Contemporary Russian Cinema's Afterlife: The Strange Case of Vasilii Sigarev

2003 is viewed by many as a turning point in the history of Russian cinema: no longer post-Soviet (Aleksei Balabanov bid farewell to the 1990s in his 2005 Dead Man’s Bluff), re-gaining success at international film festivals (Andrei Zviagintsev’s 2003 The Return, winner of the Venice film festival, is a story about a god-like figure of the father who comes back to his children), and markedly transnational (Hollywood opened production studios in Moscow, and Russian cinema travelled back to Hollywood via the success of Timur Bekmambetov’s vampire trilogy).

At this time Russian cinema welcomed a new cohort of directors such as Iurii Bykov, Valeriia Gai Germanika, Boris Khlebnikov, Nikolai Khomeriki, Renata Litvinova, Kirill Serebrennikov, and many others. Together with the influential producers such as Elena Iatsura, Dmitrii Lesnevskii and Aleksandr Rodnianskii, they brought Russian cinema back from its near-death state and created a new cinematic style characterised by highly abstract concepts and visual language. A decade later, this type of cinema became the object of intense public scrutiny: Zviagintsev’s 2014 Leviathan was the most talked about Russian film of the year. Released in the new political climate of post-Crimean Russia, Leviathan revealed stark divisions between ordinary citizens, on the one hand, and the state, business and church, on the other.

What kind of cinema is possible in the new ‘patriotic’ climate of the Russian Federation? To answer this question, Dr Vlad Strukov (University of Leeds) will examine the cinematic oeuvre of Vasilii Sigarev (b. 1977), drawing on the analysis of Sigarev's earlier Wolfy (2009) and focusing on his most recent productions Living (2011) and The Land of Oz (2015).

Biography: Vlad Strukov is an Associate Professor in Film and Digital Cultures (University of Leeds), specialising in film theory, world cinemas and digital media. He is the principal editor of the journal Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media. His most recent publications include a monograph entitled Contemporary Russian Cinema: Symbols of a New Era (Edinburgh UP, 2016) and edited volumes New Media in New Europe-Asia (Routledge, 2014) and From Central to Digital: Television in Russia (Nauka-Press, 2014). He is the director of the Leeds Russian Centre (Russia[n] in the Global Context). His forthcoming publication is an edited volume on the technology of flight and visual culture which will be published with Routledge in 2016.