Kevin M.F. Platt

History, Image and Repetition:
From 19C Painting to Stalinist Film
April 1, 2005

Abstract:
Iconic representations of national history tend to be used and reused over the course of many generations of political life: part of their affective power relates to their own ingrained, dusty historicity (the potency of the Gettysburg Address relates as much to its continual redeployment over a century and a half of political life as to its initial rhetorical effectiveness). Yet when a representation of the past is reused to many different ends, it can accumulate traces of many and even ironically incompatible significances.

In this talk I examine visual representations of the Russian national past and their reuse in historical painting (Ilya Repin), opera (Rimsky-Korsakov, Shaliapin), and film (Sergei Eisenstein) over the course of six and a half decades of rapid political change (1880-1945) in order to study this dynamic of affective and significatory superinscription.

Kevin M.F. Platt
Associate Professor & Chair
Slavic Languages and Literatures
Acting Chair
Comparative Literature
University of Pennsylvania