Touched by War: Tactility and Trauma in Recent Russian Films

This essay focuses on two recent Russian films, Beanpole 2019 (dir. Kantemir Balagov) and A Siege Diary 2020 (dir. Andrei Zaitsev), that explore the tactile dimensions of war and trauma. I trace how the experiences of war qualitatively impact the female characters’ experience of touch, relying on its quality of reversibility or reciprocity, as articulated by the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Although the two films ultimately deliver opposing messages about whether touch can be healed, Beanpole and A Siege Diary may both be interpreted as cinematic responses to one of the exhortations of The Unwomanly Face of War, Svetlana Alexievich's pathbreaking oral history of Soviet women's participation in World War II: bring back the body (Alexievich 2018: xviii).