Dealing with Soviet reality: Kira Muratova’s films as a distorted mirror, smashed to pieces | Kino 2025
Date and time:
Tuesday 15 April, 2025
18:30 - 20:00
Location:
ONLINE
No one has analysed Soviet reality and its various manifestations, the nature of violence, and its traces better than the filmmaker Kira Muratova. Although her films may appear absurdist and fantastical, they most accurately convey the essence of the processes she encountered in Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine, offering us effective tools to deal with this often traumatic experience and discuss it today. In this seminar, we will explore the methods Muratova employs to deconstruct Soviet rhetoric and dismantle traditional hierarchies—not only between different social groups but also between humans and animals, living beings and objects, dialogues and various soundscapes. In her films, all these elements are granted equal rights to exist within a single frame. Nothing remains secondary—or rather, everything becomes secondary at once. In this way, the aesthetic form of her films becomes its content, and editing, as the director herself states, emerges as the true protagonist of the film.
£35 general £25 student Friends and Benefactors of the Institute are also eligible for a discount.
Lecturer
Anna Onufriienko
Anna Onufriienko is a cultural studies researcher. From 2014 to 2022, she worked as a film critic and programmer at the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre (the Ukrainian film archive). She is a co-curator of exhibitions on Ukrainian cinema and art (VUFKU. Lost & Found, Ukrainian Film Posters of the 1920s–1930s) and co-director of the montage films ‘Atomopolis. Assembling Utopia’ (2016) and ‘Intervision-Lviv’ (2018). She has also worked as a programme coordinator for numerous retrospective film programmes. She is a co-editor of the books Cinematographic Revision of Donbas (2015, 2018) and VUFKU. Lost & Found (2019), as well as the DVD set Chornobyl [in]Visible (2017). Additionally, she has contributed articles to these publications and various other magazines. She completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Cultural Studies at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in The History of European Culture and Ideas at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Her research interests include Soviet cinema and visual propaganda, the history of technologies, and their representation in media.
