Abstract
The era of Russian Symbolism coincides with the period of cinematography penetration into urban everyday life. The new phenomenon needed to be comprehended. The verbally expressed layer of symbolists’ reflection on the nature of cinematography, expressed in fiction texts, articles and essays, was studied by N.M. Zorkaya, J.G. Tsivian and R. Bird. This article makes an attempt to analyze a nonverbalized type of reflection – symbolists’ mimetic game practices, where players bodily reproduced features of the cinematic experience. The sources of the research were the models of such game practices constructed by memoirists (A. Bely, L. Ivanova, V. Verigina, L. Ilyashenko). With the help of structuralist and semiotic methods, game gestures are analyzed as signifying game structures. It is established that their signified are disclosed as the problematization of 1) formal, structural and genre borders of film, 2) the phenomenon of voyeurism and the formative gaze of The Other, 3) the alienation of the actor’s body. The conclusion is made that at the time of the first decade of the 20th century the symbolists’ ideas about the nature of cinematic language were not yet clearly expressed, but existed in the form of a semantic conflict.
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