Re-Cinefications: Decentring the Archive of Soviet Film

The early history of Soviet film coincides with the fall of the Russian Empire and the subsequent establishment of local film institutions across its ruins. Framed by the Soviet modernizing project––in unison with electrification, industrialization, and collectivization––this process was denoted as ‘cinefication’ and stretched across the culturally heterogeneous USSR. Emphasising ‘cinema’s relational character,’ media theorist Pavle Levi expands the meaning of ‘cinefication’ from a mere 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 the ‘general cinefication’ of the visible world. Interwoven into historically particular political projects and geographies, ‘the technologies and the practices of mechanical image production and reproduction (…) have irrevocably transformed the role of the imaginary in the social reality.’¹ This framework suggests understanding cinefication as the continuous diffusion between off- and on-screen realms, which often challenges the conventional understanding of film as a medium and takes place in areas only adjacently related to the cinema as a projection setting.

Combining historical and the expanded theoretical perspectives on cinefication, the program prompts a revisit to Soviet film from where it interrogates with the present: the archive. Though often resting in the shadow of other institutions such as movie theater or film studio, the archive can occupy no less decisive point in the chain between ‘the imaginary’ and ‘the social reality.’ In this way, the dominant Russocentric archival approach in Soviet film studies persists in masking the imperial continuities that proliferated through the centralized mode of historical cinefication. Within this homogenising framing, racialized and extractivist visions of bodies and lands of Caucasus, Central Asia, and Far North remain unaddressed, while the various alternative modes of cinematic mediation developed in these and other regions have not been cared for. Commonly facing censorship or rejected from international distribution by Soviet authorities, some of these diverse experiments have been either left unfinished or depleted after undergoing Moscow’s ideological and aesthetic re-editing. Therefore, they only left traces in project descriptions, screen tests, or the fragments of films that remain unidentified in the catalogues of film archives.

Yet, which––minor and multiple–– re-cinefications can occur in the critical, experimental, and decentring interventions to the legacy of Soviet film? How, consequently, would the shapes of the major cinefication mutate? 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.

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