The Russian Institute held a Russian film festival and civic culture lecture at the Seoul Art Cinema in Jeong-dong, Jung-gu for four days from Thursday, November 2 to Sunday, November 5, 2023. At this film festival, which was planned as part of the 18th Humanities Week event hosted by the National Research Foundation of Korea, Professor Lee Ji-yeon of the Russian Institute conducted a total of four lectures on Russian culture and arts under the theme of “The Sound of Russian Film.”

Professor Lee Ji-yeon gave a lecture on how Soviet composer Dmitry Shostakovich (1906-1975) participated in 38 films, from the music for the silent film <New Babylon> (1929) to his posthumous work <Last on Thursday> (1977). He said he did. His active film music work, which covers everything from cartoons to popular commercial films, was said to be an unavoidable choice for a musician who had to hide his inner resistance to the system under Soviet oppression at times.

However, considering Shostakovich's passion for film music and his sharp reflection on film language, the extremely clichéd contradictory description of him as a hidden dissident is as much about the life of Soviet intellectuals as the assessment that his music is divisive and full of political cynicism. He said it was an arrogant and hasty judgment. He emphasized that this was the case with Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953), who had to endure criticism as a formalist, and Alfred Schnitke (1934-1998), a representative of Russian neo-avant-garde music, who lived a marginal life. He said that for them, film was not an alternative choice to continue life in the Soviet Union, but a cutting-edge and optimal medium for their avant-garde musical experiments.

Moreover, Prokofiev, who tried to think about the moving images of silent films through sound, Eduard Artemiev (1937-2022), who captured the unseen universe in film with extraordinary instruments like synesthesia machines, and sonicism and popular music. He emphasized that for Schnittke, who went back and forth unconventionally and told the divisive life of Soviet intellectuals in the 1970s through music, the film was rather a heterotopia filled with creative freedom and new possibilities.

Although it was a somewhat unfamiliar film to the public, about 500 people, including about 400 ticket buyers, attended the event, which included a total of 4 film screenings and 4 public lectures, confirming the fact that there is a very large base of Russian film enthusiasts in Korea. It was.