Visual Laboratory by Anastasiya Shulgina

(c) Oksana Nesenenko, 2010

Thursday, 1 June 2017, 19:00

Deviant Figure on the Soviet Screen

Until recently, the marginal culture of USSR has not been the subject of historical and cultural research. The representation of social deviations in Soviet historiography was one-sided, as they were rather described in the context of irreversible “elimination of plague,” considered to be a relic, or a metastasis, of the capitalist past. Today, due to the availability of certain documents, as well as the westernization of research methods, the situation has considerably changed. Now the study of deviant behavior, particularly in film theory, gives the opportunity to recreate the specificity of everyday culture of the past era in more comprehensive ways.

As a deviation, alcoholism, with its typical everyday manifestations, has been transformed into an ambiguous and recognizable cinematic figure of a “boozer.” Anastasiya Shulgina will consider the ways and strategies of alcoholics depiction in the Soviet cinema, as well as the widespread myths around the image of alcoholism.

Anastasiya Shulgina is a film researcher, filmmaker, graphic designer, and Fellow Researcher at Maksym Rylskyi Institute of Art History, Folklore Studies, and Ethnology (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine).

Visual Laboratory was founded at Visual Culture Research Center in 2010 as a platform for presenting and discussing research projects from various fields of humanities with a special focus on visual studies. Its format allows reviewing both, accomplished and ongoing projects by way of exposing the process of research, and engaging everyone interested into the production of common knowledge.

Admission is free

Supported by: ERSTE Stiftung and Charles Stewart Mott Foundation