Virtual Friday Night Films at the Wende: Disgraced Monuments

Disgraced Monuments was filmed in Moscow and Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad) in 1991 and 1992 and edited in the Wexner Center’s Film/Video Studio in the fall of 1993. In the nearly 100 years of Russian and Soviet history that filmmakers Laura Mulvey and Mark Lewis cover in the video, successive waves of iconoclasm have left a trove of relics—dismantled and often partially destroyed monuments—that memorialize the nation’s various political regimes. Now mostly hidden away in museums, warehouses, and studios, these objects occupy a curious, almost undefinable place in post-Soviet Russian culture. Are they painful reminders of oppression? Or an important part of cultural heritage? Can they be both?

This week’s selection is presented in conjunction with the Cold War Spaces program Contested Space: Communist and Confederate Monuments.

Disgraced Monuments is streaming for free online through August 14, 2020, courtesy of the Wexner Center for the Arts, click here to watch. The text excerpt was written by Jennifer Lange, Curator, Film/Video Studio Program at the Wexner Center for the Arts.

—

Virtual Film Picks are inspired by the in-person Friday Night Films at the Wende program series. This selection is part of a curated list of weekly movie suggestions that can be watched at home, in conjunction with #WendeOnline.