Biopolitics in Contemporary Russian Cinema by Ellina Sattarova B.A
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Title Page Biopolitics in Contemporary Russian Cinema by Ellina Sattarova B.A., Moscow State Linguistic University, 2009 M.A., University of Montana, 2013 M.A., University of Pittsburgh, 2015 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2020 Committee Page UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Ellina Sattarova It was defended on July 27, 2020 and approved by Randall Halle, Klaus W. Jonas Professor, German Neepa Majumdar, Associate Professor, English Vladimir Padunov, Associate Professor, Slavic Languages and Literatures Sergei Prozorov, Professor, Political Science, University of Jyväskylä Dissertation Director: Nancy Condee, Professor, Slavic Languages and Literatures ii Copyright © by Ellina Sattarova 2020 iii Abstract Biopolitics in Contemporary Russian Cinema Ellina Sattarova, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2020 This dissertation looks at a corpus of recent Russian films that comments on the politicization of human life in contemporary Russia. The preoccupation of Russian culture with the relationship between political power and human life has been particularly acute since the beginning of Vladimir Putin’s third presidential term, characterized by a shift in the administration’s discursive practices, which now posited Russia as a stronghold of traditional values. The newly adopted rhetorical strategy was corroborated by a string of biopolitical initiatives, including tighter abortion restrictions, a ban on homosexual propaganda, the decriminalization of some cases of domestic violence, and the so-called Dima Yakovlev law, which prohibits the adoption of Russian orphans by U.S. citizens. The dissertation investigates the ways in which Russian arthouse cinema has conceptualized the recent changes in the Russian political landscape and focuses, in particular, on the modes of spectatorial address deployed by filmmakers to communicate their bio(political) concerns to the audiences. While the films explored in the dissertation are meant to serve as a critique of the increasingly fraught relationship between human life and political power in contemporary Russia, there might be, I argue, a certain degree of compatibility between the authoritarian practices of the state and the often monologically inclined cinematic statements produced by Russian filmmakers in recent years. The dissertation, however, does not make an overarching claim about the “complicity” of recent Russian cinema in the authoritarian project of the state. Organized as a series of case studies, it offers instead a number of potential approaches to conceptualizing the relationship between the two. Theoretically iv indebted to Giorgio Agamben’s work on biopolitics, the project brings into relief both the reach and the limits of his theoretical paradigm by staging an encounter between Agamben’s conceptual universe and contemporary Russian “biopolitical” cinema. I take issue, among other things, with Agamben’s reductive view of power as solely prohibitive and make room for an imperial narrative that is notoriously missing from Agamben’s account but remains, as I contend, key to understanding the specificity of Russia’s biopolitical project that is tangled with the country’s imperial persistence. v Table of Contents Preface ........................................................................................................................................... ix Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1 1.0 The Church, State, and the Body: Inflections of Religious Power in Andrei Zviagintsev’s Leviathan and Kirill Serebrennikov’s The Student .......................................... 11 1.1 Leviathan, Bespredel, and the End of History ............................................................ 15 1.2 Cutting Off the King’s Head: Dispersed Power in The Student ............................... 43 1.3 Authoritarian Fictions?................................................................................................ 64 2.0 Russia’s Quiet Other: Dmitrii Mamuliia’s Another Sky and Aleksandr Kott’s The Test ................................................................................................................................................ 76 2.1 Mamuliia’s and Kott’s Homines Sacri ........................................................................ 77 2.2 Escaping the Apparatus of Language? ....................................................................... 82 3.0 (De-)Framing the Other: Vulnerable and Resilient Bodies in the Cinema of Ivan Tverdovskii and Aleksei Fedorchenko .................................................................................... 104 3.1 Tverdovskii’s De-Othering Cinema .......................................................................... 106 3.2 Fedorchenko’s Counter-Histories: Beyond the Bareness of Bare Life .................. 132 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 149 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 157 vi List of Figures Figure 1 ........................................................................................................................................ 16 Figure 2 ........................................................................................................................................ 20 Figure 3 ........................................................................................................................................ 20 Figure 4 ........................................................................................................................................ 24 Figure 5 ........................................................................................................................................ 24 Figure 6 ........................................................................................................................................ 28 Figure 7 ........................................................................................................................................ 30 Figure 8 ........................................................................................................................................ 31 Figure 9 ........................................................................................................................................ 37 Figure 10 ...................................................................................................................................... 37 Figure 11 ...................................................................................................................................... 41 Figure 12 ...................................................................................................................................... 41 Figure 13 ...................................................................................................................................... 42 Figure 14 ...................................................................................................................................... 42 Figure 15 ...................................................................................................................................... 48 Figure 16 ...................................................................................................................................... 54 Figure 17 ...................................................................................................................................... 55 Figure 18 ...................................................................................................................................... 55 Figure 19 ...................................................................................................................................... 58 Figure 20 ...................................................................................................................................... 59 Figure 21 ...................................................................................................................................... 79 vii Figure 22 ...................................................................................................................................... 81 Figure 23 ...................................................................................................................................... 91 Figure 24 ...................................................................................................................................... 92 Figure 25 ...................................................................................................................................... 92 Figure 26 ...................................................................................................................................... 92 Figure 27 ...................................................................................................................................... 93 Figure 28 ...................................................................................................................................... 94