Sculpture and Affect in Cinema’s Expanded Field: From Aleksey Gherman’s Hard to Be a God to Aleksey Gherman Jr’s Under Electric Clouds

Abstract

The chapter unravels the intermedial and interart admixture of sculpture and cinema in the posthumously released magnum opus of Aleksey Gherman, and the subsequent work of his son, Aleksey Gherman Jr. The films of the two Ghermans share the ambition to expand the cinematic experience towards the plastic arts, revealing two distinct ways in which an ‘intermedial sensibility’ may emerge in contemporary cinema. Hard to be a God (Trudno byt bogom, 2013) provides unique insights into the performative value and the phenomenology of what we can conceive as the cine-sculptural. Under Electric Clouds (Pod elektricheskimi oblakami, 2015), on the other hand, foregrounds sculptures in film more literally within the context of contemporary culture and the productive overlaps between the domains of cinema and installation art. The essay also examines how these connect to specific Russian traditions and how the sculptural images and images of sculptures activate different relations to language.