The Terror of the Body and Repulsive Stalinism in Aleksey German the Elder’s Film “Khrustalyov, My Car!”
Abstract
The aim of this article is to analyse and interpret the image of male physicality in the film Khrustalyov, My Car! (dir. Aleksey Yuryevich German /1998/). The starting point of the analysis is a question about the appearance of the socialist realist hero in the cinema of Stalin’s era and in periods when he was critically reinterpreted. Using German’s film as an example, ways in which an individual was subjugated in a totalitarian system are shown using the discourse of corporeality. The fictitious story of a tragic relationship between father and son can be interpreted as a metaphor of the traumatic soviet experience. Like every story about a trauma, inaccessible to the order of consciousness, and therefore also inaccessible to language, also this film makes the body the vessel of painful memory. In this case the body in question is a man’s body at various stages of development. The narrator experiences the terror of growing up in the socialist reality, while his father becomes a victim of a Stalinist purge and terror, whereas Stalin experiences the terror of death. In the film ideologically correct corporeality, imagined through the canon of socialist realism, is deconstructed. The director shows real bodies inhabiting Soviet Union: defiled, suffering and dead.
Keywords:
Aleksey German, socialist realism, corporealityReferences
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Authors
Paulina Gorlewskakwartalnik.filmowy@ispan.pl
Jagiellonian University Poland
Filmoznawczyni i rosjoznawczyni, absolwentka Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, doktorantka w Instytucie Sztuk Audiowizualnych Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego.
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