Understanding Russian Culture through Film
The Mellon Symposium
March 30–April 1, 2007
Psychology 105
Free and open to the public
The Mellon Symposium presents screenings, discussions,
lectures, and scholarly panels that focus on trends, patterns, and mechanisms in Russian culture
as seen through cinema. Participants include renowned Russian documentary filmmaker (and Emmy
winner) Sergei Miroshnichenko, noted film historian Yuri Tsivian (University of Chicago), prominent
Eisenstein scholar Anne Nesbet (UC Berkeley), and a number of scholars of Russian culture from
leading liberal arts colleges (Reed, Williams, Pomona, Oberlin, and Dartmouth). The symposium
intends to facilitate interdisciplinary discussion among scholars of Russia who focus on
film, but approach it with different methodologies and intellectual agendas; and to provide
the Reed community and general public with a greater opportunity to explore Russian film and
cultural history. The symposium is organized by the Reed Russian department, with funding provided
by the Mellon Foundation. All events are free and open to the public.
Friday, March 30
7 p.m. Special Event
A screening of Sergei Miroshnichenko’s Born in the USSR: 21 Up (2005), followed by a conversation with the director
Saturday, March 31
10:30 a.m.– noon Keynote lecture
Yuri Tsivian (University of Chicago)
"Turning Pictures: Give and Take between Vertov's Films and Constructivist Art"
1:30–3:30 p.m. Panel One
“The Other in Soviet Film”
- Brian Kassof (Reed College), “The Visible and Invisible Other: America in the Films of Grigorii Aleksandrov”
- Susan Larsen (Pomona College), “Ungrievable Losses: Melancholy, Masculinity, and Surrogate Paternity in Khutsiev's Two Fedors and Bondarchuk's Fate of a Man”
- Marat Grinberg (Reed College), “Literary Intertexts in Aleksandr Askoldov's Commissar (1967)”
3:30–4 p.m. coffee break
4–6:30
p.m. Screening &
roundtable discussion
Sergei Loban’s Dust (2005); “Document
and Allegory in a No–Budget Movie”
Participants: Arlene Forman (Oberlin College), Mikhail
Gronas (Dartmouth College), Lena Lencek (Reed College)
Sunday, April 1
10:30
a.m.–noon Keynote lecture
Anne Nesbet (UC Berkeley), "Ecstatic Economics: Vertov, Eisenstein, and Making Marx Visible"
1:30–4 p.m. Panel Two:
“Nostalgia and Scandal
in Russian
Film”
- Julie Cassiday (Williams College), “Eroticism and Espionage in Aleksandr Macheret's Engineer Kochin's Mistake (1939)”
- Konstantine Klioutchkine (Pomona College), “Zavetnye Mul'tfil'my: Classic Cartoons and Their Obscene Versions”
10 minute coffee break
- Larissa Rudova (Pomona College), “History and Nostalgia in Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark”
- Evgenii Bershtein (Reed College), “Sokurov and Pornography”
4–5 p.m. Closing reception
