You are invited to a special event:
Monday, April 22
Mahindra Humanities Center/Politics, Literature and the Arts Seminar
Cosponsored by the Davis Center
“Filming the Gulag”
Kristian Feigelson, Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris
Moderated by
Svetlana Boym (Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University; Faculty Associate, Davis Center) and
Susan Suleiman (C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France and Professor of Comparative Literature, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University)
Barker Center, 12 Quincy Street, Room 133
6:00 p.m.
How is the Gulag represented in the former Soviet Union?
Despite many books published by former prisoners of Gulag (Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn), who describe the everyday of the Soviet concentration camp, and by numerous historians who offer the analysis of the institutions of Gulag, there were very few films that showed
the visual reality of the camps. « Gulag » remains an administrative designation estranged from the visual and material traces of the Soviet camps, which, (unlike the Nazi camps), have been erased from history.
This despite the efforts of associations such as The Memorial to perpetuate historical remembrance in Russia since 1989. In 1988, the documentarist Marina Goldovskaya provoked a widespread debate on the origin of the Gulag with her film “The Power of the Solovkis”
but this controversy was short-lived. A rare few fictional films and television series based on literary works about the Gulag were produced in the ex-Soviet Union. I wish to analyze the paradoxes which span the whole of post-Soviet society, torn between impossible
remembrance and the camps recreated in the imagination. I will derive this study from research I conducted this autumn in the Solovkis Islands, which 1920 prefigured the entire Soviet prison camp system, as well as from the filmic documentation of the NKVD
from 1927-1928. The Solovkis islands will actualize the Leninist expression of the "class enemy" in order to eliminate those designated. « Slon » a one hour and half movie was shot by A Tcherkassov (1927-1928) in the Solovki : it’s questions the tensions between
the « mise en scene » and the marks of reality. This propaganda film combined different sequences, describing the daily life in the Solovki, still haunted to-day with ghosts and traces. This spectral presence, combining archives and testamentary traces, reminds
us a german propaganda film produced 15 years later in an another context by the nazis « Der Fürher schenkt den Juden ein Stadt » (1944) on Theresienstadt ghetto. But both are unique documents showing us in time the fiction and reality of the Labor camps
during the 20 th century, expressing an unusual visual side of the Totalitarism.
Kristian Feigelson is a leading international scholar on Russian, East European and world cinema, and a renown sociologist of media. He is professor at the University of the Sorbonne Nouvelle where he teaches cinema. He is a frequent contributor to Le Monde
and many academic journals and the author of numerous works on Russia, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, including
Les Etats post-soviétiques : identités en construction, transformation politique et trajectoires économiques, (Armand Colin, Paris, 2004) and
Caméra politique/Cinéma et stalinisme (Théorème 8, PSN, Paris, 2005). His latest book is
La fabrique filmique : métiers et professions (Armand Colin, Paris, 2011) and
Bollywood : industry of images (Théorème 16, PSN, Paris, 2012).
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