Page 119 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

CONCLUSION
Balabanov's and recent Russian Cinema's, unequivocal ethical standing becomes explicit in the light
of his major two major works, Brat {Brother, 1996) and Vojna {War, 2002), where he openly challenges
the ongoing liberalisation and Westernisation of Russia as the source of lawlessness and ethnic wars.
His is not a new sentiment - it has been around since the times of Peter the Great and intensified the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century, but its traditionalist Slavophile, anti-modernist impetus that has
inspired Berdyaev's 'The Russian Idea has never really been tackled by cinema.
The Russian Imperial cinema and the Soviet avant-garde, as stated above, were powerful channels of
western modernisation, while the Soviet cinema mobilised anti-Western feelings for its own brand of
anti-traditionalism, epitomised by the national myth of the Socialist Paradise on Earth.
The tragic clash between tradition and modernity that has engendered the Gothic novel and
drama, and has historically nurtured horror cinema, is played out with a vengeance in Of Freaks and
Men It could be seen as a textbook rendition of Berdyaev's 'religious existentialist' tenet that the
'history of society is determined not by economics and politics but by religion and philosophy'. And,
one is tempted to add, by cinema.

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