Announcements

The academic talk and seminar "Deleuze and Russian cinema"

The academic talk and seminar, delivered by Dr. Sergey Toimentsev, is to be held as part of the international scientific program of Russian Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Technology (RIAS).

(Ph. D. in Comparative Literature (Certificate in Women’s Studies), Rutgers University)

13.00 pm, July 02, 2015

(Venue: 16-18, Verkhnyaya-Radishchevskaya st, metro station Taganskaya, The main campus Sholokhov University, Moscow, Russia)
Room 200

"DELEUZE AND RUSSIAN CINEMA: THE PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS OF CINEMATOGRAPHY IN A TOTALITARIAN STATE"

How would Russian/Soviet cinema look in the light of Gilles Deleuze's film-philosophy? Early Russian Cinema (e.g. Vertov, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko) is widely represented in Deleuze’s Cinema 1 to exemplify the key components of the movement-image, such as the dialectical montage, the action-oriented narrative and its complicity with a dominant ideological regime. Yet in his second Cinema volume references to Russian cinema almost disappear and predominantly European and American modern films serve to demonstrate the emergence of the time-image. Does it mean that there is no time-image in Russian film? This presentation attempts to answer this question by arguing that the Soviet time-image is a latecomer in the history of world cinema that fully manifested itself only after the Cinema books were published. By rehabilitating the legitimacy of the Soviet time-image in terms of Deleuze’s philosophical aesthetics, the talk will equally address a number of methodological questions. For example, how shall we read Deleuze’s “difficult” books on cinema? According to his metaphysical framework or along the historical evolution of film? What is the relation between philosophy and a history of film? What other national cinematic traditions, unknown to Deleuze, could be viewed in terms of his taxonomy of images?