The body in the dark: body, sexuality and trauma in perestroika cinema

Abstract

AbstractThe paper analyses the role of the body and sexuality in perestroika chernukha cinema—a. bleak and dark film trend that became synonymous with the message of hopelessness of the post-Soviet cinema. Chernukha's ‘indulgence’ in sexuality, bodily excesses and violence was often described in terms of cheap sensationalism and naturalist thematics. The chernukha message, however, could be seen as more complex by looking at the junction of history, body and trauma in the films. The article adopts the notion of affective body derived from Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of affect, and investigates the dynamics of trauma and melancholy in chernukha. The hypothesis is that the sensationalist and unrestricted discourse of sexuality and the body found in many perestroika films in fact reproduces traumatic anxieties and the inability to move beyond historical inscriptions of the Soviet era. As such, chernukha cinema emerges not only as a traumatic representation, contained within a given film, but also it becomes ...

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