CBEES Advanced Seminar “Nativism, Avant-garde, Decolonisation: Towards the vernacular aesthetics of early-Soviet Georgian cinema” with Dušan Radunović, Associate Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University

Speaker: Dušan Radunović, Associate Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University

Discussant: Oksana Sarkisova, Research Fellow, Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives, and Head of Visual Studies Platform, Central European University

Chair: Asiya Bulatova, Researcher at the School of Culture and Education, Södertörn University

Abstract: In the broadest sense, this paper aims to evaluate the evolution of imperial discourses about Georgia and the Caucasus at large in the early Soviet context. It lays out the complex figuration of the national idea in Georgia under imperial rule, followed by the ideology of representation that underpinned those processes, from its inception in imperial years to its controversial re-negotiation during the short-lived period of national emancipation in the 1920s. The central part of the paper is dedicated to the Georgian Soviet film Eliso (1928), which emerged from the collaboration between the Georgian poet-turned-filmmaker Nikoloz Shengelaia (1903-1943) and the screenwriter Sergei Tret´iakov (1892-1937). The paper argues that Eliso fundamentally challenged the reigning mode of representing the Caucasus by questioning the inherited “sovereignty” of the colonial gaze, to inaugurate a different, vernacular vision. To illustrate the ways in which the film circumvented the existing mode of representation, the discussion focuses on the implementation of Sergei Tret´iakov’s key concepts, such as fact, production [proizvodstvo], and purpose [naznachenie] in the cinematic figuration of indigenous subjects. While the centrality of Tret´iakov’s productivism for the emergence of new visuality on the peripheries of Soviet film industry will broach the broader question of the crisis of (Soviet) modernist project, the appraisal of Shengelaia’s emancipatory effort will gear us towards the conclusion that the political emancipation of the (colonial) self went hand in hand with the emancipation of the strategies of representation.

Dušan Radunović is Associate Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham, where he teaches Russian cultural and social history and film theory. He has published on a range of subjects, from intellectual history to critical and film theory. Dušan is the author of monographs on the genesis of the concept of form in the twentieth-century Russian humanities (forthcoming) and on Mikhail Bakhtin and co-editor of the volume Language, Ideology, and the Human: New Interventions (Routledge, 2012). Dušan is also interested in the archaeology of film medium and in the way in which the medium of cinema interacts with other media. In this context, he has worked on Sergei Eisenstein’s late writings on cinema and on the interaction of post-war avant-garde cinema and art practices in Eastern Europe.