Балабанов. Перекрестки

Colleen Montgomery. Of Freaks & Gangsters: Balabanov’s Post-Soviet Revisionist Cinema

In the early 1990s, the dissolution of the Soviet Union led to an unprecedented period of decline for the Russian film industry. In the wake of this collapse, many prominent critics and filmmakers faulted a “weak cinema mythology” for the dwindling state of their national film industry, and called for filmmakers to create a new national mythology for the post-Soviet era. Numerous Russian filmmakers heeded this call in fashioning new, positive national myths and heroes that “idealize Russia’s imperial past and culture.”

Aleksei Balabanov’s post-Soviet films, on the other hand, offer a radical alternative to this form of post-Soviet heritage film. Rather than offer a nostalgic view of Russian history and culture, his films—furnished with a host of “freakish” and unsavoury characters—cast a bleak light on Russia’s imperial past and propose no new national mythologies for the future. Looking at two of his most widely distributed, yet very stylistically divergent films, “Of Freaks and Men” and “Dead Man’s Bluff”, this paper examines how Balbanov’s post-Soviet films: deconstruct long-held national mythologies; create a new type of anti-hero, a ruthlessly capitalist, deeply individualist figure; and, lastly, shed light on the socio-economic impact of the introduction of a Western capitalist system to post-Soviet Russia.