Morley, Rachel;
(2022)
"The grinding of sand on tiles…”: Forms of female subjectivity in 'DAU. Katya Tanya'.
Apparatus: Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe
, 14
10.17892/app.2022.00014.293.
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Abstract
This article offers a close reading of 'DAU. Katya Tanya' (2020, Germany, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Russia), one of the seven DAU films which Jekaterina Oertel co-directed with Ilya Khrzhanovskiy. After first surveying a broad range of responses to the position and role of women in the DAU project from journalists, film critics, cultural commentators, academics, project participants, crew members, and the directors themselves, I discuss the film’s representation of the protagonist, Katya, in the light of this context. Approaching 'DAU. Katya Tanya' as cinema, as an aesthetic object, but also considering the ways in which it reveals the project’s tension between the ‘real’ and the staged, I argue – contrary to most existing responses – that the female subject does, at times, occupy a meaningful and active place in the film (and, by extension, in parts of the project), but that this is not sustained. To do so, I examine the ways in which female subjectivity is expressed formally (that is, cinematically) in the film. My analysis falls into two main parts. I focus initially on the film’s first, self-contained nine-and-a-half minutes, which function as a prologue, outlining how Khrzhanovskiy and Oertel make use of formal cinematic means of expression connected with the symbolic actions of speaking, looking, and feeling to express their female protagonist’s subjectivity. In the second part, I consider the ways in which, and the extent to which, the directors succeed in incorporating a woman’s perspective – what we might term the “female gaze” – and in privileging the “female subject-position” across the film as a whole. My focus here is on Khrzhanovskiy and Oertel’s representation of sex, both heterosexual and lesbian, in the film’s four sex scenes. Finally, I consider the impact of the film’s ending on the representation of the female protagonist and its significance as part of Khrzhanovskiy’s stated aim in DAU to use the past as a vehicle for talking about the problems of the present day.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | "The grinding of sand on tiles…”: Forms of female subjectivity in 'DAU. Katya Tanya' |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.17892/app.2022.00014.293 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.17892/app.2022.00014.293 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © 2022 Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The articles in Apparatus are published under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This license does not apply to the media referenced, which are subject to the individual rights owner's terms. The authors hold the copyright without restrictions and retain publishing rights without restrictions. |
| Keywords: | Jekaterina Oertel, Ilya Khrzhanovskiy, Denis Shibanov, Ekaterina Uspina, Tatiana Polozhy, female subjectivity, female gaze, cinematic language, feminist film theory, cinematic sex, pornography, Russian women's cinema, lesbian cinema, lesbian gaze, LGBT rights in contemporary Russia |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > SSEES UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10150909 |
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