Soviet animation and state censorhip under Brezhnev - Berlin branch talk

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