Threatened Faces

Soviet Auteur Cinema and the Anthropology of the Thaw

Abstract

Numerous studies on gesture in Soviet cinema have emerged in recent decades. While this field of research does not discard facial expressions, specific explorations of the face and its affects, especially in late Soviet cinema, remain much rarer. After Stalinism with its sculptural, monumental tendencies, the late 1950s marked a subjectification of Soviet cinema, as in Mikhail Kalatozov’s Letiat zhuravli (The Cranes Are Flying, 1957), through the use of close-ups of the female protagonist’s enigmatic face. This subjectification proved formative for Thaw cinema. It unfolded, this article argues, in parallel with the concept of the “universally developed personality” (“vsestoronne razvitaja lichnost’”; from Russian “litso”, meaning both “face” and “person”) in post-Stalin socialist anthropologyas formulated by the Communist party and reproduced by the social sciences. This concept of personality revised the idea of sacrifice for the collective and first encompassed everyday (consumer) needs. Thus, on the one hand, representatives of auteur cinema around 1960, such as Marlen Khutsiev, Andrei Tarkovsky, Larisa Shepit’ko, and Mikhail Romm, emphatically staged faces with more or less clear reference to the anthropology of the Thaw. On the other hand, the face in their films alludes to traumas of a post-war society and bears considerable potential for a disquiet that has not yet come under closer scrutiny. In media terms, this article discusses relatively harmonious representations of the face, which at the same time envision an unmistakable tension between the optimism of reproducibility and the exhibition of vulnerability.