Elizabeth Papazian
Associate Professor, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Associate Professor, Russian
Associate Professor, Cinema and Media Studies
4123 Jiménez Hall
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Research Expertise
Film Studies and Cultural Studies
Elizabeth A. Papazian is Associate Professor of Russian and Film Studies and a core faculty member of the Comparative Literature Program. She has been teaching at the University of Maryland since 2000, and received her Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale University, also in 2000. Her research interests include literary and cinematic modernism, documentary modes in literature and film, and the intersection between art and politics, focusing in particular on early Soviet culture. She has published articles on Soviet cinema, including “Offscreen Dreams and Collective Synthesis in Dovzhenko’s Earth,” in The Russian Review (2003), “Ethnography, Fairytale, and ‘Perpetual Motion’ in Sergei Paradjanov’s Ashik-Kerib,” in Literature/Film Quarterly (2006), and “Literacy or Legibility: The Trace of Subjectivity in Soviet Socialist Realism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies, ed. Jonathan Auerbach and Russ Castronovo (2013). Her book, Manufacturing Truth: The Documentary Moment in Early Soviet Culture, was published by the Northern Illinois University Press (2009). She is co-editor, with Caroline Eades, of The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia (Columbia University Press - Wallflower Press, November 2016). She is currently working on a book project on realism in Soviet cinema. She teaches courses in Russian language, literature, and cinema, in both English and Russian.
Publications
Ethnography, Incongruity, History: Soviet Poetic Cinema
This essay examines the entangling of the poetic and the ethnographic in the art cinema of the 1960s as an indicator of a broader collision of epistemological/discursive regimes in postwar Soviet cinema—and ultimately, a clash between two fundamentally op
Author/Lead: Elizabeth PapazianFunding Agency:
Abstract
This essay examines the entangling of the poetic and the ethnographic in the art cinema of the 1960s as an indicator of a broader collision of epistemological/discursive regimes in postwar Soviet cinema—and ultimately, a clash between two fundamentally opposed approaches to the discursive production of history. In the Soviet poetic cinema of the 1960s, the temporal-spatial frameworks of the Stalin era are disrupted, shifting first of all, to what Tarkovsky called a lived experience of time—that is, to the subjective emotions and experiences of individual people; second, to localized histories that may not coincide with the supra-national Soviet developmental narrative; and third, to the positing of an archaic, even pre-historical temporality as a kind of lost ideal. I argue that poetic cinema serves as a site for playing out the contradiction among temporalities and spatialities in post-Stalin culture, and therefore among opposed sense-making projects and representational modes, creating the possibility for subverting the colonial function of Soviet cinema.
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