Taking recent Russian cinema as its investigative field, this volume sets out to do two things. First, it argues for an analysis that accounts for Russia’s imperial preoccupations, rather than for categories of nationhood less suited to its dominant historical mode. Second, the volume suggests that the analysis move beyond an inventory of images toward conjectural questions about conditions of representation and production. Is the analysis limited to narrative evidence or is the imperial trace evident in more embedded ways, in conditions of production, patterns figured differently from Anderso ... More

Taking recent Russian cinema as its investigative field, this volume sets out to do two things. First, it argues for an analysis that accounts for Russia’s imperial preoccupations, rather than for categories of nationhood less suited to its dominant historical mode. Second, the volume suggests that the analysis move beyond an inventory of images toward conjectural questions about conditions of representation and production. Is the analysis limited to narrative evidence or is the imperial trace evident in more embedded ways, in conditions of production, patterns figured differently from Anderson’s imagined community? Six chapters organize the inquiry around work by Russia’s internationally ranked directors, including Mikhalkov, Muratova, Abdrashitov, Sokurov, German, and Balabanov. This volume draws on work that brackets the presumption of developed nationhood to argue for Russia’s recurrent exigencies of empire over nation-building; the state-centralizing pull of the imperial metropole; and historically weak nation-formation. It investigates features of the contiguous empire, marked by diverging imperial and demotic identities, largely absent the autonomous linkages of nation and civic society, in contrast to familiar models for British colonialism. If we take this work seriously, we may find patterns that lend themselves to cultural formations different from those associated with presumptive nationhood.