Authors

Lars Kristensen¹;  ¹ University of Skövde, Sweden

Discussion

Boris Groys’ assertion that formalism and the avant garde aesthetics of the early Soviet Union did not die with the implementation of doctrines of Socialist Realism has been contested for nearly three decades (Groys 1992). Opponents argue that there was a clear break between the two movements (see e.g. Kirn 2015), but Groys maintains that, in terms of depicting reality, the aesthetic regime of realism was the same. It is worth recalling this discussion of transition of doctrine, as the current war in Ukraine has been marked as a definite turn towards a neo-Soviet condition. The transition from post-Soviet to neo-Soviet will be examined through the aesthetics of necropolitics by comparing two eras of Russian cinema - postcommunism of the 1990s and the current post-war in Ukraine cinema, the latter which only now is being released from its cask. While we can in hindsight pinpoint the aesthetics of necrorealism as the refusal binary biopolitics and the striving for the creation of “a new species'' (Yurchak 2006: 249), then it is more contentious to demarcate how the necroaesthetics of high-Putinism will pan out. It is the aim of this paper to discuss a possible break in the aesthetics regime of Russian cinema through the analysis of Mikhail Brashinsky’s film Volny/Waves (2023). In this film, a cult of death is found to resemble a summer camp, but where the ones over 65 voluntarily are taken to the next level, echoing the American eco-dystopian and anti.Malthusian thriller Soylent Green (1973), as well as Eduard Limonov’s 316, punkt “v” (1998). Brashinsky’s film will be set against the necrorealism of Evgenii Yufit, who best personifies the necrorealist perspective (Berry & Miller-Pogacar 1996). Volny has nothing of the “intellectual freedom, creativity, and radicalism” that characterized the necrorealism of the 1990s (Fenghi 2023: 256), however neither does it reclaim to be “an ‘engine’ … of cultural and social transformation”, which seems systematic of authoritative culture in Russia (Murawski 2022).

Cited works:
Berry, E. & Miller-Pogacar, A. (1996) ‘A Shock Therapy of the Social Consciousness: The Nature and Cultural Function of Russian Necrorealism’, Cultural Critique, No. 34 (Autumn), pp. 185-203.
Groys, B. (1992) The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Fenghi, F. (2023) ‘The Absolute Elsewhere: Pavel Krusanov and the Countercultural Sources of Russian Imperialism’, Ab Imperio, 3/2023, pp. 255-289.
Kirn, G. (2015) ‘Between Socialist Modernization and Cinematic Modernism: the Revolutionary Politics of Aesthetics of Medvedkin’s Cinema-Train’, in E. Mazierska & L. Kristensen (eds), Marxism and Film Activism: Screening Alternative Worlds, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 29-58.
Murawski M. (2022) ‘Notes from the Opening of a Neo-Soviet House of Culture’. Slavic Review. 81(1), pp. 209-210 Yurchak, A (