The Imperial Trace Recent Russian Cinema

The collapse of the USSR seemed to spell the end of the empire, yet it by no means marked the end of Russia's enduring imperial preoccupations, extending over four and a half centuries since the reign of Ivan IV. Is there such a thing as an imperial trace in Russia's contemporary culture? Condee argues that we cannot make sense of contemporary Russian culture without accounting for its imperial legacy and mapping out the terms of such an analysis. She turns to the instance of contemporary cinema to focus this line of inquiry. Within film (and implicitly other cultural fields as well) do we limit our accounting to narrative evidence--Chechen wars at the periphery, historical costume dramas of court life--or could an imperial trace be sought in other, more embedded ways, in the manner and structure or representation, the conditions of productions, the recurrent preoccupations of its leading filmmakers, the ways in which collective belonging is figured or disfigured? This book organizes these questions around the work of Russia's internationally ranked auteurs of the late Soviet and post-Soviet period: Kira Muratova, Vadim Abdrashitov, Nikita Mikhalkov, Aleksei German, and Aleksandr Sokurov.

Nancy Condee is on the Slavic and Film Studies faculty at the University of Pittsburgh. She has been Director of the Graduate Program for Cultural Studies for over a decade (1995-2006) and is a Senior Associate Member of St. Antony's College (Oxford University). She is co-founder and co-editor of the journal Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, and serves on a number of editorial and advisory boards, including Kinokultura, Critical Quarterly, and Russian Studies in Literature. She is a member of the Russian Guild of Cinema Scholars and Critics (Union of Cinematographers of the Russian Federation) and is one of two US scholars annually for over a decade invited to and supported by the Kinotavr Film Festival (Sochi), Russia's leading post-socialist film festival. She has served for six years as Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the largest US grant agency for social-science research in the former socialist bloc.