Police Aesthetics

The Documents Emerging from the secret police archives of the former Soviet bloc present us with an urgent question: how do we read in archives that are more like explosive warehouses than the dustbin of history? Detonated by negligent readings, these documents have caused scandal after scandal, compromising revered cultural figures and abruptly ending political careers. Police Aesthetics offers a revealing and responsible approach to such materials. Taking advantage of the partial opening of the secret police archives in Russia and Romania, Vatulescu focuses on their most infamous holdings-the personal files-as well as on movies the police sponsored, scripted, or authored In the archives, she finds more than just secrets: she gains new insights into the writing of literature and raises new questions about the ethics of reading. She shows how police files and films influenced the writing of literature, from autobiographies to novels, from high-culture classics to avant-garde experiments and popular blockbusters.

Police Aesthetics opens a fresh chapter in the heated debate about the relationship between culture and politics in twentieth-century police states. Not only did the secret police shape many an artist's biography, its files redefined the literary production of the Soviet era in general, as the works of Isaac Babel, Victor Shklovsky, and Mikhail Bulgakov all attest. Similarly, Police Aesthetics tracks the fateful encounters between cinema and the secret police. Vatulescu analyzes the fascinating, if little known, corpus of secret police filmsùfrom newsreels to documentaries and featuresùand reveals unsettling policing fantasies in the works of Soviet cinema masters such as Dziga Vertov and Alexander Medvedkin.

General

ISBN		9780804760805
Fiction/Non-Fiction		Non-Fiction
Publisher		Stanford Univ Pr
Pages		247
List Price		$60.00
Author		Vatulescu, Cristina
Publication Date		11/08/2010
Release Status		In Print
Format		Hardcover
Language		English
Measurements		Height: 9 Inches (US) Width: 6 Inches (US) Thickness: 1 Inches (US) Unit Weight: 1.05 Pounds (US)