Exhausting Socialist Internationalism: Kira Muratova and Sergei Parajanov

Drawing on my book in-progress, Feeling Collapse, this talk looks beyond the geopolitical analysis of the dissolution of the Soviet Union that fueled the Cold War and its immediate aftermath. I instead read the collapse through shifting attachments that shaped the dissolution of the Soviet empire and rise of ethno-nationalisms. The books explores waning of affective attachments to the idea of a Soviet “good life,” including Soviet multinationalism and socialist anticolonial internationalism, as well as attendant commitments to a socialist world cultural commons. Taking up minor emergent mediums from the late 1980s through the early 2000s—from video art to performance from the Caucasus and Central Asia—it recenters accounts of the collapse that have been marginalized by a focus on the metropolitan centers of Moscow and Leningrad. This talk in particular turns to Kira Muratova’s 1989 Asthenic Syndrome, one of the last films banned by soviet authorities, alongside Sergei Parajanov’s filmic collages produced during his incarceration, to understand the exhaustion of socialist humanist internationalism in the montage and collage as they anticipate our authoritarian present. While often marked by failure, exhaustion, stasis, and death, these works also attempted to reorganize rhythms of desire to explore alternative senses of being together in time amid this transitional moment.