Genre film, spectacle and the Strugatskii brothers in Fyodor Bondarchuk’s The Inhabited Island

This article focuses on Fyodor Bondarchuk’s Obitaemyi ostrov (The Inhabited Island Parts I–II; Russia 2008–9), which is based on the Strugatskiis’ novel of the same name. The article’s argument is twofold. First, I suggest that the book and film versions offer, respectively, a more open work and an overdetermined narrative. The novel is rich enough to stimulate ample cognitive work on the part of the reader; the films, by contrast, follow a pattern of reduced complexity, suppressing cognitive efforts on the viewer’s part. Such an overdetermined or closed narrative is analogous to the central metaphor of the self-enclosed totalitarian world of the planet Saraksh portrayed in Obitaemyi ostrov. Second, I argue that the multi-referential, mass-market approach taken by the director, Bondarchuk, offers audiences spectacle instead of the more subtle effect of cognitive estrangement so crucial to the Strugatskiis’ imagination. Whereas the Strugatskii brothers made their mark by transforming the conventions of genre literature into the mythologemes of the late Soviet intelligentsia, the movie version adapts the novel to the dominant stereotypes and promptings of mass culture – in effect, reversing the Strugatskiis’ own telos.