Stefan Lacny awarded BASEES PGR prize

BASEES is delighted to announce that Stefan Lacny, PhD candidate in the Department of Slavonic Studies, Trinity College Cambridge, has been awarded the PGR prize for his article ‘Creating the Polish enemy on the Soviet screen, 1925-1939’.

Stefan Lacny, “Creating the Polish enemy on the Soviet screen, 1925-1939”, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 17(2) (2023), 60–79.

Lacny’s article offers an impressively synthetic view of the representation of Polish people in Soviet film prior to World War II. Lacny balances depth and breadth admirably, offering insightful close readings of a range of films that are effectively incorporated into a much broader argument about the ideological function of depictions of Polish people in Soviet film in the period in question. Lacny argues convincingly that depictions of Polish masculinity at this time combined representations of threat and vulnerability, which at once generated and assuaged anxiety among spectators regarding Poland in the geopolitical context, as a danger to Soviet territorial integrity. The article engages Laura Mulvey’s influential understanding of the erotic gaze of the spectator in an innovative way, to articulate the combination of pleasure and danger captured in the representations of Polish characters under discussion. The jury would like to commend Lacny for his important contribution to Soviet film studies and cultural history—in particular, for his illuminating formal analysis, and his incisive application of that analysis to broader political and ideological currents. The article is exemplary in its clarity of argument and effective engagement with existing scholarship.