The eighteenth annual Russian Film Symposium, “Recycle, Restage, Rewind,” was held on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh from Monday 2 May through Saturday 7 May 2016, with evening screenings at the Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ Melwood Screening Room.

While re-makes and sequels have long been a staple of filmmaking in the US and Western Europe, they were rare during the years of the Soviet Union. Indeed, re-makes were limited to reshooting published literary works, such as Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and Queen of Spades, and Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina. Even Grigorii Chukhrai’s The Forty-First (1956) was not so much a re-make of Iakov Protazanov’s film of the same title (1927) as a re-adaptation of Boris Lavrenev’s popular Civil War novel (The Forty-First, 1924). And sequels were missing from Soviet cinema for a different reason: multi-part feature films (in one case five full-length films) were all shot and edited at the same time, with individual parts going into distribution and exhibition less than a week apart. The one exception involving “Shurik,” the Soviet hero of an almanac film, became so popular with Soviet audiences that the director, Leonid Gaidai, made several follow-up feature films chronicling “Shurik’s” misadventures.

This tendency continued for the first fifteen years of the post-Soviet period. Over the past decade, however, re-makes and sequels have been a major presence on Russian screens. While this trend can be explained in part by the Russian film industry’s adoption of Western and international film practices, driven by the displacement of total state financing (with its relative indifference to box office receipts) by private capital investment (with its obsession for profits), the specific kinds of re-makes and sequels in Russia differ dramatically from their Western counterparts. Strangest of all (for the Western view), the boundary between re-makes and sequels is blurred in Russia: both are grounded in popular late-Soviet films (either big screen films or made-for-television films), but are set in present-day Russia, thereby foregrounding the discontinuities between daily life under “developed socialism” and daily life in the conditions of “developing capitalism.”

Attendance at individual events:

Monday 2 May:
10:00 (Posvar Hall, University of Pittsburgh):
Film: Andrei Konchalovskii’s The Postman’s White Nights, 2014
49 people

2:00 (Posvar Hall, University of Pittsburgh):
Film: Sergei Solov'ev’s 2-ASSA-2, 2009
42 people

7:00 Opening reception for the Russian Film Symposium (at the home of Vladimir Padunov and Nancy Condee)
98 invitations

Tuesday 3 May:
10:00 (Posvar Hall, University of Pittsburgh):
Film: Grigorii Chukhrai’s The Forty First, 1956
72 people

2:00 (Posvar Hall, University of Pittsburgh):
Film: Roman Prygunov’s Dukhless 2, 2015
68 people

Wednesday 4 May:
10:00 (Posvar Hall, University of Pittsburgh):
Film: Dmitrii Kisilev et al.: Elki 2, 2011
74 people

2:30 (Hemingway’s):
Roundtable: Recycle, Restage, Rewind (Part One)
Led by Nancy Condee (University of Pittsburgh) and Denis Gorelov (Komsomol'skaia Pravda)
44 people

7:30 (Pittsburgh Filmmakers):
Film: Oleg Stepchenko’s Forbidden Empire, 2014
97 people

Thursday 5 May:
10:00 (Posvar Hall, University of Pittsburgh):
Film: Rustam Khamdamov’s Parallel Voices, 2005
66 people

2:00 Excursion to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater
12 people

7:30 (Pittsburgh Filmmakers):
Film: Aleksei Fedorchenko’s Angels of Revolution, 2014
114 people

Friday 6 May:
10:00 (Posvar Hall, University of Pittsburgh):
Film: Zhora Kryzhovnikov’s Kiss Them All! 2, 2014
67 people

2:00 (Posvar Hall, University of Pittsburgh):
Film: Timur Bekmambetov’s Irony of Fate. The Continuation, 2007
61 people

7:30 (Pittsburgh Filmmakers):
Film: Renat Davletiarov’s The Dawns are Quiet Here, 2015
91 people

Saturday 7 May:
11:00 (Hemingway’s):
Roundtable: Red Empire Reloaded (Part Two)
Led by Vladimir Padunov (University of Pittsburgh) and Larisa Malyukova (Novaya Gazetta)
42 people

2:00 Excursion to Andy Warhol Museum and Duquesne Incline
12 people

7:30 (Pittsburgh Filmmakers):
Film: Vasilii Sigarev’s The Land of Oz, 2015
122 people

10:00 (Ali Baba’s):
Farewell banquet
40 people