Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transliteration
- Figures
- Introduction
- 1 Abstracted Subjectivity and Knowledge-Worlds: Aleksandr Sokurov's Taurus (2001)
- 2 The Lacking Sense of Cinema: Aleksandr Proshkin's The Miracle (2009)
- 3 Gatekeepers of (Non-)Knowledge: Aleksei Balabanov's Morphine (2008)
- 4 Symbolic Folds and Flattened Discourse: Andrei Zviagintsev's Elena (2010)
- 5 Non-Knowledge and the Symbolic Mode: Nikolai Khomeriki's A Tale About Darkness (2009)
- 6 The World and the Event: Kirill Serebrennikov's St George's Day (2008)
- 7 A Plea for the Dead (Self): Renata Litvinova's Goddess: How I Fell in Love (2004)
- 8 Body in Crisis and Posthumous Subjectivity: Igor' Voloshin's Nirvana (2008)
- 9 The Difficulty of Being Dead: Aleksandr Veledinskii's Alive (2006)
- 10 Intentionality and Modelled Subjectivities: Aleksei Fedorchenko's Silent Souls (2010)
- 11 Abandoned Being: Mikhail Kalatozishvili's The Wild Field (2008)
- 12 Amplifications of Subjectivity: Aleksandr Zel'dovich's The Target (2010)
- Filmography
- Bibliography
- Index
12 - Amplifications of Subjectivity: Aleksandr Zel'dovich's The Target (2010)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transliteration
- Figures
- Introduction
- 1 Abstracted Subjectivity and Knowledge-Worlds: Aleksandr Sokurov's Taurus (2001)
- 2 The Lacking Sense of Cinema: Aleksandr Proshkin's The Miracle (2009)
- 3 Gatekeepers of (Non-)Knowledge: Aleksei Balabanov's Morphine (2008)
- 4 Symbolic Folds and Flattened Discourse: Andrei Zviagintsev's Elena (2010)
- 5 Non-Knowledge and the Symbolic Mode: Nikolai Khomeriki's A Tale About Darkness (2009)
- 6 The World and the Event: Kirill Serebrennikov's St George's Day (2008)
- 7 A Plea for the Dead (Self): Renata Litvinova's Goddess: How I Fell in Love (2004)
- 8 Body in Crisis and Posthumous Subjectivity: Igor' Voloshin's Nirvana (2008)
- 9 The Difficulty of Being Dead: Aleksandr Veledinskii's Alive (2006)
- 10 Intentionality and Modelled Subjectivities: Aleksei Fedorchenko's Silent Souls (2010)
- 11 Abandoned Being: Mikhail Kalatozishvili's The Wild Field (2008)
- 12 Amplifications of Subjectivity: Aleksandr Zel'dovich's The Target (2010)
- Filmography
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the previous chapters I demonstrated how subjectivity is brought into question by means of excessive and/or engulfing exteriority: the selfpresence leads to either the dispersion of the subject or to its heterogeneous, multiple modelling. In the final chapter, I am concerned with the confirmation of the subject in the moment of self-recognition whereby finite identity is rejected in favour of the infinite self. I discuss a film that employs non-knowledge as the drama of subject-modelling – as a story of appearance and obliteration – whereby the limits of the self are conceived as a movement away from the self into the topography of solitary subjectivity confronted with open-ended being. Rather than engaging in self-validating activity, which might result in the destruction of the self, the subject becomes an excess of discourse per se, that is, it centres on self-preservation, which ensures infinity in movement. The subject enters the divine state of amnesia after cataclysmic ruptures in discourse. The subject is no longer an architect of the modelled world, but a pre-eminent observer of the unfolding universe. I am particularly interested in the filmic materiality of non-knowledge and the immateriality of subjectivity existing outside the temporal framework of historicity. I centre on issues of scale and amplification as a type of movement in the symbolic mode, whilst keeping posthumous subjectivity in focus. For my purpose, I utilise Aleksandr Zel'dovich's The Target with its emphasis on transient spaces and the epiphany of the universal monad.
In her review of The Target, Barbara Wurm (2011) notes that Zel'dovich (b. 1958, Moscow) tends to produce one film per decade. Indeed, he released his Sunset in 1991, Moscow in 2001 and The Target in 2010. Each of the films is ‘a kind of quintessential résumé’ of the previous decade. Hence, my use of the film in the final chapter of the book is manyfold. On one level, I use it to explore the relationship between the subject's interiority and filmic modelling of space in the global era. On another, I investigate how in the symbolic mode the subject concludes its abandoned being by overcoming death and escapes from the post-apocalyptic world into the world of nothingness where distinctions of posthumous subjectivity are no longer relevant. Finally, I summate the main points presented in the study.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Contemporary Russian CinemaSymbols of a New Era, pp. 236 - 257Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016