Sex, Love, and Videotapes
SEX, LOVE, AND VIDEOTAPES (2024–2026)
Collaboration with Christina Pestova
“Sex, Love and Videotapes” is a research project and an audiovisual production in the making, that seeks to investigate how expressions of love and sexuality were translated and regulated in a Soviet context and how the public discourse of sexuality shifted in the Post-Soviet context of the 1990s. Furthermore we seek how these discourses construct an ideological and cultural divide between East and West. “Sex, Love and Videotapes” will be produced as a series of experimental documentaries to be released in 2025 and 2026.
At the beginning of 2023 we set out to look at the medium of film and to make film from the viewpoint of audiovisual translation. There are several reasons, most crucially we believe that the process and articulation of translation in audiovisual culture reveals and perhaps also challenges cultural and ideological structures. We delved into this issue both with an interest in the practice of translation in filmmaking and in how one could view the world through translation. Our main focus has been what in a Russian-speaking context is called “author’s translation” – a form of voice-over dubbing usually recorded or performed as a simultaneous translation. Historically, it is a form of translation that has been widely used when screening foreign films at festivals, for example in the Soviet context where live interpreters were engaged to translate films for the local audience.
With the introduction of the VCR player in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, the author’s translation became the main format to translate the massive influx and unofficial circulation of Western, mainly American, film in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. But unlike the festival interpretation, these translations were recorded and added to the original soundtrack, which makes them an important documentation of a particular cultural context. Due to technical limitations and the fast pace of the production where translators could work through several films a day, the recordings were usually made once and could not be edited. Thus the translations were very direct and sometimes quite improvised. This is also one of the arguments for choosing this form of audiovisual translation for our investigation – it has an aspect of performance where the translator is not only an interpreter but also an actor who makes an intervention in the dialogue. Another reason is the swift and spontaneous translation process where – we assume – there is a leakage of ideological and cultural articulations. There is very little room for an editorial process or a process of self-regulation that would smoothen out such traces.
The research
Initially we approached the translation and distribution of VCR:s as a movement and we addressed the translators themselves seeking their motives and rationale to engage in this practice, but they mostly seem to have understood themselves as professionals rather than actors on a political or cultural scene. The business was very lucrative compared to other opportunities. The research has gradually been redirected to the recorded translations, trying to trace the encounters between translator and cultural context in the actual film text. Through the directness of these translations, we believe that we could extract how a social and cultural shift was emerging not entirely but partly through the translational act and its restructuring of language. If language “speaks us”, as suggested by among others Jacques Derrida, and if a translation is a form of speaking, it also holds the potential to determine and shift our view of the world. What particularly sparked our attention was something that the translator Andrey Gavrilov mentioned during a conversation:
We did not have a language of love. When I was translating a conversation between lovers, especially if it was a scene where they were in bed, it was difficult to find a translation that didn’t carry the atmosphere of classic literature or the anatomical vocabulary of a gynaecology textbook. So, we had to invent.
There were, of course, already sexual and obscene vocabularies in Russian, but this was not a language that would be used in public and it sounded foreign to a Soviet audience. In a later conversation, however, another translator (Yuri Serbin) responds that expressions of sexuality were barely an issue for the author’s translators, in his view the vocabulary was already there and after all widely used. He rather sees it as a matter of shame – whether the translators themselves feel morally obliged to invent and establish a decent language of sexuality. At the same time, he continues, his point of view might have to do with him being of a later generation and that the public discourse where he has been active as translator was already reformed by previous generations.
The film production
With this in mind, watching hours and hours of romantic and erotic movies voiceovered in Russian, we believe that a notion of “translator’s shame” is the crucial point we have been seeking – the fragile intimacy of the translational act which is amplified when the translator’s voice is merged into a conversation between lovers.
From an initial interest in translation and how the distribution of pirate VHS tapes influenced the public discourse in a Soviet and Post-Soviet context, the work digs deeper and deeper into the public articulation of sex and love and desire. Furthermore we seek how these discourses reflect and are used to construct an ideological and cultural divide between East and West, how these notions mirror each other and how they overlap and integrate through the expression – and silence – of sex and desire.
Our research will result in a series of films, or episodes, that cover topics of the censorship that sexuality and the performance of bodies faced throughout Soviet era and how the public discourse related to sex shifted during the 1980s and 90s, topics of developing and distribution of audiovisual culture, both individually and collectively, topics related to the performativity of the translators’ voices – how their mediation shaped the viewers’ linguistic perception of sexuality, and how all of these histories are activated in contemporary politics and culture.
The project has been funded by the Swedish Research Council and is currently hosted by the artistic faculty at Gothenburg University.