This presentation will investigate films that represent history affectively rather than narratively, tracing how, in these cinematic representations of history, aesthetic experience itself becomes an affective experience that eventually substitutes for historical knowledge or memory. Focusing on films that came out in the late 2010s, the paper will examine the capacities of affective historicism for undoing the emotional and narrative organization of affects as well as analyse the limits of this mode when it comes to critiquing the dominant interpretations of Soviet and Russian history.
