Carol Rifelj Faculty Lecture Series: Irina Feldman and Nikolina Dobreva

Irina Feldman, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and Nikolina Debrova, Department of Film and Media Culture, will give a lecture as part of the Carol Rifelj Faculty Lecture Series: We offer an interdisciplinary reading of Korean auteur Bong Joon Ho’s 2013 Snowpiercer. Set in a dystopian near future, in which an attempt to fight global warming has triggered a new Ice Age, this sci-fi film paints a powerful picture of the brutal inequalities of globalized capitalism. We use the film’s visual language as a springboard for our theoretical application in order to structure our analysis around three key issues: the diagnosis of the ills of capitalist society; the nature of historical progress as embodied in the Marxist metaphor of the “train” or “locomotive” of history; and the possibility of an effective revolution. We argue that Snowpiercer presents an accessible and novel approach to criticizing the capitalist system and the authoritarian political tendencies it espouses.