This is a guest lecture by Dr Eva Binder, a senior researcher at the Department of Slavic Studies, University of Innsbruck (Austria). Her research interests include contemporary Russian cinema, 20th-century Soviet auteur cinema, the aesthetics of documentary film and literature, and transcultural and postcolonial approaches to Eastern European cultures. In addition, she is involved in promoting media literacy in the instruction of Russian as a foreign language.
The documentary work of many contemporary filmmakers invites viewers to contemplate what is presented, and engage in the gradual process of discovering what is within the frame. Rather than informing or instructing them, these films invite viewers to share a world. Furthermore, documentary films often rely on concrete locations, rendering them sensually perceptible. This is particularly true of Marina Razbežkina and Sergej Loznitsa, two documentary filmmakers whose films KANIKULY (Holidays, 2005) and PEJZAŽ (Landscape, 2003), together with their very different approaches to documentary filmmaking, will be the focus of this lecture. Analogous to the urban design approach of shared space, the lecture will argue that both films provide multi-sensory zones of encounter between filmmaker, subject and viewer. Building on this idea, the analysis of the two films will focus on this encounter, considering the ways in which the viewer is activated, the senses addressed beyond vision, and the role of the film form in stimulating active viewing.