Vile Bodies: Reassessing Chernukha in Recent RussianCinema

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.