VISIONS OF ECOLOGY on Art and the Environment in Eastern Europe and Eurasia
EVENT #5: CINEMA AND THE ENVIRONMENT IN EASTERN EUROPE | THURSDAY, APRIL 27, 2023 4:00pm EST
BARBORA BARTUNKOVA
PH.D. CANDIDATE, YALE UNIVERSITY
“POST-APOCALYPTIC ECOLOGIES: THE END OF AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE (1966) AND THE CZECHOSLOVAK NEW WAVE”
MASHA SHPOLBERG
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, BARD COLLEGE
“CHERNOBYL AND THE CRAFTING OF A SOVIET NUCLEAR IMAGINARY”
KATIE TRUMPENER
PROFESSOR, YALE UNIVERSITY
“DEAD LANDSCAPE, DESERTED VILLAGE: FILMING EAST GERMAN ECOLOGY BEFORE AND AFTER 1989”
Barbora Bartunkova is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History of Art at Yale University and the 2022–23 Chester Dale Fellow at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. She specializes in modern and contemporary European art, photography, and film, with a particular focus on interwar and Cold War visual cultures. Her research interests include the intersection of aesthetics and politics, representations of women and gender, and the relationship between art and ecology. Her dissertation is titled “Sites of Resistance: Antifascism and the Czechoslovak Avant-Garde” and her recent publications include an essay on post-nuclear ecologies in the Czechoslovak New Wave for Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe, eds. Masha Shpolberg and Lukas Brasiskis (Berghahn Books, forthcoming October 2023). She holds an M.A. in History of Art and a B.A. in French with Film Studies from University College London.
Masha Shpolberg is Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts at Bard College. Her teaching and research explore Russian and East European cinema, ecocinema, global documentary, and women’s cinema. Together with Lukas Brasiskis, she is co-editor of Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe (forthcoming from Berghahn Books in October 2023) and with Anastasia Kostina co-editor of Contemporary Russian Documentary (under contract with Edinburgh University Press). She holds a Ph.D. in Film and Media Studies & Comparative Literature from Yale University.
Katie Trumpener is Emily Sanford Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Yale (and on the Film and Media Studies Graduate Faculty). She works on literature, film and visual culture in Western and Eastern Europe. She is finishing books on Nazi and Cold War German cinema; recent publications include (co-ed. with Tim Barringer) On the Viewing Platform: The Panorama Between Canvas and Screen (Yale University Press, 2020), and “Stalin Boulevard: Panoramic Vistas and Urban Planning in Eastern European Photobooks,” in Remapping Cold War Media: Institutions, Infrastructures, Networks, Exchanges, ed. Alice Lovejoy and Mari Pajala (Indiana University Press, 2022).
VISIONS OF ECOLOGY is a year-long series on art and the environment in Eastern Europe and Eurasia supported by the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (REEES) program at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. https://reees.macmillan.yale.edu/visions-ecology
Read event recap on the Yale REEES website: https://bit.ly/3smQaiH
Welcome everyone I’m Molly Brunson it is uh a pleasure to welcome you here for the final installment of visions of ecology this has been a year-long series on Art and the environment in Eastern Europe and Eurasia and I’m happy to welcome you here as faculty director of the Russian East European and Eurasian
Studies program here at yell University who has sponsored this series uh I encourage you by the way to join the Reese mailing list uh if you’re online joining us this will be dropped in the chat uh otherwise uh please do follow us uh through our website throughout this year I’ve been lucky to
Work with two co-collaborators uh here at Yale yelen the cheva Klein and Barbara bartonova who have helped put this series together it really in fact have put this series together this is very much their brainchild and it’s been a pleasure to work with them both both uh together we
Have sought to bring into conversation an international Collective of Scholars artists and curators to consider the intersections of Art and ecology and we hope that this Series has been generative in forming new connections and potential collaborations and really furthering the study of the environment in this region
Of the world uh we invite you to watch recordings of all previous events uh most of which are already up on the Reese website you can find them there uh so let me introduce our panel today the title for our panel is Cinema in the environment in Eastern Europe and
It has been organized both as a celebration of the end of our series uh but also and perhaps more importantly as a celebration of a significant new publication in the fields of film and ecology all three speakers today uh two in person one online uh will be presenting work from from the
Forthcoming book Cinema and the environment in Eastern Europe from communism to capitalism which has been edited by Lucas biscus and Masha schulberg Masha is here today uh and will be published in October by bergon press uh and we have flyers for the book here so please do be sure to grab one of
Those before you leave today uh so I’ll introduce our speakers today in the order that they themselves will be presenting our first presenter will be Barbara bartonova barbaraa is a PhD candidate in the history of art at Yale University and the 2022 23 chesterdale fellow at the National
Gallery of Art Center for Advanced studying the visual arts she specializes in modern and contemporary European art photography and film with a particularly particular focus on interwar and Cold War visual cultures her research interests include the intersection of Aesthetics and politics representations of women and gender and the relationship
Between art and ecology her dissertation is titled sites of resistance anti-fascism and the czechoslovak avangard our second presenter will be Masha schulberg who is an assistant professor of film and Electronic Arts at Bard College her teaching and research explore Russian and East European Cinema Eco Cinema Global documentary and
Women’s Cinema in addition to her work on the book Cinema in the environment in Eastern Europe from which our panel has been taken today she is also co-editor Ong with Anastasia cotina of contemporary Russian documentary which is under contract with Edinburgh University press she hold a PhD in film
And media studies and comparative literature from Yale University our final presenter will be Katie trumpener who is Emily Sanford professor of comparative literature and English at Yale and also on the film and media studies graduate faculty she works on literature film and visual culture in Western and Eastern Europe she’s
Finishing books on not on Cold War German Cinema and her recent Publications include a volume co-edited with Tim Behringer called on the viewing platform the Panorama between canvas and Screen she has also recently published an article Stalin Boulevard panoramic fistas and urban planning and Eastern European photo books which appeared in
The volume remapping Cold War media institutions infrastructures networks exchanges so as for our format today uh we have a hybrid format which means we have those of you here in person we’re delighted to see you we have another contingent online we’re very delighted to have you joining us as well and so
What we’ll do is we will move through our presentation through the three panelists uh and at the very end we will invite questions both from those of you here in the audience and online so please if you have a question and you’re watching us online you may drop it into
The Q&A or the chat at any time uh we’ll collect those as the three panelists speak um and for everybody else jot down your questions and we’ll get to them in the discussion period uh one more important announcement and that is for those of you who are in person thank you our
Special thank you for being here uh will be uh in exchange for a reception after the event so please do stay and join us for the reception so once again thank you all for coming this is Cinema and the environment in Eastern Europe Barbara go ahead thank you so much Molly for this
Wonder introduction and also to yena and uh Molly for co-organizing this wonderful series it’s been an incredible year and I encourage everyone to follow up on the lectures online and uh my special Thanks goes to mas spulber and Katie trer for uh joining us in conversation about um C the cinema and
The environment uh I will now share my screen um and share with you works I hope can you hear me can is this good wonderful so my talk today focuses on the 1966 film the end of August at the hotel ozone directed by Yan Schmidt and written by pavur the post-apocalyptic film offers
Oblique vision of a world devastated by atomic war it is however not concerned with the immediate aftermath of nuclear destruction instead it explores how humans might operate in a radically transformed world as a way of raising existential questions about the nature of who we are as a species and our relationship to the
Environment Hotel ozone follows a group of women as they navigate desolate Landscapes and ruined spaces of civilization in search of other survivors their older leader is the only one who remembers life on Earth before the nuclear apocalypse however the younger women born after the disaster are completely detached from history culture and
Societal norms and engage in often violent Behavior the young women mostly follow their Elders orders to find other people but they are indifferent to the underlying reason for their quest to find male counterparts with whom to preserve human life on Earth there have been various interpretations of this film to date
Scholars and critics have often read it through the lens of the science fiction genre or seen it as a political allegory for example uh as a commentary on life and intergenerational conflict in socialist Czechoslovakia or as as a metaphor for the Soviet Union’s Colonial exploitation of Eastern Europe and the
Destruction of its natural resources and preor culture my analysis of the film instead examines a central but understudied question how does Hotel ozone deploy the Cinematic media to explore post-apocalyptic ecologies and in particular the relationship between humanity and the natural environment I will address this question by conducting a close reading of Hotel
Ozone and situating it in relation to other czechoslovak New Way films that touch on nuclear themes through this analysis I aim to show how Hotel ozone offers a deep reflection on environmental conditions in the post-atomic age overall my talk argues that hotel ozone uses the anxieties surrounding the
Cold War nuclear struggle as a starting point for a deeper investigation of the relationship between human and non-human life and thus making a vital contribution to 20th Century Cinema based on a short story written by yurachek in 1958 Hotel oon was initially conceived as the filmmaker’s final
Project at the state Film School FAMU in Prague due to limited resources the school however rejected their proposal and they finally got the opportunity to make the film after enlisting in the czechoslovak Army where they worked for its military film unit the film thus got strikingly made under the offices of czechoslovak army
Film in the meantime yurachek had created a different vision of a distant future in his screenplay for the pioneering 1963 science fiction film Iaria X1 directed by yri po and it’s worth noting that this film is screening tonight at the metrograph cinema in New York so if anyone has time and wants to
Catch it you may so after this lecture in iar1 an international spaceship crew Encounters in 2,163 a defunct military spaceship from 1987 its occupants associated with Western capitalism had killed each other the spaceship holds nuclear warheads and an accidental detonation leads to the death of two explorations team members this crisis articulates The
Haunting threat of the atomic age in the 20th century another key precedent for hotel ozon is the Hall of lost footsteps which was yarel y’s graduation project at FAMU in 1960 yides was motivated to create a cinematic response to the nuclear threat after the first successful French atomic
Bomb test in 1960 which he for grants in his experimental short film FM the film combines everyday scenes at a CPL station and on a train with expressive dreamlike sequences as well as documentary footage of the Holocaust nuclear explosions and the aftermath of the 1945 atomic bombings of
Japan 20th century violence also appears in vila’s 1966 iconic film daisies which opens and closes with documentary footage of aerial combat explosions and bombarded cities this framing sets the stage for the playful yet disruptive Adventures of two young female protagonists who choose to quote go bad because everything is
Going bad in the world unquote daisies offers a compelling Counterpoint to Hotel oon in which women also reject social conventions to engage with the world in an experimental way however as I will later show this rejection has much more devastating implications in Schmid’s film a key sequ sequence in y’s Hall of
Lost footsteps which strongly resonates with the opening of Hotel oon juxtaposes a romantic encounter Between Two Lovers rendered in luminous colors with black and white footage of a bomber and a close-up of a ticking clock these shots are accompanied by sound Snippets of countdowns delivered by offscreen Voices in English French and German
Following the countdown a shot of a nuclear explosion introduces a sequence that interlaces red tinted shots of the couple disoriented in a haze of radiation with black and white clips of the devastating effects of atomic war on cities and human bodies the countdown sequence resonates with the first moments of Hotel ozone
Which begins with a long shot of an empty Hanger’s interior as a monotonous male voiceover counts down from 10 in English before the image Fades to White next a field of weed swaying in the wind is shown as another disembodied male voice declares the countdown in Russian followed by another weight out
Fade out to White the use of English and Russian here of course highlights the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War situating the film’s imagined future in a postwar World War II context this dualistic opposition is however soon Complicated by the subsequent subsequent
Shots a countown in Chinese accompanies a closeup of reading glasses on an open book The English voice reappears and overlaps disjointedly with the Chinese countdown before another fade out to White the next shot depicts a richly decorated space of a church here two French and Russian Vo es alternate in
Counting down from 10 to 1 creating a synic rhythm following another fade into white the sequence ends in a multilingual chorus of overlapping voices accompanying a view of a TFT of grass set against a rock formation before Fading Into white again the soundscape of multiple intering languages suggests Humanity’s shared
Complicity in the new clear arms rays and instills a sense of collective responsibility for environmental destruction in contrast toes andova Schmid avoids using charged visual tropes such as the mushroom cloud or explicit depictions of industrial Warfare and mass suffering instead Hotel ozone stages the world’s destruction more abstractly as a series of erasur
Each opening shot performs an effacement by Fading Into white erasing different aspects of human civilization ation including modern technology agriculture literature and religion ultimately the natural environment is also a phased the final shot of hotel ozone’s opening sequence symbolically stages the ultimate disappearance of the human
Trace on Earth as a wet footprint on a stone ground gradually Fades before our eyes when considered in the context of Atomic Warfare the dark evaporating footprint evokes The Haunting nucle clear shadows in the aftermath of the US atomic bombings of Japan it also highlights the power of the atomic bomb
To obliterate humankind and other life forms on Earth here we are reminded again of the Hall of lost footsteps which opens with a series of telegraphic paper strips marking the pivotal events of the atomic age the first of them reads heroshima human Footprints were found in the burned
Concrete while yish is film is concerned with the lethal effects of nuclear experimentation and War Schmidt brings into relief the significant impact of humankind on the environment by juxtaposing The Fading footprint with geological stata contrasting the ephemeral trace of human existence with a deep time of planetary
History a large fisure widens to reveal a dark abyss as the image Fades into a tracking shot closely charting the surface of a geological terrain onto to which the film’s opening credits are superimposed as Jennifer Fay has remarked in her analysis of nuclear test films Cinema became a way to record and
Naturalize the nuclear condition that leaves clear signals of human cost planetary change in the geological record the visual motif of the human imprint also brings to mind the media theorist Le manovich’s claim that Cinema is the art of the index it is an attempt to make art out of a
Footprint this statement highlights the Cinematic medium’s unique relation to reality due to the photochemical basis of their film image the opening sequence of Hotel ozon indeed Sly returns toward the medium of film itself with the countdown evoking the head leader of a film reel and the
Fade out into white laying bare at the reflective surface of the projection screen these self-reflexive gestures can be read as an attempt to highlight the potential of the Cinematic Medium as a substrate onto which the relationship between living beings and the environment presence and absence past and future can be
Screened in hotel ozone the natural environment also provides a different kind of screen that adopts different bances from refracting the women’s experiences to acting as barriers to their subjectivity after the credit sequence the film focuses on a cross-section of a felt tree an older woman’s hand enters
The frame with her index finger lightly touching the tree TR surface as the woman narrates significant events since the nuclear catastrophe her index finger highlights the tree rings as markers of temporality her disembodied voice addresses a yet to be seen view placing the viewer in the position of the young
Women who are only now learning about the effects of the nuclear disaster and their Journey this shot thus represents the women’s m landscape while mediating personal and Collective history The Cinematic Trope of a tree section as a means of exploring the constructed nature of identity and memory famously also appeared in Alfred
Hitchcock’s 1958 film bertigo and Chris marker’s 1962 short film l in Vertigo and hotel ozone tatch mediates narratives about the characters presumed lives and demarcates the limits of life and death in hotel ozone the nuclear disaster is not depicted as a single traumatic event but rather as a prolonged process of
Death and loss in the elders account many survived quote there were enough of us people animals and trees only later did everything start to die off people animals and trees unquote her insistence on shared experience is however undermined throughout the film which refuses to offer Redemptive vision of
Harmonious inters species relations in a World freed from the destructive nature of modern civilization the shot of the tree cross-section is perhaps the most powerful visual metaphor for the film’s staging of the relationship between the female protagonists and the natural environment as it emphasizes haptic engagement as a model for making sense
Of the world and exploring the possibilities and limits of knowledge when the older woman discovers a series of white abstract marks un ruined buildings in an abandoned town she follows and touches the markings her fingers dusted in chalk powder these traces turn from abstract shapes to a promising human human shaped
Stick figure the leader becomes animated with hope that this seeming evidence of other human life will lead them closer to an encounter ultimately however she learns that one of her group members has chalk hidden in her trousers Hotel ozon pres presents the viewer with a series of unprecedented models for the
Relationship between humans and their environment throughout the film The Young Women explore their surroundings experimentally testing the limits of their agency yet this radical and potentially liberating attitude is often portrayed as destructive the natural environment remains as a sight of human exploitation and Reckless Behavior for example when the group finds a gasoline
Canister they let the flammable liquid spill into the grass then one of the women mischievously lights it on fire and another one throws life ammunition into it causing an explosion and a blaze that scares their horses as the women encounter different beings they do not hesitate to commit meaningless and cruel killings they
Twist up the head of a snake slay a stray dog with a firearm shoot and disembowel a cow catch fish with grenad and cut their heads off and finally kill the only human being they encounter the brutal display of animal killing is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of
Hotel ozone Schmid deployed this tactic to shock audiences without acknowledging the problematic nature of committing violence against non-human animals in his cinematic attempt to address the crisis of social relations in the face of environmental Devastation the film is mostly emotionally distanced from its characters conveying a matter of fact
Representation of the group’s nomadic journey and alienation by means of cinematic naturalism this approach contrasts remarkably with a later czechoslovak New Way film that thematizes the cyclical nature of human violence yurri yakobis 1968 Trilogy the deserters and the nads following narratives set during both World Wars the film imagines the
Aftermath of a global nuclear disaster the figure of death and a young nurse Escape an underground shelter and seek in vain to find human survivors ac across Plains of cracked Earth and Lush Landscapes yakobis cinematic approach draws on FK culture bold colors and at times hallucinatory cinematography this dizzying film
Envisions a world where even death’s life loses meaning as she has no more people to kill ultimately she perishes on a green Green Field amid a dramatic and absurd aerial bombing the grotesque nature and intense visual stylization of yisus post-apocalyptic Universe stands in Star contrast with the paired down black and
White aesthetic of hogel ozone and its sense of Detachment the film however provides a few rare glimpses into the older woman’s subjective experience in these instances the environment is activated through point of view shots such as when she contemplates the Fresco on the ornate ceiling of a dilapidated Baro
Church in another sequence her childhood memories are mobilized by a seemingly familiar landscape as the point of view shot charts the trees and the glimmering river in a valley deep below yet for her young followers the river is merely another obstacle to be overcome after crossing the river the
Women finally encounter another human being an older man inhabiting the derel hotel Hotel ozone at the bottom of the valley the hotel’s interior reflects the man’s precious attachment to rics of civilization such as the last newspaper published before the nuclear apocalypse an old television a chess set and a gramophone with a single
Record his overly polite manners appear humorous in the face of the women’s experience of nomadic survival especially when he proudly opens a parasol on the hotel hotel’s patio to serve the women milk a product of animal domestication they are unfamiliar with this scene opposes two distinct conceptions of human life in the
Aftermath of the Apocalypse here the filmmakers diverge from their naturalism in a bird’s eyee view shot of the parasol that entirely conceals the characters underneath the stripes of the sun shade evoke the opening cross-section of the tree yet it acts as a radically different kind of screen that emphasizes the separation
Between the viewer and the subjects of cinematic fiction exhausted by the journey and realizing that the older man cannot fulfill their hopes of conceiving children the older woman falls ill as she lies in bed blankly staring at the ceiling she reflects on Humanity’s presence on the planet quote tins are
Falling apart and cartridges are resting nothing grows the Earth Los us unquote the old man attempts to counter her pessimistic Vision by arguing that she will be the immortal founder of a new civilization yet she insists we are like Burman and the Earth loes us soon after
The woman dies it is then this deeper realization of Humanity’s complicity in environmental destruction that appears to contribute to her death her burial again brings to mind the film’s opening through a series of close-ups of the women’s hands with dirt behind their fingernails the camera’s proximity convey conveys a rare moment
Of intimacy and introspection the camera finally rests on the clasped hands of the old man before slowly tracking upward to reveal his face as he silently utters I will plant something here maybe a juniper the man’s promise to plant a tree suggests a continuation of Life the woman’s decaying body providing
Nutrients to other organisms within the ecosystem a face the boundary between the body and the environment figure and ground unlike other beings killed in the film the woman’s death is memorialized on a meadow at top a hill which Bears two other Graves with wooden crosses thus human mourning and rembrance
Rituals are embedded within the natural landscape which is emphasized by the sound of the Wailing wind taking over as the group slowly walks away yet this elic representation of je as part of of the cycle of life is followed by a much more cynical ending as the young women shoot the man after
He refuses to give them his gramophone the only artifact of A Lost Civilization that has sparked their interest in hotel’s o in hotel ozone’s concluding part the finitude of human life is thus laid bare in its Pathos and absurdity the film thus goes beyond its matter OFA exploration of conditions of
Survival and introduces a critical perspective the final shot of the film reveals an expansive flattened view of a Treeline Mountain Side its Horizon traversed by miniature figures that move offscreen their presence is overshadowed by the vastness of the mountain and the intense howling of the wind as we have seen Hotel ozone is
Mainly preoccupied with the issue of Humanity’s survival yet the film’s conclusion crucially suggests a decentering of human subjectivity the film thus off offers a speculative vision of what fate Humanity can have in a post-apocalyptic World raising key questions about the role of humans within their broader ecologies thank you very
Much I’ll just transition thank you Barbara um that was lovely I I think that close reading is going to serve us well because for what I’ve prepared for us um I’m going to talk a little bit more broadly um about both kind of the aims of the volume I know that this is
The last event in the series right Barbara the yeah okay so um I’ll start first just by saying a big thank you to Molly um and Barbara and Elena for this wonderful series that you’ve put together I’ve been attending all of the talks um as many as I’ve been able to
Online and I have to say they’ve set the bar pretty high um so as Molly mentioned the idea for this particular panel grew out of the edited volume that barb Katie and I are all contributing to and so I thought I would just throw we have the
Flyers down here but I wanted to throw the table of contents up on the slide I think there is one issue that I need a few permissions to request hold on we’ve got a little technical issue let me make you an editor just waiting for it to connect to the internet
Sorry y guess isn’t working so I’m trying to see if I can get on yellow Wireless yes thank you I mean I should be able to get a wheel wir less well done um yeah do we want to let Katie jump ahead and I’ll try to connect no she’s
Not would you like me to go yeah Katie if you don’t mind if you feel ready then I can try to connect to the internet while you no problem at all thank you so let me just uh get my PowerPoint up all right well that was indeed lovely
Barbara um I’m going to do something very different I’m gonna talk uh more uh extemporaneously can everybody see my PowerPoint hi everybody is that working yes do you want to go into presenter mode py what’s that do you want to go into presenter mode yes I do U let me
Just start the slide okay how’s that perfect okay very good um so I’m going to talk more off the cuff uh if I have if I begin to exceed my 15 minutes please uh let me know and I will quickly bring things to an end um so I wanted to
Talk uh give a kind of overview of the um environmentalist movement in East Germany and what kinds of films were made uh under with government support despite the government um Guerilla films and illicit films and then what kind of films were made in the immediate after math of 89
And I guess um my first slide um brings back a lot of memories for me because I had just moved to West Berlin in 1987 in the fall of 1987 um when 20 stazy agents forcibly dismantled the fledgling Ecco Library run by one of the East Berlin churches
Which had been set up the year before uh arresting seven on charges of Distributing a treasonous publication which was this little mimeographed Eco newspaper um Eco newsletter and that was a shocking event uh for many of us widely publicized and actually kind of announced to the world there was a new
Independent Eastman Eco movement that hadn’t really existed before oh now I’m having trouble getting my um my slide to go forward I wonder why that is there we go um so um in fact um just to give a very brief the briefest of backgrounds um East Germany like other parts of
Communist Eastern Europe under stalinism had fostered a productive ass sensibility and the emphasis was on rebuilding from the ruins of war and ensuring economic prosperity for its citizens the ecological was thought about uh from time to time but the cost of that rebuilding tended to be minimized and overlooked pretty
Consistently until 89 um East Germany did have official Watchdog organizations but again and again they were persuaded to overlook environmental damage to raise the country’s standard of living and um this is I think especially ironic in 1980 the government became worried by the success in West Germany of the newly
Founded green party and so they decided that they uh would found their own affirmative ecological group The Society for nature and the environment which was intended to focus on nature while ignoring the obvious ecological crisis going on in East Germany and it was the organization was designed to uh contain and deflect
Um ecological energies among its own citizens and even though there were many stazi agents planted in the group they worried constantly about church influence and um so it’s it was sort of a minor miracle that and a truly independent ecological group emerged under Church sponsorship um in the late 80s and
Despite the seizure of the ecological Library there was a regrouping the following year a new ecological Coalition um across East Germany called the new ark and they had a publication uh which is and three of issues are going to set the agenda for the rest of
What I talk about on the one hand they had an issue about Forest death and I’m going to be construing that fairly broadly um so the problems that they pointed to were the chemical industry toxic pollutants and indeed Forest death all over East Germany and uh going into neighboring Bohemia uh secondly was
Atomic energy after chern and as as you’re going to as we’re going to see the question of atomic energy was skewed in an interesting Direction in East Germany because they housed one of the largest uranium mines in Europe which was um initially started in the 40s as a
Kind of secret Soviet Army occupied place to produce uranium for the Soviet nuclear program so atomic energy in both senses of the word raw materials as well as nuclear power and third and most surprisingly perhaps and I think this is a very distinctive emphasis of the easterman movement was the issue on our
Inner cities are collapsing and as we’re going to see the question of the Demolition and raising of villages of historic buildings is going to be seen as part and parcel of what the ecology movement should think about and I think this is rather unusual I don’t know of
Other ecological movements that had this as one of their pillars um so for most of this we’re going to be talking mainly about two EC trouble spots on the bottom of the map this is north and south of Lei uh in the south of um East Germany
So vmot at the very bottom of the screen is this um enormous mine it was the it was the world’s fourth biggest uranium mine which um produced uh U 23,400 tons of uranium enough to build I think hundreds of um uranium bombs and um this as we’ll see led to lingering
Radioactivity and the destruction of numerous medieval Villages when the mines expanded or because of radiation um and to the north is a different kind of trouble spot a bitter felt a very appropriate rely named the name in German means bitter field this was the epicenter of the East German
Chemical industry belt and the producer of much of the acid rain which killed the forests okay so let’s start with um pollution and acid rain um so this is probably the most famous um easterman film about ecological issues it was a gorilla film it was secretly made by people from the
Green Network Arc um it was made with the help of a West Berlin cameraman and one or two other West berliners who snuck into East Germany um they picked a day when the Lutheran Church was having its annual conference so they knew a lot of the stazi would be there um sort of
Surveying the goings on of the church which was tolerated but always um under deep suspicion by the government it was also um the day of the the um one of the big uh soccer championships so they thought whichever stazzi people were not at the Lutheran thing would be home
Watching television so they snuck into um the mining area the the the chemical area around bitterfeld and they just took handed pictures uh with the help of a local ecologist who was there and the pictures are pretty shocking they managed to develop the film smuggle
It to West Germany it was shown on West German and International television and it was also watched internally inside the um East German Eco movement and the East German Protestant church and the Stasi were bitter and tried in vain to figure out who had made the film if
People had been caught they would most likely have faced long jail sentences especially since this involved East West ecological collaboration and would thus have been labeled treasonous almost certainly and led to Long prison sentences so um so this is uh you can see already from the smoke that’s coming
Out the smoke is in a natural and strange color and clearly has chemicals in it in addition they found um this was apparently the color of the sky and they found these many many barrels with seeping toxic and radioactive radioactive chemicals which were running into the soil um creating huge weird
Blistery Bings and running directly into uh local rivers and into the water table near various highrise settlements so clearly this was an Eco catastrophe waiting to happen and already happening um with the money that um they did surreptitiously get some money from some of the television companies that showed
Their film footage and with this they bought their own video camera and they tried to make a further film but there were stazi plants in the group who managed to um make sure that most of the film was spoiled um there was another attempt at the same time uh throughout
The 80s by a documentarian named gter Lipman to make his own film about um which was supposed to be called who has destroyed You Beautiful Forest about Forest death and um he made eight attempts to MIT footage and every time it was turned back and um the studio
Verdict was too many dead trees too little optimism and another commentator said the people who live here already know about it and no one else needs to know so it was only after 89 that he was able to release this and it had the telling subtitle uh how a film was
Prevented and so it includes the story of the Banning of the various footage uh and there were other films that came out right after on or after 89 which had also been kind of slowly in the making but weren’t officially approved including this film about the louses region and its Devastation by
Overmining chemicals Etc let’s go on to the tricky question of energy radiation and vismo which is the big Soviet mine um vismut is the German word for bismut um the the radioactive element and um this is the major film made about it I think this subject was so taboo that it was really
Not possible to even try to make anything about it until after 89 because um this was a Soviet controlled um a Soviet controlled area controlled largely by the Soviet Army for the benefit of the Soviets and that was a very delicate relationship which really was never talked about openly um
So between a million between half a million and a million workers worked here between 1949 when the mine was set up and 1989 uh fker cup has absolutely horrifying statistics which have been secret until 89 so I’m just going to read a few of them aloud so from so in a
Six-month period in 1949 alone over a thousand workers were killed in on the job accidents um almost 3 3,500 additional workers required amputations over 16,000 suffered very severe Health damage um over 11,000 Forest workers escaped uh over 200 crippled themselves to avoid further labor and over 500 workers found guilty
Of sabotage were sentenced by Soviet tribunals to long labor terms so basically this was run in the first first place it was manned primarily by force laborers and former prisoners and one um anglo-american journalistic expose in 19 uh 49 claimed that it was part of an international goog what the
Names buval and Bellen were to the anti-nazis of Europe five years ago um most of the people he interviews in the film are part of a later wave of workers many of whom are displaced people who are um uh Germans from the Eastern territories who came as refugees after the war and
Were forced to make a new beginning and came to vismo in order to try to make a fortune uh it was high paying because the work was so was so dangerous um and he the film largely consists of interviews with the surviving workers which touch on things like their very
High incidents of cancer a lot of workers who died even under the slightly improved safety conditions and their children’s birth defects um there had been several attempts to uh depict the frontier Society Soviet soldiers uh prostitutes and other prisoners uh shipped their forc labors of various kinds one of them
This extremely interesting film was made in 58 but not released due to Soviet pressures and was only released in 72 very much worth watching and there was also a very ambitious novel which was criticized heft heftily in 1965 and the writer ended up abandoning the novel and dying of alcoholism it was
Published uh belatedly only in 2007 and is now also available in English translation uh what was released at the only film about nuclear anything in East Germany is this very cold war film from 1959 white blood which blames uh the Americans for causing radiation poisoning and uh blasts their nuclear
Program and of course the film makes absolutely no mention of the fact that East Germany was itself a major uranium producer so back to the film from 93 so this is a very hard-hitting um piece of investigative journalism which talks a lot to survivors and tries to understand kind
Of what they went through at the beginning the end of the film there is an attempt to show radioactivity so they have um Geer counters which they are showing close up at the beginning of the film and at the end of the film they have somebody with
A guer counter going around in the Villages nearby and because the um all of the concrete used in local building from 49 onward tended to be made of local Stone even the pavement in these um Villages is still radioactive okay that brings us to the third and final topic which is
Architectural ecology and this too has several interesting faces so one of the big um kind of refrains in a few Brave and highly censored films before ’89 and in a series of films after 89 is the question of what was raised um in the 80s they were still raising villages to expand
The face of coal mines and thus to extract a few more years of coal supplies and the fact they were some of the villages were Medieval Villages was irrelevant um some Villages a a series of villages in the 50s and 60s were torn down because of the uranium mines the
Mines were swallowing them they were destabilizing them or The Villages had become radioactive so they had to be raised and again and these were Medieval Villages there was also a lot of critique and this is to be found throughout um easterman feature films in daring films that were controversial
Almost banned but not quite banned about the Eraser of older neighborhoods and other inner cities and the justification was on the one hand to erase the memory of viline society and class society and class struggle and to modernize housing and to concentrate workers in high-rises
Both in the inner city and in and in Satellite cities um and then finally there’s a very interesting film by the same person in 83 he made this highly ambivalent film about the raising of a village for Mining and in 93 he made a much more forensic film about the
Raising of a famous Baroque Church which the Nazis had used um it was raised in 68 to build the potam computer center and he does a kind of forensic analysis and goes back and grills people as to how they came to make the decision why the decision was was um a foregone one
And so on okay so these are some of the films that talk about the demolition of rather beautiful older buildings in the inner city and the building of um high-rise prefab satellite cities which are rather soulless in their General Galt and which in the Post 89 period
Many of them became hot beds of Neo fascism um one question that I’d like to just put out there there was a lot of criticism in the late 80s under chesu Romania had a systemization program which involved raising the historic core of Bucharest to build grand boulevards
Modeled partly on pnom pen and the raising of many medieval Villages especially ethnically Hungarian and German villages with the population transferred on mass to um new high-rise agroindustrial centers and there was a plan he then planned to raise half of Romania’s Villages by 2000 there were sustained protests from Hungary and from
West Germany and actually worldwide and I guess the question that I come to belatedly is to what extent were these smaller scale East German vill raisings comparable if less systematic were they problematic in the same kind of obvious way that to Outsiders the Romanian systemization looked so here is a a
Beautiful ambivalent kind of guarded film made in 83 officially released in with a limited release of um a mourning for a village which was about to be destroyed and then was destroyed to produce two extra years of coal and in what I think of as the most moving
Moment in this film we see this woman holding up a picture a historic picture of this older Inn which has been there for 200 years we pan out and we see her standing there and we see how dilapidated the in has become and then we pan up further I don’t have a still
Of this I’m sorry but we pan up and we see workers on the roof all body dismantling the building so she’s standing there with this Photograph as a kind of guarant there I have the historical record this was here it won’t be here but I’ll have the picture and I think
That’s especially interesting uh then the same director 10 years later made this interesting film forensic film about the destruction of the garnos and Church in plotto um but there’s another film which was made in 20 06 so long after this first wave of films by some directors who are very interested in
Uranium and its After Effects and they went back and made a film about the Lost Villages of vismut so all of these Villages which were raised in the 50s and 60s um because of the mine of the uranium mines in various ways and um what is most striking to me is how much
They focused in on the Civil courage of some of the local um teenagers at the time who several of whom took surreptitiously took pictures to document this their their Villages both before and during the demolition process and in many cases um they were threatened in one case their film was
Pulled out of a camera by the Soviet soldiers who were there but some of the pictures survived they hid the pictures for 40 years and then after 89 that this is the documentation and um there’s also in addition a woman who grew up in the village was devastated by as everybody in the
Village was by its destruction and years later set about trying to make a Chronicle of what the village was so that her children could understand something about where she came from even though there is nothing left to look at um and I think I guess one of the things
That really moves me about this is in my view um after ‘ 89 documentarians had a new kind of freedom to to um release previously secret documents to uh to um produce an interplay between images and statistics um but above all they gave homage to to the to their forerunners
These lay teenagers who were just furious about what was happening and even though their scope of action was very limited they nonetheless did Brave things to try to document what was happening and to me it seems as if they are pointing back to these people as their own forebearers and they are
Trying to establish a kind of longer lineage of civil courage in the face of you know a very powerful and at at times frightening government to try to tell the truth about what was happening ecologically so I’ll stop there but I hope at least that’s pequ your interest
In what was going on in East Germany so thank you very much thank you Katie and we had originally I’m I’m guessing that we had originally structured our talks to follow a chronological format um but I think I’m actually going to dwell kind of in the second part of my talk on that
Period of the late 1980s so I think there’ll be some nice overlap um and Katie thank you for taking us like through such a transhistorical moment in the talk um so in what I would like to do today I kind of have two parts to my
Talk the first part is that as one of the co-editors I wanted to talk a little bit overall about what our aims were in the volume and I think they intersect with the series that um Barbara and Molly and Elena have organized and then in the second half I’ll talk more about
Chernobyl and the ways in which Chernobyl both challenged and really crafted or created um very belatedly a Soviet nuclear imaginary um so here once again is the flyer for the volume you see the table of contents on screen and so the central question of the volume
And I think of the series that you have organized also is why Eastern Europe right um we have a small a mighty but small audience here today um so I think that that speaks kind of to this question right like what is specific about Eastern Europe why is it worth
Looking at Eastern Europe from an ecocritical point of view um and I want to share with you some of the answers that my co-editor Lucas and I came up with and trying to draft the introduction um so the first answer that we gave is that uh the relationship
Between humans animals and nature is just so at the Forefront of so much of Eastern European Cinema um and I joke with my students that I have a very troubled relationship with tarkovski I often say love the art hate the man um but for better or worse he has become a
Metonym for so much of Eastern European Cinema and so up here I have a still from his film Nostalgia and next to him um there’s still from Batar damnation so when I was a graduate student here Katie trumpener was my PhD adviser um and something that I’m
Infinitely grateful to Katie for is that she affirmed me in my desire to Champion small Cinemas meaning both small National Cinemas and small Cinemas in the sense of Cinemas that didn’t fit this featurelength you know um Ur driven art Cinema type of film making um and so
With Lucas when we said about doing the volume we wanted to acknowledge that yes there’s a lot of nature in the most conical films um but there’s also a sense in which people like darovsky have eclipsed a lot of other forms and kinds of film making and so one of our main
AIMS in the volume was to try to move away from both a Russo Centric Lucas is from Lithuania I’m from Ukraine to move away from a very Russo Centric Canon um to consider the cinemas of the countries that were annexed to the Soviet Union in
The wake of World War II but also to consider other forms of film making beyond the kinds of films that were made for the art Cinema circuit um and one of our really big hopes specifically with adopting an ecocritical lens is that focusing on the land on something kind
Of that physical and material would really emphasize local histories and local legacies of resistance to the uniform the kind of the uniform homogenizing modernizing yet homogenizing Force um of the Soviet project um and one of the things that we would talk quite a bit about um in
Working on the volume was how the very term Soviet block invokes a kind of totality right this it invokes this image of something completely total with no Vari within it and so our aim was really to think about the variation that there was all across the lands that were
Shaped um by this project and I think that the very fact that in this panel our papers today speak to cinema produced in Czechoslovakia in Ukraine and in East Germany um is really significant in and of itself um and worthwhile so the second answer to the
Question of why Eastern Europe um has to do with how Trends evolve in Academia um we realized we did this deep plunge into the literature um on ecocriticism uh and we realized that there was a really interesting conundrum in the temporality in the chronology of how books came out so although ecocriticism
Is rooted in the environmentalism of the 1970s it really coalesced as a movement within literary studies in the 1990s um and as scholar Ursula heisa and others have demonstrated it concerned itself first with romantic poetry that was kind of the first object people looked at um and then North American
Nature writing people like Emerson thorough Etc um and this happened at the same time that there was also a consolidation of postcolonial studies and so what happened with ecocriticism is that it kind of jumped from paying attention to objects from the First World um which I just mentioned um to
Increasingly paying attention to what was going on in the former Third World um and in the literature of the global South and all of this makes a lot of sense right as Scholars um and I think popular culture have been recognizing increasingly more and more right it’s
The countries of the first world that created the trouble it’s the countries of the former third world that are paying the price for it um what Lucas and I realized in putting together our volume was that this completely eclipsed or overlooked the former second world um and that’s strange thing about
Temporality is that all of this is happening in Academia in the early 1990s right after the Soviet Union has collapsed and so because the collapse of the Soviet Union happens at that time there’s a lot of attention to it on the part of anthropologists people working in political science sociologists but
Nobody’s really thinking about kind of the cultural products of the former Soviet Union um in terms of this EOC critical gaze it’s completely eclipsed kind of by this first third world connection and so what we thought is that in a way we were kind of jumping on
A bandwagon um since the 2000s there’s been a series of books coming out about various kinds of Eco Cinemas books on excellent books on Chinese Eco Cinema Italian Eco Cinema and so we were coming out with one more book about another area studies Eco Cinema but we really
Deeply and truly thought that Eastern Europe has something very special to offer um precisely because it complicates a a lot of the fasile I think ideas and Concepts um that have been played around with um in ecocriticism uh and so uh oh I also wrote down in my notes that um when it
Comes to Eastern Europe the kind of scholarship that has been done since the collapse of the Soviet Union has mostly focused on individual figures so there has been scholarship on the landscape you know of Isaac litan um on the exceptional nature writing in Leo Tolstoy and dorv and M pishin um there’s
So much of it there but almost all of the studies have been about individual figures and there hasn’t really been an attempt to systematize it or to think about these things um and these texts in relation to one another and so our Hope was that the volume would take this kind
Of first step to creating a more systematic study um and then the third and final reason is that uh one of the central debates in all of the scholarship you know on eco anything is this question of the anthropos scine as a term um and there’s been a big debate between
Whether or not we should call it the anthropist scene or the capitalo scene and the argument goes that when you call it the anthropist scene you’re kind of blaming all of humanity for the problem that we find ourselves in whereas it’s actually the countries of the first
World that caused all the trouble and so the proponents of capitalist scene think that it’s a much more specific term because it singles out the responsibility of the global north um and Lucas and I really thought that looking and attending to what was happening in the former communist countries complicates this right by
Demonstrating that even communist countries can take an approach to Nature that is just as extractive and just as exploitative um as the countries of the so-called Global North nowadays um so those were like the three structural kind of things that we were thinking about in putting together the book um
And I hope they resonate with some of the talks um that we’ve been hearing so far and so without further Ado I’m going to talk to turn to Chernobyl in my paper and Chernobyl really is this moment of the undoing um of the Soviet Union and I
Think a really key turning point um in the way that nature is conceived in the region so oh here’s the the title of my talk is Chernobyl and the crafting of a Soviet nuclear imaginary so as fous as it sounds Chernobyl has been having a moment um
The success of s’s riveting 2018 book I I sat down thinking that I would start reading it and I read it cover to cover um and Craig Mason’s 2019 miniseries got both Scholars and the broader public interested in the disaster and its Legacy the disaster actually took place
On April 26th 1986 and so I think find it deeply meaningful Barbara pointed this out to me yesterday actually thank you that we are we’re talking about this exactly on the 37th anniversary of the disaster um and our editors actually at bergon very thoughtfully pointed this
Out um by highlighting all of the books that they’ve been publishing related to Chernobyl and its Legacy uh so I’ll add also that one of the reasons that I personally am so interested in chern is that I was born in 1988 in Ukraine two years after um the disaster happened fortunately no
Death which was out of the way of the cloud um but I’ve been thinking about my own lifespan as the measure of distance we have chronologically to Chernobyl right like I am as old as as the disaster to some extent um and I think that there’s many things that Chernobyl
Can teach us the one that I would like to focus on here is what it has to tell us about nuclear imaginaries on either side of the Cold War divide so uh in her study of the way that Chernobyl has been represented in Russian um B Russian and
Ukrainian fiction film allab vka um a film scholar following Bart calls the disaster quote unquote a master signifier or a key symbol if Hiroshima Nagasaki marked the start of the Cold War she argues Chernobyl came to Mark its end um and in her article she has an article about the fiction films
Representing Chernobyl BR haveta demonstrates the ways in which these narrative films work to nationalize what was at first perceived to be a global disaster transforming Chernobyl into the founding trauma of the new Ukrainian and belarussian Nations more recently historian s ploi also compellingly argues that in exposing the Soviet regime of lies and
Secrecy um Chernobyl essentially set off a chain of events that led to the demise of the Soviet Union and here are just some photos of the many protests that took place across Ukraine and Belarus um kind of associating the the trauma of Chernobyl with a desire increasingly for National self-determination so the Violence
Rought by Chernobyl appears in retrospect as much conceptual as physical in nature for those who who were living in its vicinity Chernobyl had very concrete devastating physical effects that would last their entire lives and well beyond for everyone else at a greater remove in the Soviet Union once the state finally acknowledged the
Event it also marked a point of radical rupture calling into question the political and philosophical Frameworks that had structured people’s lives one cannot help but wonder if the shock value of the event also had to do with the fact that the Soviet Union was not just politically or technologically ill
Equipped to face the disaster but also intellectually equipped um as early as 1965 in a piece titled the imagination of disaster Susan sag no less argued that Cinema played an important role in normalizing what is psychologically unbearable namely the mid 20th century realization that quote Collective incineration and Extinction
Could come at any time virtually without warning Sant herself found all of these American disaster films very unconvincing and uninteresting um and she actually wrote quote they inculcate a strange apathy concerning the processes of radiation contamination and destruction that I for one find haunting and depressing nevertheless she believed
That these films both distracted people and helped to normalize um or neutralize the unbearable and what I find absolutely fascinating what I argue in my piece is that unlike the US the Soviet Union lacked a nuclear imaginary um Anthropologist Nancy Reese was one of the first to point out that quote there
Really was no Russian Cold War culture and indeed the kind of consciousness of the nuclear arms race that from 1945 on inspired Western War fantasies and peace movements and their thousands of cultural Productions had hardly taken place in Russia or as historian Miriam Dobson would somewhat more colorfully
Put it there was no Soviet equivalent of on the beach no Russian Bill Haley hoping he would be the only man left with 13 women when the hbomb went off before the gorbach era few Soviet writers and film directors portrayed human civilization on the brink of self-destruction or tried to conjure up
A post-apocalyptic World Imagining the destructive power of atomic weapons was antithetical to the forward-looking spirit of the Communist project and she goes on actually toite VAV mul Stalin’s right-hand man saying how can it be asserted That civilization could perish in an atomic war then why should we build socialism why worry about tomorrow
It would be better to supply everyone with coffins now of course the imaginary of nuclear war differs substantially from that of a nuclear or Atomic accident yet the imbalance is striking while one can count dozens of American post-apocalyptic uh films Soviet examples are few and far between the
1962 thaw era classic nine days in one year shows a scientist willingly exposing himself to a lethal dose of radiation for the sake of Soviet science and progress but it avoids any explicit imagery we don’t see any kind of r radiation illness and it focuses instead on the characters relationships tarkovsky’s stalker
Released in 1979 um was retroactively said to have foreseen the exclusion Zone um and was in part inspired by rumors of an earlier Atomic accident Chernobyl wasn’t actually the first one at the mayak plant outside of chabin in the late 1950s in 1957 and const Constantin lush’s Dead
Man’s letters which is the only film to explicitly depict a post apocalyptic landscape that was caused by nuclear war by The Fallout of nuclear war was actually in production at the time of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 so in this regard what’s really interesting when we look beyond the
Soviet Union to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe as Barbara talk so wonderfully demonstrated um is that those countries Czech Slovakia Poland Hungary to a certain extent had a greater Freedom when it came to certain things um and so as Barbara’s paper has shown there was quite a bit of interest
Um in imagining right post-apocalyptic realities on the part of Czech and Slovak filmmakers even if those filmmakers struggled to make or exhibit those films of the films that were made I’ve tried to kind of uh group them a little bit and think about what features they share what we get especially in the
Early 1960s are quite a few uh science fiction films that are co-productions the first two Ginza comes later um but the co-productions are often East German polish C Slovak co-productions and all of them what they do is that they try to imagine the nuclear disaster something
That has already taken place both in the past and Far Away um so planetas which is also known as first spaceship on Venus um which has many different titles in many different languages is a film in which scientists travel to Venus and they realized that Venus had a sophisticated civilization that
Completely undo itself through nuclear war right and so it’s this imagination of what could have happened on Earth but it’s displaced onto Venus um Barbara has already mentioned the Kad ex Bay in which it’s nuclear warheads in a floating capitalist space ship where everybody has killed themselves um and
The reason I put kinza up here is kinza is quite different kinza is not a co-production it’s a Soviet film from a much later period but it highlights the fact to which in the Soviet Union it was so impossible to imagine anything being related to nuclear Apocalypse in Kad
It’s just it’s a it’s a planet that’s devastated that doesn’t have any water or nutrients and so we first meet our protagonists on this kind of desiccated planet um and there’s another film fasar asra which also imagines like a dying Planet that’s devoid of resources and
It’s unclear kind of a Mad Max style environment and it’s unclear what’s caused that environment um but what’s important is that in all of these this is another planet in a far away place and something that’s already happened in the past then we get a series of in the late
Socialist period we get a few I shouldn’t even call it a series just a few kind of films here and there um which are art films which aspir to the status of art films the first is of course Hotel ozone which Barbara described and analyzed so beautifully um
And then together with it in the volume we have a chapter by Eliza Rose um Ona which is a Polish film called tender spots from 1981 and I personally have included this polish hit comedy that millions of people watched in Poland from 1984 called sex Mia or sex Mission
Um and so that one’s not an art film it’s a comedy but what unites all of these films is that they’re imagining a kind of post-apocalyptic landscape and again the event itself is already in the past it’s already happened and we start after the event and we start in a
Universe that is just kind of like slowly kind of like slowly becoming more and more decrepit um and so what interests me here is the fact that if you think about American analoges right in the American analoges uh the kind of the nuclear war is always an excuse on which to hang
Spectacular visuals really stunning Graphics um and in the American films we always get a Lone Survivor who perseveres Against All Odds and rallies everybody um behind them what we get in the Eastern European films instead is decrepit infrastructure and instead of a hero locating other survivors
What we get are doomed loners just kind of suffering away their time on Earth um and the world goes out not so much with a bang as with a long whimper what these films do allow us to track is that as the Cold War went on the threat really shifts from the threat
Of nuclear war um to increasingly the threat of an accident at one of the atomic power plants um but the but the result of all of this the fact that you can kind of name these films on one hand or on two hands means that there was a
Dir and a dir of iconographic reference for anything like nuclear disaster before Chernobyl happened and so that’s my main argument here is that when Chernobyl happens there’s kind of no tradition no visual audiovisual tradition um within which to conceptualize or understand it um and this lack I think comes across most
Clearly in stanich’s to of oral history titled voices from Chernobyl and She interviewed many people for this project one of the people that she interviews is a resettler named anab badaya so somebody who used to live in one of the villages near Chernobyl and had to be relocated after the dis disaster and
This resettler asks what’s it like radiation maybe they show it in the movies have you seen it is it white or what some people say that it has no color and no smell and other people say that it’s black like Earth but if it’s colorless then it’s like God God is
Everywhere but you can’t see him so in 1986 actually kind of contrary to everything we might imagine there were two documentaries that were made by the Soviets immediately in the wake of the disaster and these documentaries essentially set out to answer bad’s question what does radiation look like
So although the party’s first reflex was to impose an information blackout it eventually reversed its policy when the Western press began uh attacking the USSR for its silence fearful that the Soviet people might learn what had happened from foreign sources Gorbachev eventually allowed newspapers to report on the disaster before delivering an
Address on television himself and among the journalists who were allowed to travel to Chernobyl um to cover the cleanup effort were two documentary teams one was was led by ran serenka of the central studio for documentary film in Moscow and the other by Vladimir shenka of the Ukrainian documentary and newsreal studio in
Kev both documentaries were heavily heavily censored um and received only a limited release in the Soviet Union but and this is fascinating they were sold to 127 countries worldwide and shenk’s film actually toured American college campuses as part of the glass niist film festival both films were also I just
Want to acknowledge this um essentially suicide missions both teams traveled to Chernobyl fully aware that the Endeavor might cost them their lives and spent approximately three months on site Sanka was miraculously unaffected he lived to be 79 and made seven more documentaries about Chernobyl but one of his cameramen
Ivanov succumbed to radiation sickness shortly after completing work on the film and there’s a really moving interview in which serka says that doov actually covered him when they were watching the reactor he put his body in between himself and serenka and kind of took the the radiation um Shen in turn
Died 11 months um after leaving the the expulsion Zone completely embattled actually he didn’t know if the film would be shown EMB battling sensors and just very depressed he kept a diary um and so we have the Diary of his time in the hospital um and his thoughts and
Reflections on trying to get the film out so collectively the two documentaries represent the first attempts to find a way of speaking about and representing radiation um and in the chapter that I wrote I go into greater depth here I’m just going to summarize the arguments really quickly so
Essentially and I I’ll I’ll completely judge here um for me the bell of Chernobyl is the more conventional film um it opens with imagery of a cloud recalling that already pioneered I think within a lot of kind of Us Media of the mushroom cloud um it f oh here here’s
Some more images of shenko uh on set I forgot and here’s a memorial to him in Kiev okay so the bell of chern the bell of Chernobyl is the film by serenka from the Moscow studio so here’s this image of the cloud which opens and closes the
Film I won’t play the clip for the sake of time um a lot of the film focuses on the peasants who have had to leave their land um and their mourning uh at this at having to leave it as well as their uh very honest descriptions of how they try
To sneak back um and to penetrate back into the Zone uh the film also features a lot of the iconography that would become the standard iconography for speaking about Chernobyl afterwards I I think this film kind of invents it um it’s a lot of Geer counters taking in otherwise Lush and verdant
Fields villages with the windows and the doors barred closed um and of course the ferris wheel in pret the biggest city that used to house almost all of the workers standing still um so what this film does the way in which it figures radiation is mostly
As an absence and an abnegation and a renunciation right so radiation means renouncing all of this land renouncing these areas um it’s an image of everything that has been abandoned um and the the problem is figured primarily through human absence um in these shots um and here’s just some more
Images of these you know the barbed wire marking the the limits of the Zone uh Chronicle of difficult weeks shevchenko film that’s the K of based crew to me personally is the much more interesting film because it’s trying to figure out how to figure radiation not negatively as an absence or renunciation
But positively and the solution they come up with and I I can’t play the clip right because we don’t have sound I can try I I’ll describe the clip um but basically what they realized is that when they submitted so both teams actually faced this with editors editors
Were afraid to handle the reals of film because the reals of film themselves contained radiation and in Moscow the editors only wanted to handle like the second positive copy um they were told that shift Tango team that one of the reels was problematic because it had all
Of these pock marks and a lot of hissing noise and so they were told not to use the film but instead they actually ended up including it in the film and basically this image that I would have shown you is images of the reactor where they say they say that radiation doesn’t
Have a face or a voice but here it is these pock marks that you see in the film that’s the face of radiation the hissing that you’re constantly hearing on the background that’s the voice of radiation and all of this is done with a direct address to the viewer so Shi
Jenko’s voice is there imploring the viewer to look closely and to listen um and so what I argue in the piece is that these kinds of direct address to the viewer that it um it invites the viewer to become more conscious of his or her sensorial appar at us to look and to
Listen actively and it also encourages us to look at the film differently um to concentrate our attention not on what is immediately apparent the signal um but everything that we normally would ignore the noise um the pock marks on the image the static on the soundtrack and it’s significant that Chernobyl occur just
Before the transition to digital film because this technique is only possible when you’re dealing with analog film and something actually that a few Scholars have thought about is that digital cameras stop functioning in zones of high radiation and so this fact that Chernobyl marks kind of it occurs as the
Soviet Union kind of it anticipates the breakup of the Soviet Union triggers it in many ways but it’s also situated at this moment of transition from analog to digital um and plays with that in really interesting ways and so finally the last kind of big argument that I make in there is that
Both films rely really heavily on voiceover to stitch this kind of tapestry of images and Reflections together because both films were so heavily censored they’re very polyphonic you can hear very different types of tone and voice in them even though it’s being read by one person um and both of
Them can be seen as a form of the essay film or as a Revival of the essay film form and this is very surprising because the idea of the essay film is something that the French kind of come up with what the essay film is but they quote
Zav they quote eisenstein they quote all of these Soviet film theorists as having conceived of the idea of a video essay before the of a film essay before the film essay itself but in the Soviet Union it’s not really used um since the late 1920s and so what your Noble
Triggers as a Revival of the film essay form um and I had this question know why why turned to the film essay so late in the history of of Soviet film making and I think the reason has to do with the fact that whenever people are faced with
Any kind of event of huge magnitude to describe it directly there’s something obscene about it right you risk obscenity whereas the film essay when you go at it obliquely and in fragments um somehow that seems to be the more correct approach and these films in their tone I’m not playing Clips just
For the lack of time um but you can see the connection to night and fog you can see the connection to Hiroshima mamur um and so kind of the the last argument that I’ll end on is that Chernobyl can be said to instigate not only the literal fracturing and collapse of the
Former Soviet Union um but also of its monumentalism of its coherent and cohesive way of knowing right and so in the end we can’t really know anything fully we can’t know things directly we can only come at things obliquely and in fragments thank you
So thank you so much to all three of our speakers today um I want to invite everybody online everybody here to get your questions ready uh does anybody have a question right now we’re a small But Mighty crew I’m happy to to get us started um
And I was I was especially taken Masa with uh your comments about the environmental conditions of film production in Chernobyl uh and their devastating consequences for the crews who were involved which got me thinking about all of our presenters today and so I’m wondering if if all of you could speak a
Little bit about the environmental conditions of producing these films I imagine they were quite different but also not entirely unrelated do you want to go first Barbara has a fascinating section on this in her chapter for the book about the drage um yeah D was also part of the
Um experience for the women uh who were chosen for the film uh they were uh non-actors who were chosen based on a um series of sessions uh there were 300 candidates uh chosen for their physical appearance and their ability to over surmount an obstacle course in the
Czechoslovak Army film studio so so they had to uh jump over fire pit w Wait through water and jump on horses and there is this uh quite troubling term that um Yan Schmidt used when referring to this form of training because he used uh the term dress which uh is a
Particularly regular rigorous form of training horses and uh that also points to the quite troubled gender dynamics of of the Film Production um and I think that also more broadly speaking and that’s something that I think also relates to um The Talks by Masha and Katie that that’s uh refer to the sort
Of environmental uh the spaces the uh abandoned Urban spaces uh uh the sort of um erasures of local memory and history and uh modes of displacement of people so actually uh the uh crumbling buildings and eerily empty uh Urban spaces were shot in the Northwestern border region of the of
Dopo which uh was a town uh that was um from which the German population has been expelled in the uh aftermath of World War II um and so there is this like a real historic and political charge to that as well and then this uh town was abandoned in
1954 to kind of uh give space to the largest czechoslovak military training Zone and that’s how the crew actually got involved so um because they were the only ones permitted to shoot in that uh type in those inaccessible areas and so it’s striking that they also kind of
Contribute to um in a different way that what the the project that uh Katie mentioned in the context of preserving the memory of um those Villages but there is also this incredibly beautiful dilapidated Baroque structure that town square and all of these kinds of uh memories of all all the people who live
There that are striking and then the the other parts of the film were actually created in the uh Shuma border region uh which is on the southwest of bohemia and uh these Landscapes were highly militarized and so they were able to kind of capture the environmental contradictions at play in those uh
Places because they were both the subject of uh Devastation and contamination of course by military activity uh and we we can see that in the film uh when the women discover that barrel of of gasoline that’s actually found in an underground bunker uh and the ammunition
Uh perhaps as well and then uh but at the same time it’s kind of um this a space where the absence of uh regular human activity and practices such as Agriculture and Mining is absent so the the vegetation can also thrive in other ways and the sort of overgrown Lush um
Uh Greenery that that emerges throughout the film is really like a big um marker of that yeah I I’ll maybe just this isn’t an answer to Molly’s question but uh your answer Barbara made me realize that all three of our papers are considering films shot in zones right so
Hotel ozen was shot in in a military zone that regular people didn’t have access to and then what Katie was describing were also kind of specialized zones um and so this this idea of yeah kind of like films being the only way by which we can have access to those
They’re not places that you can go on your own and so the film becomes an intermediary or a representative of an area that’s inaccessible otherwise um that all three of our papers deal with the loss of villages or the life the loss of traditional kind of agrarian
Life um and then something else that comes out in the volume um and not so much maybe in our talks is the fact that envir environments in and of themselves but also environmental disasters Know No Boundaries right so like boundaries tend to be human drawn um but actually Katie
And Alice Lovejoy wrote together a chapter for the volume that considers the smut um and also some kind of other like local mining activity that happens across the East German czechoslovak border um and so I think films as embodied experiences that take us to zones we wouldn’t be able to access um
Also are able to question borders in a really interesting way and maybe I don’t know Katie if you want to respond to Molly’s question yeah I was I had two different things I wanted to say first of all I masha’s um example of the Chernobyl people with their radioactive film
That’s amazing um I mean that’s also shows enormous civil courage and the the burning need to document at whatever price um I I guess I would say of my people in a way the um the vismo film to me is especially moving because actually
In a in a deep way it’s a socialist film that is that is finding a mode of solidarity among the the surviving miners that’s amazing they have this amazing Rapport the film also indexes older miners culture and songs from miners culture where they’re they’re wishing each other luck and getting back
Out of the ground again so in a way the film is gesturing towards the roots of the 19th century roots of socialism in industrialization and and you know these these very um High mortality extractive technologies that are there um but it’s full of anger at the failure of the
State to protect its people so I think the thing is at this point to go into vismo for a day to shoot right it’s it’s dangerous and it’s dirty um and the mine is still being remediated um the people who made The vismo Villages one continue to make documentaries about um uranium
Remediation around the world they also made a documentary about the RLC so they’re interested in the kind of posts Soviet cleanup situations but the real point is the this large population of half a million to a million people lived and worked there over years and somehow the thought
Of their survival and safety was least on the minds of the the the Builders of socialism and you know they were they were being implicitly asked to make a sacrifice with their lives and their health to these uncertain ends and basically to foster a kind of war machine that
Terrified them and everybody else um one other thing I wanted to say and this isn’t this wasn’t exactly smly Molly’s question but it’s maybe related to it one reason I highlighted the kind of meta medial elements in many of the pictures I showed like note photocopier note video technology Note
Camera note photo is of course course this is also a period of media transition so one of the reasons in in Czechoslovakia there was a Alice Lovejoy writes about this there was a um there was a video media newsletter which was um made by kind of underground people
And smuggled out of Czechoslovakia and on video cassettes and shown on a worldwide circuit so there were ways in which emerging reproductive techn te ology was kind of challenging the state Monopoly on media which at least in East Germany was very crucial okay we’ve let you guys have the Xerox machine for your
Church purposes you’re not supposed to be allowing traitorous materials about ecoc crisis in our country be printed on them or be mimic mimeographed on them you know and this is actually in East Germany one of the main reasons why a lot of the opposition groups clustered around the churches they were liberal
Spaces they were open to various forms of Civic conversation and they also had means of reproduction that no no one normally had access to a xerox machine um so anyway I mean I guess I just wonder you know we have a coming together of this massive Eco disaster
And this potential shift in media control and both of those things were actually crucial for the end of that dispensation and the the opening of a different dispensation if that makes sense thank you um do we have other questions I actually have two one first
Of all thank you so much for all three talks amazing so my first question is to K and brother small one I was really fascinated by the the quote um that you had that the people who we there already know and no one else and people who do
Not live here they um don’t no one else needs to know and I was wondering um so this is coming from an official Source if um there are any other um similar codes and or official response um that is as cical as this one so that would be
My first question and the second question is more Broad and it goes all three of you um because the volume I think covers both documentary fiction so I wonder um what you take on the dynamic imagy and definitely some dialog terms do we follow kind of the same lines do they each other
So Katie do you want to respond to the first question to us time to think about the yes I I I had a bit of trouble hearing it um but yes there are certainly other quotes um about the same film The cultural Minister said this will never ever be shown in our Cinemas
So I mean this is always um the way of it um you know there’s a there’s a deep unwillingness on the part of the sensors to actually admit that anything is wrong but it’s evidently wrong I mean the the the forests were dying and that was clear to anybody who walked in them
Um yeah as as so I don’t know if that answers your question but yes there’s there’s all kinds of um and of course after ‘ 89 a lot of the new work was especially in the 90s and 2000s a lot of the new work was about censored films
And what all had been said um re reconstituting the paperwork what what had the official opinions been so there’s actually a thick file on and you know occasion um oppositional films would be used as stazzy training films this is what we’re looking for so there’s a complicated
Interplay I’m I’m I’m sorry that that might or might not answer your question but sure you want me to go okay that’s that’s a really fascinating question about documentary versus fiction and it was something we we made a conscious choice to to think across that divide um
I think that a lot of what you find is what you would expect right the documentary films are more focused St critique and trying to use the the the status of the image is more as evidence um whereas in the fiction films it’s a lot more about a kind of sensorial
Aesthetic exploration um I think that’s something that’s particularly fascinating so one thing that I’ll say about not necessarily nuclear films um in my in my dissertation hopefully my book I have a chapter about polish ecological documentary of the 1970s and what you see a lot of is um nationalist
Movements and ecological movements going hand in hand because um the industrialization of Poland and Slovakia and Hungary is perceived as a Soviet imposition um there’s a kind of there’s a way in which ecological movements converge with nationalist movements um and so a lot of what happens is that in
These images the voiceover becomes incredibly important because the voiceover tells you how to see and how to receive the images and I’m always paying a lot of attention to what’s happening with sound in the documentaries and how they’re drawing your attention to certain elements and not others um with the fiction I’m just
Kind of freewheeling here but something Barbara said earlier um really resonated with me which is that in a lot of the fiction films there there’s almost like a similar aesthetic that you get in stalker in hotel ozone in a lot of these films there’s an emphasis on decrepit structures decrepit infrastructure and
Also images of nature that we know is polluted and yet is still strangely verden or still strangely L like luscious right and I think that the fiction films are much more interested in exploring aesthetic divisions between like things that we know are bad and yet are still beautiful right and like how
How how can the Mind combine those things and so I think they’re engaging with aesthetic aesthetic and moral categories or thinking about how those come together in the image um that would be like my first just kind of impromptu attempt at an answer can I bring up oh
Sorry could I bring up one other thing in East Germany at least there was the documentarians got more and more discouraged in the 80s partly because in the 60s and 70s they were occasionally able to make films that were pretty critical and that that didn’t just drown
Out what people were saying about their workplaces with voiceover but they actually you know express some kind of critique or or expressed indifference to the official ideals and the films were able to capture that and so the documentarians felt they had a kind of bond with the people they were filming
And they were kind of spokesman for the people they were filming by the 80s this had become much more difficult because the government was really anxious and wey and would kind of shut that all down and so they so some documentarians especially people working in industrial workplaces you know which were very
Polluted which had all kinds of Labor problems they would come in and people were suspicious and didn’t want to talk to them they saw them as kind of state agents and I think that was very wounding to the kind of am propa of these documentarians who were trying
Their best but the system you know the the lines kind of hardened and they were actually pretty unable to convey what they actually saw and taped because it would just be censored out so that’s a factor as well sorry to interrupt you Barbara worries that’s really um fascinating to think about the
Difference between what what are the possibilities and limits of both of these documentary in fiction forms and what’s um actually striking um I found personally that that Schmid and URC actually worked as part of a uh Army Studio that produced mostly so they worked specifically on documentaries news reals
Reportages and so they were actually part of that whole system that was creating instructional films and Military propaganda and it’s really and this is actually something that Alice Lovejoy in her uh in-depth kind of study of uh czechoslovak Army film has also revealed is that it was not only this uh
Kind of more standard military uh Film Studio that would produce a documentaries for uh the purposes of the army but that actually it was also a training ground for uh an entire generation of young filmmakers that would become some of the most crucial figures of the czechoslovak new wave so
Not just uh Schmid and urichuk but also y y y menel and others so that was really fascinating and uh the Army film studio um LED this production of two um fiction films and uh what made me think about masha’s point about the fact what you know of the sort of effective
Sensorial and aesthetic exploration so uh what um might be the critical thing that fiction film can bring that documentaries can’t let me to uh consider the other films that I mentioned in my talk each of them include at least you know some um actual documentary footage so there is this
Kind of hybrid format that they introduce however Hotel ozone absolutely refuses to do so and um um I found this uh really fascinating um statement by Schmidt who actually uh perhaps it might speak to that issue uh and he he says we are all too used to the usual propaganda
Proclaiming the danger of those terrible nuclear weapons it’s indifference and indifference must be feared I attempted to make this film against posters people are used to reacting to posters and newspapers like masses in general terms and without feelings while in my film I try to affect each viewer individually
So that everyone would feel in their own way so I think that’s actually um quite a powerful uh comment on that note I I have one last thought on this which is uh something that I want to explore more that I don’t know enough about we have a
Colleague Sova who I think knows a lot more um but I I’m really curious about the like the legacy of Soviet poetic documentary and like what ends up happening with that in the late socialist period um because I think that’s a really interesting and ambivalent place to look at how
Documentaries being used um and I I’m also really curious about its after lives as maybe something in between the kind of evidentiary documentary for critique and fiction film for sensory exploration kind of modalities I think we may have come up against our time limit in this room um
And having been in this room before when another group is clamoring to come in I know it’s not pleasant so I’m going to call an end to our event um but not before thanking our panelists one more time for really um fantastic comments thank you so much please join
Me and once again if you are in person come and join us we’ll raise a toast we can talk more disaster films um or whatever else you would like to talk about uh and in general celebrate the end of this Academic Year that reception will be upstairs thanks everyone it’s