Russ,East European,Eurasian St 275 - Avant-Garde as Lifestyle: Cinema and Socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

Explores the avant-garde film traditions of Eastern and Central Europe, including works from the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. The course focuses on how avant-garde filmmakers engaged with the socialist project in the USSR and Eastern Bloc, and its call for new forms, sites, and life practices. We will investigate how avant-garde cinema represents everyday life amidst the public and private spaces of socialism. In approaching the relationship between cinema and space, we will consider examples of architecture (Constructivist, Functionalist, Brutalist), as well as theoretical writings by and about the avant-garde. Conducted in English, no prerequisites.