We are happy to announce that this event has been RESCHEDULED for Friday, December 7th. To see the original event page click here.
This year’s 1812 bicentennial offers a festive recruitment into Russian civic spectacle: framed ceremonial enactments, the militarization of the self, a ritual alignment of private and governmental identities, the brightly festooned state. Its pageantry invites us to look back on the contradictions of 1812, of which three will be examined for their potential as models of a globalizing present:
1. The conundrum of francophonie;
2. Anti-imperial discourse as constitutive of the imperial encounter;
3. Moscow’s ashes as contested domains.
Relevant texts are likely to include Vasilii Vereshchagin’s 1812 oil series (1893), Vasilii Goncharov’s centennial film 1812(Khanzhonkov/Pathé-Frères, 1912), and this year’s 2,500 kilometer horseback ride to Paris by twenty Cossacks in symbolic pursuit of Napoleon’s troops.
Nancy Condee is professor of Slavic and Film Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Recent publications include The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov (ed. with Birgit Beumers, I.B. Tauris 2011); and Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema (Oxford 2009), winner of the 2011 MLA Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures and the 2010 Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award from SCMS (Society for Cinema and Media Studies). Other volumes include Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity (ed. with Terry Smith and Okwui Enwezor, Duke 2008). Her articles have appeared The Nation, The Washington Post, October, New Left Review, PMLA, Sight and Sound, as well as such Russian journals as NLO, Seans, Znamia, Voprosy literatury, Iskusstvo kino. She has worked as a consultant for the Edinburgh Film Festival, the Library of Congress, and Public Broadcasting for Frontline television documentaries and was Executive Producer for a CD-rom database Kino ottepeli (2002). At the University of Pittsburgh she is director of the Global Studies Center, one of eleven such US centers funded by a US Department of Education Title VI grant.
RSVP at jordan.center.workstudy@gmail.com
In the fall of 2012, the Jordan Center will host two public lectures reflecting on the 200th anniversary of the events that transformed Russia, Europe and the world in 1812. Our speakers will consider 1812’s legacies in the broadest sense, touching on film and music, nationalisms and empires, warfare and violence, Tolstoy and post-Soviet film.
