Introduction

I start by providing an overview of the major social, political and cultural changes that have occurred in Russia since Putin’s coming to power in 2000 and the Bolotnaya 2011 protests. I discuss Russian film market and industry, focussing on the emergence of new practices and a new generation of filmmakers. I zoom into particular film studios that have been responsible for the production of the most successful films and provide an overview of existing research on the Russian cinema of the period. I outline the methodological parameters and objectives of my research. I introduce the concept of the symbolic mode and explore the relationship between the symbolic mode and the ‘native’ traditions of representation. I consider the symbolic mode a critique of film semiology, polemicizing with mimetic theories and re-visiting poststructuralist thought concerning semiotics / signification. I argue the symbolic mode suggests a move away from the concerns of identity representations towards the problem of subjectivity construction. I introduce Badiou’s concept of film as a way of thinking and I identify how the film chapters develop the argument, pointing out that relevant concepts will be introduced in the film chapters.

The Lacking Sense of Cinema: Aleksandr Proshkin’s The Miracle (2009)

The Miracle documents the introduction of the symbolic into the real by means of sensing the lack, or in Lacan’s terms, the lack-of-being. The lost object—whether voice, memory or senses—is the ultimate horror because it reveals the uncanny voids in the discourse. Being is conceived simultaneously in the ontological sense of openness within which ideas emerge, and being in the noumenal sense of the world, or of entities separated in the world from the temporal perspective—the vibrations of time and culture. The symbolic is the ontological horizon of Being whereas its anterior is the lack-of-being, that is, the there-of-Being (Dasein) lacks its place in the order of reality. The symbolic mode is characterised by the minimal gap between its elements and places they occupy: as Lacan noted, in order for the gap between elements to occur, something has to be fundamentally excluded. What happens in psychosis—and in The Miracle—is precisely the inclusion of this lacking object into the frame of ‘reality’. It appears within the constructed world as the hallucinated, or imagined, or mystified object: the voice, which in this case equals the gaze, haunts the cultural discourse as paranoiac.

Amplifications of Subjectivity: Aleksandr Zel’dovich’s The Target (2010)

In the final chapter, I am concerned with the confirmation of the subject as a transcendent category in the moment of self-recognition whereby the finite identity is rejected in favour of the infinite Self. Zel’dovich’s The Target employs the sublime as a drama of subject-formation—both as a story of emergence and obliteration—whereby the limits of the self are conceived as a movement away from the self into the topography of solitary subjectivity confronted with open-ended being. The subject becomes an excess of discourse itself, that is, it centres on self-preservation which ensures infinity in stasis. The subject enters the divine state of amnesia after cataclysmic disruptions: the subject is no longer a tyrannous architect of the fallen world but a pre-eminent observer of the unfolding universe. I am particularly interested in the cinematic materiality of the sublime and the immateriality of subjectivity existing outside the temporal framework of history. I centre on issues of scale and amplification as matters of cultural vibration in a post-apocalyptic world. I conclude by demonstrating how Zel’dovich’s The Target with focuses on transient spaces and the epiphany of the universal monad. Thus, this chapter summates the key points presented in the book.

The Difficulty of Being Dead: Aleksandr Veledinskii’s Alive (2006)

The dis/appearances of the characters in Veledinskii’s Alive denotes ruptures in continuity (including the continuity of the gaze). The role of the phantom is to overcome the complete break between the living and the dead as well as to overcome the ruptures in discourse. The persistent revenant is an epitome of the return: they become by coming back and in doing so they create a repetitive experience—teleological aporia, a certain inheritance. The phantom is a trace and also a differance (in Derridean terms) in that their spectral effect is in the ideological tendency and the promise of emancipation. In Alive, the phantom resists the totality of representation and so emerges as a method of paralogy: legitimacy of the subject is determined by a denial of the possibility of legitimation. The spectre as a mediation of discourse which lies in between, and in Alive—not between life and death but between death and death. In Alive political agency is the phantom’s expediency whereby the gaze onto the spectator—the pervasiveness of the ghostly experience problematizes the status of the spectator who—in the presence of the posthumous narrator—emerges as a posthumous spectator.

A Plea for the Dead (Self): Renata Litvinova’s Goddess: How I Fell in Love (2004)

The symbolic mode betrays the habit of thinking of mental and sensory events in terms of habitual places (the last is the task of allegorisation): instead it deals with cosmological states. Renata Litvinova’s film forward concerns of intentionality as a matter of discursive interruption and drawing the spectator’s attention to the film’s self-referential strategies. Film as a form of knowledge regains the discourse of the sacred place in that it operates from its own sacred grove of immanence, that is, it alludes to the ‘external world’ by means of the exegetical tradition. Goddess utilises the rhetoric of doubling which problematizes the distinction between objective reality and dreamed reality. The only way for the spectator to tell the difference between the realms is by paying attention to the politics of location. Cinematic enlargement serves as a form of the uncanny in that it presents the familiar object / texture in a completely different way by disturbing the conventions of haptics, kinesics and chronemics. The film demonstrates how the discourse speaks through the subject whose function is no longer to contain discourse but to provide its own commentary. The resulting effect in Goddess is a proposition that thought and signification are performances.

Symbolic Folds and Flattened Discourse: Andrei Zviagintsev’s Elena (2010)

I demonstrate how subjectivities work to flatten such folds (as conceived in Deleuze’s work on Foucault and Leibniz) by examining Elena, the logic of which is underpinned by the notion of flatness. In his special attention to surfaces and patterns Zviagintsev elucidates a particular film philosophy which Zviagintsev’s cinematographer, Krichman, calls ‘visualisation’, or transference of meaning with the help of cinematic symbols. The symbolic modes instantiates a new plane of meaning, a surface on which meaning is inscribed, which, while alluding to the materiality of being, is elusive in its metaphysical construction. Cinematically, while the camera looks in both directions, it glides above these surfaces and in doing so creates meaning; it is in the gap between surfaces that the meaning is actualised. Krichman and Zviagintsev discuss non-representational strategies which they call ‘visualisation’. Zviagintsev compares film to a ‘magical mirror’ which enables a two-directional mode of operation: while viewers watch films, the films watch the viewers (Zviagintsev 2014). For him, film offers both knowledge and non-knowledge. The latter—a more powerful stance, according to the director—provides ‘freedom and emptiness’, that is, a temporal lack of signification, a void of meaning to be filled in the process of watching (2014).

Gatekeepers of (Non-)Knowledge: Aleksei Balabanov’s Morphine (2008)

Balabanov’s Morphine is concerned with cultural memory conceived as a continuum; not as identity but rather subjectivity in construction. The concepts relates to Badiou’s study of subjectivity. It determines existence in a world where the horizon of knowledge is always disappearing and is never available to us in its integrity whereby the subject is barred from the infinite. Different directions and speeds of movement generate the transcendental subject in that the subject is in relation to the variations of the lived. One of such states implies a continuum, or becoming without determination, whilst the other, refers to the imperative to construct knowledge out of the elements of the continuum. Such assemblages, rituals and rites allow the subject to access the ‘beyond’, a different realm, where the elements of the past are positioned towards the future. The transcendence of the subject is coded as an unstoppable flow of imagery—a hallucination—divided into sequences by reiterations and references to the cultural discourse: an introspective vision produces not self-organisation but self-destruction as the subject becomes aware of its own infiniteness. I showcase how Balabanov’s Morphine captures the brutality of such openings and the self-annihilating impact of nothingness.

Abandoned Being: Mikhail Kalatozishvili’s The Wild Field (2008)

In his theory of subjectivity, Jean-Luc Nancy speaks of ‘abandoned being’: ‘From now on the ontology that summons us will be an ontology in which abandonment remains the sole predicament of being, in which it even remains—in the scholastic sense of the word—the transcendental’. For Nancy ‘abandoned being’ is a solution to the problem of western discourse with its obsession with representation defined in such terms as appropriation, fulfilment, destination and so forth: ‘“the West” is precisely what designates itself as limit, as demarcation, even when it ceaselessly pushes back the frontiers of its imperium’. I engage with Nancy’s problematisation by analysing a film that situates knowledge, literally, at the frontier of the ‘imperium’. Mikhail Kalatozishvili’s The Wild Field (2008) deals with the problems of presence as identified by Nancy, by means of exploring post-imperial subjectivity in crisis whereby post-imperial legacy designates the demarcations of knowledge and being after crisis, involving re-negotiations of being in a world that has escaped the ontological ‘closure’ determined by the imperatives of representation. I argue the symbolic mode opens being to transcendental inferences when the subject confronts gaps in discourse in the state of impartation and dislocation.

Intentionality and Modelled Subjectivities: Aleksei Fedorchenko’s Silent Souls (2010)

I use Fedorchenko’s film, with its faked and performed claims to authenticity, as a means to explore the so-called authenticity-thesis. It contains a particular methodological claim which, according to Ferrara, amounts to a ‘postmetaphysical standpoint’ as an acknowledgement of the impossibility to grasp reality outside an interpretative framework, and that there exists ‘an irreducible multiplicity of interpretative frameworks’ (1998: 11). As a result the subject is for ever destined to float among competing versions, paradigms, symbolic universes, etc. which can never be overcome either through recourse to some decisive evidence or design and use of an experiment. Ferrara’s term ‘self-congruency’ does not presuppose coherence or consistency; instead, it is a matter of symbolic identity and relevance, that is, constant iteration and examination of subjectivity. I show the authenticity-thesis is particularly useful for our consideration of abstract identities, such as traditions and rituals, in the symbolic mode. They advance a feeling (and knowledge) of continuity in time: the capacity to experience the continuity of the other helps forward the congruency of the self, leading to the annihilation of the identity. Such identities rely on the demarcations of the congruent being in opposition to self-confusion and self-diffusion.

Body in Crisis and Posthumous Subjectivity: Igor’ Voloshin’s Nirvana (2008)

Symbolisation is not about providing symbols as naïve interruptions of the moving image but rather opening the cinematic production to pro-nomination, that is, meaning-making before all names and terms. This process is similar to ex-scription (from Latin ‘exscriptus’, meaning ‘a copy, a transcript’). According to Nancy, it means ‘that the thing’s name, by inscribing itself, inscribes its property as name outside itself’ (1993: 175), or what I called above, strategies of externalisation. Here cinematic work is about writing as ‘ex-scribing’, or working from another edge, or describing states while also pointing to another, metaphysical dimension, that of ex-scription. I explore the possibility of presenting the subject cinematically as a mode, that is, a system of gestures and emotions, and everything else that comes to pass: ‘waves and vibrations, migrations, thresholds and gradients, intensities produced in a given type of substance starting from a given matrix’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 153). My analysis of Nirvana attests, the body without organs is first and foremost a performing body, a body that is performing itself by means of itself, whereby the boundaries between internal and external structures are blurred and the body becomes a continuous act of inscribing meaning.