THE CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER IN SOVIET HORROR FILMS by Anastasia Nagornova A Third Year Research Project in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts in Film and Media Studies at The School of Advanced Studies University of Tyumen June 2020 МИНИСТЕРСТВО НАУКИ И ВЫСШЕГО ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ РОССИЙСКОЙ ФЕДЕРАЦИИ Федеральное государственное автономное образовательное учреждение высшего образования «ТЮМЕНСКИЙ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННЫЙ УНИВЕРСИТЕТ» ШКОЛА ПЕРСПЕКТИВНЫХ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЙ (SAS) ТЮМГУ Директор Школы к.ф.н., Ph.D. А.В. Щербенок КУРСОВАЯ РАБОТА СОВЕТСКИЕ ФИЛЬМЫ УЖАСОВ: КОНСТРУИРОВАНИЕ ГЕНДЕРА 42.03.05 Медиакоммуникации Выполнила работу Студентка 3-ого курса Нагорнова Анастасия Валерьевна Очной формы обучения Руководитель Щербенок Андрей Валерьевич PhD, к.ф.н. Тюмень 2020 3 DECLARATION OF ORIGINALITY By submitting this research project, I hereby certify that: I am its sole author and that any ideas, techniques, quotations, or any other material from the work of other people included in my research project, published or otherwise, are fully acknowledged in accordance with the standard referencing practices of my major; and that no third-party proofreading, editing, or translating services have been used in its completion. Anastasia Nagornova WORD COUNT: 4682 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................. 5 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 6 AMERICAN AND SOVIET ........................................................................................ 8 METHODOLOGY AND DATA ................................................................................ 12 SOVIET HORROR FILMS ........................................................................................ 14 THE UNCANNY WOMAN ....................................................................................... 16 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................... 20 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................... 21 FILMOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................ 23 ILLUSTRATIONS ...................................................................................................... 26 5 ABSTRACT The horror film was not widely represented in Soviet cinema. The actual experiments with the genre have been started in the late 1970s – 1980s precisely when the gradual rapprochement with the USA began in the USSR due to the policy of glasnost. American films influenced the genre form, but the inner gender core remained “Soviet.” At the same time, American horror cinema has been the prevailing source of understanding of some of the critical issues related to the horror genre studies, especially gender constructions. Such over-analyzed models are problematic since they might not exist or not work in other cinematic traditions. The purpose of this study is to address this issue inherent in previous analyses of horror cinema and formulate a specific gender model (in particular, the female one) in Soviet horror films, the analysis of which has been lacking. This essay looks at female figures from 20 horror films released in the USSR between 1915 and 1991. Findings suggested that the logic of Soviet gender model is different compared to the Hollywood one. In order to show it, this paper combines several approaches, such as Clover’s idea of the “Final Girl,” Mulvey’s concept of the “male gaze,” and Freudian theory of the uncanny. 6 INTRODUCTION The horror genre has a huge cinematic tradition. It appeared since the emergence of cinematography starting, probably, from the Lumiere brothers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1895) – the legend says the audience screamed watching a train coming directly at them. There are many different horror film schools: German Expressionism, Hollywood horror films, Italian horror, British Hammer Studio horror films, etc. so that such a genre became an important component of film history. Interestingly, it was not widely introduced in Russia until the late 1970s in a sense of domestic production: most of the horror films were imported. Only a few ones were shot here, for example, At Midnight in the Graveyard (1910) or Zagrobnaia skitalitsa (1915), which are either lost or partly preserved. Some experiments with the genre have been started in the 1970s – 1980s when several films were shot in the USSR. There are three reasons for this lack of horror films. First, Soviet filmmakers were not interested in this genre due to the Soviet ideology in which the focus has been placed on socialist realism, politics, and propaganda. The Stalinist cinema had to express specific ideas and moods suitable for the ideology where “the plucky optimism of comedies and the somber triumph of war movies had their utility for presenting a particular mindset to which the Soviet citizen could aspire; the indulgent despondency of horror did not.”1 Second, there was no need to be “entertained” the way horror genres do by frightening the audience. There were enough real horrors due to the Civil War, The First World War, and The Great Patriotic War. Third, Soviet cinema had much less experience with horror aesthetics and techniques than other cinematic traditions in terms of cultural foundations. Unlike European horror, it did not have so many diverse sources: detective stories, Gothic literature, Baroque art, the Decadent movement, and 1 Lev Nikulin, “No Horror in the Soviet Union?” NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, April 26, 2019, http://jordanrussiACenter.org/news/no-horror-in-the-soviet- union/#.XtKW1fgzZPb. 7 fairground spectacles like freak shows.2 In the Russian Empire, the genre was developed mostly in the Romanticism culture in the figures of Pushkin and Gogol and “Satanism of Silver Age” and then reflected in the early experiments with horror, for example, in the first adaptations of Gogol’s works (Viy (1909), The Portrait (1915)).3 However, because of the Revolution, its further development stopped in its infancy. Nevertheless, although the horror genre was not vividly expressed in Soviet cinema, it is still important for understanding some of the critical issues related to this genre studies as a whole, especially gender constructions. It is not obvious at first glance why - it is more logical to suggest rather a melodrama or romantic comedy do this. However, Carol Clover points out that exactly the horror genre deals more with gender than any other genre. She looks at three different cinematic categories – the legitimate genres, such as melodramas, dramas, etc., horror, and pornography – and claims that they are ranked by the degree of sublimation of the sexual drive. Clover explains it on the example of Body Double (1983) by De Palma, in which the main character, an actor Jake, goes through the three layers of cinematic career, starting with Shakespeare and ending with pornography, because of his diverse fears: For De Palma, the violence of horror reduces to and enacts archaic sexual feelings. Beneath Jake's emotional paralysis (which emerges in the “high” genre) lies a death anxiety (which is exposed in the burying-alive of horror), and beneath that anxiety lies a primitive sexual response (which emerges, and is resolved, in pornography). Thus, “sensation” genres, in contrast with the legitimate genres, deal more with the unconscious, and “pornography thus engages directly (in pleasurable terms) what horror explores at one remove (in painful terms) and legitimate film at two or more.” 2 Dmitry Komm, Formuly strakha. Vvedenie v istoriiu i teoriiu fil'ma uzhasov (SAint Petersburg: BKhV-Petersburg, 2012), 16-30. 3 Josephine WAll, “Exorcising the Devil: RussiAn CinemA and Horror,” in Horror International, ed. Steven J. SChneider And Tony WilliAms (Detroit: WAyne StAte University Press, 2005), 338. 8 Therefore, Clover writes, “pornography, in short, has to do with sex (the act) and horror with gender.”4 So by studying Soviet horror films, we can see how gender was perceived and constructed in the USSR because, unlike other genres, the horror genre directly addresses gender issues. AMERICAN AND SOVIET The study of gender constructions in horror films is mainly based on the American tradition, which is problematic. Donato Totaro points out there are more interesting examples of gender constructions in European horror films which are necessary to consider rather than look at over-analyzed Hollywood models. The reason is that American gender constructions might not exist or not work in other cinematic traditions because their conventions are very different.5 Taking this into account, this paper is going to focus on Soviet horror films, gender critique of which has been lacking, providing another view on how gender might be constructed in cinema. However, the problem here is that it seems more logical to analyze Hollywood horror films rather than Soviet ones because they were the most popular and wide- screened so that their function of gender construction and their influence, therefore, are clear. Soviet horror films are very few and poorly known among the audience, which apparently means the analysis of them does not make any sense for an understanding of how cinema might construct and encourage views and stereotypes. This paper challenges such an