The Department of Cinema and Media Studies is pleased to announce the symposium, BY THE VERY BLUE SEA: BORIS BARNET AND HIS FILMS, which will be held at the University of Chicago on March 6–7, 2026, in conjunction with the retrospective of Barnet’s work at UChicago’s Doc Films in January–March, 2026.
In English-language scholarship, Boris Barnet (1902–1965), a contemporary of Sergei Eisenstein, is considered a member of the second generation of Soviet filmmakers. He started making films in 1927, two years later than Eisenstein, did not write about Montage, and made mostly genre films. The Soviet tradition, however, views Barnet as one of most brilliant and unusual filmmakers of his time, and a peer to Eisenstein, Dovzhenko, and Vertov. French filmmakers and critics too, due in large part to Henri Langlois of the Cinématheque Française who discovered Barnet in the 1950s, think of him as the unquestionable crème de la crème of Soviet cinema. This symposium aims to reassess Barnet’s place and placement in cinema history, delve into his films, and showcase the most recent scholarship on the filmmaker for the University of Chicago community and beyond.
SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE
Friday, March 6 – Cobb Hall 307
10:00–10:30 Maria Belodubrovskaya, Opening remarks
10:30–11:30 Bernard Eisenschitz, “To the Distant Observer: Life Had Crept Into the Stereotypes”
11:30–12:30 Valérie Pozner, “Boris Barnet: Out of Genre”
1:30–2:30 Anna Kovalova, “The Tale of Two Cats: Untangling the Early Collaboration between Boris Barnet and Nikolai Erdman”
3:00–4:00 Jonathan Rosenbaum, “The ‘Very Blue’ or ‘Bluest’ in Black and White”
4:30–5:30 Screening of The Thaw (1931)
Friday, March 6 – Logan Center 201
7:00 PM Screening of Once Upon a Night (1944) on 35mm
Saturday, March 7 – Cobb Hall 307
10:00–11:00 Vincent Bohlinger, “Barnet’s Montage vs. Soviet Montage”
11:00–12:00 Peter Bagrov, “A Whistle-Stop on the Pantheon: The Reception of Boris Barnet and His Films Across Time”
1:00–2:00 Yuri Tsivian and Daria Khitrova, “The Big Iron on His Hip: Barnet’s Jeddy and Kuleshov’s Collective”
2:00–3:00 Closing discussion with Anne Eakin Moss, Christina Kiaer, and Julia Vaingurt
Saturday, March 7 – Doc Films
4:00 PM Screening of Alyonka (1961) on 35mm
7:00 PM Screening of Bountiful Summer (1950) on 35mm
The symposium is organized by Maria Belodubrovskaya and Hannah Yang with support from the Adelyn Russell Bogert Fund of the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Warner-Reynolds Research Scholar Fund, Doc Films, the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, the Film Studies Center, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, the Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies, and the Department of Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.