Page 115 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

in Outskirts is the tension between the new' Russian way of life and the old' Soviet one. Structured
as a postmodern pastiche, the film mobilises the early Socialist Realism aesthetics, signified by the
borrowed title of Boris Barnett's 1933 classic and by the black-and-white visuals. The characters
an unruly bunch of peasants from the Russian hinterland, are ironic replicas of famous cinematic
prototypes from the period, and so is their textbook opposition to capitalism. They take their
explicitly sadistic tactics against de-collectivisation of their village all the way to Moscow, where hell
breaks loose. Lutsik's 'perfect sense of pastiche' allows him to 'lean heavily on [the] source material
and yet manage to maintain [the film's] own stature [in this] attack on capitalism which even Soviet
cinema in its heyday could not tise to'. 3 5
Maverick director Artur Aristakisjan joins Lutsik in this unprecedented 'attack on capitalism'.
His two docudramas Ladoni (Palms, 1994) and Mesto na zemle (Place on Earth, 2001) feature close
observations of the abject lifestyle of urban outcasts whom Aristakisjan spent quite a long time getting
to know. His films deliberately pursue the cutaneous sensation of humiliation and physical trauma,
culminating in the self-mutilation scene in Place on Earth, where the hippie leader cuts off his penis in
a symbolic protest against people leaving the commune, and in the particularly sadistic episode whete
a desperate mother tortures her child out of fear that it would be taken away from her. A n d although
the director prefers to describe these shocking images as expressions of the raw romanticism of

The new hyper-realist face or die horror genre: Place on Earth (¿001)

101