The tale of two turns: Khrustalev, My Car! and the cinematic memory of the Soviet past

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe essay offers a reading of Aleksei Iu. German's film Khrustalev, My Car! (1998) as a memory event. Khrustalev, My Car is discussed together with two other films about the Soviet past, The Cold Summer of 1953 (Aleksandr Proshkin, 1987) and Island (Pavel Lungin, 2006). Showing deep but reversible transformations of the central characters, each of these films develops in two turns: first from citizen into victim, then from victim into citizen. Crucial to this reading of Khrustalev, My Car! is a narratological analysis that distinguishes between several levels of narrated reality: what the narrator claims has happened in his fictional world; what he suggests could have happened; and what he could not possibly know but dreams about. Starting with the narrator's wet dream, culminating in the imagined scene of the gang rape of the father and ending with the wishful dream of the father's (and others') return from the camp, the film develops as an articulated, analytically unfolding work of mourning.