Projecting Russia in a Mediatized World by Stephen Hutchings

Author:Stephen Hutchings [Hutchings, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, Asian American Studies, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781000538212
Google: glxVEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2022-01-31T04:17:54+00:00

The Russian state, nonetheless, increasingly requires cinema to endorse official patriotism. In 2016, the Ministry of Culture named eight patriotic storylines it considered worthy of funding, one of multiple such directives over the past decade (Child 2016). Putin is in a line of Kremlin occupants to have recognized cinema’s effectiveness as a tool of persuasion, beginning with Lenin’s 1922 dictum that ‘of all the arts, cinema is the most important’, a refrain reprised by Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev. Film’s nation-building role exploits the suitability of its audiovisual mode and populist reach to the large-scale projection of national fantasies and myths. But cinema has always been more thoroughly traversed by transnational flows – economic, aesthetic, and cultural – than other mass entertainment forms. As Andrew Higson argues, ‘the paradox is that for a cinema to be nationally popular it must also be international in scope … it must achieve the international standard’ (Higson 1989: 40). Canonic, Stalin-era films, produced at the height of Soviet isolationism, were heavily influenced by Hollywood (including Aleksandrov’s legendary escapist musicals). In the era of accelerating global connectivity into which post-Soviet Russia was born, international film markets, products, and audiences converge with domestic ones. The plethora of cross-national co-productions – one index of this convergence – include Mikhalkov’s paean to tsarist culture, The Barber of Siberia (Sibirskii tsiriulnik 1997) but also art-house masterpieces like Sokurov’s Moloch (Molokh 1999), co-produced with a Berlin-based company, which provided Russia’s Oscar entry (Bergfelder 2000). This further complicates the national deployment of cinema for cultural diplomatic purposes – and not for Russia alone – by ceding some control to the partner nation, whilst attracting new audiences (Leontyeva and Bezenkova 2016).

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