Please join us for a talk with Daria Ezerova, Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Harriman Institute.
It has become clear that chernukha was neither a one-time Soviet phenomenon, nor limited exclusively to the Russian context. And yet, the reemergence of chernukha aesthetics in the Russian cinema of the mid-2000s was unexpected, to say the least. Neither a response to a degenerated political discourse (as under late Socialism), nor a reflection of a sanguinary reality (as in the 1990s), this return came during a time of purported stability and prosperity. Daria Ezerova investigates this new chernukha as a cultural product of a changed relationship between political power and its subject in mid-2000s Russia; a phenomenon she refers to as “the biopolitical turn.” Ezerova examines how the poetics of the abject and hyperrealism turns cinematic representations of the body into a locus of both enacting and resisting political power, thus registering broader (bio)political changes and contributing to the films’ subversive potential. The talk will analyze this trend over the last decade, highlighting changes in the Russian cinematic idiom before and after the protests of 2011-2013.
Daria V. Ezerova specializes in twentieth-century and contemporary Russian culture and society with a focus on ideology, theories of space, and Putin-era literature and cinema. Her book project Derelict Futures: The Spaces of Socialism in Russian Literature and Film, 1991-2012 examines how political power shaped the representation of space and time after the collapse of the USSR. Combining insights from social sciences and critical theory with research on urbanism, literature, and cinema, the project stakes a broader claim that the spatial expression of the idea of progress reveals distinct phases in the way Russian culture registered the fall of the USSR. Through this, it exposes cultural and political complexities obscured by the umbrella category of “post-Soviet” and participates in a transdisciplinary conversation about the interconnection of spatial practices, politics, and culture, as well as broader debates on the relationship between post-socialism and post-modernity. Before coming to the Harriman Institute, Dr. Ezerova was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian Studies at Davidson College. She has an additional research interest in art history and her article on the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood on Russian Symbolism is forthcoming in Slavic Review. She is also interested in the study of popular culture and has a chapter on horror and “body genres” in an anthology on Russian cinema. As the President of the ASEEES Working Group on Cinema and Television, she curates the film series for the ASEEES annual convention.