The Film-Phil Lisbon Seminars: Jeremi Szaniawski
June’s Film-Phil Lisbon Seminar will be led by Jeremi Szaniawski (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) who will talk about “Death, Dying, and the Death Throes (?) of Necrorealism in the Films of Alexander Sokurov and Yevgeny Yufit”. The session will be held on June 4, 2025, at 15:00 WEST in room B201 of NOVA FCSH (Av. de Berna, 26 C) and online via Zoom. To receive information about joining the meeting online, it’s mandatory to register in advance here.
Abstract
In the 1980s and 1990s, several filmmakers in late Soviet and post-Soviet Russia — including a group which went on to refer to itself as the ‘necrorealists’ — produced a series of films focusing on death, decay, and insanity, in aesthetics that often borrowed on the look of black-and-white 1920s and 1930s cinema. But these films (Yevgeny Yufit’s Silver Heads (1998), Alexander Sokurov’s The Second Circle (1990), or even Piotr Lutsik’s Okraina (1998)) did much more than just pastiche or parody these early Soviet cinema aesthetics, or even to allegorize the collapse of the regime and the social decay in the 1980s and 1990s in Russia. What will be argued in this lecture is the emergence of a new sublime — albeit a degraded one — centered around death and the vital energy it begets. These generative powers gave birth, in turn, to some of the most striking and unique characterizations and formal experiments in film history, and surely to some of its strangest affects.
Bio
Jeremi Szaniawski is associate professor of Comparative Literature and Film Studies, and the Amesbury Professor of Polish Language and Culture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov: Figures of Paradox (2014), and the editor or translator of another nine volumes, all in film studies (most recently Kubrick’s Mitteleuropa: the Central European Imaginary in the Films of Stanley Kubrick, 2024). He has published widely on Sokurov as well as other major figures of Russian cinema, including Andrey Tarkovsky, Aleksey Balabanov, and Aleksei Gherman.