Dr. Irina Chiaburu, who teaches at the Jacobs University in Bremen,
has been kind enough to agree to present a small lecture on the topic of
Soviet cartoons during the Brezhnev era and the relationship between
state censorship and artistic freedom. After the lecture, there will as
usual be a question round, as well as some time for refreshments and
socialising.
Games with the censor: Anti-censorship strategies in Soviet animation during the Brezhnev period.
In the warmer cultural, political and intellectual climate of
Khrushchev's Thaw, animation artists, just like their colleagues in
other creative professions, started challenging the received theory and
methods of their medium. The concepts of ideinost' and narodnost',
ideological imperatives handed down to the artists by state ideologues
had shaped the aesthetics of post-war Soviet animation. But in the
artistic thaw of the period, the concept of uslovnost' became the
guiding principle of experimentation in the field of animation
aesthetics in the 1960s and 70s. This concept originated from the
artists themselves and eventually came to be accepted by the state.
The state's recognition of uslovnost' as a fact of animation allowed
all those working in the field much more creative freedom than those
engaged with other artistic media, thus turning animation into the most
radical of Soviet arts, where formal innovation thrived even after the
Brezhnev administration re-established the aesthetic constraints of
Socialist Realism on all other arts.
This talk will take a closer look at the expressive potential and new
narrative possibilities that uslovnost' offered Soviet animation
artists, against the routines and methods of the Soviet censorship in
the 1970s. Uslovnost' allowed the artists to fruitfully exploit some of
the blind spots of the Soviet censorship. Finally, this struggle of
artistic freedom versus state censorship during the Brezhnev era, will
be placed in the wider frame of the struggle between the post-Stalinist
Soviet intelligencia and the state apparatus, explaining why, despite
the fact that the films in question did not contain politically
subversive messages, the practice of using artistic means to baffle and
censor was subversive.
Time and Date: 1900, Sunday 1st March.
Place: Aufsturz, Oranienburger Straße 67, 10117, Berlin
