Cinematic emotions: From the Soviet avant-garde to Stalinism
Cinematic emotions: From the Soviet avant-garde to Stalinism
A virtual book presentation and discussion of Psychomotor Aesthetics: Movement and Affect in Modern Literature and Film by Ana Hedberg Olenina (Arizona State University) and Feeling Revolution: Cinema, Genre and the Politics of Affect under Stalin by Anna Toropova (University of Nottingham).
Friday, April 2, 2021
10–11:15 a.m. (Arizona time, MST/PDT)
Zoom Link: https://asu.zoom.us/j/2547561917
Book information:
In Psychomotor Aesthetics: Movement and Affect in Modern Literature and Film (Oxford University Press, 2020), Ana Hedberg Olenina considers the notions of expressive movement and empathy which emerged at the cross-roads of the arts and psychophysiological research in the early 20th century. The book explores motivations for such interdisciplinary engagements, from a search for a more immediate transmission of unconscious creative impulses in handwriting and voice modulations, to utilitarian concerns with optimizing labor efficiency and raising the effectiveness of propaganda spectacles. Underpinned by archival research, this study reveals little-known sources of Russian Futurism, Formalist poetics, avant-garde films of Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein and early Soviet programs for evaluating film audiences’ reactions.
In Feeling Revolution: Cinema, Genre, and the Politics of Affect under Stalin (Oxford University Press, 2020), Anna Toropova’s exploration of Stalinist cinema as a ‘laboratory’ of emotional revolution brings to light the medium’s vital role in cultivating the distinctive emotional values and norms of the Stalin era, ranging from happiness and victorious laughter to hatred for enemies. Feeling Revolution’s study of how Soviet filmmakers were called upon to help forge emotions and affects befitting the New Soviet Person focuses on the overlap between the battle to shape new forms of audience response and the development of a distinctively ‘Soviet’ system of film genres.
About the authors:
Ana Hedberg Olenina is an assistant professor of comparative literature and media studies at Arizona State University. Her main research focus is the Soviet avant-garde, while her broader interests lie at the juncture of early film history and media theory with an emphasis on historical configurations of sensory experience, emotional response, embodiment and immersive environments. Her essays have appeared in Film History, Discourse, Kinovedcheskie zapiski and several anthologies in Russia and the USA. She holds a PhD from Harvard and an MPhil from Cambridge University.
Anna Toropova completed her PhD at University College London. Before taking up her current post as a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham, she held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the cinema, culture and medical history of the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1953. She is the author of numerous articles on the emotional repertoire of Stalin-era cinema, early Soviet studies of spectators and the interface of cinema, science, and medicine in revolutionary Russia.