Satire and Protest in Putin's Russia ed. by Aleksei Semenenko (review)

Abstract

in fact the staggering examples of representations of deaths in movies make them funeral instruments’ (p. 222). Leaving aside the oddity of opposing death to reality, realistic ‘ontologies’ like André Bazin’s (Pop’s apparent target here) were nothing if not death-haunted. Adding to the general untidiness, the use of terms like ‘philosophy’ and ‘thinking’ oscillates between the specialized and the colloquial senses. What has initially presented itself as a rigorous intervention in the filmphilosophy debates ends up with proclamations like this: ‘Whenever we feel like screaming at the screen [exasperated by Cristi Puiu’s endlessly bickering characters from Sieranevada], philosophical intuitions are never far behind’ (p. 221). For someone who had earlier sneered (p. 7) at the existence of a book called The Philosophy of Clint Eastwood (The University Press of Kentucky, 2014), Pop’s sense of the philosophical can sometimes feel rather loose, if not all-accommodating.