Mythological Conceptualization in A.O. Balabanov’s Films and Interpretation of “The River”

Abstract

This paper attempts to uncover the semantic message of “The River”, an unreleased film that was supposed to be a new program product in the filmwork of Aleksei Oktyabrinovich Balabanov. At the beginning of the article, the author reveals the director’s method of conceptualizing his films that appeal to the mythological conceptualization of the narrative structure in addition to the plot and genre of the film. The latter is clarified in the process of comparing the films with the structure of a fairy tale, which has also already been noted by some researchers of Balabanov’s movies. The novelty of the article is connected with a philosophical analysis of the indicated conceptualization of “The River” film-project (2002) and an attempt to identify aesthetic effects and symbolic meanings encoded in the film production.The author believes that the close attention of “The River” project’s director to the cultures of traditional society, and especially the culture of northerners — the Tofalars (Tofa), the Yakuts (Sakha), is due to the proximity of the traditional cultures of the North and the Arctic to the mythological method of conception in culture. In this sense, “The River” project was, in all likelihood, to become the director’s experiment in building an archaic topos with a crystalline mythological concept of the abundance of the natural over the cultural and the corresponding mentality and psychology of the actions of the “old era”. The main thing in this cinematic experiment was to take the culture “off the table” and analyze the natural spontaneity in human nature, with the subsequent “splitting” of mythological consciousness, breaking the epic circle of tradition with a symbolic outcome, through the concept of “boat” and “river”, to a universal human principle, metaphysical topos of thought. The prophetic gift of the director, embodied in a number of his films, is interpreted on the example of “The River” and reflects the message for the path of self-development of the cultures of Russian peoples.