Human Documents on Screen and Stage: A Contrapuntal Reading of Post-Soviet Documentary

Abstract

The goal of Human Documents on Screen and Stage: A Contrapuntal Reading of Post-Soviet Documentary is to consider how two documentary media – cinema and theater – engage with historical, social, and political reality in Russia over two decades, from the end of the 1990s to the end of the 2010s. This dissertation argues that, during this period, a transition takes place from ethics as the dominant of documentary discourse to the aesthetics of the document in works of contemporary Russian documentary film and theater. To track this shift, I analyze formal aspects of post-Soviet documentary cinema and documentary theater, such as sound, space, and materiality, following the logic of counterpoint. Counterpoint implies the multiplicity and simultaneous coexistence of independent, separate, and sometimes conflicting entities. Drawing on Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of audiovisual counterpoint in montage and on Edward Said’s concept of contrapuntal reading as a critical method, I suggest a new approach to the aesthetics and politics of the documentary. I maintain that the logic of counterpoint is instrumental in understanding how documentary cinema and theater work with new technologies, materials, platforms, ideas, and realities in Russia during this period. This dissertation brings contemporary works of post-Soviet documentary cinema and theater and present-day academic discourse on media and performance into conversation with early Soviet theoretical debates on cinema and theater. I show that, while post-Soviet artists of film and theater often rediscover and reevaluate artistic and theoretical works of Soviet documentarians, this multifaceted interaction nevertheless leads them to work out new aesthetic regimes of post-Soviet documentary.Chapter One explores sound in post-Soviet documentary films and theatrical productions to suggest that voice leading, rather than “voice giving,” occupies the primary position both in terms of the sonic organization of these documentary works and of the audience’s perception of the documentary as representation of the real. Chapter Two brings together post-Soviet documentary film and theater to analyze the notion of documentary space. It shows how documentary cinema uses the frame and documentary theater utilizes the stage box both as limiting and structural devices. Chapter Three is focused on documentary materiality and addresses the affective power of the material environment on screen and on stage.