Document Type
Article
Abstract
After the bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, Putin’s administration reacted promptly to the new rhetoric in Washington and, in turn, re-branded Russia’s campaign in Chechnya as a clear-cut conflict of backward Islamic terrorists assaulting civilized Russia. As a result, the entire Chechen nation and its struggle for political independence has been systematically misrepresented and maligned in the Russian mass media, particularly in film and television. While an abundance of scholarship has examined what sorts of stories Western film and TV drama have been telling about war and terror, and what kinds of myths and ideologies they have been projecting or questioning since 2001, surprisingly little has been said about the representations of the ongoing Russo-Chechen conflict in contemporary Russian cinema, which changed dramatically after 9/11. Focusing on Nikita Mikhalkov’s film 12 (2007), this article offers the first comprehensive insight into the subject. By combining a socio-historical contextualization with close readings of selected scenes from 12, the following analysis argues that Mikhalkov’s film is the first cinematic counter-narrative that not only problematizes the Kremlin-propagated discourse on the Northern Caucasus, but also calls attention to the issues of racism, xenophobia and public indifference to human suffering in contemporary Russian society. It is further argued that Mikhalkov’s subversive rhetoric and his critical attempt to explore possible routes to minority support complicate his status in Russian and Western scholarship as an extreme nationalist and a pro-Kremlin artist, demanding that we revisit his films with more attention.
Repository Citation
Ladygina, Yuliya. "Nikita Mikhalkov’s Cinematic Verdict on Contemporary Russia." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 11, no. 4, 2011, pp. 1–13. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol11/iss4/15