Contrasted with “feminine explosion” in world cinema, modern Russian cinema only begins to show “feminine shift”. Russian press starts to claim new women names in public discourse. Women filmmakers are still a small group, but they make major gains in artistic endeavors realization.
Many researchers define post-Soviet gender order as “neo-partiarchy”: ...
(Show more)Contrasted with “feminine explosion” in world cinema, modern Russian cinema only begins to show “feminine shift”. Russian press starts to claim new women names in public discourse. Women filmmakers are still a small group, but they make major gains in artistic endeavors realization.
Many researchers define post-Soviet gender order as “neo-partiarchy”: domination of authoritarian masculine power generates reaction – “feminine power” whose subjects use various responsive, tactic, indirect ways of opposition.
Under conditions of modern Russian state-market capitalism women surmount their marginal status in society by building their own life project. However, they only gain symbolic power in public space: “women’s cinema”, although offering scope for public utterance, did not yet enter the cohort of hot ticket; on a movie industry scale “women’s cinema” exists as small “atelier” (generally there are low-budget art cinema or documentaries). The attempts to re-define “men’s order” of Russian movie industry are explained by women filmmakers’ cultivation of uniqueness and non-reproducibility of author’s pattern, own style, thus striving to affirm their right on artistic expression. Namely through auteur cinema, even though women filmmakers address genre formulas, set patterns are shattered.
As A. Melikyan, V. Storozheva, V. Gai Germanika, O. Bychkova and N. Meshchaninova show, today traditional romantic model of gender relations disintegrates. Young women’s autonomation, their adventurous behavior is heavily based on instability of modern socio-cultural order, growing “precarization” of society.
With that, women filmmakers, contrarily to their men counterparts, aren’t yet participating in direct propagation of new national-patriotic State ideology, in creation of new social myths.
Young “women’s cinema” works with existing traumatic social reality, with whole problem of gender relations. Same as “men’s cinema”, it sidesteps acute political issues, problematizes social space and starts to be perceived in political categories. As part of fiction film, V. Gai Germanika and N. Meshchaninova mainstream the arsenal of documentary filmmaking, this way social space is transcoded into political. The accent on texture, authenticity, literalism, sincerity and graphic manner close to the wind (explicit language, showing woman personage’s masturbation etc.) make it possible to look at sore spots of Russian life.
This distinguishes contemporary Russian young women’s movies from “post-thaw period” women filmmakers’ auteur cinema. Soviet stereotype of filmmaking as masculine profession remains strong: it requires physical stamina, resilience and iron health. We connect the sources of its stereotype to Soviet times when men have got priority right to make it into filmmaker studios. “Post-thaw period” auteur cinema represented by brilliant works of L. Shepitko, K. Muratova, T. Lioznova and D. Asanova, is rather an exception from the rule.
It is conventional to traditionally evaluate auteur cinema following “vague” esthetic criteria. In our paper we’ll try to track changes in understanding of auteur cinema in terms of socio-cultural, gender and political transformation, from “post-thaw” cinema till present day and to show esthetic criteria as effect of social changes.
It is important to understand whether there is a special “female aesthetics” able to accompany the formation of the political subject of the feminist movement in Russia.
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