The course explores Soviet and post-Soviet Russian films in their ideological and imaginative relationships to different historical and political contexts. The course aims at making students familiar with how gender is used as an analytical tool in film analysis, and how feminist film theories can be used in specific contexts of film-production and various national film practices. The course will also examine how Soviet and Russian films of the 20th c. textually negotiated and re-negotiated conditions of being, belonging and becoming for gender and ethnic identity in Soviet trajectories of domination and subordination and post-Soviet transformations. The course will include discussions of politics of representation of gender, race and ethnicity in Soviet and Russian popular cinema of different genres (comedy, adventure, adaptation, historical and combat films) as venues for developing fantasies of cultural identity, gender normatives and racialiased social stereotypes. The course will particularly attend to the construction of race and Orientalist discourse in Soviet popular cinema.

The course is organized in cooperation with Aleksanteri Institute's Russian and East European Master's School.