Vol 11, No 2 (2019)

The visit of the VGIK delegation to the Republic of Serbia and the mutual exchange of experience with colleagues was fruitful. exchange of experience was fruitful. The program of anniversary events included master classes, joint classes and a concert class of students of the All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography named after S.A. Gerasimov and the Faculty of Dramatic Art of the University of Belgrade (FDU), as well as showing films of graduates and students of VGIK.

The emergence of cinema brought about the issue of forming a comfortable environment for film screenings. This essay analyzes the characteristics of the first spaces used for film exhibition in St. Petersburg and Moscow and the architecture of the movie theaters built in these cities in the first decades of the 20th century and characterized by a combination of theatrical architectural traditions, eclectic restaurant design and elements of the fading Art Nouveau style.

Film exhibition was a profitable business. Initially, screenings were held in rented spaces but soon specialized buildings were designed and constructed. The essay looks at the largest and most popular movie theaters built in St. Petersburg’s main street, Nevsky Prospect, and in the center of Moscow, discussing their architectural features and their historical development. Thus, during the 1920s and 1930s, large movie theaters included a foyer with a stage for variety shows and a theater-like auditorium with a high-mounted, dark-framed screen; the spectators entered the auditorium via the main entrance and, after the screening, exited directly to a street or a yard.

The documentary by Victor Turin The Steel Way. Turksib (1929) is analyzed in this essay from the perspective of interaction between nature and society. The essay compares Turksib with the avant-garde films of Dziga Vertov and analyzes the language, editing system and poetics of intertitles characteristic of Turin’s film. It is noted that in the visual structure of Turksib images of the “sculpting in time” (according to Andrei Tarkovsky) allocate a significant role to the ethnographic pictures of local people’s life, virgin landscapes and wild and domestic animals. The accent is put on the emphatic rhythm of the intertitles, which actualizes the problems of interaction between nature and society. The construction of the Turkestan-Siberian railway through the Kazakh steppe and the Siberian forests demonstrates the advancement of scientism whose proponents are convinced of the inevitability of scientific and technological progress. The essay shows how the attitudes of the representatives of power, the transformers of the region lead to a change in value priorities in particular, towards “the pacifying of the stubborn nature” with the aim of putting it at the service of man. The essay ends with an analysis of Turksib’s significance as an ecological message and concludes that if the ideas and artistic techniques of Turin’s film were developed further, the history of documentary cinema in the following decades could include ecology as one of its major directions.

The research is dedicated to the screen adaptations of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot made in Russia in different cultural and historical periods. Films produced from 1910 to 2003 are analyzed in chronological order, with the aim of showing the transformation of the image of Prince Myshkin (Prince Christ), one of the key images of Russian culture¹ within Russian national consciousness.

The essay analyzes the following films:

1. The Idiot (1910), directed by Pyotr Chardynin
2. Idiot (Nastasya Filippovna) (1958), directed by Ivan Pyryev
3. Idiot (1981), directed by Vladimir Tumaev
4. Down House (2001), directed by Roman Kachanov
5. Idiot (TV series, 2003), directed by Vladimir Bortko

The essay reveals gradual “trivialization” of the image of Prince Myshkin. The first step down was from the “divine child” of Pyotr Chardynin to the “angel” of Ivan Pyriev. God placed man above angels, so Chardynin shows Myshkin as a pure child of the Garden of Eden, the highest among the analyzed screen images of the novel’s main character. The second step was made from Pyriev's “angel” to Vladimir Tumaev's “fallen Adam”. In Tumaev’s 1981 adaptation, the image of Prince Myshkin is still characterized by evangelical parallels but they are absent in the characters created in the 2000s by Roman Kachanov and Vladimir Bortko. Ordinary people with varying degrees of mental disorders become substitutes for “Prince Christ”.

¹ Dostoevsky calls Prince Myshkin "Prince Christ" in drafts to the The Idiot. The writer accentuates the evangelical parallels of this image are

This essay continues the study of the semiotics and synergetics of Framing in the Art of Cinematography which substantiates the hypothesis that framing (perspective) constitutes one of the most important codes of screen communication in its cinematographic and metaphorical contexts. Thus, framing is represented by two hierarchical levels of representation of contextual semiotic connections: the connection between mise-en-cadre and mise-en-scène (the level of the cinematographic form of film sign); and the relationship between cinematographic imagery, action and meaning (the level of the cinema sign).

Framing consolidates the process of cinematography divided by the artistic and production dichotomy, which is especially important in the context of mass culture determined by the total industrialization of all areas of life, including cinema.

The essay is based on the statement of Sergei Eisenstein that each “high” film work has the unity of two dialectical categories: the content (abstract language, part of logical thinking) and the form (emotional language, part of emotional-sensory thinking). It identifies and analyzes the spatial-temporal and linear-tonal features of cinematic framing as a method of expressing the metaphorical existential context of the crisis of Russian self-identification, using as examples a number of expressive episodes of the documentary film Anna: 6–18 (1980-1993; dir. Nikita Mikhalkov, DOPs: Pavel Lebeshev, Vadim Yusov, Vadim Alisov, and Elizbar Karavaev). This film work is explored as a study of the socio-cultural situation in modern Russia undertaken from a multi-faceted and multi-level authorial perspective associated with expressive cinematographic framing.

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Intensive development of knowledge in the 20th century, including the emergence of new sciences and humanities, constantly creates a problematic situation in the sphere of art, shifting art’s designation to what in the philosophy of science is known as “normal science”. This is associated with the idea of art as a science that has reached a stage of maturity and consistency and, therefore, complies with its norms. The concept of art as “normal science” is characterized by a certain degree of conservatism, as it presupposes art’s self-protection against deviations from the established methodology.

However, sometimes the artistic processes of modernity require different approaches. In addition, the emergence of new humanities shifts the already established methodology of art. This happened in the first decades of the 20th century, in the era of a linguistic turn in the humanities, indicating the invasion of natural sciences in the humanities; and this is happening today, at the turn of the 21st century, in a situation of a cultural turn, the emergence and intensive development of the science of culture. The current turn requires a deeper understanding of the structure and components of art history, i.e., its sub-disciplines: art history, art theory and art criticism.

The essay argues that in the situation of cultural turn the theory of art can carry out functions which the other two sub-disciplines cannot. It propounds that art theory is able to make a decisive contribution to the elucidation of two problems: the relationship between art and cultural studies and the problem of historical time, which is important both for contemporary art and for art history.

Films of the Portuguese director Pedro Costa seldom steal the limelight of cinema scholarship. The specific marginality of his works, the complex semi-documentary structure of his films and, at first glance, the social nature of his subjects complicate the analysis of his films. This essay undertakes a detailed investigation of his films' structures and problematics in the context of intellectual development in 21st-century European cinema. Four films by Costa — Bones (Ossos, 1997), In Vanda’s Room (No Quarto da Vanda, 2000), Colossal Youth (Juventude em Marcha, 2006) and Horse Money (Cavalo Dinheiro, 2014) are regarded as elements of a single artistic system that transforms, becomes more complex and absorbs more and more cultural codes.

The essay defines the motifs representative of the four films, visual metaphors that refer to sacred texts and the gradual transformation of the director’s aesthetics. It is motivated by the necessity to carry out a complex research of all components of Costa’s films from the existential perspective: in the author’s opinion, such perspective gives the opportunity to define specific features of the director’s aesthetics. The systemic interdisciplinary approach is determined by the necessity to expose the aesthetic and anthropological problems explored in Costa's films and to define their philosophical basis, using a combined historical, cultural, semiotic, anthropological and hermeneutical approach. The essay concludes that the core of Pedro Costa’s art relates to existential philosophy and anthropology and that his main concern is spirituality, a theme realized most adequately via cinema.

The essay represents the first effort to explore the artistic methods employed in the TV series about World War II (the Great Patriotic War) and analyzes four multi-episode TV shows released in 2004. In its own way, each of these series responded to the new public interest in the less known aspects of the war. Simultaneously, each of them established a dialogue with the previous cinematic and TV productions, comprising direct reminiscences to earlier films, objectivizing the audience expectations formed by earlier productions, or even arguing with them. This dialogic trend should be considered as part of the postmodernist framework of contemporary television: reminiscences of popular post-war films or literal or visual citations from these films become an integral part of contemporary cinema and television and also act as documentary-like reference points.

In all reviewed cases, the authors emphasize adventure narratives well suited for TV presentation and rendered even more spectacular by modern visualization technologies. The producers are confronted with a contradiction between the chosen historical context and imaginary plotlines: it is quite difficult to put the series’ characters within the imaginary space, depriving them of the well-known facts, especially those propagated in earlier film and TV productions. Inevitably, each plot is aggressively influenced by the tragedy of the “little man”, in which the place of the enemy occupied in the Soviet tradition by the Gestapo and the Abwehr is replaced by the repressive Soviet state security services. Even a decade after its release, Shtrafbat (The Penal Battalion) plays a major role in the public and professional discussion on the ethics of war-related films and television series. Meanwhile, At a Nameless Height, a series which contains even more reminiscences to Soviet film and television productions, should be regarded as one of the earliest works in which the sense of authenticity was sacrificed to the imaginary expectations of the viewers – expectations formed by the Soviet historical and cultural framing.

Brief presentation of authors and contents of articles of the current issue