PhD Oral Exam - Egor Shmonin, Film and Moving Image Studies

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

This dissertation develops the concept of postpoetic documentality to describe a shared aesthetic and epistemological mode through which Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian filmmakers articulated decolonial forms of subjectivity within late Soviet documentary cinema, particularly during the Perestroika of the late 1980s. Tracing how dissensus and the distribution of the sensible become available within Soviet visual culture once its monopoly on representation begins to fracture, the dissertation argues that postpoetic documentality marks an epistemological departure from the earlier poetic cinema movements of each republic and from postcolonial models developed outside the Soviet context, naming instead an anti-imperial outcome internal to late Soviet cinema itself. The argument unfolds through three national case studies, each isolating a distinct gesture of subjectivation. Lithuanian cinema produces the subject through nomination, naming itself from within khôra, a space of pre-subjective potentiality, as in the declaration "This is I." Latvian cinema produces the subject through demand, an event rupturing the documentary apparatus from within, as in the dying imperative "Film me." Estonian cinema produces the subject through duration, a sustained inhabitation of historical and spatial in-betweenness theorized here as kairoskhôra. The dissertation positions postpoetic documentality as a mode of subjectivation specific to the late Soviet Baltic periphery, structurally bound to everydayness, landscape, disappearance, and the colonial apparatus of representation, and offers a comparative account of how decolonial subjectivity could be produced from within, rather than against, the apparatus of Soviet cinema itself.