Ethnography, Incongruity, History: Soviet Poetic Cinema

Abstract

AbstractThis essay examines the entangling of the poetic and the ethnographic in the art cinema of the 1960s as an indicator of a broader collision of epistemological/discursive regimes in postwar Soviet cinema—and ultimately, a clash between two fundamentally opposed approaches to the discursive production of history. In the Soviet poetic cinema of the 1960s, the temporal‐spatial frameworks of the Stalin era are disrupted, shifting first of all, to what Tarkovsky called a lived experience of time—that is, to the subjective emotions and experiences of individual people; second, to localized histories that may not coincide with the supra‐national Soviet developmental narrative; and third, to the positing of an archaic, even pre‐historical temporality as a kind of lost ideal. I argue that poetic cinema serves as a site for playing out the contradiction among temporalities and spatialities in post‐Stalin culture, and therefore among opposed sense‐making projects and representational modes, creating the possibility for subverting the colonial function of Soviet cinema.