LFU:online

Participants will become acquainted with the history of the Soviet Union as well as with its social and political system; they will broaden their knowledge on cinema, film aesthetics and film history and will undertake exemplary film analyses.

2021 marks the 30th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The decade preceding the end of the Soviet Empire, in particular the years of Perestroika from 1985 onwards, was culturally a most exciting time of change and transformation. For the first time since the 1920s, the Soviet mass media allowed a limited diversity of opinion. The propagated “transparency” (in Russian glasnost'), however, directly lead to an exposure and condemnation of the lies of the state. Above all, however, the end of the Soviet Union was heralded in events that radiated far beyond the country's borders. Among them are the Chernobyl reactor catastrophe of 1986 or the peaceful protest action in the Baltic States, where on 23 August 1989 people from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia formed a human chain of about 600 km from Vilnius via Riga to Tallinn and demanded the end of the Soviet occupation.

One artistic medium that provided different narratives of change and imagined the end of a political and social system in different ways was cinema. In this course we will take a closer look at the different narratives of dissolution and disintegration, rebellion and departure in late Soviet cinema. Besides the question WHAT is told, we will especially deal with questions of HOW something is told. Masha Gessen's highly exciting and topical book The Future is History. How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (published 2017 in the English original, 2018 in the German translation) will serve as an introduction to the subject and as a narrative and historical framework.

Lectures; presentations by the participants; discussion of texts and films

Regular and active attendance; presentations by participants; essay at the end of the term

Recommended as introduction and as historical framework during the course:

Masha Gessen: The Future is History. How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. New York: Riverhead Books 2017 (or in its German translation published 2018). 

Due to substantial differences in the allocation of ECTS-Credits in various curricula (teacher training programs/specialized degree programs), the requirements for this course vary. Information will be provided by the instructor at the beginning of the course.