Балабанов. Перекрестки

In an interview following the release of his last feature film “Me Too” Aleksei Balabanov referred to it as a work of “fantastic realism”. This succinct formulation alludes to the tradition of magical realism and invites a close analysis of the film in the light of the artistic movement that perhaps had the most complex relationship with 20th-century literary modernism.

With the unexplained fantastic elements seamlessly interwoven with Balabanov’s signature hyper-realism, bizarre naming, themes of death and transcendence, and the incantation-like, disorienting soundtrack, “Me Too” demonstrates the director’s take on magical realism and in this way becomes distinctly different from the rest of Balabanov’s oeuvre.

This paper strives to uncover a less-studied modernist strand in Balabanov’s work—that of magical realism—through a close analysis of the ways in which its various tropes and elements are employed and re-imagined in his last film.

Aleksandr Pogrebnyak. Judgement of History: Balabanov’s Verdict

The main line of Balabanov’s films is philosophising contemporary Russian history whose logic is most clearly reflected in the dialectic trinary of “Dead Man’s Bluff”, “Cargo 200”, and “Me Too”. The first of those represents the 1990s, and its jocular tone enhances the critical diagnosis to the contemporary Russian statehood—the point is not even that an office with a view to the Kremlin is taken by a thug but that he is a subject who stakes on “safety measures” that guarantee him survival in any situation. “Dead man’s bluff” with a bulletproof folder is a sign of a radical dystopia—in the 1990s succeeded only he who was choosing foul play by default and preferred self-preservation instinct to existential authenticity—which is why the main value now would be “stability”, fair play for everyone else. “Cargo 200”, set in the 1980s, is not only a backstory but also an antithesis of “Dead Man’s Bluff”—even though motives of despair, pathology and absolute evil prevail here, utopian theme is also present; characters might kill and rape each other but nonetheless they all have human dreams—which is why a perspective, a horizon of future opens in the film’s end. Finally, “Me Too” may be seen as a final result: the people of Leninsk of the day before yesterday no more have a place in Moscow or Saint Petersburg; their “happiness” transformed into an “empty signifier”, and the “law” turned out to be the heaven’s irrational will; the power does not prevent them from going to the zone from which no one has ever returned.

Aleksei Medvedev. Balabanov: Genre as Metaphor

Genre and metaphor, it would seem, are non-congruent phenomena. However, in Balabanov’s work genre elements turn out to be not merely instruments to construct a story but precisely metaphorical references to mentalities and mindsets. It is not only, and not so much, a genre irony or an ironic commentary to Russian cinema of the 1990s, that is, not a second reality, but an exposure of rules in accordance with which our reality functioned, and still does. For instance, the moon in “Cargo 200” only at a first glance is a marker of horror, of zombies and vampires to come; it is, in fact, a concise and clear indicator that real ghouls are already here. It is this paradoxial use of genre that the paper is dedicated to.

John MacKay. “I Don’t Like Directors Much”: Balabanov’s Self-Reflexive Cinema

Balabanov’s films are often taken to be tough, realist portraits of Russia, past and present. Yet there is a distinctly modernist interest in filmmaking itself as a theme in his films, hidden allegorically within their plots. This paper is trying to read a few of Balabanov’s films, “Brother” especially, as allegories of their own production.

Colleen Montgomery. Of Freaks & Gangsters: Balabanov’s Post-Soviet Revisionist Cinema

In the early 1990s, the dissolution of the Soviet Union led to an unprecedented period of decline for the Russian film industry. In the wake of this collapse, many prominent critics and filmmakers faulted a “weak cinema mythology” for the dwindling state of their national film industry, and called for filmmakers to create a new national mythology for the post-Soviet era. Numerous Russian filmmakers heeded this call in fashioning new, positive national myths and heroes that “idealize Russia’s imperial past and culture.”