Spanning six decades, her seventeen features and four shorts move from the late Soviet era to post-Soviet Ukraine, breaking cinematic rules with repetition, collage, unruly performance and a tactile, object-rich world. This volume reframes Muratova as an autrice working from the margins and proposes ex-cinema as a central concept in her radical practice at the edges of language, genre, and empire.
Across four parts, leading and emerging scholars examine form and style, gender and queer aesthetics, ethics and community and Muratovas dialogues with European cinema. Attending to decolonial questions, feminist perspectives, and the politics of visibility, the volume shows how her films unsettle canons and centres while tracing the collective artistry behind them.
It offers an accessible, interdisciplinary guide to a singular filmmaker and fresh scholarship for students, researchers and cinephiles.
Arvustused
Restless, dissonant, and formally radical, the films of Kira Muratova resist easy interpretation. This volume brings together leading scholars to explore aesthetic, political, and philosophical dimensions of her work, addressing questions of affect, gender, gesture, gaze, defamiliarization, perceptual disruption, Muratovas position between auteur cinema and art practice, as well as the ethical and political stakes of her cinema. Moving across films, themes, and theoretical approaches, the volume reveals Muratova as one of the most original artists of her time. * Oksana Bulgakowa, Professor of Film Studies at the Gutenberg University in Mainz *
Introduction: People Dont Like to Look at This: The Ex-Cinema of Kira
Muratova
Irina Schulzki and Irina Gradinari
Part I. Rebellion of Form
1. Late Style in Kira Muratovas Eternal Return
Ivan Sokolov
2. Neither Narrate nor Describe: Kira Muratovas Non-Totalising Art of
Collage
Irina Denischenko
3. Formalism and Defamiliarisation: A Study of Self-Reflective Form in Kira
Muratovas Film Aesthetics
Vera Kotelevskaya
4. A Different Rhythm of Breathing: Brevity in Muratova's Oeuvre
Eugénie Zvonkine
Part II. Reframing Gender
5. Gender Axiology in Soviet Cinema and Kira Muratovas Early Features
Nikolai Poselyagin
6. Gaze and Affect: The Asthenic Syndrome
Irina Gradinari
7. Reading Muratovas Aesthetics through Fashion
Marina Rojavin
Part III. Community and Ethics Reimagined
8. An Ethics of Gesture in Muratovas Cinema
Irina Schulzki
9. Kira Muratovas Likenesses
Lida Oukaderova
10. The Screen as Cage: Dismantling the Human-Animal Divide in The
Sentimental Policeman
Raymond De Luca
11. The Art of Deception: Genre, Attunement, and Intention Attribution in The
Tuner
David G. Molina
Part VI. Interlacements and Contexts
12. Through the Looking-Glass Water: Ex-Centric Visions in Muratova and
Parajanov
Olha Briukhovetska
13. Dysphonia as an Art Practice: Muratova, Tarkovsky, Gogoberidze
Lilya Kaganovsky
14. Loss of Control in Auteur Film: Agnès Varda and Kira Muratova
Michael Niehaus
15. Performatism of Language in the Films of Kira Muratova and Herbert
Achternbusch
Ilja Kukuj
16. Kira Muratova in the Ukrainian Cinematic Process: Perspectives from
National Film Scholarship
Larysa Naumova
Index
Irina Gradinari is Junior Professor of Gender Studies in Literary and Media Studies at the FernUniversität in Hagen. Her research interests include feminist theories of the gaze, genre and intersectionality, popular culture and cultural memory studies. Her publications include: Feministische Blicktheorien und ihre Folgen (2024); digital:gender de:mapping affect. Eine spekulative Kartografie (2025, co-edited with Julia Bee and Katrin Köppert), (Re-)Visionen: Epistemologien, Ontologien und Methodologien der Geschlechterforschung (2025, co-edited with Ksenia Meshkova and Stephan Trinkaus) and Staatsgenres: Zur politischen Dimension von Filmgenres (2025, co-edited with Michael Niehaus) Irina Schulzki is the Publishing Director of the open-access journal Apparatus: Film, Media, and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe. Her research spans film and gesture, fan fiction, theories of the comic, phenomenology and media, Mikhail Shishkins prose and the cinema of Kira Muratova. She has authored numerous articles and book chapters and edited several volumes and special issues, including Mise en geste: Studies of Gesture in Cinema (Apparatus 5, 2017; with Ana Hedberg Olenina) and Decolonising the (Post-)Soviet Screen (2024; with Heleen Gerritsen). She is currently completing the co-edited collection Cinéfemmes: Womens Cinema of the New Millennium (with Irina Gradinari; 2026) and a monograph, A Cinema of Gesture: Kira Muratova and the Poetics of the Moving Image.
