The third colloquium in the series features Ellina Sattarova, Instructor, Department of Russian Studies at Dalhousie University (Canada). She will present on “The Non-Final Cut: The Biopolitics of Necrorealist Cinema.”
Register to Attend on Zoom: https://bit.ly/REEES-EllinaSattarova
The Non-Final Cut: The Biopolitics of Necrorealist Cinema As the Soviet Union began to show signs of decay, the necrorealists, a group of Saint-Petersburg based amateur artists and filmmakers, celebrated the imminent death of the state with an overflow of onscreen corpses and previously-taboo images of intricate violence and grotesquely decomposing bodies. In this talk, I will investigate the biopolitical underpinnings of the necrorealist phenomenon, focusing, in particular, on the group’s cinematic efforts. With its inherent paradox of simultaneous stillness and motion, the cinematic medium allows the necrorealists to blur the boundary between life and death and thus challenge the absolute separation of the human and the inhuman, political and bare life. Paradoxically, however, the necrorealist project of dismantling boundaries is ultimately dependent on boundaries itself: the mediating shield of a cinematic screen, the safety of the editing room, and the time- and space-defying capacity of the cinematic cut. My investigation into necrorealist biopolitics poses a set of broader questions pertaining to the intersection of biopolitics and the cinematic medium and the relationship between biopolitical bodies on and off the screen.
Bio:
Ellina Sattarova is an instructor at the Department of Russian Studies at Dalhousie University. She holds a Ph.D. in Slavic and Film Studies, as well as a Ph.D. certificate in Cultural Studies, from the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests include biopolitics, late Soviet and post-Soviet Russian cinema, and Central Asian cinema. She is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled Biopolitics in Contemporary Russian Cinema, in which she investigates the increasing interest of contemporary Russian filmmakers in the fraught relationship between human life and political power.