The Imperial Trace This page intentionally left blank The Imperial Trace Recent Russian Cinema nancy Condee 1 2009 3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offi ces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2009 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Condee, Nancy. Imperial trace : recent Russian cinema / Nancy Condee. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-536676-1; 978-0-19-536696-9 (pbk.) 1. Motion pictures—Russia (Federation)—History. I. Title. PN1993.5.R9C66 2009 791.430947’09049—dc22 2008029349 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Acknowledgments Grateful acknowledgment is due, fi rst of all, to my home institution, the University of Pittsburgh, where the Dean’s Offi ce of the School of Arts and Sciences, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, the University Center for International Studies, and the Russian and East European Studies Center are the primary units to which I am indebted for support and leave time. I would like to thank the Richard D. and Mary Jane Edwards Endowed Publica- tion Fund for indexing support. The British Academy generously provided a visiting fellowship, sponsored by Carol Leonard, to St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, during a critical stage of the manuscript. I would also like to acknowl- edge the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, and Bob Huber in particular, for an introduction to the kind of broadly interdisciplinary work that developed my interest in this topic. The professional and material support, goodwill, and logistical help provided by Kinotavr (Open Russian Film Festival), in particular Mark Rudinstein, Igor’ Tolstunov, Aleksandr Rodnian- skii, and Sitora Alieva, were invaluable over many years in providing a working atmosphere without which this research would not have been conducted. This volume has benefi ted from colleagues’ responses when portions were presented at Birkbeck College (School of Advanced Studies, London University Screen Studies), Cambridge University (Trinity College), Columbia University (Harriman Institute, Center for Comparative Literature and Society), the Mel- bourne Conferences (University College, University of Melbourne), New York University (La Pietra), Oxford University (Magdalen College, Wolfson College), University College London (School of Slavonic and East European Studies), Uni- versity of Manchester (Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Center), University of Nottingham (School of Modern Languages), and Yale University (Slavic Department and the University Council on European Studies). vi acknowledgments I would like to thank in particular several of the scholars, colleagues, and friends who have read portions of the manuscript, offering counterarguments on issues about which we have disagreed. They include Peter Barta, Mark Beissinger, Birgit Beumers, Paul Bove, Joe Camp, Bill Chase, Ian Christie, Katerina Clark, Evgeny Dobrenko, Dan Field, Mario Fischetti, Ilya Goldin, Julian Graffy, Seth Graham, Jonathan Harris, Stephen Hutchings, Marcia Landy, Alena Ledeneva, all the Levines, Colin MacCabe, Alexander Motyl, Catherine Nepomnyashchy, Petre Petrov, Ilya Prizel, Greta Slobin, Terry Smith, Oleg Sul’kin, Ronald Suny, and Elayne Tobin. Among the many Russian scholars, critics, and friends who have argued with me about the ideas presented here are Liubov’ Arkus, Petr Bagrov, Dmitrii Eliashev, Pavel Kuznetsov, Evgenii Margolit, Andrei and Elena Plakhov, Dmitrii Prigov, Dmitrii Savel’ev, Irina Shilova, Aleksandr Shpagin, Natal’ia Sirivlia, Elena Stishova, Vladimir Strukov, Diliara Tasbulatova, Mikhail Trofi menkov, and Neia Zorkaia. My greatest thanks for their patience, humor, and resources (in every sense) go to Vladimir Padunov, Kira, and Nikolai. Contents 1. Introduction: Custodian of the Empire, 3 2. Cine-Amnesia: How Russia Forgot to Go to the Movies, 49 3. Nikita Mikhalkov: European but Not Western? 85 4. Kira Muratova: The Zoological Imperium, 115 5. Vadim Abdrashitov-Aleksandr Mindadze: A Community of Somnambulants, 141 6. Aleksandr Sokurov: Shuffl ing Off the Imperial Coil, 159 7. Aleksei German: Forensics in the Dynastic Capital, 185 8. Aleksei Balabanov: The Metropole’s Death Drive, 217 9. Postscript, 237 Notes, 245 References, 303 Index, 332 This page intentionally left blank The Imperial Trace This page intentionally left blank 1 © Introduction: Custodian of the Empire Britain had an empire, but Russia was an empire. — Geoffrey Hosking, “The Freudian Frontier,” 1995 Russian democrats destroyed the “empire”—that is, their own country. — Aleksandr Tsipko, Nezavisimaia gazeta, January 31, 1995 In this volume I anchor my argument in two overlapping fi elds. First, I investigate the core concerns of six major Russian directors who weathered the collapse of the USSR—and with it, the collapse of their own industry—yet managed to work from the early 1990s onward under very different professional and artistic conditions. Nikita Mikhalkov, Kira Muratova, Vadim Abdrashitov, Aleksandr Sokurov, Aleksei German, and Aleksei Balabanov are arguably Russia’s lead fi lmmakers. Of these six, Mikhalkov and Balabanov are best known for their commercial cinema. Mu- ratova, Abdrashitov, Sokurov, and German are widely considered the country’s key art house directors, however much they have at times resisted that designation. They span a quarter-century, from Muratova’s birth in 1934 to Balabanov’s birth in 1959, and more than forty years of fi lm production, from 1967 to the present. Occupying a central place in recent Russo-Soviet fi lm, these six directors represent a critical cultural continuum from the late Soviet to the post-Soviet 3 4 introduction years. To the extent that I am interested in capturing the directors’ individual cinematic preoccupations, I do not attempt to move beyond that task to promote some unifying thesis about the state of Russian cinema today. The six directors are too diverse, sui generis not only as individual fi lmmakers, but also accord- ing to other markers of difference: where they studied and with whom, their generational experience, the industry demands of commercial versus auteur cin- ema, their political loyalties or disloyalties, and so forth. It would be diffi cult to argue that, individually or as a group, they are representative of some larger set: from script to postproduction, the industry conditions in which they work are highly differentiated from one another. And so, although I offer some compari- sons throughout the volume (in particular in the postscript), I am not convinced that much can be gained from an ambitious effort at what I contend would be an artifi cial totality for its own sake. If this book succeeds in providing six individual portraits of Russia’s leading directors, it will have fulfi lled half its task. The second fi eld is the larger and more speculative issue of Russia’s cul- tural environment and its distinct difference from the national cultures of Western Europe. It is to this second fi eld that the weight of this long introduc- tion is devoted so as to frame the specifi c theoretical issues I pursue in the di- rectors’ individual work. The research question that underlies this volume has to do with how the six directors, whatever else their concerns may be, variously fi gure Russia as a cultural space, and the ways their fi lmmaking practices, in production as well as content, articulate distinct historical patterns that we have not yet adequately explored. If, as Hosking suggests in the epigraph, Russia was an empire, how is that relationship fi gured in cinema? How does the condition of being an empire (or the condition of its dismantling, as Tsipko suggests) circulate in the work of these directors? I again do not see this second task as equatable with a sum- mary of Russian cinema today. Quite the opposite: a summary account would tie up loose ends, providing a more coherent picture of a discrete cultural fi eld; the effort here is instead to initiate a line of inquiry, potentially cutting across all cultural fi elds, but left intentionally open-ended, to ask a set of research questions for which only conjectural responses at best may be attempted. As the reader may appreciate, I have sought to balance these two tasks. There is much to be said, for example, about Nikita Mikhalkov’s work beyond those features that are neatly consistent with a model for a regenerated empire. And in the work of a complex director such as Kira Muratova the ideological trace is laid out in a playful and circumspect modeling system. An easier ap- proach would have been to select only those fi lms with irrefutable mimetic evidence of the empire and then to “discover” its presence. Such an approach is akin to tackling the dog in Chekhov only in order to stumble upon his “Lady with a Lapdog.” I am interested instead in a somewhat more fraught and specu- lative investigation: examining the work of Russia’s lead directors as such and, within that portraiture, to ask whether a particular concept of cinema has a custodian of the empire 5 place in a larger investigation of their work. Subsuming what I have called the imperial trace to their cinema (rather than the other way around), each chapter functions fi rst as an interpretive frame within which I ask how the work re- fracts the social and political conditions of the imperial imagination.