The aesthetics of justice: recognition and the Holocaust in Soviet films of the Thaw

Abstract

ABSTRACT The mediatisation of war crimes trials in the USSR during the Thaw led to the emergence of a sub-genre of the Soviet war film: melodramas focused on the unmasking of Nazi collaborators through narrative recognition. Built on the trope of anagnorisis, the films hold an aesthetic mirror to the juridical process of investigating, sentencing and punishing enemies of the state, resolving the disruption of collaboration to the Soviet myth of war. But by drawing upon the authority and effect of witness to trauma, the films also generate an indexical reference to the time and place of experience, undermining the narrative logic of the genre. The Lithuanian television film, Balys Bratkauskas’ Two in a Small Town (1965), marks a significant departure from the genre, testifying to the Holocaust by conveying the intimacy of violence in the western periphery of the USSR.