Biopolitics and the Cinema of Extremes

Abstract

In the past few years, a number of scholars have examined Russian culture in a global context, marking a turn toward the transnational in Russian studies. However, scholarship on contemporary Russian cinema has been slow to take up this trend, paying more attention to local and internal aspects of recent cinema than to global socio-political conditions. This article addresses this issue by focusing on Russian cinema of the 2000s and 2010s alongside two concurrent developments in European film: the French cinéma du corps and the Romanian New Wave. Specifically, it focuses on the aesthetics of the body in Vasilii Sigarev’s Wolfie (2009) and The Land of Oz (2015) and compares it to that of Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day (2001) and Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005). The article argues that the representations of physicality in Sigarev’s films exemplify a cultural response to the rise of biopolitics in Russia, which took place with the spread of neoliberalism to the post-Soviet space. By considering Russian cinema in tandem with that of France and Romania, the article demonstrates that while the modes of representing the body may differ, all of them seek to create a biopolitical subject as a critique of social conditions that obtain with the global hegemony of neoliberalism. At the same time, they construct a different viewer: while Denis’s and Puiu’s humanistic modernism sees the spectator as a sovereign subject, Sigarev’s postmodernist leaning destroys the possibility of an external vantage point, interrogating the extent to which the biopolitical/neoliberal condition can dominate cultural expression. The comparative analysis thus not only tests the notion of cultural singularity in the twenty-first century but raises a broader question of how neoliberal subjectivity can be represented in the visual arts.