Similarly, the children in Zviagintsev’s The Return are compelled to verify the identity of their (dead) father after he comes back. It has been argued that they desire to know that he is their actual father and so they search for an old photograph that proves the connection (Beumers 2004a; Strukov 2007; Vicks 2011; Cavendish 2013). I maintain that their primary task is to ascertain that he is actually alive: if the photograph as a medium is a trace of the past, a recording of the ghostly appearance of history, their nameless father is a resurgence of discourse in all its volatility and aggression. In Alive, immediately after Nikich and Igor’ abandon Kir, he encounters a priest who gives him a lift to a large cemetery outside the city where the soldiers are meant to have been buried. The serendipitous and somewhat uncanny detail is that the priest – ­Father Sergei – ­looks exactly like Kir. The remarkable resemblance is due to the fact that the actor’s brother, Aleksei Chadov, plays the role of the priest. This doubling subjectivity symbolises the blurring of the boundaries between the world of the living and the world of the dead, between the earthly and celestial ontology. In religious terms, Kir’s encounter with the priest provides yet another explanation of the ghostly apparitions. In the Orthodox tradition, after the death of a person ‘the soul visits the heavenly habitations and the abysses of hell, not knowing yet where it will remain, and only on the fortieth day is its place appointed until the resurrection of the dead’ (Rouz 1984). Some souls find themselves in eternal joy while others are in fear of eternal torments, although some reconciliation is possible by means of the ritual of the bloodless sacrifice or commemoration at the liturgy. The film accepts this belief as a premise for the depiction of the soul’s journey, whereby visits to heaven and hell are replaced with encounters with people in this world. The film itself becomes a form of cinematic ‘panikhida’, or the Trisagion Prayers for the Dead; in other words, the film assumes the function of the ritual itself. The purpose of such use of

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the dif f ic ult y o f be ing de a d 193 ritual is to ensure that if somebody died in repentance but was unable to manifest this while they were alive, they would be freed from tortures and would obtain repose thanks to the commemoration at the Divine Liturgy. Ultimately, the film propels the view of life as a path to the eternal habitation whereby non-knowledge is the finite intemporality of living. In retrospect, the events of the film appear as stages on the soul’s zigzagged journey. Similarly, Zviagintsev’s The Return incorporates ideas of male bonding, journey and stoicism. The film consists of imagery that elevates the boys’ journey to the island to the level of an eschatological experience. In Stoic terms, this is the conflict between what Seneca calls ‘an ordinary journey’ and life as a journey, and the photograph, which the boys search for in the attic and which is later repeated in the final photo-show, is used as a means to disclose the origins of the journey.7 In Orthodoxy, which frames the transformations of the soul as a journey, the third, ninth and fortieth days after the person’s death are particularly important because these days evoke the resurrection of Christ, the nine classes of angels and the final judgement occurring on the fortieth day. In Alive, the transition from the third to the ninth day is marked by Nikich’s and Igor’’s (dis-)appearance, whereas the meeting with Father Sergei is, of course, symbolic of the Judgement Day, and the film emerges as a postevental site of posthumous subjectivity. The soldiers’ sudden disappearance causes anxiety in Kir not because of the terror of the gaze of the Other, but because of the descent into the terrifying luminescence of the being-beyond. For Kir, the closing moment occurs when after a long and painful search he finally finds the graves of his friends (Father Sergei accompanies him on the search): the camera moves slowly from one tombstone to another, each of which, according to the vernacular tradition, is decorated with a photograph of the deceased, that is, the ultimate ‘proof’ of their unearthly status.8 The slow-moving camera instils a feeling of serenity and remorse as Kir engages in a conversation with the dead: he walks from one grave to another, calls out his friends’ names and makes empathetic comments. (Sigarev provides a similar predisposition of the traumatised subject conversing with the dead through the image of a child who has a troubled relationship with her abusive mother and transfers her love into friendship with a deceased person, with whom communication is established via the medium of photography.) While Father Sergei performs a ‘panikhida’, Kir walks away from the cemetery and is hit by a passing car. The camera immediately cuts back to the cemetery and reveals a tombstone with Kir’s photograph, implying that he had been dead all this time. As in the previous scene, where the

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gaze of the camera is associated with Kir’s subjectivity, Kir continues to observe himself from outside of the self; to paraphrase, the function of his gaze – t­he posthumous subjectivity – ­is now delegated to the spectator. This revelation releases the narrative tension, but not for long, as the camera shows Kir lying unconscious on the ground. As the camera moves closer he comes back to himself and as he looks up he sees Nikich and Igor’: the story returns to its starting point, eschewing linearity of time and privileging the spatialised construction of meaning. The friends accuse each other of being late and complain about the pain of waiting before the three of them walk away on their journey.9 (The disappearance and lateness are, of course, strategies of deferral that come alive in the act of ‘awaiting’, that is, being in waiting rather than being as overcoming.) This time, however, there is no doubt that Kir is not alive as he is able to walk without his prosthetic leg: his body has become reassembled in the process of transition from one world to another. In the film’s summation, the young nurse paints the doors in the hospital’s male toilet; the white paint covers graffiti in a symbolic gesture of forgetting by remembering. The white paint alludes to the white colour of the burial shroud used in the Orthodox tradition.10 The colour of the paint also reminds the viewer of the circumstances of the soldiers’ death at the beginning of the film: they were ambushed in the middle of the winter somewhere in mountains covered in snow. As a matter of fact, the symbolism of snow and death is maintained throughout the film thanks to Nikich’s and Igor’’s winter camouflage – ­it remains a reminder of the passing of life and eternal death. Such epitomes highlight the main principle of signification in Alive – ­the process of externalisation along with the need for faith and perception. These advance the mystery of embodiment – o­ f things, spaces and forces. The spirit can be sensed and perceived only in flesh, and the Cartesian divide between existence and transcendence is bridged in the realm of the visual. The film as a medium becomes a zone of transfer and co-existence. On the narrative level, the film makes a point of the chasm between One and Two, between the unity and division of being,  by portraying characters in pairs, or even resorting to the use of twins and doubles. Such use affirms a metaphysical view of all humans, who are immersed in the world at the same time as being posthumous subjectivities. The film makes use not of the concepts of reincarnation or resurrection, but rather of the idea of ghostly existence whereby the spectre does not relate to any ‘real’ object or person. Instead, the spectre symbolises the gap in the process of signification: it always returns as a disturbance or as a rupture. The ghost is a nocturnal flâneur for whom the night is a countersite as well as counter-sight, that is, a constellation of symbols, figurations

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the dif f ic ult y o f be ing de a d 195 and affects. It is a space filled with apparitions of the self: the dismembered body of the spectre is reconstituted thanks to doubling and the experience of the subject experiencing its own death through uncanny encounters (or through performing the performing self as in Goddess). The result of such a construction of space is that, unlike the epic films which often provide a compression of duration (e.g., Bodrov’s Mongol (2007) represents several years that define the parabola of centuries to follow), Alive offers an expansion of duration whereby a fixed duration of forty days is questioned by letting the subjects re-live this period again and again. Moreover, Alive – a­s I mentioned above – s­patialises time; by this I do not imply the procedure of capturing duration by means of spatial interventions. Instead, I point towards the process of mapping time whereby the film produces a cartography of intemporality. This becomes a matter of mixing historical ‘speeds’, which in turn problematise history. On the visual level, in Mongol the slow and sombre panoramic shots suggest a long elapse of time, and the landscape that infinitely extends before the viewer signifies the imminent arrival of historical time. Conversely, Alive utilises close-ups to articulate the immediate presence of time and to demonstrate its multilayered construction: subjects occupy the same space while remaining invisible to each other; the borders between these spaces undermine the linearity of historical perception. The first cinematic mode – a­ s exemplified by Mongol – s­ peaks to the concerns of empire: the constant parade of vistas as an emblem of imperial structure. The second mode, or the symbolic mode of Alive, expresses the sensibility of the postimperial, posthumous subjectivity – ­internalised spatiality undermines colonial agency. The epic film often employs the voice-over to articulate the omnipresence of the empire; Alive utilises ‘voices’ – t­ hey can never be heard in unison – ­to express multiple being after the imperial collapse.11 Living after the collapse of the empire is compared with the wandering of the soul of the dead in the space of this world. The focus is not on the body as in zombie films, but on the spirit, the soul, which inverts the customary paradigm of the contemporary condition as the living dead,12 turning it into the dead living. The latter is not a privilege but a challenge. Indeed, in Alive Veledinskii explores both the trauma of death and the trauma of living, of absence and presence, and of memorial and memory, in his search of the third space, of the unpresentable and non-knowledge. Alive is an arena for capturing trauma cinematically (the regime of the analyst) and sounding it out (the regime of the analysand), thus constructing a psychogeography of ontology (the regime of analysis). On the technical level, contrary to genre conventions and as documented in viewers’ comments in film appreciation blogs,13 Alive makes

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no use of computer-generated imagery, prosthetic or any other apparatus aiming to deform and reconstitute reality in ways that would legitimise the presence of the spectre, or the living dead, as the other. Quite the opposite, the low-key aesthetic of the film foregrounds non-knowledge not as extraordinary, but as the persistence of the familiar, and with it the intimation of death. On the visual level, the film does, indeed, borrow from post-apocalyptic and zombie films, for example, George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985): in Alive, Kir occupies the world after apocalypse where the dead return as revenants. Kir himself is transformed into a revenant: in one of the final scenes (Figure 8) he walks away from the cemetery; his heavy limp, the industrial pylons and the light of the sun disappearing beyond the horizon create the postapocalyptic effect of the ‘walking dead’. Kir’s being is not in the light (knowledge) but in darkness (non-knowledge), which, in the symbolic mode, suggests a reorientation of subjectivity is required to re-actualise the presence of a different order of signification in the current world. In this process, systems of signification are expanded and they shift from the drives of narration to the drives of intentionality, while the symbolic mode remains the main tool of commemorative practice, reminding us of that initial encounter. Maurice Blanchot coined a term – a­ utre nuit (the second night) – ­in order to reformulate Freud’s notions of the uncanny: in the first night we approach the absence (the fantastic); and in the second night ‘“everything that has disappeared” appears’ (cited in Suglia 2004: 144). In other words, in the first instance, one is in the state of sleep or death, whereas in the second, the night is never open to the subject, who always remains outside, always searching. The second night requires the suspension of mimetic perception in response to the desire to experience the imaginary as pure immateriality of signs (i.e., the doubling of the subject when each of the constitutive parts bears the pain of resemblance in the presence of the other). Alive, I propose, constitutes ‘the third night’ – ­it does not help the appearance of phantasmagoria, nor does it facilitate the return of the repressed fantasies (as in Freud), nor does it draw a nocturnal parallel between the night with its spectres and going to the cinema. The third night turns its gaze onto the spectator – t­he pervasiveness of the ghostly experience problematises the status of the spectator who – i­ n the presence of the posthumous narrator – ­emerges as a posthumous spectator. He is the one who gazes back and reveals the purpose of cinema – ­it is an archaeology of mourning presented in the form of rituals. The (dis-)appearances of the characters in Alive denote ruptures in continuity (including the continuity of the gaze) or, in fact, as reconfigura-

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the dif f ic ult y o f be ing de a d 197 tions of discourse. The role of the phantom is to overcome the complete break between the living and the dead as well as to overcome the ruptures. Hence, at the start of the film the cracks and shadows on the wall are reassembled in imagination as an abstracted subject. The persistent revenant is an epitome of the return: they become by coming back and in doing so they create a repetitive experience – ­teleological aporia, a certain inheritance. The phantom is a trace and also a differànce (in Derrida’s terms) in that their spectral effect is in the ideological tendency and the promise of freedom. The phantom’s ultimate goal is to mystify discourse as a form of rhetorical compulsion, revulsion and repetition, whereby each mystification is both an epistemological return and a unique event (i.e., the imagery of the double which emphasises the multiplicity of subjectivity). The phantom resists the totality of representation and so emerges as a method of paralogy: the legitimacy of the subject is determined by a denial of the possibility of legitimation. The contradiction between the (modernist) urge to materialise the spectre and the (postmodernist) lack of interest in the materiality of the spectre is resolved in the symbolic mode where materiality itself is ghostly and it imposes the qualities of otherness on the spectators, who literally become spectators of the spectre and ghosts themselves. In the following chapter, I examine the relationship between such (im-) materialities and (re-)presentation as a difference between intentionality of the self and potentiality of the self. I argue that the symbolic mode eschews the concerns of ‘an authentic identity’ conceived in sociological, psychodynamic and other terms, in favour of a subjectivity that performs its purpose by means of ritual, that is, differentiation and not detachment, whereby continuity is possible thanks to the subject’s iterations, vibrations and returns on the margins of knowledge. This feeling of vitality is given to the gaze, the function of which is to provide a locus for the symbolic mode in its multiple continuities.

Notes   1. I am grateful to Julian Graffy for his helpful comments on the first draft of this chapter.   2. The following is an indicative list of contemporary Russian films about the conflict in the north Caucasus: Aleksandr Rogozhkin’s Checkpoint (1998); Sergei Solov’ev’s Tender Age (2000); Aleksei Balabanov’s War (2002); Nikolai Stambul’’s Battle March (2002); Evgenii Lavrent’ev’s Countdown (2004); Valerii Todorovskii’s My Stepbrother Frankenstein (2004); Vitalii Lukin’s The Breakthrough (2006); Farid Gumbatov’s The Caucasus (2007); Aleksandr Sokurov’s Alexandra (2007); Nikita Mikhalkov’s 12 (2007); and many others.

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  3. Russian society has been dealing with multiple traumas stemming from the country’s turbulent past, with one overshadowing another and competing for public attention. For example, Vera Glagoleva’s One War (2009) deals with the largely taboo subject of Russian collaboration with the Germans during the Second World War. Aleksandr Mindadze’s Innocent Sunday (2011) reminds the viewer of the Chernobyl disaster, using the post-apocalyptic context to explore the relationship between death, body and subjectivity. Andrei Kavun’s Kandahar (2009) is a cinematic return to the traumatic experiences of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. And more generally films about the Soviet experiment which has traumatised Russian people (e.g., through the imagery of disability as in Marina Razbezhkina’s Time of Harvest (2004).   4. For my analysis of films that utilise distortion of ‘reality’ but not imagery, see Chapter 8.   5. For example, Dmitrii Meskhiev’s Our Men (2004), Artem Antonov’s Twilight (2005), Aleksandr Rogozhkin’s Transit (2006), Petr Todorovskii’s Riorita (2008), Aleksei Kozlov’s Away from the War (2009), and many others.   6. On the politics of patriotism in contemporary Russian cinema, see Norris (2012). The most recent examples of ‘patriotic films’ are Evgenii Lavrent’ev’s ID (2004), Vadim Shmelev’s Final Countdown (2006), Sergei Bondarchuk’s 9th Company (2006), Aleksandr Voitinskii’s and Dmitrii Kisilev’s Black Lightening (2009), Aleksandr Kott’s I Will Take You around Moscow (2009) and The Brest Fortress (2010), Oleg Fesenko’s 1812: The Lancer’s Ballad (2012), Kim Druzhinin’s and Andrei Shal’opa Panfilov’s 28 Guardsmen (2015), and many others.   7. For further discussion of the relationship between subjectivity, movement and film, see Strukov (2007).   8. For a discussion of the use of photographs and freeze-frames as practices of mise-en-film in Zviagintsev’s The Return, see Cavendish (2013).   9. This mise-en-scène is a reference to the absurdist play by Samuel Becket, Waiting for Godot (1953), in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait endlessly for the arrival of the mysterious someone called Godot. I find a similar use of this literary allusion in Zviagintsev’s The Return. 10. The same colour scheme is used in the baroque palace in Voloshin’s Nirvana. 11. See Chapter 11 on abandoned being in the post-imperial, post-apocalyptic era. 12. The following publications are indicative of contemporary studies of representations of the undead on screen: Scott (2007); Drezner (2011); Moreman and Rushton (2011). 13. See, for example, posts on rutracker (http://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4117637, last accessed 6 May 2014) and ekranka (http://www. ekranka.ru/film/8, last accessed 6 May 2014).

C HA PT E R 10

Intentionality and Modelled Subjectivities: Aleksei Fedorchenko’s Silent Souls (2010)

In previous chapters I established that film as thought is also an expression of intentionality: film is both a mental state and an event that provides a sense of ‘aboutness’. The question ‘what is the film about?’ signals that a complex network of actors is involved in the distribution of meaning and yearning to produce (or reduce) and ascribe some ontological quality. ‘Aboutness’ is somewhat different from other states that can be defined in terms of the senses since the latter may not necessarily produce a perception of intentionality. In the scholastic tradition, ‘aboutness’ implies an idea of the mental or intentional inexistence of an object or phenomenon and their appearance in the process of enunciation as immanence rather than meaning (e.g., in worshipping, something is worshipped but it does not connote the meaning of worship). Such immanence differentiates intentionality from intentions whereby the former relates to mental states, and the latter is just a state or a projection of a particular sense.1 As a result, intentionality cannot be instantiated in the physical world, or in a world which physicalism is true. Daniel Stoljar (2010) believes that even if physicalism were to be eschewed, our thinking would not solve the paradoxes of intentionality,2 because intentionality is not an indication (of a specific object) and is not predetermined by senses although it operates alongside them.3 In relation to film theory, the concept of intentionality goes back to Husserl’s phenomenology. He used the term to distinguish between the meaning of the object and the object as such. These two dimensions account for the corporeal and reflective ways of experiencing objects and situations, whereas intentionality connotes self-referential processes, or the thought-thinking about itself. Here a mode of consciousness (noesis) is detracted from the intended object (noema). In developing Husserl’s ideas, Aaron Gurwitsch focuses on the Gestalt structure of perception whereby noema is a matter of sense in experience and it accentuates other aspects of experience that require uncovering, undoing and bringing back to light

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in the process of signification (1966). Allan Casebier uses Gurwitsch’s ideas to argue for film being a visceral experience impacting the perception of film as a sensuous givenness and viewing the spectator as marked by hyletic data: ‘the sense, lines, patterns, size and shape relationships, the camera movement, camera placement, editing forms, sound textures’ (1991: 13). This citation elucidates the focus of such a sensory interpretation of Husserl’s ideas: rather than debating forms of perception, it draws the attention to the materiality of the visual apparatus of cinema; that is, it replaces mental processes with affects. The dichotomy of sensations as mental events (Descartes, Condillac) or as physical alterations (Locke, Hobbes, Spinoza,) has been replaced in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (2002) by the concept of sensations as artefacts or products of analysis, which, in fact, do not correspond to the experience or, to be more precise, do not correspond to any specific phenomena in the experience. The original concept of intentionality accounts for the transfer between states and asserts perception over sensation in its ability to produce meaning. In fact, Husserl, too, resists the comparison between representation and the represented world. He circumvents the linguistic problems of the referent by splitting it into ‘objects-as-intended’ and ‘objects-as-is’. In relation to cinema, this indicates the shift to considering film experience as simultaneous seeing and perceiving, and ultimately compels the spectator to view images as both ‘real’ and illusionary. In this regard, there is a connection to Bergson’s ideas about direct image-objects which is a rejection of the need to recreate objects into representations, and instead a direct givenness of transcendent objects to different modes of consciousness. Instead of asking about which objects exist independently of our mind, Husserl asks about an act’s intentional character. Instead of asking about how our mental states relate to our bodies, Husserl asks how particular acts relate to other mental states. In order to proceed with his enquiry, Husserl introduces the concept of ‘epoché’, or withholding, or what I would call a discursive interruption or rupture. The purpose of ‘epoché’ is to focus on the internal structures that make our mental states and experiences. Interruptions and ruptures enable the discussion of the relationship of such mental states to discourse, or shared experience. (Here, shared experience does not connote ‘objective’, that is, it does not imply an agreement, but rather distributed ownership of knowledge.) Husserl distinguishes between ‘objects’ and ‘content’, whilst my notion of the symbolic mode involves the idea of interaction between the two, whereby ‘objects’ and ‘content’ are not juxtaposed, but are related to each other by means of discursive interruptions. My understanding of the symbolic mode is similar

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in ten tio na l ity and mo de l l e d su b j e c t i v i t i e s 201 to Husserl’s notion of the intentional content which is not in the act as its constituents but rather an abstract, ideal, modelled structure that different acts have in common. This idea, abstract part – ­in discursive practice – ­is delegated to culture, the oscillations of which produce signification. Thus, meaning is not derivative, nor is it a product of the mental state, but rather it is an outcome of cultural vibrations or meaning-giving occurring in the process of relating, referring. That is why objects appear larger than they are: meaning-making defines the horizon of signification whereby the spectator perceives not an actual object, but the possibilities regarding this object – ­non-knowledge. The misconfiguration between the horizon of the object and the horizon of knowledge creates non-knowledge as all other possibilities of knowledge. The notion of the symbolic mode does not indicate an anti-materialist point of view: I do not mean to suggest that objects exist solely by virtue of our experience of them. Instead, the symbolic mode suggests that we experience objects in the way we do because our mind organises experience in a particular way and in doing so it transcends objects: that is, it presents them to us as ideas and relations. Bazin famously held that ‘there is ontological identity between the object and its photographic image’ (1967: 2:98). Following Bergson, I argue that film is an ontological art because it works with the ontology of our thinking and does not presuppose some essential relationship between the image and ‘reality’. As I have demonstrated in preceding chapters, problematisations of such essential and essentialising relationships are discomforting, as they disable identification and leave the subject vis-à-vis its own determination and the chaos of being. Even appearing has its own duration and ontology whilst pure being always escapes from the horizon of knowledge. Non-knowledge, however, does not warrant inconsistency or incoherence; on the contrary, it is consistent and coherent in its own unknowability. To reiterate, inconsistency and incoherence are matters of representation whilst presentation deals with gaps and ruptures. The latter derives its authenticity due to the lack of pretence for authenticity, not in representation but in awareness. The authenticity thesis contains a particular methodological claim that, according to Alessandro Ferrara, amounts to the following proposition: The form of universalism most appropriate to a postmetaphysical standpoint is that proceeding from the exemplary self-congruency of a symbolic whole – ­two significant models of which are, at the level of life-world practices, the congruence of a life-history and, at the level of expert-practices, the congruency of the well-formed work of art. (Ferrara 1998: 10)

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Ferrara explains that the term ‘postmetaphysical standpoint’ is an acknowledgement of the impossibility of grasping reality outside interpretative frameworks, and that there exists ‘an irreducible multiplicity of interpretative frameworks’ (1998: 11). As a result, the subject is forever destined to float among competing versions, paradigms, symbolic universes and so on. They can never be overcome either through recourse to some decisive evidence, or through design or use of an experiment. The postmetaphysical standpoint emphasises the importance of intentionality as a starting point for determining the position of the subject in relation to the free-floating systems of signification. Ferrara also notes that the term ‘self-congruency’ does not presuppose coherence or consistency. Instead, it is a matter of intentionality and relevance in the symbolic mode or a constant iteration and examination of subjectivity. The authenticity thesis is particularly useful for my consideration of abstract categories, such as traditions and rituals, in the symbolic mode. They advance a feeling (and knowledge) of continuity in time: the capacity to experience the continuity of the other helps forward the congruency of the self. In addition, such subjectivities rely on the demarcations of the congruent being in opposition to self-confusion and self-diffusion that I have evidenced in the films discussed in the book.4 In this chapter, I explore the issue of self-congruency of the multiple self in the symbolic mode by using Aleksei Fedorchenko’s Silent Souls. Fedorchenko was born in 1966 in the village of Sol’-Iletsk in the Orenburg region, which occupies a special place in eighteenth-century Russian imperial history, in particular the colonisation of central Asian territories: the village is on the way to what is now known as Kazakhstan. The village has a salt lake, which, although man-made, is similar in its properties to the Dead Sea in Israel. In the following chapter, I put forward the concept of abandoned being as a figure of post-imperial, post-apocalyptic and posthumous subjectivity by utilising the associations between the Russian steppe and the Jewish desert as formative geocultural spaces of meaning production, and by analysing Mikhail Kalatozishvili’s film which is set in the borderless spaces somewhere between Russia and Kazakhstan. I showcase how Kalatozishvili’s work is a result of the imperial collapse in the sense that he and Fedorchenko work in liminal spaces – ­external and internal, respectively – ­of the post-imperial terrain. The original title of Fedorchenko’s film is Buntings [Ovsianki]: at the start of the film the main character buys a pair of birds who travel with him everywhere. The English title is derived from the film script which describes local people as having ‘quiet deep souls’ [glubokie, tikhie dushi], which is a symbol of the affective predisposition and also

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an early indication of the posthumous status where ‘quiet’ infers ‘dead’, or ‘non-existent’, or what I conceptualise as ‘non-knowledge’. The film was directed by Fedorchenko in collaboration with Denis Osokin (aka Aist Sergeev), the author of the film script. In 2012, they released another collaborative project, a film entitled Heavenly Wives of the Meadow Mary, which continues the ethnocultural concerns of Silent Souls. On Silent Souls, Fedorchenko and Osokin collaborated with Mikhail Krichman, the award-winning cinematographer who is responsible for all Zviagintsev’s films. Thanks to Krichman’s involvement, Silent Souls was celebrated at the film festival circuit, including its premiere at the Venice Film Festival where it received a number of prizes, including as the FIPRESCI Prize and Golden Osella prize for best cinematography. Fedorchenko was previously known as the author of documentaries and mockumentaries such as First on the Moon and Shosho. First on the Moon is a mock-documentary that tells the story of the ‘unknown’ Soviet space programme, which launched the first man to the moon in 1938. The film traverses the spaces of Chile, China and Mongolia to validate these ‘historical’ events (alternatively, it presents the story of deception as a global phenomenon). In his review of the film, Alexander Prokhorov argues ‘First on the Moon is an important film for Russian cinema also because it redefines the notion of utopia as the discourse of social wish-fulfilment’ (2006). And in her essay – ­wittily entitled ‘Mourning the Mimesis’ – ­Daria Kabanova notes that ‘the readily observable inconsistency between “everything was really so” and “everything closely resembles the truth” in fact mimics the problematic relationship to mimesis that is built into the mockumentary genre’ (2012: 79). Taking the approach of Cultural Studies, in her KinoKultura review, Tat’iana Mikhailova views the film as an exploration of ‘a cultural identity that seems to differ from, if not directly oppose, an imperial Russian identity’ (2012). She mixes data derived from the directors’ interviews, analysis of the film text, archaeology, topology and, most strikingly, evolutionary biology to propose an ethnocentric reading of the film. Such a reading is meant to deconstruct ‘the imperial self’ with its ‘xenophobia, aggression, and the self-aggrandizing mania’ (2012); however, it paradoxically reproduces the very type of essentialising the film and the critic aim to deconstruct. Written from the anthropological perspective, Serguei Oushakine’s review, also published in KinoKultura¸ focuses on the inversion of gender roles in Silent Souls. Oushakine notes that Fedorchenko’s film is one of many contemporary Russian films that use ‘the death of a woman to initiate a story about two men sorting out their complicated relationships with each other’ (2012). He accounts for the re-emergence

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of the trope of ‘men without women’ not by the superseding ‘value of masculine camaraderie or utopian visions of the global collective’, but as ‘a symptom of the upcoming collapse of the man’ (2011). Silent Souls is about two men, Miron Kozlov (Iurii Tsurilo), the director of a pulp and paper mill, and Aist Sergeev (Igor’ Sergeev), a photographer working at the same factory. The name of the second character is the same as the scriptwriter’s pen name, which enacts an extra-textual self-reflexive mode. One day Miron invites Aist to his office and tells him about the unexpected death of his wife Tania (Iuliia Aug). Miron wants Aist to assist in the traditional burial rite which involves cremation of the body of the deceased. The men take Tania’s corpse to a site on the Oka River where they build a pyre out of axe handles and perform the ancient ritual. Miron scatters the ashes in the waters of the river. On their way back from the burial ground, the men get lost and encounter two women with whom they engage in casual sex. In many reviews the critics describe the two women as prostitutes; however, in the film there is no suggestion that the women have sex for money. This is very important for my understanding of the film because, in the non-exploitative framework, the sexual act is no longer a symbol of male dominance and the men’s corrupted nature, but a symbol of enjoyment of life and the men’s remembrance of Tania through sexual acts. On their way to her burial site, Miron and Aist carry the buntings – ­symbols of the soul, love and eternity. Aist – w ­ hose name in Russian means ‘stork’ – h ­ ad bought them at a market just before Tania’s death and did not want to leave them behind. As the men approach the bridge across the Oka River,5 the birds escape from the cage, flap around the men and distract the driver, inadvertently causing their car to crash – ­it hits the sidewalk barrier and falls off the bridge into the river. The men and the birds fail to escape. The events between the death of Tania and the men’s death last for about twenty-four hours, which suggests a cyclical cosmogonic structure of ontology. Almost all the film time is devoted to the burying ritual, and I would claim that the film itself functions as a burial ritual, in the same way as Alive is a filmic requiem. In Silent Souls the purpose of ritual is a reconstruction of an indigenous culture. The film claims to depict the people of Meria [Меря] who, according to legend, lived in the Volga region before the arrival of the Slavs in the tenth century. Aist, the character, is a self-proclaimed historian of Meria, who aims to detect elements of the ancient culture in present-day Russia: the names of places and people, including his own name, as well as traditions and rituals indicate that the culture had survived through centuries albeit in the changed form. Aist’s goal is to collect and preserve the knowledge about Meria as well as to develop it in the present-day

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in ten tio na l ity and mo de l l e d su b j e c t i v i t i e s 205 world. By extension, the purpose of the film is to capture and advance the culture of an ethnic minority. That is why Aist has an elevated role: he is simultaneously one of the characters and the narrator, thus, delimiting between ontology and epistemology of cultural practice. To elucidate, the film utilises a bifocal approach to cultural tradition: on the one hand, it is directed towards the past and wishes to excavate knowledge about a forgotten culture; and, on the other hand, it is directed towards the future in its aspiration to affirm the position of Meria in Russia’s multi-ethnic and multi-confessional society, that is, to reappropriate space in the political realm. The ethnic politics of the film has been discussed by the film’s commentators.6 The film presents itself as a grass-roots movement that mirrors the activity of various internet users who, on their websites and in social media, attempt to reconstruct the culture and language of Meria.7 Taking all this into account, it would be possible to define Silent Souls as an ethnographic film, which provides a cultural minority with a voice of its own. For example, in its identity politics Silent Souls would make an important distinction between the Meria and the Slavic people, all merging to form what is nowadays known as ‘Russian’ – ­as in Badiou’s notion of One as Two. In Cultural Studies terms, the film would construct ‘Russianness’ as a multi-ethnic, multicultural identity. However, the problem with Silent Souls is that it is not based on anthropological data, but, just as with Fedorchenko’s earlier First on the Moon, is a cinematic fabrication – f­ake-lore, not folklore – i­t suggests an abstracted notion of difference and shifts from identity politics towards the discourse of modelled subjectivity conceived as the coherent multiple. Indeed, Silent Souls does have some ethnographic value but of a different type. It is in the interpretation of cultural territories, spaces and landscape, and in how it invests them with some profound, metaphysical meaning. Stylistically, Silent Souls produces the effect of the pagan epic, which is evident in the emphasis on space as both a theme and a structural element of the film.8 To elucidate, as ethnographic cinema Silent Souls makes a contribution by documenting the process of modelling a new ontology, which should be defined not in terms of ethnic identity, but in terms of neopagan subjectivity. Neopagan refers to the global movement of nature-based religions, which, in the academic discourse on popular geopolitics, is understood as a form of alternative faith in the postmodern, post-religious world. Robert Saunders notes that ‘modern-day practitioners of pan/polytheistic nature worship have enthusiastically adopted the exonym of “pagan” in recent years, though typically eschewing the neo- affix’ (2012: 789). To elaborate on my earlier point, while Silent Souls is based on spurious data, it is truthful in demonstrating the global movement towards (re-)creating

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new forms of faith, in this case, neopaganism. The difference in actualisations brings forward the issue of intentionality as a matter of multiplicity of interpretative frameworks and self-congruency of the symbolic whole. I interpret the spectator’s awareness of the cinematic falsification as a rupture in discourse, a rupture that is manifested as intentionality rather than as an actual discontinuation of the mimetic overtone. Indeed, in its depiction of the ancient culture of Meria, Silent Souls is concerned with modelling subjectivities in relation to space and beyond the void. This polemic is introduced from the outset. The very first interior scene is a presentation of Aist’s house: the camera shows a wall-wide photographic collage in his kitchen-cum-bathroom-cum-living room. The collage consists of numerous pictures of the village of Neia, which together provide a panoramic view of the settlement. Unlike the majority of anthropological/ethnographic films, Silent Souls is not preoccupied with the authenticity of the location (are these photographs of a real settlement?; are they images of a few villages?), but rather with the composite effect of self-congruency (as photographic assemblages discussed above) whereby the impression of the village is built from individual shots, which are equivalent to individual memories and fantasies brought together in the symbolic mode. The presentation of the collage is accompanied by Aist’s internal monologue: the voice-over tells the spectator about the death of Aist’s father. He was a local poet who, in his poetry, aimed to capture the essence of the local culture. Just like his father, Aist is a village chronicler: he records local events, words, habits and traditions. His creative gaze, though, is retroactive insofar as it aims to model what is lost rather than to capture what is happening. This is evident in the scene in which the viewer is made aware of the ‘scientific’ work Aist aims to produce. The camera shows Aist sitting at a desk and typing on a computer. The text is visible to the spectator, who learns that Aist is not recording current events in Neia as one would expect, but is rather reminiscing about his own past, recollecting events from his youth when he was a student in St Petersburg. Modern-day technology is utilised for the purpose of retrospective assembly of meaning: the computer is not an external prosthetic memory device, but an apparatus for creating and recording fantasies of and about the past whereby memory is not necessarily a shared experience, but a manifestation of the subject’s intentionality in relation to the past. The main question is not an issue of fictionalisation of discourse, but of discursive strategies of imagination and myth-making in the symbolic mode. As the camera lingers over the computer screen, the spectator is able to read the remainder of the text. It tells us about an incident that happened

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in ten tio na l ity and mo de l l e d su b j e c t i v i t i e s 207 many years earlier when a person was found drowned in St Petersburg and the police visited Aist to collect evidence, that is, to (re-)construct an event using procedural practices. In their investigation of the murder the police used a Polaroid picture of the dead person, challenging the immediacy of death as an accidental encounter.9 The incident is, of course, a premonition of the future events in the film – ­Aist’s own death in the Oka River, accentuating the practice of simultaneous backward- and forward-looking. (The very first sequence in the film denotes such a bifocal arrangement: the camera shows Aist riding a bike from behind, and then reverses and shows the road behind Aist as if he is looking back and observing the area from his standpoint). From the text appearing on Aist’s computer screen the spectator also learns that when Aist was a student of photography in St Petersburg, he had a relationship with a local fellow student, suggesting a circular, cyclical presentation of events – t­he eternal homecoming. Her place of birth is designated in great detail – ‘­from the Ring canal’ [s Obvodnogo kanala] – ­and it symbolises her affinity to the Meria culture (the water and the river) as well as the eternal status of feminine subjectivity (the ring). The cinematic subject here is conceived by means of spatialising subjectivity. The relationship between the unnamed woman and Aist should also be interpreted as a marriage between urban and rural spaces, between the imperial centre and the internal periphery.10 In Silent Souls, the other main character, Miron, is introduced with the help of a similar spatialising strategy. At the beginning, he summons Aist to his office to discuss an urgent matter. Before Aist enters, the camera shows Miron sitting at his desk while a handyman is trying to fix a display located behind him. It is a three-dimensional model of the mill with electrical lights fitted in place of the street lights. The worker is replacing a faulty connection, making sure that all the lights can be turned on and this way the mill can become ‘alive’. The three-dimensional model is an attempt to model the space of the factory; in its purpose it is similar to that of the photo-collage in Aist’s flat – ­to model a space occupied by a particular subjectivity. The two introductory scenes relate subjectivities to imaginary spaces as well as modes of communication. With Aist, a connection is established between photography and computer, and with Miron a connection between three-dimensional modelling and television (a TV set is clearly visible in his office). Both computer and television are modern-day means of mediating and modelling ‘reality’. Silent Souls aims to make a point not about technological progress, but rather about the nature of film as a medium and its relationship to the gaze and to the construction of subjectivity. The film continues with a scene in which, in order to explain his request

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to Aist, Miron invites his friend onto the roof of the building – ­the ritualistic top of a mount – w ­ hich provides them with a panoramic view of the factory, the village and the river. Uchitel’’s The Captive deploys mountains as a vantage point in a somewhat different way. On one level, mountains are used as a symbol of local, Caucasian identity invincible to Russian imperial conquest. On another level, mountains provide the Russian subject with a means of observing and surveying the life of the local people who remain vulnerable under the gaze of the Russian soldier. Eventually the mountains become a locus of the gaze which unites the captor and the prisoner, the Russian soldier and the Chechen insurgent, and also leads to the destruction of the latter (Strukov and Hudspith 2015). In Silent Souls, by reaching the ultimate vantage point, the characters not only achieve a transcendental view on the events, but also complete the journey in terms of the modes of illusion and the symbolic mode. In Chapter 5, I analyse an extended sequence from Khomeriki’s A Tale About Darkness, in which the main characters also achieve the ultimate vantage point when walking on top of a parking garage. I argued that the film challenges the authenticity of all structures of objectivity by focusing on performance as a conception of being, or, in Badiou’s terms, as acts, events and occurrences. Instead of authenticity, the characters provide verbal gestures that destabilise ‘the state of being as it is’ and turn love into an event and, in fact, conceive of life as such as an occurrence, an interruption whereby ruptures are indications of non-knowledge. Verbal gestures are analogous to a protest/rupture conceived as an entirely interior movement. In this chapter, I am concerned with visual gestures, that is, the possibility of thinking the gaze as a discursive visual field that the director uses to model subjectivities. I approach such visual gestures through the concept of panorama, that is, a specific visual field enabled by the gaze that is positioned in the open and undetermined space of the symbolic mode. Erkki Huhtamo offers three types of panorama as a cultural phenomenon: the painted, the performed and the discursive. The last one refers to the moving panorama ‘as a figure of speech, writing, or visual representation. Panoramas of imagination are no less interesting, or real, than the concrete ones. Their massive cultural presence demonstrates how the media penetrate minds and provide schemes for experience’ (2013: 15). Indeed, Silent Souls is a progression from one type of panorama to another: from the painted panorama/photo-collage (the photographic model of the village), to the performed panorama/three-dimensional model (with lights going on and off as part of the performative spectacle), and, finally, to the discursive panorama/the view from the roof, which opens the door to the exploration of the capacity of imagination to structure time

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in ten tio na l ity and mo de l l e d su b j e c t i v i t i e s 209 (history), practice (tradition) and ontology (subjectivities). Conversely, the media of visual presentation and communication – ­the computer and television – a­ re given from the historical perspective in reverse order, that is, from the newer medium to the older one, thus compelling the spectator to enquire about the panorama–technology connection as evident in the scene on the roof. I argue that the third type of panorama is linked to the film camera (computer → television → film), that is, the tool for creating the panorama of imagination with its own subjectivities in the symbolic mode. Such predisposition of the male subjectivity – ­control of the gaze as well as of the imagination of the observed – i­s symptomatic of god-like status; however, in Silent Souls it is not the omnipresence of the Judeo-Christian god, or singularity (no god shots are utilised in the film), but of the pagan gods, hence polytheism and multiplicity of subjectivity as assemblages of knowledge. (The use of photographic image/shot assemblages is similar to the way in which Aist’s photo-session is presented – ­see the discussion below.) Such multiplicity is apparent in the logic of the spatial modelling of the Meria world. In his study of the cultural geography of neopaganism, Saunders delimits four distinct conceptual loci of religious immanence: the social, political, numinous and poetic spaces (2012: 792). The first includes the quotidian interactions between the individual and other members of the religious community. It is noteworthy that the social space in Silent Souls is organised according to the doctrine of inclusion: the narrator confirms that each person he and Miron meet on the way to the burial site is a Meria. His knowledgeable gaze incorporates identities into the orbit of the cultural discourse as the people become silent witnesses to the unfolding universe of the ritual. In the film the political space is linked to the social space. It designates particular areas of cultural practice in relation to self-governance as a form of grass-roots activity of the faith-followers. For example, a policeman stops Miron’s car at a checkpoint; as the men are transporting a dead person in their private car, by law the policeman is supposed to inspect their documents, including the death certificate; however, the policeman lets them go because he recognises that they are performing a ritual and so the rules of the modern world are temporarily suspended as the characters enter intemporality. ‘For neopagans, the “sacredness” of numinous space is constructed or recognized by linking it to nature. This synthesis of the known natural environment with the unknown spiritual world permits neopagans to locate the sacred in various forms, from personal space (the magic circle) to the all-­encompassing (the cosmos)’ (Saunders 2012: 793). In Silent Souls, the numinous space is a space of sexual activity and energy. The natural environment is charged

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with vitality and sexual intensity. The events take place in the autumn so the colours of the film are muted, which emphasises the intensity of the imagined world. The autumnal colour scheme of the film suggests nature’s grieving over Tania’s death, and, inversely, Tania’s death and cremation can be interpreted as the end of the natural cycle. In this model, Tania represents the natural law, Miron represents social order, and Aist the supremacy of discourse: their coition – b­ oth physical and symbolic – ­consolidates the powers of nature and human beings in the symbolic mode.11 Within this framework, Tania is conceptualised not in terms of fertility rites or as a mother figure, but rather as a sexual entity (not Hera but Aphrodite, hence the cult of water and rivers in the film). The poetic space is occupied by celebrations of body and sex. Silent Souls contains scenes of explicit sexual activity (e.g., a scene of Tania masturbating in front of Miron, and Miron washing Tania’s hair and body in vodka), but none of penetrative sex. In numerous reviews one finds a misinterpretation of sexual activity in Silent Souls: Miron talks about having penetrative sex with Tania, but the film never shows it; in fact, it is possible that Miron’s impotence is a reason why Tania has no children. This also explains the inventive sexual games and rituals, suggesting that the focus of the film is not on sex as a bodily practice but on sex as energy. Sex belongs to the sacred rather than the profane plane of discourse, and it is regulated by tradition rather than by law. This is symbolised by a phallic toy Aist owned as a child; it is meant to be a traditional Meria toy but is obviously a gimmick construed of different objects, yet in its shape it is reminiscent of Iarilo, the Slavic symbol of (male) fertility. In other words, this is a fake ethnographic object which produces an effect of authenticity thanks to the established conventions of signification. As an adult he uses it as a penholder, evoking the idea of sexual energy as non-knowledge, which poetic imagination transforms into knowledge and hands down from one generation to another. The pagan significance of this object imposes a particular interpretation of events and spaces in the film. The events take place in an abstract space somewhere in the centre of Russia and references are made to the city of Kostroma. The name of the city is not only a place name, but also the name of an ancient Slavic god, a symbol of springtime and fertility. The cult of the god included the rite of burning a human-shaped effigy, and so the film makes a reference to the rituals practiced by different cultural groups. What is particularly important in this reference to Kostroma is how space can be adjured with sexual energy and potency. Space is re-embodied in the symbolic arrangement of the film. Space – ­along with the (female) body – ­becomes an object of the scopophilic gaze. (Here I refer to Freud’s concept of the

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in ten tio na l ity and mo de l l e d su b j e c t i v i t i e s 211 pleasure of looking (scopophilia), Lacan’s idea of the human body existing in its narcissistic aspect (the mirror stage), as well as Laura Mulvey’s critique of fetishising women on screen, a concept she developed in 1975 and revised in 1989.) In the masturbation scene, the camera shows Miron watching Tania and sharing the intensity of her pleasure: the camera transforms both of them into ambiguous objects of the spectator’s gaze. This space of sexual pleasure is framed as a flashback: it is in looking back, in the retrospective work of memory that the sexual energy of the subject is released. This notion of the retrospective gaze connects sexual pleasure with death. The characters never speak of death in negative terms; to them death is about diffusion – ­in Russian, ‘rastvorit’sia’ (to dissolve, to fluidify) – ­disappearing in the waters of the river and merging with the greater being in afterlife, that is, cosmos. The word ‘rastvorit’sia’ is also a common trope used to denote sexual pleasure.12 In order to conceptualise this relation between space and subjectivity, I propose the fifth type of space – ­the symbolic space, which also correlates with the discursive panorama as in Sokurov’s Taurus, or the capacity of imagination to organise time and space and assign meaning. The symbolic space provides self-congruency of the multiple in the symbolic mode; it is a condition that hinges on the intentionality of the subject and ensures the symbolic relevance of space via cross-examination of experience and the awareness of continuity in time. The symbolic space is fulfilment that seems ‘to rest on experiences that can be conceptualised in the vocabulary of psychoanalysis as the experiences of psychic symbiosis and separation, of narcissistic exhibitionism and idealization, of self-acceptance and shame, of Oedipal rivalry, of emotional ambivalence and affect splitting, of sovereignty over the self and the fear of being emotionally overwhelmed’ (Ferrara 1998: 72). Following Ferrara, I distinguish between authenticity and fulfilment whereby the former advances representation, whilst the latter advances presentation. The symbolic mode eschews the concerns of ‘an authentic identity’ conceived in sociological, psychodynamic, ethnic and other terms in favour of coherent subjectivity, which performs its purpose by means of ritual/differentiation versus detachment. Symbolic coherence is the property of anticipating, projecting and modelling continuity in time (non-knowledge), or acting as if continuity equates to time (knowledge). In other words, the coherent subject in the symbolic mode vibrates on the margins of knowledge and non-knowledge. This effect of vitality is given to the gaze, the function of which is to provide a locus for the symbolic mode in its multiple continuities. Silent Souls utilises the gaze as a particular form of agency. This includes the strategy of spatialising the gaze and also charging it with a

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new ontological meaning. This is particularly evident in the way in which mirrors are used in the film. In Litvinova’s Goddess, death is presented as a multistage process which is always delayed to indicate the presence of non-knowledge. These processes of effacing are synchronised with the processes of mirroring. Both death and the voice-over appear as nondiegetic interruptions in the world experienced by the characters and observed by the spectator. As indices of non-knowledge they demonstrate that the evental site has closed to the void and that being in the post-­evental situation takes the form of repetition, a succession of non-events, the hall of mirrors. In Silent Souls, the infinity effect of mirroring is achieved in a different way. The characters spend a lot of time driving in their car: one such sequence consists of a single take lasting over two minutes. The men always sit in the front and Tania’s body is placed behind them on the back seat. The camera is positioned in such a way that it shows the world outside the car visible through the windscreen. It also shows the two men from behind and Miron’s face as reflected in the interior mirror. In other words, the camera exemplifies the gaze of someone who is travelling on the back seat of the car. By associating the spectator’s gaze with the gaze of the deceased person, Tania, the director explores the posthumous position of the characters and the spectator, too, whereby looking at the screen provides the infinity effect in the same way as the hall of mirrors does. The term ‘silent souls’ designates not only the Meria people, but also the spectator and humanity at large: according to Fedorchenko, we inhabit a world that we have lost, that no longer exists except in the imagination, and always as a reflection and a zigzagged movement in time. The posthumous gaze of the camera is also utilised in the masturbation scene, with the woman pleasuring herself in front of the camera (the body parts for desire and body parts for seduction as in a pornographic film).13 The camera rolls back to reveal Miron watching Tania, making sure that the spectator is aware of Miron’s gaze (unity as complementarity). As the camera rolls farther back, it associates the camera with the spectator who is now observing not Tania’s but rather Miron’s (visual) pleasure, problematising the role of the cinematic gaze as a tool of objectification (unity of Two as love, leading to the concept of sex–unity–death). The work of the camera overcomes the separation of gender and sex and the binary oppositions between concrete and abstract, bodily and emotional, thanks to the symbolic mode. Finally, the bodies and the gaze appear as part of the mise-en-scène, and, as such, they acquire a greater sense of materiality. If it were possible to mark the gaze in space it would appear as a zigzag in the same way as gestures and gaze are zigzagged in Litvinova’s Goddess. The symbolic projection of materiality is also evident in the cremation

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in ten tio na l ity and mo de l l e d su b j e c t i v i t i e s 213 scene. As the men burn Tania’s corpse, they perform an ancient ritual, the purpose of which is to annihilate the material entity. The destruction of the object secures the validity of the image: the woman remains as pure appearance, as a symbol of ontology per se. Cremation is a premodern practice insofar as it disinvests from the representation of the self as ‘my body’, which is characteristic of modernity.14 Instead, it maintains the notion of the self as non-knowledge, that is, the self as an aura. The symbolic mode enables the materialisation of such an aura into bodily forms for infinitely profound interiority. Silent Souls works against the concept of the body as a container for spirituality. Rather than presenting subjectivity as Gestalt with an inside and outside, or surface and depth, and the boundary, rendering one or the other inaccessible to vision, the film works to establish the idea of sexuality as a force transcending such boundaries and dichotomies of being. The symbolic mode dispatches the self as the continuing experience of ambiguity and difference, often in doubling paradigms and in occupying the space of the double. In Silent Souls, after the burial, as a spectre, Tania no longer comes back to Miron – ­and by extension the spectator – ­in dream sequences or flashbacks: she now resides permanently in a different realm. However, her image is available in a materialised form as a video recording of her sexual intercourse with the husband. Miron makes a suggestion that Tania was sexually attracted to Aist, thus forming a single entity between one woman and two men,15 and she continues to bind their subjectivities in afterlife. Aist deletes the recording just a few seconds before the car crash, destroying the final material evidence of their existence as desiring subjects: Tania becomes a pure idea, both ‘ewige Weiblichkeit’ (the eternal feminine) and ‘Weltseele’ (world soul, anima mundi), as conceptualised by Goethe and introduced into Russian discourse by Vladimir Soloviov (1853–1900). This reading contradicts Mikhailova’s and Oushakine’s interpretation of the film. Both consider the film in sociological terms as a symbol of a national (demographic) crisis. They note that Tania does not have any children as she is infertile and that Aist’s mother dies while giving birth to a stillborn child, also a girl. When Tania’s mother telephones Miron to inquire about her daughter, he does not tell her about Tania’s death. Mikhailova asserts that the film’s ‘images and motifs surprisingly lack a major element of analogous mythological constructions – ­the theme of fertility and the circle of life, inevitably associated with motherhood’ (2012). Mikhailova and Oushakine downplay the transcendental meaning of femininity, and particularly the ways in which it evokes non-biological forms of reproduction, symbolised in Tania’s relation to the river. In this regard, the bridge is an erectile structure imposed on – ­always temporarily – ­but not obstructing

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the flow of life. The film does not diminish the mother’s role ‘in comparison to the husband’s authority’, as Mikhailova suggests (2012), but rather presents femininity in mythological ways when its return is always in the form of the spectre. The erasing of Tania’s recording is comparable with the double death of the father in Zviagintsev’s The Return: first the father dies when he falls off the tower, and later he dies again when the boat carrying his body sinks. Such doubling of his passing problematises his living status in the first place: was he real or did the boys, his sons, imagine him, following the discovery of his photographic image in the attic? In Chapter 1, I demonstrated Sokurov’s production of posthumous subjectivity where Sokurov speaks of death as a past anterior, that is, a catastrophe that has already occurred, whereby his own cinematography points to the mortality of the subject and conceives itself as the very catastrophe, the self emerges as the other. This process is pertinent to photography as a form of art: Derrida (2001), echoing Barthes, bestows photography with spectral qualities. The ability of photography to present the self as the other allows Derrida to speak of the structure of the posthumous self as the multiple selves – ‘­the plurality of deaths’ (2001: 285). In cinema, ‘the plurality of deaths’ corresponds to the multiple workings of the gaze and particularly its capacity to look at the screen as well as off the screen, into darkness and at the onlooker himself. Derrida equates death with photography and vice versa as a type of temporality – ­the ‘havingbeen’ (l’avoir-été) which he distinguishes from the ‘having been there’ (avoir-été-là) – a­ ‘hallucinating metonymy: it is something else, a piece from the other (from the referent) that finds itself in me’ (2001: 292). He continues to account for how the other appears in the self – ­his concepts of the punctum and stadium, or what I call rupture – ­and contaminates the dichotomy of life/death. This is the force of ‘pluralisation’, of turning the self into the multiple others, and the possibility of ‘seeing a photograph in a photograph’ as a deconstruction of narration and mimesis, a process that Derrida labels as ‘phantasmimetism’ (2001). In Silent Souls ‘phantasmimetism’ is conveyed through the figure of Aist, who works as a photographer at the paper mill. He is shown at work, taking photographs of female workers, one at a time. It is not clear whether these photographs have a utilitarian purpose or are commemorative events. The sequence is presented as a number of photographic shots whereby each photograph documents the ephemerality of being. The film camera records how the flash of Aist’s photographic camera blinds the female subjects: it steals their capacity to see and to be ‘in the seeing’ whereby they always remain the seen. Each flash of light suggests transience as the camera moves on to the next subject. The actual photographs,

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in ten tio na l ity and mo de l l e d su b j e c t i v i t i e s 215 or rather the filmic moments immediately after the photographs are taken, are not shown: each moment ends with the camera flash, compelling the spectator to model their own ‘photographs’/impressions of women’s faces and the imprints of time in their imagination – t­he symbolic panorama. To reiterate, in this sequence each flash obliterates the subject from the screen, turning the vision and the memory of the spectator into a subsidiary screen in the process of symbolic signification. It elevates the function of Aist to that of the divine figure who is empowered to capture and model subjectivities through the use of photographs and his own imagination. It is the latter that facilitates the self-congruence of the world, which is modelled thanks to the use of the former. It is in the realm of imagination, as a matter of intentionality, that Silent Souls completes the process of the sacralisation of space by constantly linking different elements in a discursive relationship of the symbolic whole. The film puts forward a unique set of otherworlds – m ­ aterial, ethereal, chthonic and majestic – ­to provide a symbolic expression for encounters and affect. The photographic session also provides Silent Souls with the sense of the interior panorama, whereby the vision of the interior space is blanked out by the (external) flash of the photographic camera. Silent Souls enquires about the possibility of the immersive vision and the total panorama – ­the subject matter of the remaining chapters.

Notes   1. For a discussion of the collapse of such senses/states, see Chapter 2.   2. Jerry Fodor provides the following: ‘I suppose that sooner or later the physicists will complete the catalogue they’ve been compiling of the ultimate and irreducible properties of things. When they do, the likes of spin, charm, and charge will perhaps appear upon their list. But aboutness surely won’t; intentionality simply doesn’t go that deep. It’s hard to see, in face of this consideration, how one can be a Realist about intentionality without also being, to some extent or the other, a Reductionist. If the semantic and the intentional are real properties, it must be in virtue of their identity with (or maybe of their supervenience on?) properties that are themselves neither intentional nor semantic. If aboutness is real, it must be really something else’ (1987: 97).  3. For a discussion of the paradoxes of intentionality, see Stoliar (2010: 199–205).   4. See, for example, Chapter 7 on the strategies of multiplication of being in Litvinova’s Goddess.   5. In Litvinova’s Goddess (Chapter 7), Styx serves as a demarcation between the Christian and pagan worlds.   6. See, for example, Mikhailova (2012).

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  7. See, for example, the portal of the Nizhny Novgorod Cultural Encyclopaedia (2014), the World of Meria website (2014) and the Regional Geography and History platform (2014).   8. In connection with Spanish art, Marjorie Trusted contends that allegory has the capacity to provide a mixture of pagan and religious elements (2007: 61).   9. For a discussion of the concept of ‘accidental death’, see Chapter 7. 10. See Chapter 11 on the relationship of subjectivity to earth/the steppe in Kalatozishvili’s The Wild Field. 11. The three characters also represent the three type of panoramas used in the film: Miron’s space is the roof, and so visual dominance; Aist signifies the view from the ground and he is a mediator and mystic; whilst Tania supplies a gaze from afterlife and symbolises aberration and posthumous being. 12. For example, this is a common denomination in popular poetry such as Olga Korneva’s 2013 poem: [Ia mechtaiu v tebe rastvorit’sia, / ia mechtaiu v tebe utonut’ – ­/ voedino s toboiu slit’sia . . . / pust’ ischeznu kak lichnost! Pust’!!], available at: http://www.stihi.ru/2013/09/14/5861, last accessed 12 June 2014. This is similar to cinematic fluidification discussed in Chapter 1. 13. Pornographic imagery is also employed in A Tale (Chapter 5). 14. See Chapter 8 for our exploration of the politics of depth and surface in relation to the body (of culture) in Voloshin’s Nirvana. 15. A similar triangulation in an ethnic context is played out in Rogozhkin’s The Cuckoo, Uchitel’’s The Captive and, originally, in Abram Room’s Bed and Sofa.

C HA PT E R 11

Abandoned Being: Mikhail Kalatozishvili’s The Wild Field (2008)

Through sacralisation of space, Fedorchenko’s Silent Souls produces an effect of ruptured continuity. The self-congruence of such a space is determined by the subject that regulates history as a conception of the end. The subject of Silent Souls is the subject that stops history by shifting its attention to the epilogue as the only space-world where the subject is not haunted by the end. The car’s abrupt swerve, resulting in the death of the narrator and a separation of the self from the self, leaves the viewer with an eternal torment appearing in intemporality. In this chapter, I wish to explore how the subject deals with separation as an altering difference whereby death is a synthesis insofar as it helps the subject to bridge the void through repetition, awakening and restitution, and whereby living and dying appears as a double gesture of alterity. As ‘thinkers of an age of rupture’ (Boothroyd 2013: 13), Jean-Luc Nancy and Badiou believe that thinking is a form of withdrawal. Such a withdrawal is a traversal of identity which challenges the phenomenon of the other as resemblance or imitation. Subjectivity appears as a result of the negation of identity (totality) whereby absolute univocity is replaced with equivocity (recollection as anti-totality). Conceptualising the subject as the gap in the now – t­ he gap as the presence in the present – N ­ ancy and Badiou permanently dislocate the subject so that such a dislocation becomes a space-world per se. In his theory of subjectivity, Nancy speaks of ‘abandoned being’: ‘From now on the ontology that summons us will be an ontology in which abandonment remains the sole predicament of being, in which it even remains – ­in the scholastic sense of the word – ­the transcendental’ (1993: 36). For Nancy ‘abandoned being’ is a solution to the problem of Western discourse with its obsession with representation defined in such terms as authenticity, appropriation, fulfilment, destination, realism and so on: ‘“the West” is precisely what designates itself as limit, as demarcation, even when it ceaselessly pushes back the frontiers of its imperium’ (Nancy 1993: 1). This is because the West produces its own subjectivity conceived as the

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pure object of knowledge, and also because the West can only represent itself and for itself, and can speak only of the outside in terms of itself. In this chapter, I would like to engage with Nancy’s problematisation by analysing a film that situates knowledge, literally, at the frontier of the ‘imperium’, where the murkiness of non-knowledge becomes apparent. Mikhail Kalatozishvili’s The Wild Field (2008) deals with the problems of presence – a­ s identified by Nancy – b­ y means of exploring post-imperial subjectivity in crisis whereby the post-imperial legacy designates the demarcations of knowledge and being-after-crisis involves renegotiations of being in a world that has escaped the ontological ‘closure’ determined by the imperatives of representation. I argue that the symbolic mode opens being to transcendental inferences when the subject confronts gaps in discourse in the state of impartation and dislocation in the post-evental, anti-representational mode. In his analysis of Badiou’s Cinema, Alex Ling contends that ‘in moving from the Deleuzian to the Badiouan screen, we pass from the One-void to the voided-One, or again, from (the) everything to (the) nothing’ (2011: 122). Ling’s assertion is based on the assumption that films represent an event and a form of being. In this chapter, I wish to enquire how the filmic image would be positioned in relation to the non-event and non-being, which together help us to conceptualise nonknowledge not as a negation, but as a structure of the void. In particular, I am concerned with how the subject refers to discontinuous spaces and how the symbolic mode operates across discursive intervals. I aim to reconsider the relationship between historical and discursive spaces and how they inform the transposition of the subject as ‘multiple without one’ (Badiou 2009). The Wild Field was Kalatozishvili’s last film before his sudden death of a heart attack (b. in Tbilisi, 1959–2009). Kalatozishvili inherited a rich Soviet film tradition as his father, Georgii Kalatozishvili (1929–84), was an actor and cameraman, and his grandfather, Mikhail Kalatozov (1903–73), was a famous Soviet director, the author of The Cranes are Flying (1957) and I am Cuba (1964). In the late Soviet period, after a short feature The Mechanic (1981), Mikhail Kalatozishvili directed two film adaptations, Scapin’s Tricks (1985), based on Molière’s play Les Fourberies de Scapin, and The Chosen One (1991) based on Prosper Mérimée’s Mateo Falcone. Both films are grounded in the Soviet tradition of ‘nationality’ cinema, that is, films produced in the national socialist republics, in this case in Georgia. They rely on all-Georgian casts and aim to convey local cultural tradition by engaging with European classical literature. His third feature film, Passion Plays (2000), is a story about two characters who travel from Tiflis to St Petersburg, suggesting a transition from the periphery to the

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centre of the Russian empire.1 In fact, the director himself moved from the film studio in Georgia to Lenfilm studios in St Petersburg in the 1990s. The Wild Field centres on the Russian presence in the Asian steppe.2 Historically, this encounter grants Moscow principalities with a sense of common identity in the fourteenth century. In this regard Kalatozishvili’s film is similar to Serebrennikov’s St George’s Day in terms of its conceptualisation of the premodern origins of Russian culture. The encounter with the ultimate desert-like steppe – t­ he war in Afghanistan – s­ ymbolises the demise of the Soviet empire. Kalatozishvili suggests that the steppe is simultaneously the cradle and the graveyard of the Russian empire, and he is interested in the future of the Russian subject who is now released from the imperial dominion.3 ‘The Wild Field’ is a denomination for the Asian steppe, conceptualised in Russian culture as equivalent to a desert. It is perceived as a delineated, open, endless and primal space, where a journey – b­ oth physical and mental – t­ akes place. In the Jewish tradition, the desert is associated with the myth of the exodus from Egypt and the return of the people of Israel to their land, both in ancient and modern times. In the Russian tradition, the ‘desert-like steppe’ is a site of the encounter of the Russian subject with the other. It is a site of colonial conquest and subsequent expansion as well as of post-imperial trauma. The steppe embodies the mythology of conquest and free spirit and of being trapped in non-space – a­ spatial equivalent of non-knowledge. The steppe is also conceptualised in terms of universal space and ‘out of space’, for example, abroad. The steppe must be conquered and cultivated in order to eradicate the wilderness, hence, it is part of the modernist project of appropriating space that is particularly evident in two initiatives: the upturning of the virgin soil, romanticised in Mikhail Sholokhov’s novel of 1932–60; and the construction of the Baikonur space station4 whereby the steppe becomes the locus of Russian modernity.5 In the post-Soviet period the steppe is conceived as a site of dislocation, as a space of loss.6 For example, in Petr Buslov’s Vysotskii: Thanks God, You are Alive (2011), the Asian steppe becomes the arena on which the late-Soviet pop star performs the anxieties of a dissident culture subsumed by official discourse. It is there that Vysotskii survives clinical death: resurrection is possible in the enchanted space of the steppe. As a result, instead of the site of Russian/Soviet modernity, the steppe is transformed into the site of the crisis of rationality. In The Target the steppe is a site of dislocation, an area that provides humans with supernatural powers: they defy death. The steppe is also recognised as a site of Russian/Soviet scientific experiments that yield the possibility of the transcendental in Aleksei German’s Paper Soldier (2008). Ivan Vyrypaev’s Euphoria (2008) presents a drama

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of utmost simplicity whereby the tragedy of passion, linked to the loss of innocence, is possible thanks to the cosmic energy of the steppe. In this film, narration is replaced by invocations of cosmogonic myths. The space of the Russian empire designates the demarcations of ­knowledge – o­ ntological, epistemological, historical and so on – ­insofar as the steppe, and the Russian empire, symbolise the ‘imperium’ of subjectivity that finds itself outside the boundaries of the familiar discourse – t­ he abandoned being. Kalatozishvili’s film poses the question of how subjectivity and knowledge are construed after they have been ‘left behind’ or, to be precise, after the subject has left the space of its own discourse. The film director is interested in the possibilities of signification at the moment of gaping difference when the subject is compelled to look at itself or, as Nancy puts it, ‘the subject contains its difference from itself’ (1993: 11). In other words, the symbolic field of the film actualises the speculative idealism of being when the subject is confronted with the need to ‘grasp itself’ and relate itself to properties outside its consciousness. Transcendental knowledge is evoked by means of following the subject, who gazes at itself and fails to reach the equilibrium of subjectification. Here posthumous being consists of failures to grasp the existential possibilities of sense because, unlike identity, abandoned subjectivity can never cease to exist. Badiou conceptualises these philosophical accompaniments as ‘transitory exteriorities’ (2007: 99). In his analysis of Sartre’s The Transcendence of the Ego, Badiou notes that ‘the immanent being of consciousness cannot be grasped through the transcendence or identifiable objectivity of the ME’ (2007: 100). Kalatozishvili proceeds to examine the structures of ‘the ME’ – ­both individual and imperial – ­by pulling the subject away from subjectivation, and away from its own temporality and discourse. Kalatozishvili addresses the issue of the ‘Western’ discourse in its ‘Eastern’ setting by inverting the conventions of the ‘Spaghetti Western’.7 By paraphrasing Vladimir Motyl’’s The White Sun of the Desert (1969), Kalatozishvili’s The Wild Field establishes discursive parameters for its ontological concerns. If the first film is about the imposition of Soviet power in central Asia after the Bolshevik revolution (nowadays perceived as the re-establishment of the Russian imperial order, in itself an extension of the project of the Enlightenment), the second film is about the degradation of this power after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Thus, a parallel between two cataclysmic events – ­1917 and 1991 – ­is established, and the subject is presented in its post-apocalyptic condition when the subject is trapped in the confusing logic of the new political regime and historical order.8 The confusion leads to the disavowal of identity and the emergence of subjectivity in the move from ‘realism’ to

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ab a ndo ne d b e ing 221 the symbolic mode. In fact, The Wild Field accentuates the state of being between consciousnesses, which results in a greater sense of interiority in contrast to the infinite vistas of the steppe. Furthermore, in terms of the subject matter, The White Sun of the Desert produces knowledge about imperial subjectivity at the height of the Soviet ideological dominion – ­the construction of the Soviet state. The time of the film’s release – ­only a decade before the occupation of Afghanistan – d ­ emonstrates the limits not only of Soviet power, but also of Western discourse which had symbolically reached its own limits, approaching the centre of Asia from different directions and collapsing under its own weight, incapable of grasping the world outside itself. Although The Wild Field focuses on the Russian condition in the post-imperial world, it makes a reference to the wider global context symbolised by the United States. In The Wild Field, the inspector dispatches medical supplies, small bags of ‘American humanitarian aid’. By making such references the film-maker raises concerns about the global outreach of the crisis shown, which aligns Russia not with post-socialist entities but rather with the new global order, including the Western ‘War on Terror’. Conceived in the form of a film script in the early 1990s, that is, after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, perceived by many as the discursive grand finale of Soviet ideology, and filmed after the occupation of Afghanistan by the US and Allied Forces, which started in 2001, The Wild Field is a reflection on the condition of global subjectivity, entangled in its own teleological otherness and failing to come to terms with its own historical monologism. From the perspective of genre, the inversion of the conventions of the Western has to do not so much with the film’s orientalist setting, but with the inversion of historical time. If the Western is a celebration of linear time conceived in spatial terms, The Wild Field is concerned with being after the collapse of such linear temporality. It is being on the margins of historicity when producing chronologies is no longer possible and the sense of time is suprahistorical insofar as the subject is exposed to vibrations of culture in the absence of the tools of summation. Here I refer to Nancy’s engagement with Derrida’s notions of finite history and infinite being. Nancy contends that ‘Accomplished Humanity is no longer historical (just as accomplished History is no longer human). This is why Derrida writes, “History has always been conceived as the movement of a summation of history.” (Or: “The very concept of history has lived only upon the possibility of meaning, upon the past, present, or promised presence of meaning and truth” – w ­ here “presence” here corresponds to “summation,” or resorption into a single figure)’ (1993: 149). In Westerns, signification is produced thanks to movement, ‘movement forward’,

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which legitimises history and charges the subject with the task of making history. In The Wild Field, history has been suspended, and the directional and teleological path has been removed from the subject, who is no longer the agent of the ‘grand narrative’,9 but rather a witness to the opening of time when the world comes into its own being. Such ontological conditioning of time being outside itself understandably produces anxiety: the subject is aware of its own existence after time whereby the succession of being in time is replaced by the cessation of time in being. This transformation is configured spatially, through what Nancy calls ‘espacement’, or ‘a quite different thinking of time – a­ thinking of its spacing’ (1993: 160). Kalatozishvili’s film explores de-territorialised subjectivity, where ‘territory’ refers not only to geographical, social and cultural environments, but also to time that has undergone ‘espacing’, and the subject is conceived in its relation to the territory of being which has been lost, that is, it emerges as abandoned being. Such dislocation of discourse is evidenced in the traces of the imperial order. These include the hospital placed somewhere in the steppe without any visible link to other social institutions or human dwellings. The hospital is a universe on its own. The fence around the territory of the hospital demarcates the spacing of knowledge in its Western rational form which perceives the body as an intelligible container. A young doctor, Dmitrii Vasil’evich Morozov, aka Mitia (Oleg Dolin), works in the hospital as well as living in it. This arrangement signifies the domestication of rationality as well as the rationalisation of being, or the inseparability of being and knowing, whereby Mitia’s medical practice is a performative exercise in being rather than a series of clinical procedures, just as in Balabanov’s Morphine. His patients include local men and women, both ‘Russian’ and ‘non-Russian’, whereby the difference is presented in recognisable racial terms. The former is a Western, diverse, stratified identity, whereas its Eastern counterpart – ­is conforming, mystical and monological subjectivity. The Eastern subject, symbolised by Galina (Irina Butanaeva), converses in Russian with an accent, which signifies a gap in the discourse (including the discourse of race). Other characters include Riabov (Roman Madianov), a local policeman, and Fedor Abramovich (Iurii Stepanov), a medical inspector. His patronymic name – A ­ bramovich – ­suggests that the doctor has Jewish ancestors, and the film ties together three major faiths – J­ udaism, Christianity and Islam – a­ s three types of knowledge, and equates the steppe with the desert and constructs a space of t­ransience – ­the steppe as non-knowledge. The steppe-desert enables hallucinatory longings, conjuring mirages and fantasies. It points to the endurance of its inhabitants, who are in constant search of purification,

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ab a ndo ne d b e ing 223 redemption and initiation. The cosmogony of The Wild Field results in the production of nomad subjectivity that finds itself in exile, wandering and awaiting temptation. From the Cultural Studies angle, both Riabov and Fedor Abramovich are remnants of the Soviet system of control, now dysfunctional. These and other characters are introduced nonchalantly: all of them are drawn into Mitia’s orbit, and the world is divided into ‘doctors’ and ‘patients’, that is, subjects and objects of discourse, except that in the film they constantly switch positions, signifying the appearance/­ disappearance of the thing in itself. Such alterations in status are framed as ‘visits’: Mitia receives his patients, guests, friends and even his lover on their way somewhere else. The hospital is the ‘here’ of the discourse; the characters’ encounters are incidences/events of when time spaces: that is, it transforms into a world or opens a continuum through an imagination of a there, which is unattainable and yet desirable, as a finite void. The characters function as nomads of history on their way to nothingness, whereby the geometry of the imperial order with its administrative divisions into regions, provinces and oblasts has been replaced by the ‘spaciosity’ of presence with its unstructured global flows, emerging as non-knowledge. Russian imperial history, and, by extension, the history of the Western discourse, turns out to be a narrative of sickness, malaise; it emerges as being after the climax, in the post-human, post-jouissance condition, producing posthumous subjectivity. In The Wild Field, the characters are in a limitless, uncontrolled environment. They are unable to move, to go away from where they are: they continue to return to Mitia’s hospital, which fails to provide them with a sense of cohesion and a sense of purpose to their community. In this sense The Wild Field is an inverted road-movie, in which the main character remains static while other characters come to visit; hence, the imperative journey is interiorised and presented as a series of visits. These visits should also be viewed as ‘returns’ of the spectre.10 They exist in the state of oblivion whereby oblivion does not mean ‘not being’, but rather being as abandonment, with every visitation signalling a rupture in discourse. This condition is characterised by vibrations of being or what Nancy calls ‘wavering’: The time of abandonment is the time, the wavering, of the instantly abandoned instant; time abandons itself, and that is its definition. And in time we are abandoned to time, just as time abandons us. Thus our time – ­our epoch – ­is more than ever the time of time, the time of the temporal ontology of abandonment, and of the end of History in the sense of History’s desperately holding on to time, resisting it and sublating it . . . What is abandoned, what abandons itself, is only in transition, the

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tilt, the teetering – ­‘between the ungraspable and the grasp’ – ­and in the skip of a beat, of a heartbeat; and even the transition, the defection, the swoon is not. (Nancy 1993: 42)

Here Nancy argues for a type of being which is in reference to itself – ­anti-historical time, which corresponds to the anti-representational drive of the symbolic mode – ­whereby the subject is cognizant of the self-presence in the void. Nancy’s notion of ‘teetering’, of being in a state of abandonment, or what I term as vibration above, is specific to the postevental subjectivity. This is evident in the structure of The Wild Field, which I analyse below as well as in the history of how the film was made, because this history reveals the gaps in discourse and the cinematic act as being after the end of history. The film is based on a script authored by Petr Lutsik (1960–2000) and Aleksei Samoriadov (1962–94),11 key figures of the Russian cinema of the 1990s along with Vadim Abdrashitov, Ivan Dykhovichnyi, Aleksei German and others. In 1998, they authored the script of a film titled The Periphery; Lutsik directed the film on his own in 1998. Set in the first few years of post-Soviet Russia, the films shows a few villagers who have lost their land to an oil development corporation. The angry men travel from their remote village in the Urals to Moscow to claim their land back. Their journey to Moscow is punctuated with incidents that strengthen the male bond. Just as in Grigorii Aleksandrov’s Volga-Volga (1938), the characters’ progression to Moscow is marked as phases of technological modernity: from on foot, to travelling on a motorcycle and later by car, the travellers approach the seat of new economic power in the Russian capital. Lutsik and Samoriadov make numerous citations from classical films of the Soviet era, such as The Earth (directed by Aleksandr Dovzhenko, 1930), Chapaev (directed by the Vasili’ev brothers, 1934) and The Ascent (directed by Larisa Shepitko, 1976), as they are concerned with the future of the grand Soviet style in the new capitalist era. Their characters are simultaneously biblical Magi, heroes of Russian folklore (the bogatyrs), reincarnations of early Soviet local representatives [khodoki], famous characters from Leonid Gaidai’s comedies (Trus, Balbes and Byvalyi) and so on. Shot in black and white, stylistically, the film combines elements of parody, comedy, noir and Soviet adventure and war movies. In his review of the film in Kommersant, Andrei Plakhov (1998) calls the film ‘a funeral of Soviet cinema’, which resurrects ‘collective dreams of the USSR’. Kalatozishvili shares some of the concerns of The Periphery: for example, his characters are predominantly male and the main function of the female characters is to emphasise the link of people to their land or

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ab a ndo ne d b e ing 225 soil [zemlia]. Kalatozishvili shows characters in extreme situations and explores the dynamics of vigilante justice; and he borrows a few scenes and motifs as his homage to the scriptwriters. For example, The Periphery features a scene of ‘resurrection’ in which a man who has been frozen in a lake is brought back to life with the help of rubbing and generous amounts of vodka. This scene corresponds to the ‘resurrection’ scenes in The Wild Field analysed below. The Wild Field was Samoriadov’s and Lutsik’s ‘unrealised script’: written in 1994, it was not transferred to screen because of Samoriadov’s tragic death. Kalatozishvili came across the script in 2006; working with Lutsik’s and Samoriadov’s script was a big risk due to their idiosyncratic style, including the use of steb, ‘a peculiar form of irony that . . . required such a degree of over-identification with the object, person or idea at which was directed that it was often impossible to tell whether it was a form of sincere support, subtle ridicule, or a peculiar mixture of the two’ (Yurchak 2006: 250). In fact, Seans published a range of statements from leading Russian film directors and critics who discussed the relationship between the original script and Kalatozov’s film (‘Seansu otvechaiut . . .’, 2009). While some noted that the film is a literal adaptation of the script [‘fil’m – ­pochti podstrochnik’] (Rutkovskii 2009), others pointed out that Kalatozishvili had altered the original script by focusing on the internal conflicts and downplaying Lutsik’s and Samoriadov’s absurdist, steb-like exploration of the economic and political anarchy of the 1990s. In my view, Kalatozishvili maintains Lutsik’s and Samoriadov’s interest in epic, archetypical situations and characters. Vadim Rutkovskii (2009) defines them as ‘bylinnye’ [‘vse lutsik-samoriadovskie geroi – ­bylinnye], whereby ‘bylina’ [bylina, from Russian byt’, meaning ‘to be’ and/or ‘being’] is a traditional eastern Slavic oral epic narrative poem, the elements of which are apparent in the film, for example, in the use of the figure of the bogatyrs. This association suggests the characters’ existence in pre-time, or beyond time or as abandoned being. The cosmogony of existence is achieved thanks to the spatialisation of temporalities in the film. While in Lutsik’s The Periphery, the main characters are mobile, the main character in The Wild Field is static. Lutsik’s film is symptomatic of the cinema of the early 1990s because of its interest in cultural transfer to the centre, Moscow. Kalatozishvili deliberately remains on the periphery of the empire: his film makes a centripetal movement, which is generally characteristic of the films made in the 2000s, for example, Petr Buslov’s Bimmer (2003), Khlebnikov’s and Popogrebskii’s Koktebel’ (2003), Gennadii Sidorov’s Old Ladies (2003), and many others.12 (See the final chapter on how subjectivity moves even

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farther away to a space that is entirely beyond our horizon, where only conversations with cosmos/eternity are possible.) Even in their depiction of the steppe, Lutsik uses visual codes of the inner periphery – h ­ e shows the outskirts of the Russian kingdom [Rus’], whereas Kalatozishvili portrays the margins of the Imperial order [Rossiiaskaia imperiia]. Furthermore, while Lutsik and Samoriadov were interested in the very process of disintegration of the Soviet order and its stylistic representation, Kalatozishvili is concerned with living in the post-apocalyptic world and the concerns of the symbolic mode. Lidiia Maslova (2009) describes the film as ‘a letter from the underworld’ [pis’mo s togo sveta] because of its distancing from present-day conflicts and historical catastrophes. At the same time, it is always a crisis, a catastrophe of some sort that brings people to Mitia’s hospital (they never come for a regular check-up). For example, Riabov, who is Mitia’s antipode due to his inability to comprehend life beyond the basic, materialist level, arrives to enquire whether Mitia has seen anything suspicious in the steppe. From the outset Mitia is established as a spiritual authority in that he is required to guide his people, especially when they are taken by an inexplicable angst and the fear of realising that they exist, like the people of Moses, in abandonment. The medical inspector Fedor Abramovich comes to deliver a pay cheque and to complain about the breakdown of the supply system and the general disintegration of the economy, society and culture. He speaks of the current situation as ‘a collapse after collapse’, that is, an ongoing crisis emerging after the apocalyptic events of 1991, hence, according to The Wild Field, the actual collapse occurred not under Gorbachev but under Putin. Fedor Abramovich uses medical ­terminology – ­as a type of trope – ­to express his lament about the end of civilisation: people no longer suffer from sophisticated types of malaise such as migraines, haemorrhoids and kidney stones; instead, he treats only injuries.13 Another way of reading this list of medical conditions is to consider it as a description of a subject who does not develop internal problems and encounters only external ones. This denotes a post-imperial condition in the steppe whereby external disintegration is mirrored in internal stasis. Another visitor, Galina, tempts Mitia with her youth and wealth (she arrives in an old Soviet Volga), but she does not succeed because, as he informs her, he cannot ‘marry the virgin’. By rejecting Galina, Mitia negates the local culture; however, he later performs an act of cultural unity. When Galina is wounded in a shooting, Mitia pulls a bullet from her stomach with his bare hands: he performs a symbolic penetration of her body, and reunites the local and imperial cultures. Such an act of penetration is both an act of aggression and an act of healing.

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ab a ndo ne d b e ing 227 Riabov, Fedor Abramovich and Galina are three of the many visitors Mitia receives in the course of the film. As Mitia is always in his abode, interacting with the visitors and attending to their needs and desires, The Wild Field replicates the structure of Gustav Flaubert’s The Temptations of Saint Anthony (La Tentation de Saint Antoine, third version published in 1874), a book that deeply influenced the young Freud. Written in the form of a play script, The Temptation of Saint Anthony details one night in the life of Anthony the Great (c. 251–356). In Flaubert’s text, Saint Anthony is faced with temptations, both as human agency and objects, to contaminate his belief that isolation is the truest form of worship. For example, Anthony is tempted by Ammonaria: he is torn between his desire for her and his desire to remain holy before God (I see a parallel in The Wild Field in the story of Mitia and Galina). The temptations include the Heresiarchs, martyrs, magicians, science, food, the monsters, lust and death. Each character in The Wild Field challenges Mitia’s assumptions about the world and tempts him by material or intellectual offerings – ­a pay cheque, animals, a car, sex and so on. Both the book and the film are notable for their depiction of spiritual torment. Like Saint Anthony, Mitia is haunted with illusions, objects that transform their meaning when they are used, and a silence that separates him from the world, as if it is some sort of trance. Whereas at the end of the novel Saint Anthony contemplates suicide, Mitia’s is threatened by his double: the Doppelgänger is a symbol of the suicide; these are attempts to detach the characters from religious frenzy and existential angst, respectively.14 Both the characters symbolise the crisis of knowledge or what, in his praise of Flaubert’s novel, Freud calls ‘the awareness of our perplexity in the mysteriousness that reigns everywhere’ (cited in Unwerth 2006: 83), a concept that is a precursor of our notion of non-knowledge. The devils and monsters that beset Saint Anthony are extensions of his subjectivity and embodiments of his memories. Similarly, in The Wild Field Mitia is engaged in anecdotal events that illuminate his being in the state of abandonment as the postevental stasis. As I have pointed out above, the film contrasts stasis and motion. Mitia completes his metaphysical journey by never leaving his place. Conversely, his visitors are constantly on the move but they are unable to change internally. Moreover, they can never let Mitia go. Even when he is fatally wounded they wish to claim him back: they cannot let death take control and similarly they cannot let him abandon them in the steppe. They treat him as a local deity as they come to worship him and offer their sacrificial giving. The contrast is also established when the modern world is compared with the wild world of the steppe. The film opens with Mitia

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travelling on an old Soviet motorcycle; he catches up with a herd of horses and they move in the same direction, symbols of the old world and technological modernity. However, the main contrast in the film is between the rapidly changing world of people and the immobile steppe. The script was written in 1991 and clearly refers to the crumbling world of the USSR; by making the film in 2008 and making allusions to the contemporary world untraceable – ­with the exception of one scene where the voice on the radio refers to 2007 – ­Kalatozishvili demonstrates that he is concerned with social change in abstract, metaphysical terms.15 He lets the viewer imagine the bustling town to which Katia, Mitia’s girlfriend (Danijela Stojanović16) returns and Russia’s capital that the characters refer to from time to time, while showing the everlasting world of the steppe where nature rules human existence. Although the viewer assumes that the characters have families and jobs, they are never shown in the environment of home or workplace (unless they are shepherds and the steppe is their workplace). People are depicted as nomads who occupy the transient space of the steppe. At first Mitia appears to be anchored; however, in actual terms he is a nomad, too (he does not have a home of his own and lives in a hospital where he prefers to spend most of his time outside; he even sleeps on the porch). His gaze is constantly fixed on the horizon as if demonstrating his desire to reach an outer realm. Mitia belongs to a bigger world of thinkers: he is often shown reading a book; in fact, he has a relatively big collection of volumes; and he communicates with the outside world using an oldfashioned radio and Morse code, which signifies his distancing from the world spatially as well as temporarily. Nancy maintains, ‘in our time . . . abandoned being, being-thrown-to-the-world in dereliction, constitutes a positive possibility of being-in-the world’ (1993: 43). The Wild Field transcribes meaning by compelling the main character to return to embrace his community even in afterlife. The film deconstructs the powers of dichotomies by doubling situations and characters, making the double the ultimate transgressor of borders and distinctions. The vision of the future is unquestionably dystopian, since extreme situations charge the film with the task of examining human nature and the meaning of life on the periphery of human existence. In The Wild Field, the characters are left behind, they have been forgotten and expelled from the course of history, and the origins of this crisis are unknown. The Wild Field identifies the crisis with the figure of man; indeed, the film presents almost an exclusively male world. The film portrays or makes reference to several women, and all such references are negative. Katia betrays Mitia when she announces that she has married another man; Galina provokes her lover by going out with another boy; the postman, Mitia’s friend,

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ab a ndo ne d b e ing 229 speaks derogatively about a seductive woman in the city; the man with a sick cow calls his former and current wives ‘idiots’ and compares them with his dog. The message of the film is not to showcase misogynist attitudes. In fact, in other scenes men are revealed to be just as inadequate and they use derogative language when speaking to each other, for example, they call each other ‘dogs’ [kobel’]. Rather, the director wishes to show that the men in the film are married to a different type of femininity – t­ he steppe (the word is a feminine noun in Russian), and generally mother earth.17 The shepherds save the life of their mate who has been struck by lightning; they dig a hole in the ground and earth him there. The scene can be interpreted as both a ritual burial and as a symbolic union with earth (the whole male body is inserted into the ground). Whether the man releases the electrical charge in the ground or, on the contrary, is charged with the power of earth, he comes back to life at dawn, which symbolises the eternal return of life and power in a pagan world.18 This incident also demonstrates that in the steppe the transition from life to death is reversible: as one of the characters confirms, ‘man never dies once and for all, at times he seems to be dead but later comes back to life, he just needs some rest’. Indeed, this belief challenges Mitia’s rational knowledge of medicine and the human body, as he often functions at the extreme of medical practice. For example, at the beginning of the film he applies a red-hot metal rod to the skin of a heavily intoxicated man in order to bring him back to life. On the one hand, the film provides a rational explanation for Mitia’s unconventional practice – ­the lack of medical supplies – ­however, on the other hand, it is evident that Mitia has obtained some supernatural knowledge by living in the steppe and observing local customs. He is not so much a modern doctor [vrach] as a primordial healer [znakhar’]: his collection of herbs is blown away by the wind at the end of the film, signifying a total recall of knowledge and victory of non-knowledge. Mitia’s ability to re-animate people who had crossed the threshold of life and death suggests that he and other characters occupy the space of the afterlife as posthumous subjectivities. The ultimate expression of the posthumous subjectivity – i­n its reversible, self-referential form – ­is the figure of the Doppelgänger, an unnamed man who lives in the hills in the vicinity of Mitia’s medical practice. The actor who plays the man – ­Iuris Launcinš – ­is known for his roles in cinema and on television: he plays a criminal in Dmitrii Parmenov’s Attempt to Escape (2007), Serebrennikov’s St George’s Day (2008), Aleksei Kozlov’s The Asian (2008), and many other productions. Launcinš introduces the aura of criminality in The Wild Field, an association that is enhanced when Riabov, the local policemen, enquires about some suspicious people in the

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steppe. In fact, one of the most dynamic scenes in the film is when Riabov, together with local men, attacks runaway criminals. Filmed as a scene from a Western, the scene provides the context in which to discuss the issue of law and order. The film-maker affirms socially institutionalised power: as a policeman, Riabov takes on responsibility for the attack, and Mitia, as a doctor, officially confirms the death of the criminals. Although clinically dead, the criminals continue living in the cultural realm: the local men plan to decapitate the corpses and keep their heads as trophies. Riabov and Mitia prevent lynch justice: that is, they avert this second death, letting the dead militia occupy the transient space between different consciousnesses. (Zviagintsev is interested in the similar case of the double death and abandoned consciousness in The Return.) Mitia’s own being is between consciousnesses, too. On the one hand, his role is to normalise the discourse of power and stabilise the social order. On the other hand, he has the function of sustaining the unstructured, esoteric knowledge of the steppe. Galina tells him a local legend about an abandoned mine where an evil spirit lives. She mentions that the mine was constructed about a hundred years ago and thus the film makes reference to late Tsarist industrialisation and Russian imperial modernity. It is indicative that the mine was eventually abandoned; this fact signifies that all attempts to colonise and modernise the steppe will fail. (Indeed, the medical inspector recalls how the house where Mitia now lives used to be a hospital with ‘clean wards and a helicopter pad nearby’.) Galina mentions that a wild beast [zver’] lives in the mine. She points out that it is neither a bear nor a wolf, but some chthonic creature that devours animals. From the narrative point of view, Galina’s story is a premonition of future events, when Mitia is attacked by a wild-looking man. Metaphysically, the beast symbolises the dark side of Mitia’s character, the evil power accumulated in the depth of the steppe. In the symbolic mode he is the embodiment of non-knowledge, which is there to challenge the structure of the world (he attacks Mitia with the map of the USSR placed behind them). In this regard, Mitia is a type of the mystic that Umberto Eco uses in order to substantiate his symbolic mode. At the start of the film Mitia refers to the mysterious man as his angel, protecting his life in the steppe. For a long time it is not clear whether the man is a trick of vision, an hallucination or a real person. Mitia chases the man on his motorcycle, but the mysterious man always escapes from his pursuit and ultimately from the horizon of knowledge. One day Mitia gets a pair of binoculars in order to locate the man and spots him on top of a hill. Leaving his binoculars behind, Mitia hurries out into the steppe and climbs up the hill; when he reaches the top he finds no one there. In con-

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ab a ndo ne d b e ing 231 fusion he looks back at his own house down in the valley, and he sees the strange man now looking at him through binoculars from his house. Mitia and his ‘angel’ have reversed their positions, with Mitia becoming the observed and the estranged one, whereas the observed is transformed into Mitia’s double.19 The double functions as a projection of Mitia’s inner self, and they switch positions in an undetermined, unregulated manner. At the end of the film the double enters the world (I find a similar resolution in Litvinova’s Goddess). The strange man invades Mitia’s home while the latter is away. Alternatively, one could read the scene as Mitia’s invasion of the other man’s world, which confirms Mitia’s posthumous status. Mitia realises that the stranger is in need of medical assistance. After Mitia helps the stranger, the latter attacks him with a scalpel. Traditionally, doubling signifies evil and suffering, the themes employed in Dostoevskii’s oeuvre, particularly in his short novel The Double [Dvoinik] (1846), which depicts a man whose life is on the verge of destruction due to the sudden appearance of a literal copy of his self, a motif also present in Dostoevskii’s later The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevskii and Kalatozishvili follow Plato’s notion of the double as a projection of the self, a spirit that governs the person, and also the ideal presentation of the self on the cosmological level, the ideal model. In the psychoanalytical perspective, the double signifies a ritualistic death, in which the double is an embodiment, a projection of the soul of the subject in afterlife. In the symbolic state, the figure of the double signifies inversion or the zigzagged movement of the subjectivity from the world to the event – ­death. I find this inversion in the finale, which shows objects turned upside down. It is known in the cationic state, the patient tends to see the self upside down. In the film this is because the villagers find Mitia and carry him on a blanket away from the house, and so he observes the world in an upturned fashion. I argue that seeing the world in the reversed manner is a stage in the process of de-personalisation and de-realisation: the disavowal of the real for the sake of the symbolic. As a result, the double is always an hallucination, a hologram of the self, being in a world that is split into immaterial, anti-representational enunciations. The film’s focus on afterlife may have origins in the neopagan framework utilised by the director (also explored in Chapter 10 with focus on the discursive dimensions of space and spacing). According to contemporary neopagan thinking which reinterprets traditional Slavic folklore, Mitia’s experience of doubling exemplifies the concepts of Nav’, or the dead person [‘mertvets’ rather than ‘trup’, where the former is an animate noun and the latter is inanimate, suggesting the difference between living beings and subjects in the afterlife]. In Russian neopaganism this concept

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has been reinterpreted following the Orthodox principle of the Holy Trinity. Aleksandr Asov, the author of many texts on Russian neopaganism, determines Iav’ broadly as the present world, which was created by Prav’, the will, whereas Nav’ is the afterlife (Asov 1992). Mitia’s transition from Prav’ to Nav’ is a movement from the world to the event, with the latter espacing the being: ‘Iav’ is something fluid, something that has been created by Prav’. Nav’ comes after Prav’, and Nav’ comes before Prav’: Iav’ exists in Prav’’ (Asov 1992).20 The end of life is when the place is engulfed by boundless space; in other words, life consists of temporal structurings of space and of singularities of nothingness, which eventually disintegrate as part of inexorable entropy, or exist in singular permanence as in The Target. Doubling is synchronised with the idea of de-territorialised subjectivity whereby the subject has experienced double dislocation. First, it was moved to the margins of the Russian empire as part of the conquest of new territories. Later, it was left behind after the collapse of the empire. Double de-territorialisation disconcerts the subject insofar as it rejects both the centre and the periphery. The characters curse Moscow and the steppe. They complain about the break up of communication with the imperial core, but they demonstrate no longing to return to it or, in fact, to belong to their new zones. Abandoned being signifies a new type of localisation whereby the subject finds itself immobile in a space that is itself mobile. It is localised on the ancient routes of global exchange – t­ he Silk Road – ­while being fixed in space the subject is untethered in time. The film provides additional imagery of the concept of immobility within the mobile space. This time the imagery is borrowed not from the panoply of myths about the ancient trade, but from the communicative system of the present-day world. Mitia is always waiting for the arrival of his lover; he is so keen that he goes to check the post as often as he can. This involves riding his bike21 to a spot in the middle of the steppe where there is a pillar with a postbox affixed to it. Mitia spends a lot of time, waiting at the pillar and contemplating the horizon. Who put the postbox there? Who delivers post in the steppe? Where does the post arrive from? While nothing changes in the steppe, this particular place is open to transcendental occurrences whereby the mysterious arrival of the post constitutes an event that causes the transformation of Mitia’s being into a world.22 Mitia’s selfpresence magnetises the symbolic in the film: ‘abandoned being finds itself deserted to the degree that it finds itself remitted, entrusted, or thrown to this law that constitutes the law, this other and the same, to this other side of all law that borders and upholds a legal universe: an absolute, solemn order, which prescribes nothing but abandonment’ (Nancy 1993: 44).

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ab a ndo ne d b e ing 233 Thus, The Wild Field actualises the final meaning of abandoned being, that is, the meaning of god conceived as formlessness or, to be precise, the giver of forms beyond all forms. This keeps Mitia safe from the abyss of khôra, from getting lost in the steppe and from dying. Indeed, in The Wild Field, with the exception of the criminals who wander into the steppe and violate its laws, nobody dies. In actual terms they cannot die because from the point of discourse they are already dead and continue living in the form of abandoned being. Such being is structured according to intervals, khôra, which are synchronised with the vibrations of culture. Derrida uses the concept of khôra to account for a type of subjectivity that ‘always takes a place which is not his own, and that one also calls the place of death, he does not have either a proper place or a proper name’ (2004: 161). Khôra determines a type of ontology that privileges spacing as divergence, deviation and withdrawal. As an invocation of Plato’s gap that always remains unfilled and unbridged and gives birth to places, The Wild Field speaks about the pre-origins of space. It is in these intervals that non-knowledge is visible to the eye, encircling the expenditure of negations in a higher affirmation of life after death. Chapter 12 explores the distinction between life and death as a gap between form and meaning whereby the image is no longer capable of filling the gap and the image becomes a form of interruption of the circularity of life, which transforms the after-effect of meaning into an origin, or eternal being of the monad.

Notes   1. The legacy of the Russian and Soviet empires is one of the dominant themes of contemporary Russian cinema. See Condee (2009) for an extended discussion of the imperial trace in post-Soviet and Russian cinema as well as films not covered in her monograph, such as Vladimir Khotinenko’s Death of the Empire (2005), Karen Shakhnazarov’s The Vanished Empire (2008), Ivan Dykhovichnyi Europe-Asia (2009), and many others.  2. In Euphoria, Vyrypaev provides long aerial shots of the southern steppe – ­along the River Dion – w ­ here chalk-white roads stretching all the way to the horizon symbolise the working of fate and the primordial passions of the main characters   3. Russian cinema supplies a variant of the steppe-desert in the imagery of the Arctic wasteland in films such as Pavel Lungin’s The Island (2006), Aleksandr Mel’nik’s Terra Nova (2008) and Popogrebskii’s How I Ended this Summer (2010).  4. German’s Paper Soldier (2008) re-visits the location of the Baikonur space station; however, unlike its Soviet predecessors, the film focuses on ethical dilemmas and emotional drama of the protagonist.

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  5. The steppe is a key trope in the ideology of Eurasianism, a political movement in early twentieth-century Russia that focused on the geopolitical concept of Eurasia. The ideas of Eurasianism have been reconceptualised in the writing of neo-Eurasianists such as Aleksandr Prokhorov and Aleksandr Dugin, right-wing political thinkers, activists, promoters of the idea of empire, and editors of the tabloid Tomorrow and the journal Elements: The Eurasian Review, respectively. The ideas of Eurasianism and neo-Eurasianism were popular in some parts of Russian intelligentsia in the 1990s. In the 2000s, they entered the mainstream discourse. Neo-Eurasianism has been examined critically in literature (e.g., Parland 2005; Shlapentokh 2007; Laruelle 2012); however, some examinations often inadvertently legitimise the right-wing discourse of empire in Russia. Sergei Bodrov’s Mongol (2007) could be interpreted as a Eurasianist cinematic text. It recounts the early life of Genghis Khan, who was a slave before going on to build an empire that would include Russia by 1206. Bodrov stresses the imperial element of the Russian state and provides it with an eschatological value of the foundational myth.   6. In his study of patriotism in the Yeltsin and Putin era, Oushakine points out that in the post-Soviet period national identification in Russia relies on the shared experience of loss (loss of status, human life, purpose, etc.) (2009: 12).   7. For a representative study of ‘eastern Westerns’, see Imre (2011).   8. On problematisations of the Russian revolution in the symbolic mode, see Chapter 3, and on Badiou’s notion of the Soviet century, see the Introduction.  9. In The Postmodern Condition (1984), Lyotard defines ‘grand narratives’ as a type of a metanarrative. One such example is that of the grand narrative of the Enlightenment and the progress of knowledge. 10. This concept of visitation as presence of superior intelligence is utilised in Tarkovkii’s Solaris (1972), see Strukov (2008) for further discussion. See Chapter 9 for the discussion of the role of the phantoms in the symbolic mode. 11. The script of the film is available at site: http://cinefil.ru/2009/01/dikoepole-scenarij, last accessed 22 March 2014. 12. Also Marina Razbezhkina’s Time of Harvest (2004); Aleksandr Atanesian’s Bastards (2006), Vera Glagoleva’s One War (2009), etc. 13. In Oushakine’s terminology, the post-Soviet subject is a traumatic subject, experiencing the loss of the homeland as a loss of the self (2009). 14. On the transcendental meaning of doubles and threat, see Chapter 7. 15. Similarly, in Zviagintsev’s The Return only the radio signal indicates the present moment which suggests the transfer of modernity to the aural realm whilst the visual paradigm of the films enables abstract, intemporal constructions. 16. She also appears in the leading role in The Target discussed in Chapter 12. 17. This is in contrast to the normative familial triad, which in Sokurov’s work is replaced by a dyad: father and son, mother and son, etc. 18. I find a similar motif in Fedorchenko’s Silent Souls, see Chapter 10.

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ab a ndo ne d b e ing 235 19. See Chapters 7–9 on the use of doubles in the symbolic mode. 20. [Iav’ – ­eto tekushchee, to, chto sotvoreno Prav’iu. Nav’s zhe – p ­ osle nee, i do nee est’ Nav’. A v Pravi est’ Iav’]. 21. His bike is of a Soviet make: it includes a pillion as well as a passenger seat and so strictly speaking it is a tricycle. The passenger seat is always empty which symbolises the lack in Mitia’s life: it refers not only to the missing partner, but also to the doubling of the self whereby only one entity can be present at a given moment. When the ‘angel’ attacks Mitia this law is violated and it causes the destruction of the world. It is noteworthy that the attack takes place in Mitia’s surgery with the map of the USSR clearly visible behind the characters. Hence, the angel’s attack is an attack on the imperial order and on the dominance of rational law that underpins and sustains it. 22. See Chapter 6 on the relationship between the world and the event in the symbolic mode.

C H A PT E R 12

Amplifications of Subjectivity: Aleksandr Zel’dovich’s The Target (2010)

In the previous chapters I demonstrated how subjectivity is brought into question by means of excessive and/or engulfing exteriority: the selfpresence leads to either the dispersion of the subject or to its heterogeneous, multiple modelling.1 In the final chapter, I am concerned with the confirmation of the subject in the moment of self-recognition whereby finite identity is rejected in favour of the infinite self. I discuss a film that employs non-knowledge as the drama of subject-modelling – ­as a story of appearance and obliteration – ­whereby the limits of the self are conceived as a movement away from the self into the topography of solitary subjectivity confronted with open-ended being. Rather than engaging in self-validating activity, which might result in the destruction of the self, the subject becomes an excess of discourse per se, that is, it centres on self-preservation, which ensures infinity in movement. The subject enters the divine state of amnesia after cataclysmic ruptures in discourse. The subject is no longer an architect of the modelled world, but a pre-eminent observer of the unfolding universe. I am particularly interested in the filmic materiality of non-knowledge and the immateriality of subjectivity existing outside the temporal framework of historicity. I centre on issues of scale and amplification as a type of movement in the symbolic mode, whilst keeping posthumous subjectivity in focus. For my purpose, I utilise Aleksandr Zel’dovich’s The Target with its emphasis on transient spaces and the epiphany of the universal monad. In her review of The Target, Barbara Wurm (2011) notes that Zel’dovich (b. 1958, Moscow) tends to produce one film per decade. Indeed, he released his Sunset in 1991, Moscow in 2001 and The Target in 2010. Each of the films is ‘a kind of quintessential résumé’ of the previous decade. Hence, my use of the film in the final chapter of the book is manyfold. On one level, I use it to explore the relationship between the subject’s interiority and filmic modelling of space in the global era. On another, I investigate how in the symbolic mode the subject concludes its abandoned

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am pl if ic a t io ns o f s ubje ct i v i t y 237 being by overcoming death and escapes from the post-apocalyptic world into the world of nothingness where distinctions of posthumous subjectivity are no longer relevant. Finally, I summate the main points presented in the study. In Chapter 1, I used Sokurov’s Taurus – ­released in 2001 – ­to put forward the main concerns of this investigation; in Chapter 12, I use Zel’dovich’s The Target – ­released in 2010 – ­to conclude my reflection on Russian film in the symbolic mode. My inquiry completes its selfreferential journey, and I hope it opens the door to future considerations concerning contemporary Russian cinema. The Target is based on a script by Vladimir Sorokin (b. 1955), one of the most prominent authors of contemporary Russia.2 The film features international stars, phenomenal costumes and set designs. Aleksandr Petliura, together with Tat’iana Parfenova, Iurii Kharikov and Irina Milakova, is responsible for the particular visual quality of the costume design which reminds the spectator of the work of the AES+F art group, who were also involved in the production of the film. They worked on the three-dimensional modelling of the sculpture of Diana Black, which I analyse below. Their art is characterised by futuristic visions rendered in the synthetic manner using digital imaging.3 Aleksandr Zosimov, together with Aleksandra Pavlova and Andrei Savin, produced the set designs; the artists are representatives of the so-called ‘paper architecture’ movement [bumazhnaia arkhitektura], known in Russia for the production of models and three-dimensional visualisations. These innovative designs, along with the outstanding music score by Leonid Desiatnikov, complement Aleksandr Il’khovskii’s cinematography. He worked with Zel’dovich on Moscow, and also with Ivan Dykhovichnyi on The Kopeck (2002) and with Il’ia Khrzhanovskii on 4 (2004), all scripted by Sorokin. The Target gained international attention at film festivals; in fact, it was premiered at the Berlinale and has been described as ‘an absolute high-scale event, a phenomenon quite rare these days, not only in Russian but . . . in European cinema in general’ (Wurm 2011; emphasis added). The film was released domestically in 2011 and shown on television in 2012 (Channel One); and it has gained a reputation as a film of ‘intellectual complexity and epic scale’.4 Indeed, the film is explicitly concerned with cosmic matters: faith, eternity and death. In order to address them, the director employs macabre humour and dark parody of a mature postmodernist, a quality derived largely from his collaborative work with Sorokin. The Target is oriented towards the future: it is a political and cultural vision of Russia in 2020, when the country will have achieved stability and prosperity thanks to global trade. Sorokin has described The Target as a visualisation of the aspirations of the current Russian political elite,

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headed by Putin and his ideologist Vladislav Surkov.5 As Sorokin notes in an interview, the Russia of the future includes ‘a feudal vertical of power, social castes, and high technologies. Zel’dovich and I constructed such an “ideal” Russia as a backdrop for the characters’ performance. This country looks like a dream. For our characters it is a comfortable dream and yet they desire awakening’ (Sazonov 2011). The Target features Viktor (Maksim Sukhanov, also starring in Litvinova’s Goddess), the Head of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Mining, and his wife Zoia (played by the British actress Justine Waddell). They lead a glamorous life in Moscow; they lack only one thing – h ­ appiness – ­the feeling epitomised in the image of an unborn child. Viktor finds out about a site built by the Soviet Space Agency in central Asia over fifty years ago. Here Soviet science is ascribed supernatural, magic qualities; this transposition is a form of de-rationalisation of Soviet history.6 The site is a target – a­ gigantic construction in the middle of the Asian steppe. This part of the film was shot in the Altai republic which is known for its religious diversity. The traditional religion of native Altaians is Tengrist shamanism, which was revived by modern Tengrist movements and Burkhanism. Viktor wants his wife to visit the target in order to achieve two goals: rejuvenation and conception. Viktor’s and Zoia’s journey is presented as a type of technological regression – ­they travel by aircraft, helicopter, car and, eventually, on foot – ­in order to accentuate their spiritual awakening. By contrast, in Grigorii’s Aleksandrov’s Volga-Volga (1938) technological progress develops in unison with ideological progress, which is manifested in the characters travelling to Moscow on foot, on a boat, steam boat and taking note of airplanes flying in close proximity. Zoia’s journey is a transfer towards transcendental knowledge which is evoked by means of following the subject who gazes at itself and fails to reach the equilibrium of subjectivation. They arrive as posthumous beings who consist of failures of grasping the existential possibilities of sense because, unlike identity, the abandoned subjectivity can never cease to exist. Badiou conceptualises these philosophical accompaniments as ‘transitory exteriorities’ (2007: 99). In his analysis of Sartre’s The Transcendence of the Ego, Badiou notes that ‘the immanent being of consciousness cannot be grasped through the transcendence or identifiable objectivity of the ME’ (2007: 100). Zel’dovich, like Kalatozishvili, proceeds to examine the structures of ‘the ME’ – ­both individual and imperial – ­by pulling the subject away from subjectivation, and away from its own temporality and discourse. Viktor and Zoia travel to central Asia with Zoia’s brother Mitia (Danila Kozlovskii), a TV presenter, and Mitia’s friend Nikolai (Vitalii Kishchenko), a customs officer and also a jockey. In the symbolic mode,

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am pl if ic a t io ns o f s ubje ct i v i t y 239 the three male characters dominate three areas of production and power: natural resources, television and customs, respectively. The film shows how all of them eventually fall as a result of interference by the political power – ­an unspecified representative of the Kremlin. Such a triangulation is indicative of different types of knowledge that fail in the presence of non-knowledge. This is not the power that emanates from the political centre, but rather the power of eternal life which is now available to the characters. In a village near the site of the target they meet Anna (Danijela Stojanović; she works both in Serbia and Russia; also appearing in Kalatozishvili’s The Wild Field). Together they descend into the core of the gigantic structure and spend a night there. The result of the healing process exceeds their expectations. In the subterranean section of the target, they undergo the process of incubation, from which they emerge in possession of eternal life. To be precise, the characters do not age but they are mortal, so the continuation of life depends on their choice and circumstances/chance. I find a similar approach to constructing subjectivity in Serebrennikov’s St George’s Day, whereby the construction of subjectivity is predicated on chance, or a manifestation of discursive ruptures. In the village the Muscovites befriend a woman called Taia (Nina Loshchinina), who looks nineteen but is, in fact, fifty-two years old. Her age gives clues to the construction of the target and its historical significance discussed below. She travels to Moscow in order to meet her lover, from whom she has been separated for thirty years. On their return to Moscow, Mitia and Anna develop a relationship; and Zoia begins a passionate affair with Nikolai, leading to Zoia’s suicide on railway tracks. The Target reveals extended references to both Goethe’s Faust7 (the search for infinity) and Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina (the search for harmony) as intertexts that define the cultural tradition of philosophical inquiry. The Target aims to conceptualise the existence of post-Faust, post-Karenina subjectivity, that is, of the subjectivity that occupies the space of the already attained philosophical and social utopias. In addition, references to Anna Karenina and Faust present The Target not as an exclusively Russian text, but a global text of adultery and of the search for immortality. Both Faust and Anna Karenina are ultimate texts of European modernity exploring the possibilities and constraints of dualism conceived in philosophical and social terms. The film alternates among four principal locations, including Moscow, the Russian countryside and the unnamed village in central Asia. The fourth location is the most interesting one – a­ superhighway, a place where Nikolai works. The superhighway is a gigantic road that connects the largest cities in Europe and Asia – ­Paris and Guangzhou – ­and

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t­ ranscends Russia from east to west. The traffic is organised in lanes, with over a dozen lanes running in each direction. Road signs, in Russian and Mandarin, provide information on the distance to destinations – 9­ 00 miles, 1,500 miles, 3,500 miles and so on – ­the numbers overwhelm the spectator by their own incogitability and innumerability, and indicate the shift of the mathemes towards myth-emes. These are indices of the amplified space which has been produced in the post-imperial, globalised era where everything seems to be connected to everything. Nikolai operates as the guardian of the superhighway – h ­ e is a customs officer and the gatekeeper of knowledge in this perfectly organised and superbly corrupt space. It is a borderless space contingent on the perception of Russia as a transient, liminal space both of global trade and transition of knowledge. In The Target, Russia as a state has two main economic functions – ­extraction of natural resources and shipment of goods between Europe and Asia. In the symbolic mode, the superhighway is a twenty-first-century manifestation of the ancient symbol of Russia – ­the road. As in Gogol’s 1842 novel Dead Souls, it leads nowhere and everywhere, and it turns the whole country into a borderless space: the road is the locus of economic and social activity, and it is a transient, indeterminate space of non-knowledge. Equally, the characters in Gogol’s novel are both dead and alive. In The Target, the characters travel the superhighway as they conduct two searches: the ethical one (they mine the ore, the salt of the earth) and the philosophical one (they explore eternal life). They are both industrialists and alchemists. In Chapter 3, I demonstrated how in Morphine Balabanov uses alchemy to map the terrain of knowledge. Alchemy and the alchemic body contain the promise of transmutation; these are the sites of symbolic knowledge, which maintain the incommensurability of finite compositions of the continuum. Knowledge is not only an abstraction – i­ n the Aristotelian tradition – b­ ut also something arrived at by intellectual illumination – ­in the Augustinian tradition. In The Target, different types of knowledge, different categorisations of subjectivity are symbolised by the civilisations of West and East, Paris and Guangzhou. The cities are never shown, instead they remain as references to other forms of being, as knowledge that escapes our horizon. These place-names are illustrations of Deleuze’s concept of subjectivity, which is a product of subjectivation, of ‘being-in-between’, that is, a series of processes that ‘allow a relation to oneself to emerge, and constitute an inside that is hollowed out and develops its own unique dimension: “enkretia”, the relation to oneself that is self-mastery’ (1988: 100). For Deleuze there is a cultural difference in how the subject is construed by means of folding and unfolding: in the West, it is unfolding, or being, towards death, whereas in the East it is

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am pl if ic a t io ns o f s ubje ct i v i t y 241 a continuous folding and refolding, which constitutes memory or, to be precise, ‘“absolute memory” which doubles the present’ (1988: 107). By contrasting the two, Deleuze puts forward an idea about how subjectivation produces a space of the infinite within the finite, or a folding-in of the universe. The Target contrasts the singularity and linearity of the superhighway with the multiple folds of the target in the Asian steppe, with the posthumous subject transcending the spaces of both. The transient status of Russian culture is manifested in the elements of material culture (e.g., the decor of Viktor’s flat combines elements of Western and Eastern interior design), knowledge of foreign languages (the main characters, who are also the country’s elite, are fluent in Russian, English and Mandarin) and other ‘fields of cultural production’ (Bourdieu 1993). The attention of the spectator is drawn to the new Eastern elements in the Russian culture of 2020, while ignoring the persistence of the Western matrix of Russian civilisation. This selective work of the gaze underscores the innate ‘Europeanness’ of Russian culture in spite of its reorientation towards the East. The latter occurs on the level of surface, thus, disabling actual hybridisation (see Bhabha 1994). The film employs foreign actors in leading roles: Julian Graffy maintains that the film would be very different – ­in fact, arguably unthinkable – ­if one of the male roles were played by a foreign actor.8 Waddell and Stojanović, playing Zoia and Anna, respectively, had to learn how to speak Russian, and they also received some training in ‘Russian acting’9 so that in the end they assume a Russian identity – a­ directorial intention whereby alterity is not manifested linguistically or racially, but rather is evident in the performative act of distancing and deferral. The film presents a new trope of otherness and mechanisms of representation. Graffy (2008a) and others have demonstrated how Soviet cinema invited a foreign character to the USSR to reveal the internal Soviet confrontations and dilemmas. Sulkin (2008) and Graffy (2008b) have shown how this trope is reversed in the post-Soviet period: the Russian hero is taken abroad, or an outsider is brought to Russia to realise that what he sees is less than edifying. I argue that in the Putin era this trope is reversed one more time to reveal a completely new cinematic and cultural identity, which perhaps is not binary but more global in structure and appeal. National and cultural identity is presented as an indeterminate category, and as a result it permits the entry of the other in the guise of the self, for example, in the form of a British actress playing a Russian woman. However, when this performative act is revealed – ­the proven adultery in The Target – ­the other is rejected and annihilated. The patriarchal order is not restored because the self/male subjectivity is deemed to have already disintegrated. In the context of

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(post)-imperial discourse advocated by Condee (2009) and of ‘cinepaternity’ developed by Goscilo and Hashamova (2010), the failure of the male subject should be interpreted as the failure of the state, while the treacherous woman represents the condition of the nation. Masculine national identity relies on images of defenders of a feminized, virtuous nation, which provides men with agency for change and expansion into the future. Women, on the other hand, through their repetitive labour of cultural transmission, function as links to an (Arcadian) past, which, together with their task of symbolizing the nation, deprives them of the agency assigned to men. This has given rise to a set of easily identifiable rhetorical strategies, which tropes the nation as mother, whore, victim, virgin, etc. (Sarsenov 2008: 187–8)10

The choice of foreign actors to perform female characters indicates the imperative to examine the clash between the nation and the state on the global stage. The use of foreign actors provides an external perspective on the domestic conflict: in this regard, it is similar to the imperial tradition of early Russian modernity when foreigners were invited to articulate and resolve the problems of Russian identity at a time of crisis (e.g., Catherine the Great who was foreign herself). From the Cultural Studies angle, these directorial interventions enable Zel’dovich to examine the transformations in the social and cultural fabric of Russia and the emergence of the new class of the super-rich in the 2000s. In the symbolic mode, he draws the attention of the spectator to the surface as a metaphor for the contemporary condition. As I noted in Chapter 4, for Badiou multiplication has no other substance than presentation itself (whilst the Deleuzian multiple evokes representation in its belief in the absolute beginning). This predisposition leads to flattening of the discourse: Badiou uses mathematical symbols to emphasise the flatness of subject production. The void – i­n this case the gigantic flatness of the target in the Asian steppe – i­s the empty beyond which the subject has to cross in pursuit of infinity.11 Badiou conceives the subject as a unitary centre of consciousness or action. It is ‘superseded in two ways or two directions: in the multiplicity and ontological mixture or rather “flatness” of the collective assemblage of enunciation; and in the individuation of an a-personal, a-subjective, pre-individual haecceity’ (Lecercle 2010: 129; emphasis added). If for Badiou flatness is an operational matter, for Zel’dovich – j­ ust as for Zviagintsev and Balabanov – i­ t is symbolic. It takes on a number of images that sustain the proliferation of surfaces/flatnesses as a mode of being in the contemporary world. The most prominent image is that of the golden mask that Zoia wears every morning. The mask is meant to help preserve her youthful looks; and it becomes redundant after

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am pl if ic a t io ns o f s ubje ct i v i t y 243 she visits the target and stops ageing. The visual qualities of the mask – ­its colour and shape – a­ re repeated in the images of the spectacles, the goddess and the cloisters, all discussed below – a­ s well as in other imagery. Traditionally, the mask is the face the imagination gives to god. Masks portray human drama not as representation but as revelation. For Badiou, the subject is summoned into being by enduring the ‘truth-event which breaks disruptively, unpredictably, into the given in all of its incommunicable singularity, beyond all law, consensus and conventional understanding’ (quoted in Schwartz 2005: 114). The mask stands between the self and the world, and so it looks both in and out, conceals and reveals, protects and projects, and thus, corresponds to the multiple gaze of film, which, as I pointed out in Chapter 1, has the capacity to look at the screen as well as off the screen, into darkness, and at the onlooker him- or herself. The mask provides ritualistic access to experience not available to the conscious mind: the mask is an indication of transcendence. The mask amplifies the transient space of the subject shifting from identity to subjectivity and encountering the terror of non-knowledge. The mask provides protection from archetypical states whilst being an archetypical image itself. Similarly, cinema presents objects only in order to refer to the states outside the framework of experience in the symbolic mode. In The Target the superficiality of elite life in Moscow is juxtaposed with the perceived depth of life in the Central Asian steppe, where people live in the shadow of the target. (This assumption is to be eschewed in the end when the people from Moscow move to the village and vice versa). The spectator learns that the target is, in fact, a leftover of the Soviet space project – i­ t is a gigantic facility in the Asian steppe; its purpose is to collect the energy of the cosmos and transfer it onto people. In its orientation, the target looks out into open space as well as downwards, under the surface of the planet. The characters climb inside the facility, which is deep below the ground; they are wearing clothes, which are stylised as space costumes, and so they are astronauts who travel underground, that is, terranauts. It is an archaic, mystical place in the centre of the world, a mark of the presence of cosmic forces (the Altai republic, where the film was made, is in the very centre of the Eurasian continent). In its shape and function the target is an archetypical well, issuing life-giving water from the dry earth, and, in the film, issuing energy to the morally exhausted subject. The well/target is a miracle, a revelation that supplants representation. The use of the well in The Target is comparable with the Wish Chamber in Tarkovskii’s Stalker (1979) and the bell tower in Balabanov’s I Want, Too (2012) and Serebrennikov’s St George’s Day. Kukulin (2013) compares the target with Arkaim, an ancient burial ground that was excavated in 1987 and became

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a site of pilgrimage in the 2000s. Arkaim is an archaeological site situated in the southern Urals steppe just to the north of the Kazakhstan border. The site was discovered by Chelyabinsk scientists who were preparing the area to be flooded in order to create a reservoir. The site was designated as a national reserve in the early 1990s and in 2005 it was visited by President Putin. The site is dated to the seventeenth century bc, although earlier dates have been proposed. It has attracted a lot of media attention fuelled by mystifications offered by the Russian neopagans.12 Because of the patterns on the floor, it has been described as ‘Swastika City’,13 as ‘Mandala City’ and ‘the ancient capital of the early Aryan civilization’. Thus, the reference to Arkaim brings together apocalyptic discourses concerning: (a) Soviet civilisation with its disrespect of nature; (b) perestroika as the start of rupture, an ancient ritualistic site; and (c) contemporary autocratic powers of Putin’s regime. In other words, the target symbolises a site of crisis which energises civilisations and the cosmic force of the target is in its ideological transcendence. The target amplifies the spatiotemporal concerns of the film. The target is both an ethical goal and a geopolitical destination. It is a speculation from the perspective of the subject about a process that is outside the subject and determines it. The engagement with that external process is framed as experimentation, which includes the concomitant and ‘contaminated’ production of a differing subjectivity. ‘Contaminated’ signifies not only the idea of a polluted and corrupted subjectivity, but also of a subjectivity that is differed and deferred from itself, and that occupies a new plane of signification in relation to the previous self. In The Target the subject subverts the finite relation to the infinite process, of which the subject is a residuum, insofar as the subject acquires the qualities of the infinite process per se (immortality). The disjuncture between the two subjectivities is the cause of ruptures. The characters resolve/bridge them by repetitive acts of suicide and by their disappearance beyond the horizon of knowledge. For Mitia and Anna, just as for Taia and her lover, it is separation, that is, an act of deliberation, the outcome of an ethical imperative, and a discursive rupture predicated on the actions of the self.14 For Nikolai, it is forced migration. He escapes Moscow on board a lorry, travelling from Paris to Guangzhou, which signifies the loss of his societal identity insofar as he no longer fights illegal immigration, but becomes an illegal migrant himself. His destination is unknown – ­possibly China – ­so he possesses the fluid subjectivity of a global migrant/nomad who always remains present and yet invisible. And, for Viktor and Zoia, it is death: Zoia commits suicide after having been beaten up by Nikolai and raped by the angry mob which Viktor had invited to a party at their dacha.15 Viktor

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am pl if ic a t io ns o f s ubje ct i v i t y 245 is murdered by the same mob, so ultimately he invites his own death, or commits suicide. Thus, all the characters find themselves occupying the space of discursive folds formed as a result of the ruptures in discourse whereby those ruptures are signified as different types of suicide. This is similar to the strategies employed in Litvinova’s Goddess, in which suicide as a form of transgression indicates different modes of transference from solitude (knowledge) to love (non-knowledge) whilst in search of infinity. In The Target, the displaced subjectivity with its orientation towards infinity reveals two types of gaze, which function simultaneously without contradiction. One of them is forward-looking, whilst the other is retroactive, constructing new connections in the ruptured discourse. For example, the film presents a futuristic vision of Moscow in 2020, with its new skyscrapers, highways and airports. In his analysis of the film, Kukulin shows how utopia is used to historicise the present, an idea that he borrows from Fredric Jameson (1982). The imagery in The Target is similar to visions of global Moscow evidenced in other art projects, for example, AES+F’s work. The Target is not a view of Moscow from the perspective of 2010 when the film was released, but rather from the perspective of the 1930s when the General Plan for the reconstruction of the capital was conceived. Indeed, The Target evokes Aleksandr Medvedkin’s New Moscow (1938),16 in which Soviet engineers create a technology that enables a visualisation/modelling of Stalin’s strategy for urban development. New Moscow includes a memorable section in which – w ­ hen the visualisation technology is activated – ­old parts of Moscow are shown to be replaced with new developments: cinema is ascribed the role of visionary (de-)construction whereby the gaze of the spectator is engaged in the transference of meaning of the future conceived in architectural terms.17 In this regard, the Moscow of The Target is an echo, a trace of the modernist Moscow of the 1930s. For my discussion, it is paramount that in its postmodernist pastiche of Medvedkin’s film, The Target actualises the idea of Moscow as a model, that is, as an abstract category, which is required in order to explore how the subject creates and institutes itself in the realm of a heterogeneous encounter in and with the world. Similarly, the retroactive gaze is actualised in the scene when Taia meets her lover after thirty years of separation.18 The meeting takes place at the fountain outside the Bolshoi theatre: the camera shows a new ­technology – ­a projection of the moving image onto the waters of the fountain. The projection streams an old television recording of a Soviet ballet performance, providing melodramatic, nostalgic undertones for the futuristic love story. Taia’s meeting with her lover signifies permanence in change – ­neither of them ages in the thirty years that have elapsed since their last

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meeting. Memory is conceived as a mechanism of externalising emotion and experience by means of a holographic ‘energy-machine’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1984). In The Target such an ‘energy-machine’ is primarily a technology of vision – p ­ anoramas – w ­ hich, as in Silent Souls, are deployed to examine the politics of (ethnic) culture in the post-imperial era and to create the panorama of imagination with its own subjectivities in the symbolic mode and to elucidate on the crisis of ethics. Viktor is personally invested in the development of a new type of ethics through mineral extraction. He believes that all minerals excavated by humans are not neutral substances, but rather sources of positive and negative energy. In Viktor’s view, all things on earth – ­people, objects and minerals – ­are morally charged; they are vessels for constructive and destructive energies (concepts that are related to knowledge and nonknowledge). In order to secure a prosperous, ethical life on the planet, people must extract only positively charged materials. By proselytising the basic doctrine of a conflict between light and darkness, good and evil,19 Viktor adheres to the dualistic religious system of the Manes, a combination of Gnostic Christianity, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism, which spread far through the Aramaic–Syriac speaking regions and thrived between the third and seventh centuries, and at its height was one of the most widespread religions in the world. Viktor’s beliefs replicate not only the logic of Manichaeism, but also its pan-continental structure: Manichaean churches and scriptures existed as far east as China and as far west as the Roman Empire (Gardner and Lieu 2004). Manichaeism was at its height at the time when the Silk Route enabled the exchange of goods and ideas between East and West. Viktor’s philosophy charges Russia with the economic task of serving as a transport link between China and Europe as well as with the philosophical task of creating an ideology that would bridge the disparate cultures of East and West. Viktor aims to extract the positive energy of people, too. Under his jurisdiction scientists develop a special optical apparatus – a­ type of s­ pectacles – ­that enables the user to view the world as a manifestation of positive and negative energy.20 When looking at an object or a person through the spectacles, the viewer sees a scale: the blue and red sections represent the amount of negative and positive energy in an object, person or space. The same principle of measuring properties of subjects is utilised during Mitia’s television shows, which are organised as a competition between two speakers. Blue and red sections at the bottom of the television screen signify the number of viewers calling in in support of one or the other contestant. This is a basic visualisation of the principles of representative democracy. Such duality of vision is brought into question: Viktor and

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am pl if ic a t io ns o f s ubje ct i v i t y 247 Mitia stage their own revolts against the hegemony of binary structures; as a result Viktor is dismissed from his position in the ministry and Mitia is ousted from his show. They find resolution in realms that should be categorised in terms of non-space, or non-knowledge: Viktor is murdered by the mob at his dacha and Mitia is in hiding for the next twenty years. They transgress the boundaries of being, first through the apparatus of vision (the spectacles, television, projections, etc.), and later through their own death and disappearance as an ultimate performance, an existential gesture – ­a zigzag, which is comparable with the zigzagged gestures in Litvinova’s Goddess. The zigzag is a visible phenomenon that interrupts the legibility of the narrative and mimetic representation. The main narrative event – ­the murder-suicide – ­in all its multiple versions, is also a zigzag in that it disrupts continuity and depends on the repetitive return, in all its warring multiplicity. W. B.  Yeats believed that each individual is composed of vacillating elements, and that this mixture of opposites held true for each nation and each era. He represented this conjunction of opposites as two interpenetrating cones (‘gyres’). In the Great Wheel, each of Yeats’ twentyeight basic personality types is arranged in such a way that it faces its direct opposite, the personality most different from it. This opposite is, in fact, its Mask. The rotation of the gyres results in the production of physical space and spiritual time and in the opposition of the moral objective and aesthetic objective – ­as in the opposition between the centre of mass and the centre of gyration in a moving object – w ­ hich, in the film’s terms, should be viewed as an opposition between the moral imperative and the desire for immortality – ­the Deleuzian fold. In Chapter  1, I recapitulated the Deleuzian notion of continuous folding and refolding, which constitutes memory or, to be precise, ‘“absolute memory” which doubles the present’ (1988: 107) and produces a space of the infinite within the finite, or a folding-in of the universe. It creates a repetitive cycle of subjectivation that aims to overcome the infinite–finite split as a matter of otherness, and, in fact, ‘otherworldedness’. In Nirvana the decentred body of the butoh dancer produces an event through negation of the world. In The Target and other films explored in this study, the movement towards otherness is looped and/or zigzagged: it constantly oscillates between different gravitational centres producing a dazzling visual effect of doubling and multiplication, epitomised by Viktor’s spectacles. On one level, Viktor’s spectacles facilitate a vision of the world beyond knowledge which creates a world of a new order. This division is rooted in the dichotomies of being as articulated in Chinese philosophy. ‘Fundamental to the Chinese way of thinking and seeing are the yin–yang bipolar concepts – e­ xterior/interior, new/old, true/false – w ­ hich, more

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than contrasts or dialectical opposites, are dynamic, relational and mutually generative ideas based on the Chinese view of change, or transformation [pien], as the ultimate reality of cosmic creation [tsao-hua]’ (Fong 1987: 100). On another level, the spectacles help bring into focus the issue of representational and presentational strategies in film. At such a moment the representational drive is dissolved in favour of the presentational: while maintaining its objective basis, film captures ‘that which lies beyond the formal likeness’, or what in the Chinese pictorial tradition is known as ‘hsing-ssu’ in its opposition to ‘chý-yün’ or ‘breath-resonance’ (Fong 1987: 101). Viktor’s spectacles simultaneously provide a global vision and a local economy of ethics, both informed by the binary logic of Russia’s geopolitical interests. Zel’dovich connects global political concerns with the individual universe of subjectivity by means of non-knowledge. The target – ­the technological, cosmic well – ­is uncanny: looking straight down into its dark interior, the camera captures the abyss below and records bizarre echoes. It connects the viewer to another realm, an underworld, a mysterious kingdom, with its reflective depths and an infinite matrix of repetitions, vibrations and amplifications. The target is an organ – ­‘a technological womb’ (Kukulin 2013) – ­which intimates the connection with the source of affect, imagination, dream and immortality. It necessitates the emergence of mythic feminine entities – n ­ ymphs, the moon-goddess, the Virgin Mary – ­and requires female keepers of the sacred precinct – ­first Taia, and then Anna. The two women are reincarnations of dakini, a powerful multivalent symbol in tantric Buddhism: they are teachers, mystics and balancers between different worlds and temporal zones. The target is also a wound on the surface of the planet and a lesion to the ego: a traumatic eruption and disruption on the surface of continuous being, leading to the expansion of self-knowledge (in the same way as scars, lesions, tattoos and prosthetics are indices of non-knowledge in Voloshin’s Nirvana). By contrast, the city is a space of civilisation and the goal of pilgrimage (which has mutated into the idea of the destination for global trade). Moscow embodies the projections of reorientation and possibility, along with the crystallisation of power. It is the centre of balance, symmetry and order, with its imposing geometry of square, diamond, rectangular and circle, evoked in the city’s structure, road layout and movement of people and traffic. The architecture of Moscow has traditionally been used as an emblem of its aspiration and outreach. Both the target and Moscow are centres of their own worlds, mystical and commercial; that is why philosophical conflicts unfold in other realms – o­ n the superhighway and Viktor’s dacha – ­which, to remind the reader, are conceived as

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am pl if ic a t io ns o f s ubje ct i v i t y 249 transient spaces. In the symbolic mode, the film mediates between two types of ethics, two worlds and two civilisations, with Russia subscribing partially to both but wholly to neither, that is, functioning as non-space and non-knowledge. The characters are condemned from all places with the exception of the target, which signifies self-disappearance as post-evental being. In Litvinova’s Goddess death is presented as a multistage process which is always delayed to indicate the presence of non-knowledge. These processes of effacing are synchronised with the processes of mirroring. Both death and the voice-over appear as non-diegetic interruptions in the world experienced by the characters and observed by the spectator. In Silent Souls, the symbolic mode renders the self as the continuing experience of ambiguity and difference, often resulting in experiencing events in doubling paradigms and in occupying the space of the double. After the burial, as a spectre, Tania no longer comes back to Miron – a­ nd by extension to the spectator – ­in dream sequences or flashbacks: she now resides permanently in a different realm: his post-evental ontology is framed as a process of self-disappearance. The Target affirms this predisposition in the final scene, which is a technical and aesthetic feat. The film concludes with a single take of the target amidst the Asian steppe. The camera moves from one side of the valley to the other in an unprecedented shot of the vast space, supplying the film with the potency of cosmic space. Colossal in size, the target appears as a dot on the body of the planet, with a view of the celestial system unfolding in front of the spectator. The target is a point, dot, tittle, monad, bindu – p ­ ure potentiality: though enormous in size, it is the smallest visible mark on the landscape. It defines a position with no extensions in actual space but with focus on cosmic space. The target/point is an image of infinity and an also an image of the world’s origins: in Tantrism, bindu is concretised in the body as (male) semen, which is manifested in the film’s final shot conceived from the point of view of god and aligned with that of the creator, that is, the only subjectivity present in the post-evental space of infinity. The target actualises the idea of the sphere as the One being, the eternal and (e-)motionless ontology of the Self,21 which, to paraphrase Yeats, can be symbolised but cannot be known.22 It is an ambivalent position of knowledge that overwhelms the subjects and transforms their non-knowledge, leaving behind a sense of terror, and, in terms of signification, compelling the subject to shift from purgatory to nugatory, that is, nothingness, the ultimate void. The purpose of the subject is to maintain the delicate balance between visible being (experience) and intelligible being (knowledge) in a world bereft of all proportions (non-knowledge). Being is presented as a form

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of cosmogony, and the relation between the worlds and forms of knowledge is the relation of symbolisation whereby the symbol of the circle is one of the oldest in the world, yearning for its source and consumption. The Target defines the subject as both the centre and the circumference – ­a point is a potential circle and a circle is an extended point – w ­ hich corresponds to the ecclesiastical notion of the omnipresent god who is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. The target is not only a technological womb but also a divine mind, which, having rejected metaphysical dualism, draws the subject into the Monist world, whereby the intelligible and the sensual ways have not been separated and hence representation is no longer required. In Chapter 2, I demonstrate how the cinematic image offers scope for imaginative manipulation and how cinema converts ‘seeing as’ into subjectivities, and how the senses of cinema emerge as sites of meaning construction. In The Target, the last has been objectified in the form of Viktor’s spectacles as the ethical procedure of seeing and always failing to see. This failure of seeing is central to the concerns of Zel’dovich’s The Target and Sokurov’s films. Both directors make use of imagery supplied in the Romanticist paintings by Caspar David Friedrich. His The Monk by the Sea (1808–10) is a source of inspiration for Taurus, insofar as the filmmaker works with a subjectivity appearing in a world constructed of its own ontology. Sokurov never reduces one to another and instead engages in the retroactive act of re-assembling knowledge-worlds as matters of relation and intentionality. His worlds are infinite in composition and limited by duration and change. As a result, the worlds of Sokurov are always political in that they contradict the laws of being, and particularly the politics of spectatorship. In The Target, the final scene is a re-creation of Friedrich’s painting The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1817). As in the painting, Anna is perched atop a cliff, with her back towards the film spectator; the rays of light pierce through the heavy clouds, silhouetting Anna’s figure and transposing her to a different vista; in the background snow-covered mountain peaks are visible. Anna looks forward with a contemplative gaze, observing the target laid flat as a giant saucer amidst jagged precipices and tempestuous clouds. Anna’s stance is that of a historian, of someone who does not wish to predict the future but to capture the past, which for her is synonymous with eternity, because it is only in the past that she can be reunited with her lover Mitia. The past and history here are not items of duration but sites of being, since both Anna and Mitia exist in the post-evental world of infinity. She experiences terror because of her encounter with the colossal structure of the target and also because of her realisation of her own immortality. The camera

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am pl if ic a t io ns o f s ubje ct i v i t y 251 transcends the landscape – ­it looks back at Anna as it moves away from her; in this distancing, the camera amplifies the gap between knowledge and non-knowledge (similarly in Fedorchenko’s Silent Souls, the camera looks back and forth, inside and outside, at and through). The fragility of the subject’s universe is exposed in the face of the gigantic powers: the sublime amplifies the immense speed of transcendence, making the subject an observer of both infinite nature and infinite human endeavour.23 As a result, the spectator no longer identifies with the fragile self but with the eternal and unyielding universe. In addition to scale and movement, The Target utilises other forms of amplification of subjectivity, namely, multiplication, repetition and enclosure. For example, in the scene where Nikolai realises his destiny, he is shown standing on the superhighway with hundreds of lorries travelling rapidly in both directions. The view of the multi-lane road and supersized lorries suggests the colossal size of the Eurasian economy, which Nikolai is unable to control. The lorries have barcodes painted on the roof; these are so big that they can be read by a scanner positioned on a plane or even a spacecraft, suggesting that the global economy is managed at a divine level. Nikolai’s work time is largely dedicated to collecting bribes and ‘hunting’ illegal migrants.24 After his crisis of self-recognition, he escapes in an empty lorry: his workmates lock the door behind him, sending him away to somewhere in China. Here the lorry is an epitome of solitary confinement, a mobile prison, and the drama of subject-modelling results in the obliteration of the subject and the limits of the self are conceived as boundaries of a jail whereby jail is synonymous to the world/ universe; in other words, the interior structure threatens the subject with the unknown. Viktor undergoes his crisis, owing to his failure to convince the international community to excavate positively charged minerals. He gives his address from a podium which is also the base of a gigantic sculpture: covered in gold and radiating light, it towers over Viktor, presenting him as a priest presiding at an ancient sacrificial ritual. By comparison, during TV shows, instead of using wine, Mitia offers other contestants a drink made of his own blood, taking the scene of sacrificial admiration to a whole new level and elevating himself to the status of god. After his unsuccessful address, Viktor is shown walking along a cloister attached to a majestic neoclassical building. The interior colonnade is repeated infinitely, breaking the boundaries of the physical space. The geometry of the building – ­the infinite symmetry of arches – ­reveals unity in multiplicity and the entrapment of the subject in the stillness of architecture. An image of eternity, the cloister signifies a movement away from the self into

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the ­topography of solitary subjectivity confronted with open-ended being. Soon after, Viktor invites migrants, vagabonds, prostitutes and other ‘marginal’ subjects to a party at his dacha, leading to the destruction of the subject as a result of performing the excess of the self. The rhythmic patterns of the architecture along with its enormous size are geometric idioms that affirm the subject’s self-recognition on his way to intemporality. These particular geometric idioms, as well as those of the swastika, cone, circle, dot, zigzag, mirroring and others analysed in the preceding chapters, form a type of movement that is characteristic of the symbolic mode – i­t is the movement towards the void and truth, whereby the latter, in Badiou’s terms is both nomination and forcing (2004: 110). This movement is also of relation to discourse, which in many instances is a relation to cultural tradition such as nineteenth-century literature or, in fact, the pictorial tradition of the twentieth century that I identified in all the films under analysis. This relation is a means of breaking down the mathemes of being in order to construct ontology as intentionality, or movement-orientation. The final scene of The Target, with the camera flying above the gigantic valley and showing the subject from the perspective of the void, is a grand finale for my enquiry insofar as the subject’s ‘being-there’ appears in the transcendental order. The multiple-being is now subsumed into a singular imminent emergence, which looks simultaneously outwards and inwards, and observes the world and observes the self in the world as the acknowledgement of the presence of the self as a relation to intemporality, that is, the self as the void. It is a moment of self-mediation, the being and the vanishing from the horizon of knowledge, and turning it onto the spectator who is there to observe the crisis of selfhood as non-subsisting permanence. Badiou contends that ‘the logic of appearance is a transcendental algebra for the evaluation of identities and differences that constitute the worldly “place” of the being-there of a being’ (2004: 197). The mathemes of cinematic presentation take us away from the representational framework of identities towards subjectivities that query the ‘impurities of cinema’ and extend beyond the apparent relation to the visible. The symbolic mode actualises the ‘pure sequence’, where its only reference is the void, the contours of which appear as non-knowledge, as de-totalised multiple being. Contemporary Russian cinema stares at the void from the angle of the void where nothing else is visible – ­in The Target the camera moves so far away that nothing visible remains on the horizon except the horizon itself. As the camera flies upwards it turns around and starts tracing its own path, so as that the movement away is simultaneously a return to the origins – ­the eternal zigzag. As Russian film-makers continue

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am pl if ic a t io ns o f s ubje ct i v i t y 253 to search for a new cinematic sensibility in the symbolic mode, they zigzag across the void of appearances and adopt an experimental stance that warrants a construction of a world-event of infinite potential.

Conclusions I have used Chapter 12 to complete my analysis of contemporary Russian cinema and theorisation of the symbolic mode: from querying existing approaches to recent Russian film (Chapters 1 and 2), to deploying the concepts of non-knowledge, world and event (Chapters 3–5), the discussion shifted to interrogating the notion of posthumous subjectivity (Chapters 7–9), considering the problem of intentionality and subjectivity (Chapters 10 and 11), and, finally, analysing of the logic of amplified subjectivity. Thus, Chapter 12 provides a conclusion to my discussion of the symbolic mode, its philosophical basis and aesthetic potential. Therefore, it would be redundant to rehearse these considerations in conclusions to the book. However, some questions that I raised in the Introduction remain unanswered, and I should like to use this final opportunity to respond to them, particularly with regard to the questions of the ‘Russian century’ (Badiou 2007b), new aesthetic style and new Russian wave. Finally, in this concluding note, I aim to suggest how the study of Russian contemporary cinema may enrich our understanding of film beyond the ‘national paradigm’ and contribute to our general theory of presentation, figuration and visual culture. At the end of the millennium, as the Soviet century drew to a close, the signs of Russian entry into ‘the rump’ century (Badiou 2007b) became apparent. To paraphrase Badiou, it was the victory of capital, ‘economizing on the unreasonable passions of thought’ (2007b: 3) and confusing the excesses of being with being per se. During the first decade of the new century, ‘vitalism and voluntarism’ (Badiou 2007b: 15) – i­n their interconnected and hybrid forms and through the resonances of nowness – ­queried the historicity of time only to embrace history as apocalypse. Unlike the postmodern scepticism about historical knowledge, which was a fantasy of the ideal finality whereby death – ­as an actuality, metaphor and ­sensibility – ­supplied new forms of living and constructing knowledge. Death emerged as the ultimate ‘face-to-face’ (Badiou 2007b) which would reveal the dynamics of the relationship of the subject to itself and would provide the possibility of thinking about being in terms of negative discontinuity. On one level, Russian cinema of the period documents this societal, political and cultural rupture through its complex relationship to the preceding visual discourses such as realism, socialist realism,

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chernukha, postmodernism, necrorealism, new sincerity, glamour and the spectacularity of Hollywood. On another level, it repositions itself ideologically and stylistically in order to conceive and produce cinema as film-thought – t­ hrough the analysis of contemporary cinema, the book has captured the very evolution of thought about contemporaneity in Russian culture. Therefore, the symbolic mode extends beyond the modes of representation, with its associated forms of signification such as symbol, the symbolic and symbolism, to include different modes of thinking about the contemporary mode and significative resemblances (appearing) which suggest a particular orientation of the consciousness (subjectivity) required to re-launch the presence of appearing. Contemporary Russian cinema has enabled me to conceptualise the symbolic mode as a field of magnetisation of film-thought, which, unlike, for example, realism, does not yield either a semiological taxonomy of codes or a system of conventions by way of repetition. In the symbolic mode the cinematic image is a projection of our imagination in its desire to produce meaning as a type of resistance to image totality. This study has focused on the process of knowledge production whereby film always appears as a procedure in signification, occurring at the point of lack through the inclusion of the lacking subject in the broader framework of the void. The result is a sense of loss, and mourning over it, when the gaze exceeds the subjectivity and evokes the possibility of an interiorisation of what can never be interiorised – ­the amplified vibration. Contemporary Russian cinema is ghostly insofar as it looks at itself from the perspective of the void and by means of eschewing permanence being as the defining factor of identity. Through discontinuity, repetition, doubling, vibration and oscillation, it focuses on the emergence of meaning through an event in a constructed world. I have characterised this process through the concept of non-knowledge, occurring and developing outside the framework of senses and affects. The films under analysis have demonstrated how the body is conceived in the post-affect period whereby contemporary film-makers defy the pathos concerning the sensual body and the body as a series of affects and they disregard the return of the nonverbal mediation of the statement back on screen as a new type of statement and a rhetorical construction, which I have encoded as ex-cribing in the book chapters. Contemporary Russian cinema has not yet produced a distinct group of directors that can be described as a new Russian wave. Nevertheless, it is now evident that Russian film-makers possess a common philosophical and sociocultural position exhibited on screen. For all of them, film is an instant of appearing that produces spaces of concentration of meaning

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am pl if ic a t io ns o f s ubje ct i v i t y 255 that cannot be reduced to a single cinematic language. They operate via the key concepts of the void, vibration, world and event, and they extend their inquiry into the new realms of transfiguration, post-evental subjectivity and amplified worlds. Thanks to their films, the symbolic mode has emerged as a logic of detours, aimed at the political, social and cultural contexts, and including a ludic preoccupation with the previous cultural canon in all its multiplicity, evident particularly but not exclusively in their engagement with the literature of the nineteenth century and the art of the twentieth century. To them, living now means ‘standing firmly in the face of the historical time’ (Badiou 2007b: 15) and being concerned about being in ahistorical terms and post-evental forms. They consider their own period as that of rupture, and not restoration: the political remains an aesthetic occurrence, which they resolve through production of the inaesthetics, that is, non-knowledge that warrants an epistemology of being beyond established frameworks. More specifically, they shift away from the issue of governance to consider the autonomy of artistic procedures in constructed worlds via subject-events and to register intracultural, intra-medial significative appearances. This has allowed me to speak of Russian cinema as a non-ideological project, that is, not one that negates ideology, but one that displays a consensual configuration of contemporary thought, or, to paraphrase Badiou, one that is an art that thinks itself in non-relation to the matheme. This pre-disposition accounts for my choice of the non-chronological, non-thematic and non-responsive analysis of Russian film, which has aimed to elucidate some ideas with regard to the nature of the medium of film, the relation of film to body, and the extrapolations of filmic presentation and visualisation. I conclude with three presuppositions that stem from my analysis of contemporary Russian film in the symbolic mode and that outline the dimensions of possible future inquiries: (a) how can one speak of figuration in the postfigurative era?; (b) how do mechanisms of play impact the operations of world-building (ludic environments) and constructing the subject as an event?; and (c) how do amplified subjectivities relate back to discourse in the post-evental condition? I am hopeful the concept of the symbolic mode will yield answers to these questions insofar as it has already provided new modes of thinking about the contemporary moment by expressing and displaying, performing and seeing, and ultimately by re-actualising film as the presence of appearing in the current world.

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Notes   1. I am grateful to Julian Graffy for his helpful comments on the first draft of this chapter.   2. This is only an indicative list of published research on Sorokin’s oeuvre: Lipovetsky (1999, 2000); Chitnis (2005); Goscilo (2007); Beumers and Lipovetsky (2009); Etkind (2009); Dreyer (2011). Note that Sorokin has a short story entitled The Target that, as has been confirmed on several occasions, is not related to the film; for a sample discussion, see Osokin (2011). For analysis of the literary origins of the film script, see Kukulin (2013).   3. Their work can be viewed at: http://www.aesf-group.org/index.php?www, last accessed 15 April 2014.   4. See, for example, Kuvshinova (2011a) and Tuchinskaia (2012).   5. Surkov (born Aslambek Andarbekovich Dudaev) is a businessman and politician of Chechen descent. He served as the First Deputy of the Chief of the Russian Presidential Administration from 1999 to 2011. He contributed to the electoral victory of President Putin in 2004. He is viewed by many as the main architect of the current political system; he is responsible for such concepts as ‘sovereign’/‘managed’ democracy.  6. A similar approach is employed in Khomeriki’s 977 (2006) and Avdot’ia Smirnova’s Kokoko (2012).   7. Aleksandr Sokurov released his Faust in 2011; the film continues the director’s investment in the exploration of eternity and the medium of film evident, for example, in Russian Ark (2003).  8. As stated during a research seminar at University College London, 22 October 2012.   9. This observation is based on Waddell’s presentation at University College London, 22 October 2012. 10. Also, see Goscilo (1996) for an in-depth discussion of the relationship between gender and nationhood. 11. This is a common predisposition for films in the symbolic mode whereby the subject returns as a revenant – ­the post-evental self – ­to confront the void in a post-apocalyptic world as in the following films: Boris Khlebnikov’s Free Floating (2006) and Help Gone Mad (2009); Aleksandr Mindadze’s Soar (2007); Vera Storozheva’s A Journey with Pets (2007), Ekaterina Shagalova’s Once Upon a Time in the Provinces (2008) and many others. 12. See Chapter 10 on filmic engagement with neopaganism. 13. See Chapter 4 on the analysis of swastika in Zviagintsev’s Elena. 14. After Taia’s reunion with her lover, she disappears from the narrative; Anna takes on Taia’s role when she moves to the village next to the target: she decides to await the end of her separation with Mitia in the centre of their universe: the target. 15. Wurm writes about this scene: ‘This horrendous party scene is another fantastic visual orgy, something between the psychological violence of the 60s,

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am pl if ic a t io ns o f s ubje ct i v i t y 257 like Jan Nemec’s The Party and the Guests (O slavnosti a hostech, 1966) or Luis Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel (El ángel exterminador, 1962) and the raw brutality of Zel’dovich’s contemporaries Aleksei Balabanov (Cargo 200/ Gruz 200) or Sergei Loznitsa (My Joy/Schast’e moe)’ (2011). 16. The film was rediscovered in 1997, which makes it a probable source for Sorokin. 17. In Chapter 10, I demonstrate how architecture and modelling are used to convey the logic of subjectivity in Fedorchenko’s Silent Souls. 18. This suggests that the lovers were separated in 1990, before the dissolution of the USSR, and that their separation has geopolitical connotations. In Bekmambetov’s Night Watch similar symbolism of numbers and father–son relationship is employed: the main character desires the death of his unborn child in 1991; however, he fails and the son is born, symbolising the birth of the nation. For further discussion, see Strukov (2010). 19. This may be an ironic reference to Bekmambetov’s Night Watch with its obsessive binarisms of ontology. 20. This is also a self-referential comment concerning the future of cinema in the digital era. 21. See Chapter 1 for the discussion of stasis and non-knowledge in Sokurov’s Taurus. 22. A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Giraldus and upon Certain Doctrines Attributed to Kusta Ben Luka, privately published in 1925. 23. The final scene of the film evokes the European tradition of the universal landscape, which is contradicted by the mystifying factor of the target. In this ambiguity The Target is similar to Thomas Cole’s painting The Titan’s Goblet (1904) where, rising above the sea and mountains, I find the gigantic structure of a goblet which serves a number of boats as a lake. The goblet is a remnant from the age of the Titans, suggesting a suprahuman interference and continuing cosmic presence. 24. They use metal nets which, when shot at humans, envelop them and disable their movement.

Filmography

The following are Russian and Soviet films and TV series analysed within the text Abdrashitov, Vadim (2003), Magnetic Storms [Magnitnye buri]. Aleksandrov, Grigorii (1938), Volga-Volga [Volga-volga]. Antonov, Artem (2005), Twilight [Polumgla]. Atanesian, Aleksandr (2006), Bastards [Svolochi]. Balabanov, Aleksei (1997), Brother [Brat]. — (1998), Of Freaks and Men [Pro urodov i liudei]. — (2000), Brother 2 [Brat 2]. — (2002), War [Voina]. — (2005), Blind Man’s Bluff [Zhmurki]. — (2006), It does not Hurt [Mne ne bol’no]. — (2007), Cargo 200 [Gruz 200]. — (2008), Morphine [Morfii]. — (2010), The Stoker [Kochegar]. — (2012), I Want, Too [Ia tozhe khochu]. Bauer, Evgenii (1915), After Death [Posle smerti]. Bekmambetov, Timur (2004), Night Watch [Nochnoi dozor]. — (2006), Day Watch [Dnevnoi dozor]. — (2008), Wanted [Osobo opasen]. Bodrov, Sergei (1996), The Prisoner of the Mountains [Kavkazskii plennik]. — (2007), Mongol [Mongol]. Bondarchuk, Fedor, Jr (2006), 9th Company [Deviataia rota]. — (2009), Inhabited Island [Obitaemyi ostrov]. — (2013), Stalingrad [Stalingrad]. Bortko, Vladimir (1988), The Heart of a Dog [Sobach’e serdtse]; 1 kanal; two episodes. — (2005), The Master and Margarita; Rossiia, ten episodes. Buslov, Petr (2003), Bimmer [Bumer]. — (2011), Vysotskii: Thanks God, You are Alive [Vysotskii: Spasibo, chto zhivoi]. — (2015), Motherland [Rodina].

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f il mo gr a p hy 259 Bychkova, Oksana (2006), Piter FM [Piter FM]. Chasovitin, Eduard (2011), Khôra [Khôra]. Chukhrai, Pavel (2004), A Chauffeur for Vera [Voditel’ dlia Very]. Dostal’, Nikolai (2005), Kolia – ­Rolling Stone [Kolia-perekati pole]. Dovzhenko, Aleksandr (1930), The Earth [Zemlia]. Dykhovichnyi, Ivan (2002), The Kopeck [Kopeika]. — (2006), Inhale-Exhale [Vdokh-vydokh]. — (2009), Europe-Asia [Evropa-Aziia]. Dzekun, Aleksandr and Kol’bus, Eduard (1989), The Master and Margarita, ­televised adaptation of a theatrical performance; 1 kanal, two episodes. Druzhinin, Kim and Shal’opa, Andrei (2015), Panfilov’s 28 Guardsmen [28 Panfilovtsev]. Ermolov, Mikhail and Nevzorov, Aleksandr (1997), Purgatory [Chistilishche]. Fedorchenko, Aleksei (2005), First on the Moon [Pervye na lune]. — (2006), Shosho [Sosho]. — (2010), Silent Souls [Ovsianki]. — (2012), Heavenly Wives of the Meadow Mary [Nebesnye zheny lugovykh mari]. — (2015), Angels of Revolution [Angely revoliutsii]. Fesenko, Oleg (2012), 1812: The Lancer’s Ballad [1812: Ulanskaia ballada]. Gaidai, Leonid (1968), The Diamond Arm [Brilliantovaia ruka]. German, Aleksei Jr (2003), Last Train [Poslednii poezd]. — (2005), Garpastum [Garpastum]. — (2008), Paper Soldier [Bumazhnyi soldat]. — (2015), Under Electric Clouds [Pod elektricheskimi oblakami]. Germanika, Valeriia Gai (2008), Everybody Dies But Me [Vse umrut, a ia ostanus’]. — (2010), School [Shkola]; Channel One; sixty-nine episodes. — (2011), Short Course on Happy Living [Kratkii kurs schastlivoi zhizni]. — (2014), Yes and Yes [Da i da]. Gigineishvili, Rezo (2006), Heat [Zhara]. Glagoleva, Vera (2009), One War [Odna voina]. Gumbatov, Farid (2007), The Caucasus [Kavkaz]. Iankovskii, Filipp (2002), In Motion [V dvizhenii]. — (2005), The Swordbearer [Mechenosets]. Kalatozov, Mikhail (1957), The Cranes are Flying [Letiat zhuravli]. — (1964), I am Cuba [Ia – ­Kuba/Soy Cuba]. Kalatozishvili, Mikhail (1981), The Mechanic [Mekhanik]. — (1985), Scapin’s Tricks [Prodelki Skapena/Skapens oinebi]. — (1991), The Chosen One [Izbrannik]. — (2000), Passion Plays [Misterii]. — (2008), The Wild Field [Dikoe pole]. Kara, Iurii (1994; premiered 2011), The Master and Margarita [Master i Margarita]; Rossiia, two episodes. Karimov, Roman (2010), Inadequate People [Neadekvatnye liudi]. Kavun, Andrei (2009), Kandahar [Kandagar].

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Khamdamov, Rustam (2005), Vocal Parallels [Vokal’nye paralleli]. Khlebnikov, Boris (2006), Free Floating [Svobodnoe plavanie]. —(2009), Help Gone Mad [Sumasshedshaia pomoshch’]. — (2012), A Long Happy Life [Dolgaia schastlivaia zhizn’]. Khlebnikov, Boris and Popogrebskii, Aleksei (2003), Koktebel’ [Koktebel’]. Khomeriki, Nikolai (2006), 977. — (2009), A Tale About Darkness (also translated as A Tale in the Darkness) [Skazka pro temnotu]. — (2011), Heart’s Boomerang [Serdtsa bumerang]. — (2010), A Night as Long as Life [Noch’, dlinoiu v zhizn’]. Khotinenko, Vladimir (1995), The Muslim [Musul’manin]. — (2005), Death of the Empire [Gibel’ imperii]. — (2009), The Priest [Pop]. Khutsiev, Marlen (1966), July Rain [Iiul’skii dozhd’]. Khrzhanovskii, Il’ia (2004), 4. — (2010), Dau [Dau]. Konchalovskii, Andrei (2007), Glamour [Glianets]. Kostomarov, Pavel and Rastorguev, Aleksandr (2010), I Love You [Ia tebia liubliu]. Kott, Aleksandr (2009), I Will Take You around Moscow [Ia pokazhu tebe Moskvu]. — (2010), The Brest Fortress [Brestskaia krepost’]. Kozlov, Aleksei (2008), The Asian [Aziat]; two episodes. — (2009), Away from the War [V storonu ot voiny]. Kovalov, Oleg (2001), Dark Night [Temnaia noch’]. Kravchuk, Andrei (2005), The Italian [Ital’ianets]. Lavrent’ev, Evgenii (2004), ID [Lichnyi nomer]. — (2004), Countdown [Obratnyi otschet]. Lebedev, Nikolai (2002), The Star [Zvezda]. — (2013), Legend Number 17 [Legenda nomer semnadtsat’]. Liubakova, Marina (2007), Cruelty [Zhestokost’]. Litvinova, Renata (2000), For Me There is No Death [Net smerti dlia menia]. — (2004), Goddess: How I Fell in Love [Boginia, kak ia poliubila]. — (2011), Rita’s Last Tale [Posledniaia skazka Rity]. Loban, Sergei (2005), Dust [Pyl’]. — (2011), Chapiteau-Show [Shapito-shou]. Lomkin, Sergei (1995), The Fatal Eggs [D’avol’skie iaitsa]. Lopushanskii, Konstantin (2006), Ugly Swans [Gadkie lebedi]. Loznitsa, Sergei (2011), My Joy [Schast’e moe]. Lukin, Vitalii (2006), The Breakthrough [Proryv]. Lungin, Pavel (2005), The Case of ‘Dead Souls’ [Delo o ‘Mertvykh dushakh’]; NTV, eight episodes. — (2006), The Island [Ostrov]. — (2009), Tsar [Tsar]. — (2012), The Director [Dirizher].

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f il mo gr a p hy 261 Lutsik, Petr (1998), The Periphery [Okraina]. Mamin, Iurii (1993), Window to Paris [Okno v Parizh]. Maslov, Vladimir and Iufit, Evgenii (1999), Silver Heads [Serebrianye golovy]. Medvedkin, Aleksandr (1938), New Moscow [Novaia Moskva]. Melikian, Anna (2007), Mermaid [Rusalka]. — (2014), Star [Zvezda]. — (2015), About Love [Pro liubov’]. Mel’nik, Aleksandr (2008), Terra Nova [Novaia Zemlia]. Men’shov, Vladimir (1979), Moscow Does not Believe in Tears [Moskva slezam ne verit]. Meskhiev, Dmitrii (2004), Our Men [Svoi]. — (2007), Seven Cubicles [Sem’ kabinok]. Mikhalkov, Nikita (2007), 12. Mindadze, Aleksandr (2007), Soar [Otryv]. — (2011), Innocent Sunday [V subbotu]. Mizgirev, Aleskei (2009), Tambourine, Drum [Buben, baraban]. Moroz, Iurii (2005), The Spot [Tochka]. Motyl’, Vladimir (1969), The White Sun of the Desert [Beloe solntse pustyni]. Muratova, Kira (1967), Brief Encounters [Korotkie vstrechi]. — (1994), Passions [Uvlechen’ia], — (1997), Three Stories [Tri istorii]. — (2004), The Tuner [Nastroishchik]. — (2012), Eternal Homecoming [Vechnoe vozvrashchenie]. Novikova, Angelina (2011), Twilight Portrait [Portret v sumerkakh]. Parmenov, Dmitrii (2007), Attempt to Escape [Popytka k begstvu]; NTV; eight episodes. Popogrebskii, Aleksei (2006), Simple Things [Prostye veshchi]. — (2010), How I Ended This Summer [Kak ia provel etim letom]. Proshkin, Aleksandr (1984–6), Mikhailo Lomonosov [Mikhailo Lomonosov]; 1 kanal; nine episodes. — (1987), The Cold Summer of ’53 [Kholodnoe leto 53-ego]. — (1990), Nikolai Vavilov [Nikolai Vavilov]; TV Moskva; six episodes. — (2000), Russian Revolt [Russkii bunt]. — (2002), Trio [Trio]. — (2005), Doctor Zhivago [Doktor Zhivago]; NTV; eleven episodes. — (2009), Live and Remember [Zhivi i pomni]. — (2009), The Miracle [Chudo]. — (2012), Atonement [Iskuplenie]. Prygunov, Roman (2011), Soulless [Dukhless]. Razbezhkina, Marina (2004), Time of Harvest [Vremia zhatvy]. Room, Abram (1927), Bed and Sofa [Tret’ia meshchanskaia]. Rogozhkin, Aleksandr (1998), Checkpoint [Blokpost]. — (2002), The Cuckoo [Kukushka]. — (2006), Transit [Peregon].

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Sel’anov, Sergei (1990), White Monday [Duhov den’]. Serebrennikov, Kirill (2006), Playing the Victim [Izobrazhaia zhertvu]. — (2008), St George’s Day [Iur’ev den’]. Shagalova, Ekaterina (2008), Once Upon a Time in the Provinces [Odnazhdy v provintsii]. Shakhnazarov, Karen (1986), The Courier [Kur’er]. — (1993), Dreams [Sny]. — (1995), The American Daughter [Amerikanskaia doch’]. — (2008), The Vanished Empire [Izcheznuvshaia imperiia]. — (2012), Love in the USSR [Liubov’ v SSSR]. — (2012), White Tiger [Belyi tigr]. Shepitko, Larisa (1976), The Ascent [Voskhozhdenie]. Shmelev, Vadim (2006), Final Countdown [Obratnyi otschet]. Sidorov, Gennadii (2003), Old Ladies [Starukhi]. Sigarev, Vasilii (2009), Wolfy [Volchok]. — (2011), Living [Zhit’]. Smirnova, Avdot’ia (2012), Kokoko [Kokoko]. Snezhkin, Sergei (2008), Bury Me behind the Baseboard [Pokhoronite menia za plintusom]. Sokurov, Aleksandr (1987), The Lonely Human Voice [Odinokii golos cheloveka]. — (1988), Days of the Eclipse [Dni Zatmeniia]. — (1989), Soviet Elegy [Sovetskaia elegiia]. — 1990), The Second Circle [Krug vtoroi]. — (1997), Mother and Son [Mat’ i syn]. — (1999), Moloch [Molokh]. — (2001), Taurus [Telets]. — (2003), Russian Ark [Russkii kovcheg]. — (2005), The Sun [Solntse]. — (2007), Alexandra [Aleksandra]. — (2011), Faust [Faust]. Solov’ev, Sergei (1987), ASSA [ASSA]. — (2000), Tender Age [Nezhnyi vozrast]. Stambul’, Nikolai (2002), Battle March [Marsh brosok]. Storozheva, Vera (2002), The Sky, The Plane and the Girl [Nebo, samolet, devushka]. — (2007), A Journey with Pets [Puteshestvie s domashnimi zhivotnymi]. Strizhenov, Aleksandr (2009), Little Iulia [Iulen’ka]. Tarkovskii, Andrei (1972), Solaris [Solaris]. — (1979), Stalker [Stalker]. Tepstov, Oleg (1988), Mister Designer [Gospodin oformitel’]. Todorovskii, Petr (1989), Intergirl [Interdevochka]. — (2008), Riorita [Riorita]. Todorovskii, Valerii (2004), My Stepbrother Frankenstein [Moi svodnyi brat Frankenshtein].

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f il mo gr a p hy 263 — (2008), The Hipsters [Stiliagi]. Uchitel’, Aleksei (2003), The Stroll [Progulka]. — (2008), The Captive [Plennyi]. Ursuliak, Sergei (2007), Liquidation [Likvidatsiia]; Rossiia, fourteen episodes. Vanina, Inna and Govorukhin, Sergei (1997), The Damned and Forgotten [Prokliaty i zabyty]. Veledinskii, Aleksandr (2002), The Law [Zakon]; Rossiia, twenty-three episodes. — (2004), Russian Idea [Russkoe]. — (2006), Alive [Zhivoi]. Vertov, Dziga (1924), Kino-Eye [Kino-glaz]. Vasili’ev, Georgii and Vasil’ev, Sergei (1934), Chapaev [Chapaev]. Voitinskii, Aleksandr and Kisilev, Dmitrii (2009), Black Lightening [Chernaia molniia]. Voloshin, Igor’ (2001), The Bitch [Suka]. — (2008), Nirvana [Nirvana]. Vyrypaev, Ivan (2008), Euphoria [Eiforiia]. — (2009), Oxygen [Kislorod]. Zaitsev, Andrei (2000), My House [Moi dom]. — (2002), Gleb [Gleb]. Zel’dovich, Aleksandr (1991), Sunset [Zakat]. — (2001), Moscow [Moskva]. — (2010), The Target [Mishen’]. Zviagintsev, Andrei (2000), The Black Room [Chernaia komnata]; REN-TV. — (2003), The Return [Vozvrashchenie]. — (2007), Banishment [Izgnanie]. — (2010), Elena [Elena]. — (2014), Leviathan [Leviafan].

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Index

abstraction, 16, 20, 22–5, 38, 43, 46, 50, 75–8, 80–6, 92–8, 100–4, 112, 127–9, 131–4, 140–1, 146, 153, 161, 177, 225, 240, 245 model and modelling, 171, 205–15, 236, 245, 251 AES+F art group, 237 affect, 29–30, 139, 146, 153, 163, 169, 171, 185, 188, 202, 254 Afghanistan, war in, 220–2 Afisha journal, 13–14, 15 alchemy, 85, 240 anti-representational mode see nonrepresentational theory apocalypse, 35, 38, 40, 50, 78, 86, 90, 98, 103, 159, 161–2, 179, 181, 184, 196, 198, 202, 220, 226, 237, 244, 253, 256 Arabov, Iurii, 38, 50, 56–7, 129–30, 171 architecture, 107, 130, 136, 165, 176, 237, 245, 248, 251–2, 257 Aristotle, 23, 85–6, 113, 134, 240 Augustine, 86 auteur cinema, 12–14, 19, 50 Badiou, 2–3, 31–3, 36, 45, 47, 61, 75–6, 78, 92, 113, 128–30, 132, 146, 154, 208, 217, 220, 238, 252 Baikonur space station, 219, 233 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 118 baroque, 92, 166–8, 170, 173–7, 198 Barthes, Roland, 40, 184, 214 Bataille, Georges, 109, 112–13, 116, 118 Baudrillard, Jean, 169–71 Bazin, André, 60–4, 201 Belyi, Andrei, 177 Bergman, Ingmar, 109–12 Bergson, Henri, 39, 43–44, 47, 91–2, 200–1

Blanchot, Maurice, 196 Blok, Aleksandr, 180 Bodrov, Sergei and Sergei Bodrov Jr, 77–8 body, 21, 118, 156, 187–8, 190, 194, 199, 210, 226, 248, 254–5 ‘body without organs’, 163 fragmentation, 37, 87, 91, 100, 105, 150, 156, 162, 171, 184, 190 pain, 85, 140–1, 173 paralysis, 58, 67 post-evental body, 45, 140, 218–20 prosthetic, 64, 162, 170, 171 scar, 50, 83, 149, 162, 170–2, 248 skin, 63, 171 Brecht, Bertolt, 143, 190 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 78, 81 butoh see dance canon, 12, 16, 19, 59, 68, 78, 82, 88, 99, 152, 162, 255 Cantor, Georg, 152, 161 capitalism, 2–3, 6, 12, 94, 100, 224, 253 censorship, 7 Central Asia, 202, 219–21, 234 Chechnya, 11, 183, 188–9, 256 chernukha style, 20–2, 254 Chernyshevskii, Nikolai, 152 China, 34, 203, 244, 246, 251 Cole, Thomas, 257 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 25 computer, 94, 99, 108, 127, 138, 196, 206–9 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot, 200 conservatism, 6 contemporaneity, 1, 9, 48, 54, 127, 130, 137, 155, 165, 168, 170, 179, 182, 195, 231, 242, 254

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Soviet century, 2–5, 10–11, 14–21, 33, 37, 55, 58, 62, 64, 67–8, 70, 76–8, 148, 157, 161, 234, 243, 245, 253 Couperin, François, 174 Crimea, 1, 2 d’Agoty, Jacques-Fabien Gautier, 171–3, 176–7 dance, 57, 64, 105, 116–17, 150, 164, 168–70, 178–9 butoh, 169, 174 death, 9, 21–2, 37, 40–7, 60, 109–12, 121, 134, 147–60, 173, 191–5, 204–15, 217, 244–5, 249, 253 deconstruction, 23–6, 33, 74–5 Deleuze, Gilles, 24–5, 31–2, 44, 91–2, 98, 110, 134, 163, 240–1 Derrida, Jacques, 23, 27, 33, 40, 86, 114, 157, 184, 186, 197, 214, 221 Descartes, 200 Doppelgänger see non-knowledge Dobroliubov, Nikolai, 123 Dostoevskii, Fedor, 71, 97, 102, 108, 231 double see non-knowledge dream, 27, 48, 115, 121, 146, 149, 151–2, 156, 165, 175 Dreambody, 175 Dreamtime, 175 Eco, Umberto, 24, 72–5, 83, 230 empire see national identity fairy-tale, 118 ‘father–son’ theme see parent–child relationship financial crisis, 1, 4, 6 flatness, 87, 91, 93–106, 117, 133, 164, 242, 247 Flaubert, Gustav, 227 Florenskii, Pavel, 43 fold, the, 92, 117, 166, 247 Foucault, Michel, 85, 93 Frankenstein, 169, 171, 197 Freud, Sigmund, 25, 71, 150, 159, 179, 196, 210, 227 Friedrich, Caspar David, 36 gaze, 18, 26–7, 29, 34, 38, 40, 52, 61, 64–9, 71, 83, 86–7, 99, 100–4, 111, 129, 135, 140, 146, 156–70, 172–3, 176–7, 186–7, 191–7, 208–15, 209, 243 bifocal gaze, 105 gaze of the camera, 100, 210–15

radiography (X-ray), 62–3, 100, 106–7, 115, 124 retroactive gaze, 61, 98–9, 136, 153, 157, 167, 172, 245 gender, 17, 37, 66, 100, 108, 125, 155–60, 162, 170, 190, 203, 211–12, 228–9 genre, 4, 8, 11, 15, 19, 24, 30, 32, 56, 74, 183, 195, 203, 220–3, 230 German Expressionism, 169 gesture, 75, 117, 119, 123, 152, 158, 163, 165, 170, 172, 208, 217 ghost, 27, 103, 137, 150–60, 169, 172, 182–97, 227 glamour, 2, 6, 20, 22, 33, 81, 147–50, 161 glasnost see Gorbachev globalisation, 2, 9, 16, 18, 24, 76, 96, 203–5, 221–40, 236–52 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 38, 239 Gogol, Nikolai, 70, 240 Gorbachev, 4–5, 226 glasnost, 5, 67 perestroika, 4, 67 Gorkii, Maksim, 26–7 Grin, Aleksandr, 171 Guangzhou, 239–40, 244 hallucination, 69, 76, 80–2, 88, 101, 116, 152, 165–7, 230–1 haptic visuality, 29–30, 38, 63–4, 153, 157 Hegel, 43, 55, 73, 76 Hitchcock, Alfred, 70 Hobbes, Thomas, 200 Hollywood, 5, 6, 8–9, 13, 34, 58 Husserl, Edmund, 199 icon, 57–62, 64, 70, 75, 86, 103, 130, 137–41, 144, 183, 191 identity, 28, 121, 134–6, 138–9, 155–60, 203, 209–11, 222–3, 241, 252 imperial legacy see national identity incest, 58, 170 intentionality, 29, 37, 39–42, 47, 55, 76, 84, 93–5, 98, 112, 121, 148, 186, 199, 202, 206, 211 internet, 1–2, 7, 10, 127, 205 intertitles, 57, 70, 81, 151–2 Japan, 38, 164, 168–72, 177, 179 Judaism, 79–80, 202, 219, 222 Jung, Carl, 73–4 Kahlo, Frida, 172–3 Kant, Immanuel, 28, 37, 59

­

inde x 283 khôra, 181, 233 Khrushchev, Nikita, 16, 55–62, 64, 67–8, 70 Kiev, 78, 82, 130 Kinotavr film festival, 15 Lacan, Jacques, 25–6, 52, 66, 69, 71, 145, 156, 211 Lenin, Vladimir, 2, 16, 21, 37–53, 62, 86, 115, 167 Lesnevskii, Dmitrii, 7 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 23, 25 Locke, John, 200 loop see non-knowledge Losev, Aleksei, 43 ludic, 110–12, 136, 159, 255 Luk’anenko, Sergei, 12 Mandelstam, 3, 66 Manichaeism see religion Mantegna, Andrea, 83, 89, 140–1 mask, 60–2, 105, 115, 123, 164–5, 171, 176, 242–3, 247 materialism, 38, 41, 49, 59, 70 matheme see non-knowledge Matisse, Henri, 104, 110 mediation, 10, 28, 30, 60–2, 145, 183–4, 191, 252, 254 memory, 42–5, 49, 55, 60–3, 66–8, 78, 80, 85–7, 91–2, 101, 105, 129–36, 143, 151, 179, 184, 188, 195, 206, 211, 215, 241, 246–7 Mérimée, Prosper, 218 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 200 Metz, Christian, 35 mimesis see realism mirror, 60, 81, 83, 102, 106, 110, 149–61, 212 model and modelling see abstraction modernism and modernity, 20, 22, 100, 102–10, 149, 154, 156–61, 166, 173, 181, 188, 190, 205–6, 211–12, 219–33, 249 Molière, 218 monde atone, 96, 133, 164, 249 monism, 42, 115, 249–53 Moscow, 1, 5–6, 12–13, 20, 41, 78, 94, 102, 124–5, 129–32, 134–7, 148, 151, 154–5, 160, 164, 166, 219, 224, 225, 232, 236–9, 243–5, 248 multiplicity see non-knowledge Mulvey, Laura 26–7, 211 Mummii Trol’, 167

mystic, 23, 27, 35, 65, 73–4, 96–7, 169, 171, 191, 216, 222, 230, 243, 248 myth-eme see non-knowledge Nancy, Jean-Luc, 28, 33, 154, 159, 178, 186, 217, 221–3, 228 national identity, 10–13, 17, 79–80, 203, 218–19, 241 empire, 11, 12, 195, 202–10 imperial legacy, 11, 202–5, 218–33 neo-Eurasianism, 234, 251 patriotism, 6, 7, 11 necrorealism, 21–2 New Drama, 20, 129 ‘new quiet cinema’, 8–10, 254–5 new sincerity, 20 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 49, 103, 134, 250 non-knowledge, 31, 44, 47, 55, 59–60, 67, 82, 85, 100–1, 103, 110, 112, 116–18, 121, 128, 138, 142, 151, 173, 185, 193, 201, 210, 220, 240, 249, 255 double and Doppelganger, 4, 44, 60, 86, 120, 126, 137, 148–60, 166, 171, 181–2, 192, 205–7, 213–14, 227–33, 247, 249 knowledge-world, 36, 250 loop, 45, 69, 111, 117, 121, 174 matheme, 44, 147–60, 174, 240, 252 multiple and multiplicity, 20, 22–3, 40, 44, 47, 61, 110, 113, 129, 130, 133, 135, 137–42, 146–60, 158, 182, 191, 194, 202, 243, 251 myth-eme, 146–60, 155, 174, 240 non-substantiality, 164 non-time, 80, 225 scale, 237–52, 254–5 vibration, 26, 50, 55, 65, 67–81, 87, 114, 121, 141, 157, 159–71, 181, 197, 201, 221–4, 233, 248, 254 non-representational theory, 28–9 anti-representational mode, 27, 98, 101, 106, 128, 224, 231, 243 non-time see non-knowledge Oedipus, 58 Orpheus, 78, 82, 88, 140, 155–7, 162 Orthodoxy, 51, 58, 62, 86, 137, 192–4, 232 Ostrovskii, Aleksandr, 123 paganism see religion pain see body

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panorama, 28, 206–15, 246 paralysis see body parent–child relationship, 11, 34, 58, 62, 102, 115, 118, 141, 143, 149–50, 161, 193, 213, 238 Paris, 26, 165, 169, 239–40, 244 Pasternak, Boris, 67 Pelevin, Viktor, 152 perestroika see Gorbachev performance, 23, 27, 59, 66, 81, 84–8, 99, 120, 122, 129–30, 133–7, 141, 152–8, 163, 165, 167, 171, 208, 238, 245–7 pharmakon, 86, 159 physicalism see realism photography, 26, 40, 54, 60–4, 71, 127, 147, 153–5, 193, 206–15 Picasso, 121 piracy, 4, 18 Plato, 23, 85, 113, 140, 185, 187, 231, 233 Polevoi, Boris, 190 Polke, Sigmar, 107 pornography, 108, 119, 210–14 posthumous subjectivity see subjectivity postmodernism, 19–20, 22, 42, 78, 89, 162, 169, 197, 205, 234, 237, 245, 253–4 post-traumatic subject see subjectivity prison, 123, 131–6, 139–41, 208, 251 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 70, 82 Putin, Vladimir, 1–2, 12 the Putin era, 1–7, 12, 15, 18, 20, 38, 76, 84, 95, 100, 150, 152, 161, 165, 226, 234 radio, 100, 228, 234 Rancière, Jacques, 113–15 Rasputin, Valentin, 56 Raushenbakh, 130, 162 realism, 22, 28, 25, 30–1, 55–6, 69, 114, 121, 151, 200–11, 211, 217, 225, 231 de-realisation, 75 hyper-naturalism, 20 mimesis, 28, 85, 113, 128, 132–5, 139, 146, 156, 203, 206 physicalism, 199, 236 representation, 6, 11, 20–4, 25–30, 39–45, 51, 59, 61–3, 68–9, 74–80, 82–5, 87, 90, 92, 98, 101–4, 106, 114, 135, 137, 143, 156–7, 165,

170, 179, 182, 186–91, 197, 200–8, 211, 213, 217–18, 242–3, 247, 250–4 socialist realism, 19 reference, 60–61, 99, 105, 112–13, 120–1, 123, 131, 137, 146, 150, 158, 186–7, 200–1 religion, 58, 68, 191–4, 136–8, 143, 199, 222–33, 238, 247–8 Manichaeism, 246–7 paganism and neo-paganism, 58, 61, 107, 137, 149, 155–9, 205–15, 224–9, 243–4 Remarque, Erich Maria, 189 requiem see ritual ritual, 105, 119, 129, 140, 150, 174, 188, 192–4, 204–15, 224, 229 birth and re-birth, 98, 121 burial, 204–15 liturgy, 192 requiem, 78, 204 theurgy, 65 Rodnianskii, Aleksandr, 7 Rublev, Andrei, 137–9, 191 rupture, 3, 32, 49, 63, 123, 133, 140, 156–8, 194, 201, 224 Runet see internet St Petersburg, 6, 11, 13, 77, 82, 126, 165–78, 206–7, 218, 219 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 220, 238 scale see non-knowledge screen, 13, 26, 29, 30, 79, 87, 99–106, 110, 124, 129, 135, 147, 158, 168, 172, 177, 206, 211, 214–15, 254 self-censorship see censorship self-presence see subjectivity Sel’ianov, Sergei, 7, 77 semiology, 23–4 semiotics, 23–5 Seneca, 193 Sholokhov, Mikhail, 219 Sisyphus, 138 skin see body sleep, 46, 94–5, 101, 121, 131, 146, 150, 160, 196, 228 Sobchak, Vivien, 29, 127–8, 153 Solov’ev, Vladimir, 213 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 71 Sorokin, Vladimir, 19, 107, 237 sound, 65–6, 116 Soviet century see contemporaneity Spinoza, Baruch, 200

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inde x 285 Stalin, Joseph 11, 16, 37, 41, 51, 55, 61–2, 67, 136, 148, 155, 183, 245 steppe, 56, 202, 219–22, 227–9 Stoicism, 193 subjectivity, 110, 113–14, 211, 222 autopsy, 86, 172 living dead, 168, 193–7 post-apocalyptic subjectivity, 38, 159–60, 220, 253 posthumous subjectivity, 32, 42, 48, 103, 121, 138, 147, 192–7, 212, 223, 229–32 post-traumatic subject, 68, 193 self-presence, 49, 63, 114, 134–5, 145, 154, 159, 181, 186, 202, 232, 244, 249, 253 subjectivation, 39, 136, 142, 152 subjectivity in crisis, 80, 218–20 symbolic subjects, 95 suicide, 21, 82, 86–7, 95, 123–4, 146–60, 239, 244–7 Surkov, Vladislav, 238 Swastika, 96–7, 244 symbol, 22–33 symbolic mode, 20–33, 75, 101, 103, 146, 215; see also non-knowledge definition, 22, 24, 74 event and post-event, 25, 30, 128, 137, 141–2, 145, 151–4, 226–33, 249, 250 visualisation, 106, 142, 214–15, 237 world-building, 30, 127, 146–9, 165, 217–20, 232, 255 Tarkovskii, Andrei, 12 tattoo, 139, 164, 171, 176, 248 television, 4–5, 7, 99, 135, 208–9, 237–9, 246–7 Tolstoi, Lev, 189, 239 torture, 83–5, 90, 171, 193 transitology, 3, 18

trauma, 57, 68, 148–50, 162, 165, 170–6, 183–4, 190–5, 198, 219, 234, 248 tyranny, 124 Ukraine, 2, 6, 17, 34 uncanny, 55, 58, 63, 66, 150, 153, 158–9, 190, 192, 195–6, 248 Vasnetsov, Viktor, 190 Vermeer, Johannes, 120 vertical of power, 1 Vertinskii, Aleksandr, 80 Vertov, Dziga, 71 vibration see subjectivity Vishnevskaia, Galina 190 visualisation see symbolic mode voice, 64–7, 69, 81, 130, 140, 153–8, 167, 185 muteness, 67, 132 object-voice, 55 voice-over 46–8, 154, 195, 206, 249 void 26, 32, 92, 101, 106, 121, 131, 151, 153, 218, 223, 242, 249, 252 Vysotskii, Vladimir 219 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 187 Woolf, Virginia, 186 World Trade Organization, 2 World War I, 79, 189–90 World War II, 18, 64, 190, 198 Yeats, W. B., 247, 249 Yeltsin, Boris, 1, 4–6, 234 Zemfira, 154–61 zen, 168, 177 zigzag, 1, 3–4, 34, 81, 157, 159–61, 163, 167, 212, 231, 247, 252 Žižek, Slavoj, 67, 102