Post-Soviet Nostalgia in Russian Cinema An Analysis of Aleksey Balabanov's Cargo 200, Karem Shakhnazarov's the Vanished Empire and Vladimir Menshov's Envy of the Gods

Abstract

Over the last decade Russia has developed a modern film industry that has been recognized internationally as one of excellence and prestige. This was clearly illustrated in 2003 when Andrei Zviaginstev’s film The Return won the coveted Venice Golden Lion Award. In recent years Russian cinema has been a popular and profitable enterprise for a country that suffered such a collapse and national identity crisis. The loss of a Soviet identity created a sudden nostalgia for Soviet films, or more importantly nostalgia for the era of economic stability which these films have come to represent. This thesis consists of two parts. The first part delves into the phenomenon of Soviet nostalgia by deploying Maya Nadkarni and Olga Shevchenko’s article, The politics of Nostalgia: a Case for Comparative Analysis of Post-Socialist Practices and is divided into three subsections. Section one attempts to present a definition of nostalgia as it is experienced in post-Soviet culture and society. Section two covers the various practices in which nostalgia can manifest itself. Section three illustrates how nostalgia can be either reflective or restorative and what implications this has for a possible revival of the Communist regime. The second part of this thesis focuses on my analysis of three recent films that depict the Soviet era with varying degrees of nostalgia: The Vanished Empire, Envy of the Gods, and Cargo 200. In order to connect the two parts of this thesis, I present information on how nostalgia is capitalized on as a cinematic technique using an article by Slavoj Žižek, Pornography, Nostalgia, Montage; A Triad of the Gaze.