Monday, March 8, 2021
7:00pm ET
Zoom webinar & YouTube Live
This event will be held virtually as a Zoom webinar and streamed via YouTube Live. There will be no in-person event.
Register here for the Zoom webinar, or tune in on YouTube Live.
Please join us for a meeting of the Russian Film Club with speakers Lioudmila Fedorova (Georgetown), Ilya Gerasimov (Ab Imperio), and Anne Lounsbery (NYU). Moderated by Daria Ezerova (Harriman Institute) and Mark Lipovetsky (Columbia University). This event is part of our Contemporary Culture Series.
Adaptations of literary classics set in the present either preserve the text in full, creating clashes with the present-day setting (Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet,1997), or adapt the plot to the modern setting as closely as possible, resulting in a loose adaptation (Clueless,1995; Ten Things I Hate About You, 1999; Sherlock, 2010-2017). Based on Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 novel, Grigorii Konstantinopol’skii mini-series Dead Souls (2020) combines the two approaches, resulting in an incisive comedy that is both burlesque and sharply critical of present-day Russian mores. At the same time, the series poses the question of how far a filmmaker can go in creating a “loose adaptation” and what ultimately defines a successful screen version of a literary classic.
