Police Aesthetics

by Vatulescu, Cristina

• ISBN13: 9780804760805
• ISBN10: 0804760802
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-11-08
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

The documents emerging from the secret police archives of the former Soviet bloc have caused scandal after scandal, compromising revered cultural figures and abruptly ending political careers.Police Aestheticsoffers a revealing and responsible approach to such materials. Taking advantage of the partial opening of the secret police archives in Russia and Romania, Vatulescu focuses on their most infamous holdings--the personal files--as well as on movies the police sponsored, scripted, or authored. Through the archives, she gains new insights into the writing of literature and raises new questions about the ethics of reading. She shows how Soviet files and films influenced the writing of literature, from autobiographies to novels, from high-culture classics to avant-garde experiments and popular blockbusters. In so doing, she opens a fresh chapter in the heated debate about the relationship between culture and politics in twentieth-century police states.

Author Biography

Cristina Vatulescu is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Zones of Contact: Literature, Film and the Secret Police	p. 1
Reading a Secret Police File	p. 11
"Police Aesthetics,"	p. 20
The Road Plan	p. 24
Arresting Biographies: The Personal File in the Soviet Union and Romania	p. 27
Preamble: Fragmentary Archives	p. 27
A Short Genealogy of the Secret Police File	p. 32
Surveillance Files: Characterization Through Collation	p. 34
Investigation Files: From Autobiography to Confession	p. 39
Stalinist Files: How Many of Those Enemies Were Forged	p. 41
Post-Stalinist Files: The Age of Surveillance	p. 46
A Note on Foucault	p. 53
The Master and Margarita: The Devil's Secret Police File	p. 55
The Distinguishing Characteristics of the Devil in 1930s Moscow	p. 56
Writer Prototypes: Madmen, Apostles, and Secret Police Investigators	p. 59
Censorship and the Authority of the Word	p. 63
Stalinist "Fantastic Reality" and Its Textual Practices	p. 68
Mikhail Bulgakov's Personal File	p. 69
Repetitions with Suspect Differences: The Writer as Copyist	p. 72
Early Soviet Cinema's Shots at Policing	p. 77
Filmmaking and Fingerprinting: Dziga Vertov's Film Theory and Practice	p. 78
Hidden and Artfully Exhibited Cameras	p. 85
The Original Show Trial Film and Its Audience	p. 88
Alexander Medvedkin: Cinema as Public Prosecutor	p. 92
The Indistinguishable Crowd: Criminal Challenges to Vision and Visual Technologies	p. 99
The Forged Party Card: Detaching Photographs, Names, and Identities	p. 103
Vigilance: The Look of High Stalinism	p. 108
Legitimizing Cinematic Vision: Socialist Realism, Depth Style and The Party Card	p. 110
Stalin as Scriptwriter and His Chekist Protagonist	p. 114
Melodrama and the Police	p. 115
Vision, Visual Technologies, and Policing	p. 118
The Many Ways Film Directors Took Shots at Policing	p. 121
Secret Police Shots at Filmmaking: The Gulag and Cinema	p. 123
The Camp as Soviet Exotica: Solovki	p. 124
An OGPU Blockbuster: Road to Life	p. 135
Discipline, Punishment, and a New OGPU Experiment	p. 137
Film Techniques and Secret Police Tactics	p. 140
Violence and Stylistic Innovation	p. 144
Interpellating a Dubious Public: The Belomor Project	p. 147
Multimedia Portraits of the Camp Inmate	p. 152
Belomor's Femininity: The Prostitute and the Shock Worker	p. 153
The Place of the Arts in the Belomor Project	p. 157
Literary Theory and the Secret Police: Writing and Estranging the Self	p. 161
Two Masters of Estrangement: Lev Tolstoy and Ivan the Terrible	p. 163
Revolutionary Estrangement and the Explosion of the Self	p. 165
Self-Estrangement and Self-Effacement	p. 167
Deposition and Autobiography: An Estranging Encounter	p. 169
"This is surrealism": Estrangement in the Interrogation Room	p. 173
Eulogy to the Lie: Self-Estrangement and Reeducation	p. 181
Concluding Thoughts	p. 187
Notes	p. 199
Index	p. 239
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