Motivy 'proverki' i 'ispytaniia' v postsovetskoi kul'ture: Sovetskoe proshloe v rossiiskom kinematografe 1990-kh godov by Iuliia Liderman

Abstract

926 Reviews Motivy 'proverki' i 'ispytaniia' v postsovetskoi kul'ture: Sovetskoe proshloe v rossi iskomkinematografe iggo-kh godov. By IULIIA LIDERMAN. (Soviet and Post Soviet Politics and Society, 28) Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag. 2005. 2o8 pp. ?24.90. ISBN 978-3-8982I-5 I-4. luliia Liderman's monograph examines three tropes of Soviet cinema-labour, war, and love-through their incarnations inStalinist, Thaw, Stagnation, and post-Soviet films.There is,however, an imbalance in theway the textdeals with this periodiza tion: Stalinist and Thaw cinema receives extensive (ifuneven) coverage, Stagnation cinema ismore of an afterthought, and post-Soviet cinema ('the i99os') is covered skeletally (at best). Despite the book's subtitle, Russian cinema of 'the I990s' is re presented (according to the scholarly apparatus at the end) by eighteen films,some of which were produced and released after 2000; some arementioned only by title and inpassing, and some appear only in the filmography.By contrast, the same apparatus lists fifty-ninefilmsof the Soviet period, virtually all ofwhich are addressed to some extent in the text. So the very titleof the study ismisleading: there is terribly little about 'post-Soviet culture' and just as little about 'Russian cinema of the i99os'. Indeed, fewer than twenty-fivepages of the entire text are devoted to post-Soviet Russian cinema and many of those are given over to images. Liderman's discussion of the trope of labour is by far themost developed, with almost half of the study devoted to it.Her distinction between 'labour with a capital letter' (the process of becoming 'thenew [Soviet] man, a new personality') and 'labour with a lower-case letter' (the daily work-day routines of theworking class, the new heroes of Soviet cinema after the I920s) is a very productive one in the discussion of Stalinist and Thaw cinema. It allows her to examine both the represented conditions of 'coming to consciousness' and those of the actual site of physical labour, arguing convincingly thatonce the factorydisplaces the family as the locus of identity forma tion forSoviet citizens, a character's work history becomes thedefining factorofhis or her being.Missing, however, isa consideration ofhow this trope istransformed during the Stagnation period (especially considering the rise toprominence of the 'produc tion film'-e.g. Sergei Mikaelian's I964 filmThe Bonus-which questions workplace practices and directly challenges the administrative apparatus), and the discussion of the trope in 'post-Soviet cinema' is limited toChildren ofCast-Iron Gods (1993) by Tomas Tot, aHungarian student at theState Institute forFilmmaking (VGIK). The discussions of the tropes ofwar and love are substantially more brief and pre dictable: representations ofwar are categorized as 'war as the order of things', 'war as a holiday', 'war as hell', 'war as home', and 'war as suffering'; love is examined in terms of the spaces shared by lovers, on-screen actions (in particular, strolls along theKremlin walls), and speeches or dialogs about love.The problem isnot somuch that little of this is new; the real problem is the absence of a systemic way of con ceptualizing either how tropeswork or how theyare transformed at differentperiods. While each of the three tropes isexamined in some detail, there isnomethodological consistency in the author's approach. This is a peculiar weakness considering the number of cultural sociologists whose work is cited throughout each chapter. Perhaps the most disturbing featureof thiswork, however, isnot the fact that ithas not been revised by the author (to eliminate repetitions) or edited by thepublisher (to eliminate misspellings, fragments,missing clauses, or conflicting information-e.g. the two dates given forEvgenii Cherviakov's The Prisoners on facing pages, pp. 64 65), but the fact that themanuscript does not seem to have been read by either the author or the editor. The text is sprinkled with Liderman's notes toherself, indicat ing in parentheses missing pieces of information that still need to be inserted: '(the name of the actor)' in the discussion of The Youth of Maxim, p. 6o; '(titles of films)' in the discussion of interior spaces, p. 79; '(another interpretation of endurance)' in MLR, 102.3, 2007 927 the summary ofKaterina Clark's argument in The Soviet Novel, p. 89; etc. This is still,or itshould still...