Eccentric Rhythms: Soviet Cinema Revisited

Maria Corrigan
Film and Media Studies
UC Santa Barbara

The dissertation explores the art produced by the members of the Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS), a collective founded in the revolutionary exhilaration of the Soviet Union in the early 1920s. Poised as it was at a crossroads between the aesthetic traditions of theater and cinema, avant-garde experimentation and socialist realism and, most significantly, silent and sound film, the youthful and enthusiastic FEKS negotiated a rapidly changing political landscape and the demands placed on Soviet artists by the state. The project synthesizes elements of the previously fragmented, untranslated history and legacy of eccentrism in the Soviet Union, in order to shed light on a poignant and informative example of media in transition across technological, national, and ideological barriers.