Difficult cases: Communist morality, gender and embodiment in Thaw cinema

Abstract

The article explores cinematic sensibility in Larisa Shepit'ko’s Wings (Kryl'ia, 1966) and Dinara Asanova’s Rudolfio (1966) within the broader context of the Thaw cinema and Communist morality. Both films became ‘gender trouble’ for the audience and censors, and were considered controversial by their contemporaries. The aim of the article is to explore how women filmmakers used the aesthetic pluralism of the Thaw to embed a critique of the standards of Communist morality. The article begins by analysing Communist morality and its reconfigurations during the Thaw. It claims that Shepit'ko and Asanova revealed non-normative experiences of womanhood and girlhood as complex, yet legitimate. Drawing on recent theories of ‘haptic’ in cinema, special attention is paid to the aesthetic strategies used by the filmmakers to encourage an embodied connection between the spectator and the film. The foregrounding of this connection can lead to a better understanding of the interrelation between the aesthetics of the film, the politics of emotions and gender/sexual norms in the Soviet society.

Notes

1. Although the official period of Khrushchev’s governance lies within the years 1953–1964, the cinematic Thaw is believed to extend well beyond the Khrushchev era (Chernyshova 2006; Condee 2000). I believe that the films chosen for analysis here encompass the conceptual and stylistic changes that cinema experienced during the rise of the ‘cultural Thaw’.

2. For contrasting interpretations of tactility and haptic in film studies, see Lant (1995) and Burch (1990). For the conceptualization of ‘tactility’, used in parallel to ‘haptic’, see the works of Barker (2009) and Naficy (2001).

3. For various interpretations of affect, see Massumi (2002), Sedgwick (2003), Ahmed (2004, 2010); see also Gregg and Seigworth (2010). For recent approaches to affect in cinema, see Issue 10 of The Cine-Files journal (2016), http://www.thecine-files.com/.

4. In ‘haptic aesthetics’, ‘aesthetic’ denotes ‘a set of principles underlying the work of particular artist or artist movement’ (Pearsall 2001); however, the term is also used close to the meaning of original Greek words: haptikos – ‘able to touch or to grasp’, and aisthētikos – ‘relating to perception by the senses’, from aisthēta ‘perceptible things’, from aisthesthai ‘perceive’ (Pearsall 2001). The affective component of ‘aesthetics’ is also expressed in aésthema – ‘emotion-feeling’. The importance of the primary meaning of the term ‘aesthetics’ was emphasized by Buck-Morss (1992); see also Fisher (1997).

5. Deborah Field (2007, 18) suggests that vospitanie is a complex term that encompasses ‘education, upbringing, and the molding of personality and values’.

6. Even as late as 1968, the book O sem'e i brake (On Family and Marriage) with the chapter ‘Byt – ne chastnoe delo’ (Byt is Not a Private Business) echoed Stalinist slogans describing the influence of bourgeois propaganda on young people who ‘do not have strong convictions […], are immature politically and morally unsustainable’ (Trutnev and Khodakov 1968, 7).

7. I follow Foucault’s understanding of normalization as an ensemble of techniques of power that defines ‘a range of degrees of normality indicating membership of a homogeneous social body but also playing a part in classification, hierarchization and the distribution of rank’ (1977, 184).