Focusing on a continuity of abandoned potentialities in cinema, the contributions to Re-Cinefications: Decentring the Archive of Soviet Film enable differentiated perspectives on the heterogeneous geographies of Soviet film. The early history of Soviet cinema coincides with the fall of the Russian Empire and the subsequent establishment of local film institutions across its former territories. Within the Soviet modernization project this process was denoted as the ‘cinefication’ of the culturally heterogeneous USSR, in unison with electrification, industrialization, and collectivization. Emphasising “cinema’s relational character,” media theorist Pavle Levi has expanded the meaning of ‘cinefication’ as establishment of material infrastructure for producing and distributing films: The spread of cinema as a technical medium gradually blended human and machine perception – to the extent of a “general cinefication” of the visible world. Interwoven into historically particular political projects, "the technologies and the practices of mechanical image production and reproduction [...] have irrevocably transformed the role of the imaginary in the social reality.” (Levi 2012, 84) A decentring approach to the archive(s) of Soviet film allows to encounter the complex relations between the imaginary and the social, which constituted the cinefied geographies of the Soviet state, as well as guided past and present aspirations of social change coming from its peripheries.

Which — minor and multiple – re-cinefications can occur in the critical, experimental, and decentring interventions to the legacy of Soviet film? Re-Cinefications: Decentring the Archive of Soviet Film invites scholarly, artistic, and filmmaking practices to the dialogue about current potentialities of reclaiming the past.

Friday, 3 October 2025
11:00–17:00 Workshop at Forum eikones
with contributions by Caroline Damiens, Nino Dzandzava, Oksana Sarkisova, Matthew Vollgraff

Saturday, 4 October 2025
10:00–15:30 Workshop at Forum eikones
with contributions by Philip Widmann, Boško Prostran (Doplgenger)
17:30–20:30 Screenings and conversations at neues kino
films by Assaf Gruber, Dana Iskakova, and Oleksiy Radynski
Dana Iskakova, Lyuba Knorozok, and Assaf Gruber in conversation

More information and full programme available here.


Organized by Olexii Kuchanskyi (eikones, University of Basel), Clea Wanner (Department of Slavic Studies, University of Basel), and Philip Widmann (Department of Film Studies, University of Zurich). Supported and hosted by eikones–Centre for the Theory and History of the Image, with addtional support by the Swiss National Science Foundation as part of the research project Paranational Cinema – Legacies and Practices at the University of Zurich, Freiwillige Akademische Gesellschaft Basel, Ukrainian Research in Switzerland (URIS) at the University of Basel, Osteuropa Forum Basel