Medvedkin, Medvedkin, Medvedkin!

Kino-train in the 30s, collective films of the Medvedkin groups in the 60s, Chris Marker’s homage to Medvedkin in the 90s: the name of the Soviet director Alexandar Medvedkin appears cyclically in the history of cinema. It appears as a subversive name: questioning the division of cinema into closed genres, questioning the separation between what can be filmed and what cannot, questioning the division between those who are entitled to film, and those who are not.
Within the frame of a half-day workshop, we would like to explore how these consecutive appearances produce a battlefield in which cinema becomes politically active and explosive. With our three speakers, our aim is to seize how these ‘Medvedkins’ constitute some singular points of tension between art and politics, between narration and matter, between representation and reality. Some real political moments which are also not without effects for a philosophical seizure of the relationships between singularity and universality, division and equality, tension and contradiction.