Eleftheria Thanouli

Eleftheria Thanouli is Professor in Film Theory at the School of Film at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her research interests include the representation of history on film, film narratology, digital cinema, film and politics and world cinema. She has contributed chapters in key publications, such as The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory (London: Routledge, 2013), The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013) and The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2016). She is the author of three monographs: Post-classical Cinema: an International Poetics of Film Narration (London: Wallflower Press, 2009), Wag the Dog: a Study on Film and Reality in the Digital Age (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013) and History and Film: A Tale of Two Disciplines (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018).

WHAT IF THAT WAS EXACTLY HOW IT WAS? SATIRE AND HISTORY IN THE DEATH OF STALIN

In his poetics of history, Hayden White argues that any historical work narrates the past using one of four kinds of emplotment: Romance, Tragedy, Comedy or Satire. In my recent work, History and Film: A Tale of Two Disciplines (2018), I argued that when it comes to the poetics of history in the cinema, these four emplotments should be replaced by the four “modes of narration” that are particularly applicable to cinematic works: the classical, the art-cinema, the historical-materialist and the post-classical. In this paper, I would like to retrace my steps in order to examine a little closer the relation between the literary modes and filmic ones. Specifically, I will analyze Armando Ianucci’s remarkable satire, The Death of Stalin (2017), in order to examine the tension between the character-centered causality of its classical narration and the subversion of classical agency of its satiric impulse. Ultimately, I would like to discuss how these two representational tactics relate to the historical reality of communism and reinstate a new form of historical realism.