UCLA

The Russian Census of 2010 found that nearly twenty thousand settlements throughout the country exist in name only and that thirty-six percent of all settlements have a population of ten or fewer. This dissertation seeks to articulate Russian popular culture’s response to the rural decline captured by these statistics via an examination of how contemporary art-house filmmakers have found in these provincial villages the ideal setting for cinematic representations of the enduring post-Soviet cultural trope of loss, as articulated by Serguei Oushakine in his anthropological study The Patriotism of Despair. By focusing on four films which use the imperiled village as a setting and central device—Gennadii Sidorov’s social drama Old Women (2003), Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s postmodern psychodrama 4 (2004), Taisia Igumentseva’s dark comedy Bite the Dust (2013), and Andrei Konchalovsky’s neorealist The Postman’s White Nights (2014)—this study historicizes what I call “New Village Cinema” in order to explain why this nascent movement arose as a phenomenon of the Vladimir Putin era, simultaneously informed by and informing the social, economic, and cultural conditions of the past two decades. Because the content of these pictures is generated by their form, and because they apply markedly different genres and styles of cinematography, characterization, and performance to similar narratives of loss, I examine each primarily vis-�-vis a theoretical framework uniquely relevant to its cinematic language. By establishing a foundational canon of New Village Cinema, this dissertation concludes that throughout the past twenty years the contemporary Russian village has remained a distinct chronotope that merits a more thorough investigation either within or without the broader field of provincial studies. While scholarship on cultural representations of post-Soviet tropes of loss—namely, the losses of empire and coherent ideology—and mourning continues to thrive, I maintain that a narrowed focus on the ongoing loss of a physical space and its typical occupants allows us to keep examining those abstract losses while highlighting a more tangible experience that resonates far beyond the Russian context.