Vatulescu C. Police Aesthetics. Literature, Film, and the Secret Police in Soviet Times

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. — 264 p. — ISBN10: 0804786925; ISBN13: 978-0804786928.The documents emerging from the secret police archives of the former Soviet bloc have caused scandal after scandal, compromising revered cultural figures and abruptly ending political careers. Police Aesthetics offers a revealing and responsible approach to such materials. Taking advantage of the partial opening of the secret police archives in Russia and Romania, Vatulescu focuses on their most infamous holdings — the personal files — as well as on movies the police sponsored, scripted, or authored. Through the archives, she gains new insights into the writing of literature and raises new questions about the ethics of reading. She shows how police files and films influenced literature and cinema, from autobiographies to novels, from high-culture classics to avant-garde experiments and popular blockbusters. In so doing, she opens a fresh chapter in the heated debate about the relationship between culture and politics in twentieth-century police states.Zones of Contact: Lirerature, Film and rhe Secrer Police
Reading a Secrer Police File
"Police Aesrherics"
The Road PlanArresting Biographies: The Personal File in the Soviet Union and RomaniaPreamble: Fragmentary Archives
A Shorr Genealogy of the Secret Police File
Surveillance Files: Characrerizarion Through Collarion
Invesrigation Files: From Aurobiography to Confession
Stalinist Files: How Many of Those Enemies Were Forged
Post-Stalinist Files: The Age of Surveillance
A Note on Foucault, 53The Master and Margarita: The Devil's Secret Police FileThe Distinguishing Characrerisrics of rhe Devil in 1930's Moscow
Writer Prorotypes: Madmen, Apostles, and Secrer Police Invesrigators
Censorship and rhe Aurhority of the Word
Stalinist "Fantastic Reality" and Its Textual Pracrices
Mikhail Bulgakov's Personal File
Repetitions with Suspect Differences: The Writer as CopyistrEarly Soviet Cinema's Shots at PolicingFilmmaking and Fingerprinring: Dziga Venov's Film Theory and Pracrice
Hidden and Artfully Exhibited Cameras
The Original Show Trial Film and Its Audience
Alexander Medvedkin: Cinema as Public Prosecutor
The Indistinguishable Crowd: Criminal Challenges to Vision and Visual Technologies
The Forged Party Card: Deraching Phorographs, Names, and Identities
Vigilance: The Look of High Stalinism
Legitimizing Cinematic Vision: Socialist Realism, Depth Style and The Party Card
Stalin as Scriptwriter and His Chekist Protagonist
Melodrama and the Police
Vision, Visual Technologies, and Policing
The Many Ways Film Directors Took Shots at PolicingSecret Police Shots at Filmmaking: The Gulag and CinemaThe Camp as Soviet Exotica: Solovki
An OGPU Blockbuster: Road to Life
Discipline, Punishment, and a New OGPU Violence and Stylistic Innovation
Interpellating a Dubious Public: The Belomor Project
Multimedia Portraits of the Camp Inmate
Belomor's Femininity: The Prostitute and the Shock Worker
Experiment Film Techniques and Secret Police Tactics
The Place of the Arts in the Belomor ProjectLiterary Theory and the Secret Police: Writing and Estranging the SelfSelf-Estrangement and Self-Effacement
Deposition and Autobiography: An Estranging Encounter
"This is surrealism": Two Masters of Estrangement: Lev Tolstoy and Ivan the Terrible
Revolutionary Estrangement and the Explosion of the Self
Estrangement in the Interrogation Room
Self-Estrangement and ReeducationConcluding Thoughts