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"Yellow House" of Russian Cinema, Pittsburgh, May 2-7,2005
March 22, 2005 - 6:50pm -- jim
The Yellow House of Cinema
Russian Film Symposium 2005
May 2-7, 2005
University of Pittsburgh
What feast is in the Yellow House afoot,
And wherefore are the multitudes there thronging??
— Boris Pil'niak, Mahogany
"Yellow house," a Russian colloquialism, means "insane asylum." Russia's film union and its principal screening venue is Moscow's famous House of Cinema. This year Pittsburgh's annual Russian Film Symposium invites you to visit the Yellow House of Cinema, a selection of Russia's newest and most interesting films.
"The Yellow House of Cinema" examines the themes, visual practices, and cultural politics in recent Russian cinema around issues of social psychosis, dementia, mania, folly, lunacy, aberration, and the absurd.This theme is a productive one for the present moment, and offers some striking insights into Russia's social identity over the centuries. Russia — the pre-1917 Russian Empire, the Soviet Empire, or the Russian Federation — has never had a coherent or consistent "national identity." Instead, from the Muscovite state of the mid-16th century through the present, Russia has borne an imperial identity, marked by the presence of a strong center that subsumed discrete ethnic identities — Ukrainian or Belorussian, Georgian or Armenian, Kazakh or Uzbek — as territories at its (often underdeveloped and occupied) periphery, where identity was never separated from "otherness." This dilemma was brought to resolution neither with the Soviet Union's loss of its East European satellite states nor with its fragmentation in 1991 into fifteen Newly Independent States (NIS). The history of the Russian Federation since 1991 continues to be marked by further internal fragmentation, discrete independence movements that have gripped outlying regions of the state. The war in Chechnya is merely the most familiar example; less violent attempts at secession continue in Dagestan, Ingushetia, Tartarstan, Yakutia, and other regions.
Russia's identity crisis, then, is a dual one. On the one hand, it is marked by the state's continued adherence to an imperial mentality predicated on the total exercise of economic and legislative control from the (imperial) political center, marked in recent months by the re-appropriation of the state's control over natural resource and technology industries, as well as the elimination of regional and gubernatorial elections and the on-going conflict in Chechnya. On the other hand, this search is marked by a dislocation within social consciousness concerning the very definition of a "Russian-ness" irreducible (yet again) to a set of negatives: "not" European, "not" Asian, "not" Caucasian, "not" New Russians, "not" Jewish, etc. The conflict between the two parts of this identity search have been recurrently represented in contemporary Russian culture as a kind of disorder within the social body of the Russian state, a disorder assigned for cinematic treatment in The Yellow House, the [in]sane asylum, a place of both refuge and detention.
The Yellow House of Cinema
Russian Film Symposium 2005
May 2-7, 2005
University of Pittsburgh
What feast is in the Yellow House afoot,
And wherefore are the multitudes there thronging??
— Boris Pil'niak, Mahogany
"Yellow house," a Russian colloquialism, means "insane asylum." Russia's film union and its principal screening venue is Moscow's famous House of Cinema. This year Pittsburgh's annual Russian Film Symposium invites you to visit the Yellow House of Cinema, a selection of Russia's newest and most interesting films.
"The Yellow House of Cinema" examines the themes, visual practices, and cultural politics in recent Russian cinema around issues of social psychosis, dementia, mania, folly, lunacy, aberration, and the absurd.This theme is a productive one for the present moment, and offers some striking insights into Russia's social identity over the centuries. Russia — the pre-1917 Russian Empire, the Soviet Empire, or the Russian Federation — has never had a coherent or consistent "national identity." Instead, from the Muscovite state of the mid-16th century through the present, Russia has borne an imperial identity, marked by the presence of a strong center that subsumed discrete ethnic identities — Ukrainian or Belorussian, Georgian or Armenian, Kazakh or Uzbek — as territories at its (often underdeveloped and occupied) periphery, where identity was never separated from "otherness." This dilemma was brought to resolution neither with the Soviet Union's loss of its East European satellite states nor with its fragmentation in 1991 into fifteen Newly Independent States (NIS). The history of the Russian Federation since 1991 continues to be marked by further internal fragmentation, discrete independence movements that have gripped outlying regions of the state. The war in Chechnya is merely the most familiar example; less violent attempts at secession continue in Dagestan, Ingushetia, Tartarstan, Yakutia, and other regions.
Russia's identity crisis, then, is a dual one. On the one hand, it is marked by the state's continued adherence to an imperial mentality predicated on the total exercise of economic and legislative control from the (imperial) political center, marked in recent months by the re-appropriation of the state's control over natural resource and technology industries, as well as the elimination of regional and gubernatorial elections and the on-going conflict in Chechnya. On the other hand, this search is marked by a dislocation within social consciousness concerning the very definition of a "Russian-ness" irreducible (yet again) to a set of negatives: "not" European, "not" Asian, "not" Caucasian, "not" New Russians, "not" Jewish, etc. The conflict between the two parts of this identity search have been recurrently represented in contemporary Russian culture as a kind of disorder within the social body of the Russian state, a disorder assigned for cinematic treatment in The Yellow House, the [in]sane asylum, a place of both refuge and detention.