Круглый стол «Эстетика советской кинокомедии». Эксцентрика, авторское начало, официозный контекст

Abstract

In the modern period the aesthetics of comedy in cinema was on the periphery of the attention of the science of art. Not least, this was due to the fact that the analysis of the comic was relegated to the background by the study of the playful relativity characteristic of postmodern trends in the screen arts of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Meanwhile, Soviet film comedy remains one of the pinnacles in the development of this genre in the cinema of the 20th century. And the decline of comedy in modern Russian cinema prompts a return to the experience of the masterpieces of the Soviet era. The relevance of the topic is connected with this: the contexts of the comic and laughter in Soviet comedies, their functions of a social, communicative, aesthetic nature were not studied in detail and comprehensively in their time. The novelty of approaches today is associated with the possibility of free from ideological pressure and the most detailed consideration, and in part are vision of the formal and substantive features of the film comedy of the Soviet period. This scientific process combines the methods of art history, cultural studies, folklore and anthropology. This text reviews the reports at the Round Table “Aesthetics of Soviet Film Comedy”, organized by the Mass Media Arts Department of the State Institute for Art Studies and which brought together scientists of different generations from VGIK, the Union of Cinematographers of the Russian Federation, the Russian State University for the Humanities, the Higher School of Economics, the Academy of the Media Industry, the Free University and other institutions. The purpose of the round table was to identify the main phases of the evolution of comedy in the Soviet cinema, and therefore the order of the reports took into account the historical chronology of the appearance of certain films and genre varieties of comedy. Since the formation of film comedy in the 1920s – 1940s, a change in philosophical paradigms, the transformation of an eccentric principle, the formation of new artistic images and motives have been recorded. The attention of researchers to the problems of the relationship between society and the state, concepts and theories of the comedy principle in the context of government orders was also obvious. Particular attention of researchers was directed to the polymorphic nature of comedy, capable of combining lyricism and farcicalness, serious and frivolous, openly conditional and life-like. A number of speakers addressed to the individual elements of the comedy film poetics, the relationship between visual and sound, transformations of characters’ images, inclusions of theatrical forms, grotesque, and absurdity. Aspects of the film language of Sergei Gerasimov, Ivan Pyryev, Stanislav Barei, Edmond Keosanyan, Georgy Danelia, Leonid Gaidai were analyzed.