Lecture by Birgit Buemers

Tashkent - 10 September 2021.
Ways of Looking. In this lecture, Professor Birgit Beumers (UK) explores different ways of looking at films. She focuses on the theme of national identity, using two films about football -- Jafar Panahi's Offside and Sonke Wortmann's Miracle of Bern -- as case studies to scrutinise how the films show the bonding of people. Then she discusses different approaches to time in the films Run Lola Run by Tom Tykwer and Russian Ark by Alexander Sokurov. She investigates how the films play with time, how they expand or condense it: one film shows 20 minutes three times, while the other captures 300 years of history in 90 minutes, and in a single take.

Birgit Beumers is Professor emeritus in Film Studies, Aberystwyth University (UK); she has taught at Cambridge and Bristol universities, and currently replaces the chair in Slavic Studies at Passau University, Germany. She specialises in Russian culture, cinema and theatre, and the cinemas of the former Soviet territories, especially Central Asia. She has published widely on Russian and Central Asian cinema, including A History of Russian Cinema (2009) and A Companion to Russian Cinema (2016). She is editor of the book series KINO (Bloomsbury), and KinoSputniks (intellect) as well as the journals KinoKultura and Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema. Member of FIPRESCI.