goEast_2024_Katalog

These sort of renegotiations and ambivalences can also
be found elsewhere in the region. Take the Soviet film
SEVERE YOUNG MAN / STROGIY YUNOSHA (1935), made
by Lithuanian director Abram Room in Ukraine after he
fell out of favour in Moscow. This film concerned with the
role of free love, love triangles and free will was eventually
banned when the work failed to be subsumed within the
ideals of Socialist Realism. Viewed from today’s vantage
point, the film is indeed queer in many ways, featuring
as it does classes, values and aesthetics that fall outside
of the norms of the time. Although the film’s characters
do discuss the moral values of communist societies, they
do so in saunas, in various states of undress, flexing their
muscular bodies while surrounded by antique statues.
Another Soviet Ukrainian production, DUBRAVKA (1967),
directed by Radomyr Vasylevskyi and based on the
eponymous story by Radiy Pogodin, depicts a teenage
tomboy with a “weird” name approaching adolescence
and developing her first crush – on a beautiful young
woman. While bravely courting “Rainbow” (as the tomboy
has nicknamed her crush), Dubravka grapples with her
growing awareness of gender expressions and roles,
among other things, finding herself alien to both the male
and female children surrounding her, “a cat that walks
by itself”. Sadly, the film is sanctimoniously infused with
more “heterodoomy” vibes than the original story, but it
still undoubtedly remains the queer darling of post-Soviet,
and especially Ukrainian film history. Symposium guests
Mariam Agamian and Olenka Syaivo Dmytryk will talk
about the queer readings of this film after its screening.
Regarding the film’s finale, they write: “Will the audience
believe in the closet and that gender and sexual roles are
played correctly? And did they believe it back in the 60s?
Or, on the contrary, did DUBRAVKA become an inspiration
and an example for a generation of tomboys, fairies,
Rainbows and tale-tellers?” (Syaivo and Agamian, 2022)
Uncovering and preserving forgotten queer pasts has long
been an urgent need of queer communities, and in recent
years it has become an important grassroots endeavour
throughout Central and Eastern Europe. We have invited
grassroots archivists, activists, researchers and curators
who act as memory agents, who are queering and diversifying
collective memories of (post-)socialist countries,
to talk about their experiences, goals and practices. The
archives that preserve often violently erased or invisible
traces of queerness in the regions are pivotal for reformulating
CEE pasts. But it is also crucial that the archival
materials circulate, as that is what creates memories, as
Dagmar Brunow (2019) writes. Anamarija Horvat makes
a similar point in her book Screening Queer Memory:
LGBTQ Pasts in Contemporary Film and Television,
arguing that film is an “affective memory resource”, as it
is a key element of the transmission of historical memory
for LGBTQ+ communities. Queer memory, she writes,
“is therefore a complex one, as it is impossible to
speak of LGBTQ people as a minority community
constructed in the same manner as either ethnic
or religious minority groups, though the queer community
will of course find itself formed across the
intersections of many such groups. In other words,
while the passage of memory in other minority
communities frequently occurs along familial
intergenerational lines, LGBTQ memory is more often
omitted from how families choose to narrate their
own past.” (2021, 4)
The Future
While curating this Symposium, it was sometimes
challenging to focus on thinking about queer cinema
and art when so many lives, including the lives of the
Symposium co-curator and participants from Ukraine
and Armenia, are often in direct danger for broader
reasons than sexuality and/or gender identity. On the
other hand, the Russian dictatorial regime is very vocal
about non-heteronormativity and gender expansiveness
being one of the pillars of the “Satanic West” that it wants
to devour. Although it is not easy to imagine a future when
one’s physical survival comes down to a matter of luck
during rocket attacks that occur on a regular basis, we are
making this effort as a gesture of our will to live – and
love – freely. However, the freedom of queer people of
Ukraine is not automatically guaranteed by the fall of the
empire that is actively trying to obliterate them (along
with their fellow citizens) at this very moment. Wars are
notorious for reinforcing divisions in societies: some lives
of queer Ukrainians are already more “grievable” (and
therefore deemed worthy of commemoration in cinema
and art) than others (Butler, 2009) – the lives of those
LGBT+ individuals fighting on the frontlines as part of the
Ukrainian Armed Forces – while many others, especially
transgender women and gender-expansive persons with a
“male” designation in their passports, are trying to navigate
the harsh reality of the martial law that prohibits them
from leaving the country as well as impending obligatory
mobilisation (among them, several potential, but sadly
absent guests of this Symposium). This is an extremely
volatile and challenging topic to discuss at this moment
in time, but it is also a perfect example for why exactly
it is important to continue conversations about the
future – despite all odds, despite the multiple man-made
tragedies erupting and unfolding in the modern world.
There is probably no more suitable place to have such
conversations than in the context of events dedicated to
queerness.
José Esteban Muñoz (2009, 1), when passionately writing
about queer utopian potential, claims that queerness is
“that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough,
that indeed something is missing”, but also a “warm
illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality”. The
Symposium will ponder the utopian potential of (queer)
futures, expanding on the notion of queer imagination as
something broader than sexuality and gender identity. We
will think of what ‘queer’ means as a verb – a constant
questioning of hierarchies and power imbalances permeating
social and political structures, a tool for disrupting
them and at the same time for offering an alternative
imaginary. Muñoz argued that a queer idealism could
be not an abstract one, but instead must be political. We
have invited artists, activists, festival programmers and
filmmakers from Ukraine, Armenia and Kazakhstan to
talk about the potential of queer feminist thinking as a
tool for political transformation. Slovenian scholar Katja
Čičigoj will be musing on queer art’s potential to imagine
different, better and more just futures and societies in her
lecture Utopian Disidentifications: Pleasure, Critique and
the Future in Queer Art.
69 CINEMA ARCHIPELAGO: SYMPOSIUM