The Politics of Russian‐Language Film Showings in Post‐Soviet Georgia. Issue 1 (May 2017) - Sherouse, Perry
Abstract : A law was implemented in Georgia in 2011 that required all foreign films to be shown with Georgian state language dubbing or subtitling. At that time, Russian was the default language of film showings. A year later, the largest movie theater in Tbilisi was fined for showing films in Russian language without Georgian state language subtitling or dubbing. This fine, however, had little effect on film‐showing practices. I describe how media‐language politics involved collaboration among social actors in the Georgian Ministry of Culture, the movie theater industry, and the film‐dubbing industry. To do so, I develop the concept of dormant law: a mostly unenforced hard law that codifies aspirational conditions. Through the possibility of selective activation, dormant law functions as a latent instrument of politics. In political and popular discourse during President Saakashvili's era (2004–2013), social actors framed Russian as a potentially hazardous symbolic resource embedded in infrastructure, whereas they framed English as either harmless or enriching to "Georgianness." In film‐language debates, citizens and politicians reflected on the meanings of "international" languages, in contrast with Georgian. The Film Law manifested a hierarchy of social value in which English and Russian were competing codes, iconic of possible future Georgian modernities.