The program prompts to revisit cinematic approaches and media practices associated with Soviet film from where the latter interpolates the present: the archive. Though often resting in the shadow of other institutions such as movie theater or film studio, the film archive occupies a decisive point in the chain between collective memory and imagination––the silences and overlooked legacies. Operations of image storage and preservation contribute to the dominant Russocentric approach in Soviet film studies and its masking of imperial continuities through ideological and aesthetic centralization. Within this homogenising framing, racialized and extractivist perspectives on bodies and lands of Central Asia, Transcaucasia, and Far North remain out of grasp for both Soviet film studies and contemporary filmmaking practices that reaffirm the respective political and aesthetic strategies. The reduction of Soviet film to its Russian legacy also leaves aside multiple threads that extended beyond the USSR’s borders, to socialist and non-aligned countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, through filmmaking practices informed by Soviet ‘educational aid’ after WWII. In turn, domestically, various alternative modes of cinematic mediation faced censorship or were excluded from international distribution by Soviet authorities, and thus were left unfinished or disfigured after undergoing Moscow’s ideological and aesthetic re-editing. What remains of them are traces in project descriptions, screen tests, or unidentified film fragments that often don’t appear in the catalogues of film archives. Tending to the margins and the invisibilities of archives, the program highlights attempts at decentring the legacy of Soviet filmmaking by accounting for potential developments that were disrupted during the XX century and remain marginalized to date.

Focusing on a continuity of abandoned potentialities in cinema, the contributions to Re-Cinefications: Decentring the Archive of Soviet Film enable differentiated perspectives on the heterogeneous geographies of Soviet film. The early history of Soviet cinema coincides with the fall of the Russian Empire and the subsequent establishment of local film institutions across its former territories. Within the Soviet modernization project this process was denoted as the ‘cinefication’ of the culturally heterogeneous USSR, in unison with electrification, industrialization, and collectivization. Emphasising “cinema’s relational character,” media theorist Pavle Levi has expanded the meaning of ‘cinefication’ as establishment of material infrastructure for producing and distributing films: The spread of cinema as a technical medium gradually blended human and machine perception––to the extent of a “general cinefication” of the visible world. Interwoven into historically particular political projects, "the technologies and the practices of mechanical image production and reproduction (…) have irrevocably transformed the role of the imaginary in the social reality.”^[1] A decentering approach to the archive(s) of Soviet film allows to encounter the complex relations between the imaginary and the social, which constituted the cinefied geographies of the Soviet state, as well as guided past and present aspirations of social change coming from its peripheries.

Which––minor and multiple–– re-cinefications can occur in the critical, experimental, and decentring interventions to the legacy of Soviet film? Re-Cinefications: Decentring the Archive of Soviet Film invites scholarly, artistic, and filmmaking practices to the dialogue about current potentialities of reclaiming the past.

^[1] Pavle Levi, Cinema by Other Means (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2012): 84.