Eighteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Despite the Soviet Union’s colossal casualties in WWII, Soviet post-war society and culture avoided discussion of psychic traumas that the war had caused. Of more than 500 Soviet films about this war, only a few depict it as traumatizing human psyche and focus on protagonists whose emotional state may be described as posttraumatic stress disorder. In this paper, I discuss Nikolai Gubenko’s feature film “Podranki” (Wounded Game or The Orphans, 1977) that depicts teenaged children who were raised in an orphanage near Odessa following the war against Nazi Germany. While the film credits do not specify which pieces of music one hears in the film’s soundtrack, music forms an essential means in depicting the protagonist’s attempts to cope with his pain. The works by Alessandro Marcello, Antonio Vivaldi, Arcangelo Corelli, and George Frideric Handel are paired with popular songs (foxtrots and tangos) from the 1940s. The theoretical framework for this study are the works by Daniel Golmark, Lawrence Kramer, Richard Leppert, and Cathy Caruth. For Gubenko, who wrote the script of this film, played the role of an antagonist in it, and selected all music for this feature himself, “The Orphans” were a way of coping with his own war traumas and his own orphaned childhood. Since one of the signs of trauma is impossibility of articulation (Cathy Caruth), soundtrack components such as music become especially important in capturing the psychological state of the inarticulate children.