XIV - Carnivals bright, dark, and grotesque in the glasnost satires of Mamin, Mustafayev, and Shakhnazarov

Summary

I wish to focus on three filmmakers who represent something of the spectrum of film satire in the former Soviet Union under glasnost. And from the bright satire of Yuri Mamin's Neptune's Feast (Prazdnik Neptuna, 1986) to his darker film Fountain (Fontan, 1988) and on to Azerbaidjan director Vaghif Mustafayev's bright and bleak film The Villain (Merzavets, 1989) and finally to Karen Shakhnazarov's darkly grotesque Zero City (Gorod zero, 1989), I wish to conduct this critical journey through the framework of carnival laughter, be it bright, dark, or grotesque.

Mikhail Bakhtin reminds us of the power of carnival laughter in his discussion of the formation of the novel at the expense of the epic: “It is (popular) laughter that destroys the epic, and in general destroys any hierarchical (distancing and valorized) distance” (The Dialogic Imagination, p. 23). Satire is, like an unstable electron particle, always in danger of breaking down, becoming something else. In this brief discussion of three directors, therefore, I wish to suggest the transitional phase that we have witnessed in what was the Soviet Union in the period between 1986 and 1989, from a liberating joyful carnivalesque form of satire to a darkly troubling formula in which both the carnivalesque and satiric laughter completely break down.