Vol 13, No 1 (2021)

Overview of the achievements of Russian science, and not only in historical retrospect, but also in terms of popularization of modern domestic developments that can significantly improve the quality of life of Russians.

Each generation of the post-war decades sought to rediscover the essence of the "great confrontation" between our people and Nazi invaders. Russian documentary filmmakers expressed each generation’s concept of the Great Victory in movies based on archival footage and testimonies of veterans. The article offers an overview of the interpretations of this topic by national documentary cinema from the first post-war years to the present.
There is an illusion that film preserves the image and meaning of the past forever. In fact, archival footage reveals the significance of the filmed event only in the context of the director’s intention and artistic message. This accounts for the eager desire of all post-war generations up to the present day to understand the essence of the key event of the 20th century — the Great Patriotic War — prompting filmmakers to return to film archives time and again to reconsider such an important page of our national history. The author examines the evolution of the concept of Victory in national documentaries both in the post-war decades and now. It is the insight into the representation of our Victory that testifies to the profundity of each generation’s historical viewpoint, the understanding of the originality of the nation’s spiritual strength, their ability to capture the vector of the country's development in the past experience.

The article examines drama features and directing decisions of non-fiction TV movies and documentary films. Using two films as examples – a renowned movie “Katyusha” (dir. V.Lisakovich, 1964, USSR) and a television film “Katyusha Big and Small” (dir. I.Firsova, 2008, Russia) author examines fundamental differences between for-screen film and television stylistics. As the choice of these films for a comparative analysis, author underlines that both products share the same plot – the combat path of the nurse Ekaterina Demina, her reflections on the War from peacetime perspective; meanwhile, both films have very different director's attitudes. In the first case, director in his masterpiece has used innovative techniques to unfold the heroine, while the second one represents a high-quality but a mediocre television direction. The author also explores the dramaturgical features of a non-fiction produced specifically for Internet platforms, and makes predictions of future transformations in the film language. The author analyses the director's techniques and methods in the documentary movie “This is Eddie. The Tale of a Lost and Stolen Childhood” (dir. R.Super, 2020). The author analyzes the stylistic features of a movie and a TV movie, taking into account the specifics of using voice-over text, working with fact and image, ways of forming the image of the hero, and many other directorial tools. Documentary films is gradually gaining new opportunities for distribution with the help of global on-demand video streaming sites where the viewer can see documentaries. Similarly with feature series documentaries should update their language, presentation and dramaturgy at the same time. However, it is assumed that the real documentary film will again be on the periphery of mass culture, and the expected renewal of the film language will be a borrowing of the TV language of American documentaries, which is characterized by the use of dramaturgically constructed interviews instead of informative voiceover text, which is the main technique for domestic modern TV documentaries. The article compares these two TV formats.

The article analyzes animated VR-experiences created by immersing an animation director or artist in virtual reality. Computer technologies, combined with the talent and creative skills of animators, allow us to find new approaches to creating narratives in virtual reality during experiments.
When creating stories in VR-environments directors face questions about changing the principles of editing animated works, changing the limiting borders of the frame, about the lack of control over the viewer's gaze and actions, the answers to which allow the authors to come to their own stylistic decisions and find new artistic approaches to creating animated narrative.
In virtual reality, the artist controls the sensor manipulators and the functionality of a VR modeling software tool in order to create a special spectacle and enhance the viewer's experience by creating interesting compositional solutions and stylistically interesting visual images, exciting storylines. Immersing the recipient in a virtual narrative has more emotional impact than watching an animated work on screen. The immersion effect, accompanies by new sensations, is achieved by switching perceptual organs from visual images, to sound or tactile sensations, for interactive participation with the possibility of interaction with objects of animation or surrounding space.
The progress of technology and the growing number of users stimulate animators to create experiments in virtual reality. These experiments provide the basis for studying animated works created in VR and for viewing in VR, in terms of its artistic, aesthetic and emotional components, as well as its perception by the viewer.

The article touches upon issues of the common and distinctive characteristics of documentary films and popular science TV series. It concerns special aspects of representation in these two screen forms in their sociocultural context and gives the author's vision of their sociocultural and anthropological foundations. The role of media images of the TV screen and the movie screen in the modern media space is substantiated. Approaching the audio-visualization of visuals from the angle of cultural studies and philosophy, mental activities of TV and movie viewers are opposed. Epistemologically, the article traces special accents typical for the popular science genre on the TV screen and in the cinema, boosted by documentaries. The relation between form and content in the screen visualization of ideas is substantiated.
The present work touches upon issues related to the goals of creating documentary films, on the one hand, and popular science TV series, on the other. It covers the pictorial scheme of directing documentary films. Furthermore, the bases of visual representation in documentary film are presented. The complex process of creating a popular science series is considered as opposed to the versatility of this genre. The author proposes certain ideas about the productive mental activity of the viewers in terms of epistemological approach.
He resorts to polemic arguments in the discussion about the development of an objective worldview. What offers the true image of the world around us, a popular science series or a documentary? The article puts up the elements of evidence as preconditions for the conformation of media semantic images through the screen. The special aspects of visual anthropology are touched upon. The author speculates about the possible correlation between documentary filmmaking and audiovisual information in ethnographic terms. The article ends with a number of conclusions.

The stories of The Witch (2015) and The Lighthouse (2019), made by the American director Robert Eggers, revolve around the conflict between natural landscapes and characters, mediated by the empty spaces of human dwellings.
The principles underlying the artistic representation of this conflict go back to the early sound era, when the interrelations between humans and the onscreen space changed significantly.
An emptiness while localizing the sound (the source of which was off-screen) became a threat to the character. This issue was given a lot of attention in the so called ‘Devil’s Cinema’ (Le cinèma de diable) concept developed by the French director and film theorist Jean Epstein.
Based on the critique of Eggers’ films, the author views his work in terms of Epstein’s Breton period (films he made in Brittany: Finis Terræ (1929), Mor vran (1931), L'Or des mers (1932)) and explores the relationship between the dramatic functions of space and motifs of evil within the context of his theory of photogenie.
Following Epstein, Eggers treats chaos as ideal cinematic material, and his films reconstruct the prelinguistic logic of a dream or a spell. The Witch and The Lighthouse deal with the conflict between human and non-human consciousness, with the struggle between human rationality and cinematic irrational logic.
A landscape is chaos capable of generating phantoms. A human dwelling is an attempt to build a spatially embodied narrative logic and thus protect oneself from evil. But this attempt leads to the appearance of voids through which evil penetrates into the human world. It is the human space that undergoes dramatic changes: it is disintegrating as the characters are nearing the defeat from evil and the very nature of cinema. As a result, the characters acquire a non-human identity.

The price of the theater admission is viewed as one of the factors for the massness of cinema. With the use of statistical materials, the dynamics of the massness is surveyed for the past 50 years. In the USSR the practice of forming the admission prices was determined by the focus of the state on providing for the broadest massness of cinema and its economic accessibility for all of the population. Despite the decline of the attendance of many years, the selected course was staid on. Over the 18 years of waning admissions (1968–1986), the average price of the cinema ticket increased for less than 3 kopeks (27.09 kop. as compared to 24.46 kop.). The societal changes and the steering of the course toward the market in the late 1980s created an impetus for the drastic growth of the price for going out to the movies. In the 1990s this trend surged sharply under the impact of two economic process: the precipitous drop in the incomes of the main populace and the no less dramatic increase in the price of the cinema ticket. The population became divided into two categories — those solvent for cinema attendance (mostly the relatively scarce and precarious middle class) and those insolvent. From the yesteryear factor of cinema’s broadest massness the ticket price was transformed into a factor of the former’s demassization. As a contribution to it, also came the profound restructuring of the theatrical repertory and the radical dismantling of communicative conventions between the cinematography and its spectators the most evident in the escalation of entertainment violence in films. Materials of three sociological surveys of spectators are used as the basis for an analysis of their estimating the price of the cinema ticket in the past three decades, the effects of its increase on cinema attendance. The issue of the «fair» ticket price is put in some perspective. Accentuated is the importance of rational price formation as a factor of reproducing the cinema audience.

The article discusses the problem of audience research in modern media system formed by convergence/deconvergence. Digital media technologies proliferation in home requires new approaches to study the uses of multiple media devices depending on different social contexts and situations. The conceptual divide between two traditional methods of audience study — qualitative and quantitive — does not allow to paint the correct picture of users’ media contacts and behavior in a new media environment. The members of the convergent audience continue watching TV, but at the same time they download video, use streaming services, look for content in the net, share their material with others and even remix and remake content. It is noted that considering all current media transformation audience research should be shifted to analysis of individual media practices of users who form their personal “media repertoire’’ / “media ensemble” out of contacts with different media technologies, platforms, genres and types of content. In conclusion it is underlined that new models of production, distribution and consumption challenge not only traditional business-models and media system but also existing conceptions of audience. Researchers should not take for granted the audience issues in media discussions but search for new approaches to adapt to the current media situation. 

The problem of legal protection of scientific, literary and artistic production is particularly acute at the present moment, in the era of rapid development of technologies that make it possible to reproduce and distribute any object with extraordinary ease. It is important to remember, however, that copyright, while protecting the interests of the owners of the products of creative human activities, allows for exceptions to the general rules. Notably, these include citing from legally published works for scientific, polemical, critical, informational, and educational purposes in order to reveal a creative intention with reference to the source and the author. Yet, the practical application of the rule on free citation often causes difficulties, since the Civil Code of the Russian Federation lacks both the definition of “citation” and the procedure for its correct execution.
Free use without the author’s consent and payment of remuneration is allowed only with the simultaneous observance of a number of restrictions: the work should be used only for the purposes listed by the law with the obligatory indication of the author and the source of borrowing, besides, the use is possible only to the extent justified by the purpose of citing. Significant difficulties in this regard are caused by the posting of photos, for example, from social networks, Instagram, whose authors, as well as the conditions for the use of their works by the account’s owner, are often unknown. Determining the correct volume also causes certain difficulties. Legitimate citation is a common case of free use of copyright objects and includes various works that exist not only in the text format. With photographs and works of fine art, the situation is somewhat more complicated, as fragments of such works can be used both as quotations and illustrations.
At the same time, correct and lawful approaches need to be specified both by the legislator and judicial practice.

A brief presentation of the authors and the content of the articles in the issue