The Program in Cultures, Civilizations, and Ideas invites you to a talk by Zachary Hicks.
When: Monday, March 9, 12:30-13:30
Where: Humanities Seminar Room (H-232)
Title: Soviet Cinema after Growth: Objective Form and Economic Downturn in Gleb Panfilov’s I Wish to Speak
Abstract: Across disciplines, scholars have described the decades since the 1970s as marked by economic downturn, deferred futures, and a loss of historical direction. This talk examines how this crisis of growth manifested in culture behind the Iron Curtain, focusing on the cinema of the Soviet 1970s, the period of “Late Socialism” in which the promise of socialist modernity seemed increasingly to give way to economic and political stagnation. This talk will offer Gleb Panfilov’s 1976 film I Wish to Speak as an allegorical exploration of political affect and historical time under late socialism. Focusing on the film’s protagonist, Elizaveta Uvarova, a provincial Party official earnestly committed to socialist construction, I argue that the film is organized around a principle of circular temporality that produces a condition of animated suspension: constant striving without resolution. Rather than reading the film as a straightforward reflection of Brezhnev-era “stagnation,” I draw on Roberto Schwarz’s notion of “objective form” to examine how aesthetic form mediates between the film’s internal logic and broader social processes. The analysis concentrates on two interrelated formal features: the film’s affective economy and Panfilov’s use of sound. Uvarova’s emotional life—marked by stoicism in private loss and tears only in moments of political commitment—generically inverts cinematic melodrama, redirecting affect from the domestic sphere toward collective concerns. At the same time, the interplay of diegetic and extradiegetic sound—most notably through songs—aurally binds together disparate social spheres, from family life to Party bureaucracy. These formal strategies culminate in the film’s circular narrative structure, which begins and ends with deferral. I argue that this circularity functions as the mediating term between aesthetic form and late-Soviet social reality, rendering legible a crisis of historicity characteristic of the period.
Bio: Zachary Hicks is a doctoral candidate in Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Program in Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on former Second World cultures since the 1970s in relation to political economic transformation and the advent of globalization. His work has appeared and is forthcoming in venues like Comparative Literature, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Slavic Review, and elsewhere. He sits on the editorial board of Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences and is a founding member of the editorial collective of Long-Haul Magazine, a journal of international labor history and culture.