Vol 6, No 3 (2014)

BIBLIOTEKA VGIK

The article examines the goals of state guardianship of Russian cinema taking into account the interaction among the state’s objective interests and cinematic openness of the country, the globalization of filmmaking process and segmentation of audience by the 'consumer loyalty' criterion. The targets, classified as optimal, are considered in their correlation with the state’s cinema legislation currently in force. The concepts of competitiveness and social significance of national cinema are interpreted generally and properly.

The article explores the dynamics of the narrative film. The author reveals points of disequilibrium in the plot, the place and importance of stimulating incident in it and determines its structure. The concepts of the nonlinear dynamics theory and dramaturgy theory are compared in the article. It is determined that dramatic situations correlate with I. Prigozhin's ideas: the probability, irreversibility and possibility of new connections. The structure of the film climax is also analyzed. The comparison of classical and non-classical story arcs is provided.

It is hard to find more seemingly distant phenomena as the theatre with its obvious “affectation” and the document always referred to as a neutral indication of the reality. However, a closer comparison of the theatre and film document reveals unexpected similarities.

The article analyses the peculiarities of the Pre-Raphaelite style from the viewpoint of its cinematic imagery. The work of Millais, Rossetti and Hunt is described in terms of film language (close-ups, the subdivision of the picture’s composition into individual narratives, the creation of a particular mood by using details, the background as a long shot, etc.) explaining the hyper-realism of the Pre-Raphaelites.

The article is devoted to the analysis of cognitive processes in art. Professor Andreyev surveys different approaches to the problem dwelling on the theory of visual thinking popular in Cultural Studies and Aesthetics and investigates conceptual alternatives to this theory. Based on psychological data, the author offers a new approach to the problem: treating thinking as a process of the change of mental codes he extends this assumption to cognitive processes in art. It is for the first time in Aesthetics and Art Theory that different levels and aspects of visual thinking are separated and their relationships are analyzed. Particular attention is paid to the inadequately researched and underestimated notion of ‘the artistic idea’, its various aspects and functions in artistic practice are explored.

The article analyses various forms and meanings of the director’s deliberate abandonment of sound and/or music both on screen and off screen. The absence of the soundtrack is defined in such terms as ‘reverberant silence’, ‘generating silence’, ‘intimate silence’, ‘inex-pressible stillness’, ‘after-sound silence’, ‘silence as absence’, which characterize the director’s aesthetic attitude towards the image.

The article reviews film genres and the factors determining genre formation as exemplified by the subgenre of youth criminal drama. Like most genres, it appeared in the USA as an offshoot of the gangster film of the 1930s, on the one hand, and as a result of the emergence of youth subculture. The image of an adolescent criminal is still popular in both mass culture and auteur cinema.

In the age of globalization international co-production takes on a new meaning. It usually means a film project realized by two or more production companies from different countries. However, modern film industry has gained a global character. The article investigates co-production as one of the ways of globalization in film industry.

The dynamics of media space restructuring raises the issue of creative thinking in multimedia practices. The article establishes the difference between the notions of creativity and craftsmanship in creating audiovisual content.

The article is devoted to the artistic relevance of sound design as one of the most significant elements of film, specifically, in documentary. The author explores the phenomenon emerging at the interface of various genres and tendencies in film art focusing mainly on the auteur’s conception realized through such notions as sound scale, depth and prominence of soundy.