Ekaterina Smirnova holds a BA in Social Sciences from the Moscow State Institute of International Affairs (2010) and a MA in Culture Studies, Lisbon Consortium, from the Catholic University of Portugal (2015). Her professional background includes working in the Culture and Events industry in Lisbon for over three years and a previous internship in the Educational department of the Lisbon Marionette Museum.

Ekaterina is currently a PhD student in Culture Studies at the Catholic University of Portugal. She holds a scholarship from the Portuguese Science Foundation (FCT) that enables her to develop her doctoral project that focuses on the relationship between creativity and censorship. She analyses the effects of power infrastructures and censorship over the individuals in the animation film industry and argues that under specific conditions censorship may foster creativity and lead to the appearance of subversive means of storytelling. Main research interests are: Visual culture, Animation, Worldmaking, Creativity, Censorship, Marionette theatre, Power relations, Subversion and Resistance.

Animation and Censorship in Russia: in Search for a Methodology for an Unconventional Case of Conviviality

Animation film studies is a research area that is still relatively young and faces a few fundamental challenges compared to Film studies. This is not surprising as animation, as an object of study, since its origins passed very different stages: from praise to inferiority and back to position as an advanced form of art. One of the most pertinent problems that stand before the academia is what Suzanne Buchan addressed in her article  “Animation, in theory”[1]. She calls out for a definition of a well-made language, a new syntax that should be established in order to describe animation film – an area which has
been marginalized traditionally in the academic circles (Beckman, 2014: 118). I argue, that Culture studies can provide such a platform in order to leave behind the traditional hegemony of theories applied to animation from exclusively Media and Film studies. With this presentation I would like to give an overview of my current PhD thesis that has two broad aims: suggesting a possible vocabulary for the development of Animation studies and including it into the broader context of academia and applying this vocabulary to the sphere of my research which is the analysis of the power dynamics between censorship institution and the artists in the Animation film industry in Russia – a country that has established itself as one of the leaders of  the experimental animation film industry since its appearance. My research takes into consideration a

broad period including pre-revolutionary Russian Empire, USSR, and Russia and looks through the prism of Culture Studies at how censorship has been influencing and constituting the creative artistic process of selected animation directors through the turbulent years of modernity in Russia in  the atmosphere of tension with periods of fluctuation between repression and liberty. My primary research question is to see what disruptive and creative implications various types of censorship can bring and analyze the ever-changing power flow between the power institution and the artists. My presentation for the conference will include a few illustrative cases of animation films where directors instead of conforming to restrictions
imposed on them by the regime sought ways to “smuggle” meanings leading to animation becoming a liminal territory of manifestation of alternative artistic discourses and space of opposition to official ideology.

Key words: Animation, Censorship, Creativity, Culture studies,
Film studies, Power relations, Subversion, Visual Culture studies, Russia