Vol 4, No 1 (2012)

The article surveys the results of the third edition of the “Great Digit”, a national award for the achievements in the sphere of cable and satellite broadcasting, which enables us to analyze the trends of their development. Despite the considerable increase in the number of new digital channels their limited budgets lead to the absence of fiction content on commercial television. This fact affects both the competition in the commercial TV segment and their opposition to ground broadcasting setting promising prospects for developing “niche” television.

The article is a continuation of the topic raised in the previous issue (#10, 2011). The cinema of Yakov Protazanov, spectacular, public-oriented and answering the requirements of the ideological demands, was also deeply connected with moral traditions of the Russian culture. Protazanov’s cinema spanned a wide terrain ranging from the problems of the moral choice and the nature of evil to the conflict of light and dark.

The article content includes the analysis of the peculiarities of the creation of the heroic character image in the Russian screenwriting. The author compares the emblematic soviet film “The Communist” by Yu. Raizman and the post-soviet film “The Edge” by A. Uchitel attaching special attention to the close interaction of the protagonist with the social medium.

The study of the fourth dimension in the Old Russian icon painting and the XX-th century physics allows to reveal a number of regularities essential for screen writing. The range of screen presentations of non-physical sphere permits to study the 4-dimensional film space. The article includes the analysis of Yu. Lotman’s dramaturgy pattern in the chronotope of the Russian puppet film. The spatial pattern is particularly obvious when used in the animation synthesis typical for 3-D animation. The combination of different display types has nowadays become an evident tendency widely exceeding the boundaries of animation as a whole and puppet film in particular.

The article investigates counterpoint as a philosophic and aesthetical opposition of the film’s sound and visual aspects. The author analyses the philosophic grounds of counterpoint as the contrast of images and an intellectual paradox and of metacounterpoint as the filmmaker’s attitude to the text as a whole.

Why does one country dominate in European film space while many others are on the edge of total loss of cinematic independence, but some, being strongly dependant, nevertheless try to stand up for themselves and sometimes succeed? Using statistical material, the article (beginning in № 10,2011) highlights the deep objective and subjective factors of the rivalry between national film industries.

The article deals with the main features of sitcom that make it an independent genre. The term “situation comedy” is compared to other comedy subgenres, such as comedy of manners and comedy of intrigue in its first sense etc. The emergence of TV sitcom properties is analyzed from the historic prospective. During all the years of its existence sitcom has managed to retain the combination of theatrical aesthetics and the nature of television which makes it not only an independent genre, but also a unique television product in a sense.

The article explores the principles and peculiarities of the cinematic language reflecting ethno-cultural stereotypes in recent Russian films. The diversity of expressive means used in modern Russian film art makes it possible to represent the ethno-cultural stereotype from different angles. Films that show visual stereotypes of the lifestyle in Poland creating a settled idea of Polish national identity are cited as an example.