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Ways of Seeing: On Kira Muratova's Brief Encounters and Larisa Shepit′ko's Wings
Author(s) -
KAGANOVSKY LILYA
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
the russian review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.136
H-Index - 24
eISSN - 1467-9434
pISSN - 0036-0341
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9434.2012.00664.x
Subject(s) - movie theater , narrative , construct (python library) , trace (psycholinguistics) , perspective (graphical) , aesthetics , sociology , history , literature , art , art history , visual arts , philosophy , computer science , linguistics , programming language
This article looks at Larisa Shepit′ko's Wings ( Krylia , 1966) and Kira Muratova's Brief Encounters ( Korotkie vstrechi , 1967) from the perspective of “female authorship.” The article argues that the work of Shepit'ko and Muratova represents a kind of Soviet “counter‐cinema” that puts the questions of seeing differently at the center of its interrogations. Here, I trace some of the ways we might begin to see the strategies, both formal and narrative, that construct new “ways of seeing” for Soviet cinema, and to place these two films in the larger history of not only Soviet cinema (or the cinema of the Thaw), but of cinema more generally and women's cinema more specifically. This analysis will start with Muratova's Brief Encounters and then move to Shepit′ko's Wings , to show the different ways in which these two films (and these two directors) break with cinematic conventions to give us a different kind of cinema, a different way of filming, and perhaps, also, a desire to see differently.