Cinematic Experience Research Articles

A Study on the Movie Theater and the Cinematic Experience in The Early Cinema Era -Focussed on the Birth and the Development of Movie Theater in Germany-

A Study on the Movie Theater and the Cinematic Experience in The Early Cinema Era -Focussed on the Birth and the Development of Movie Theater in Germany-

CAVE: Making Collective Virtual Narrative: Best Paper Award

CAVE is a shared narrative six degrees of freedom (6DoF) virtual reality experience. In 3.5 days, 1,927 people attended its premiere at SIGGRAPH 2018. Thirty participants at a time each saw and heard the same narrative from their own individual location in the room, as they would when attending live theater. CAVE set out to disruptively change how audiences collectively experience immersive art and entertainment. Inspired by the social gatherings of theater and cinema, CAVE resonated with viewers in powerful and meaningful ways. Its specific pairing of colocated audiences and physically shared immersive narrative suggests a possible future path for shared cinematic experiences.

Brings Reality Through Virtual Reality

Film festival is a place to convey specific film for specific purposes. Festival nowadays were broaden their medium, not only on screen but also involved more audience with new technology mobile devices. As the longest running documentary film festival in Indonesia, Festival Film Dokumenter (FFD) have been concern about the impact of film screenings to the audience. Since 2016, FFD have been intend to using several medium to convey disability rights awareness. FFD conducted the program Virtual Reality (2016) and The Feelings of Reality (2018). Both of those program were using Virtual Reality (VR) technology during the festival showcase. In 2016 program, the audience even placed in the replica setting to have a similar situation with people with epilepsy. 
 VR is the new attempt to brings the new documentary experience. This technology lead the impression of reality to the audience. VR known as a device that can enhance the audience cinematic experience. In documentary filmmaking, which always closely associated with the depiction of reality - in a way, the VR technology can provide different perspective on perceiving documentary. In documentary screenings, VR have a powerful strength on bringing the reliable reality which closer to the audience. 
 Festival offers the discourse on watching the documentary into experiencing the documentary using VR. This paper will discuss about how festival provide alternative medium to present disability issue to the public. Vice versa, how audience raised their awareness through VR technology. This study conducted in qualitative impact study that focused on in-depth interview with both festival organizer/programmer and audience. This study found out that VR technology identically constructed the reality. This method is the most effective way to raising the awareness because people would feel how to live with disability closely and clearly. Rather than just watching a film, experiencing disability through VR prove a different impression to the audience. By presenting the actual condition of people with disability, VR succeed to give more heightened impact and awareness on this issue.

Intimate media: new queer documentary and the sensory turn

ABSTRACT The heightened visibility of LGBTQ documentaries is often viewed within critical contexts of New Queer Cinema: B. Ruby Rich’s intervention which highlighted an urgency among a new kind of practice, identifying trends across queer film and video. This article explores contours of new queer documentary which played an important role in New Queer Cinema, re-examining ways that queer nonfiction film and video evolved out of distinctive relations to the history and traditions of the documentary form, its established practices, and commonly-held social functions. This approach underlines ways that this work’s often intense evocations of sexuality and bodily sentience as experienced across private and public space marked a crucial moment in what David Howes calls a transdisciplinary sensorial revolution. Keeping mobile and productive cross-pollinations of practice and theory in frame, this article explores emerging vocabularies for the cinematic experience by distilling components, here summed up as intimacy, gesture, and magnitude, of new queer documentary that operated not in opposition to but as part of a transvaluation of documentary’s long-established associations. With a focus on the fraught politics of new queer documentary in US contexts, these concepts are analysed through key filmmakers, including Barbara Hammer, Tom Joslin, and Marlon Riggs.

Medieval Saints and Modern Screens: Divine Visions as Cinematic Experience by Alicia Spencer-Hall (review)

Reviewed by: Medieval Saints and Modern Screens: Divine Visions as Cinematic Experience by Alicia Spencer-Hall Anthony Ballas Alicia Spencer-Hall, Medieval Saints and Modern Screens: Divine Visions as Cinematic Experience, Amsterdam University Press, 2018. ISBN: 9789462982277, 304 pages, Hardback, €95,00. It is not every day that one finds medieval scholarship, film theory, popular culture and theology braided together in an accessible and provocative volume. In Alicia Spencer-Hall's Medieval Saints and Modern Screens, the author accomplishes just this; the book is a melding of medieval hagiography, mysticism, media and fandom studies, taking the reader through often surprising parallels between these and other disciplines. For Spencer-Hall, modern cinema and computer screens share an aesthetic similar to the divine visions of medieval female saints, bridging the vast temporal divide between these two forms of media. As Spencer-Hall quotes Bruno Latour, "[w]e do have a future and a past, but the future takes the form of a circle expanding in all directions and the past is not surpassed but revisited, repeated, surrounded, protected, recombined, reinterpreted and reshuffled" (59). It is within this "polytemporal context" that Medieval Saints operates, offering a seamless juxtaposition of pre-modern and postmodern media. The book explores at length the parallels between modern cinema and computer screens and the lives of the Holy Women of Liege as accounted in their vitaes—the hagiographic works written about them and their divine visions. At the root of Medieval Saints lies a pedagogical imperative, as Spencer-Hall "maintain[s] that medieval mystical episodes are made intelligible to modern audiences through reference to the filmic—the language, form, and lived experience of the cinema" (11). Although, as Spencer-Hall claims, cinema offers the spectator an "agape-ic encounter"—a "transcendent experience," that "is functionally identical to the episodes of ecstasy which are the mainstay of medieval hagiography"—the author does not simply reduce the transcendent properties of mysticism or cinema to one another (11). In this way, Spencer-Hall conceives of "hagiography as cinematic media" (12) and "film as divinity" (16), while also maintaining the independence of the two. By bringing these two forms of media together, Spencer-Hall expands the definitions of both, and thereby opens them up anew through comparative analysis. It is worth mentioning the two key points in the introduction upon which the author's argument later hinge: firstly, the insistence that "hagiographic media fuse textual, visual, and the haptic both in diegesis and in their respective modes" (13), and secondly, a critique of the typically gendered interpretation of Agape, opting instead for a definition as "'equal regard' between all humans and between humanity and divinity" (14). On the latter point, the dyad "seeing/being seen" does not rely on the male gaze, but rather "the agape-ic encounter offers a counter point, and means to move beyond, earlier theories of film spectatorship which pivoted on the notion of film spectatorship as ineluctable objectifying, particular to women," thereby contesting Laura Mulvey's "insistence on the 'male gaze'" (15). It is in the relation between spectator and screen, writes Spencer-Hall, that "we perceive (feel and see) ourselves being seen, and thus we are looked and felt into being" (16, my emphasis). The figure who most influences Spencer-Hall's reading of spectatorship is Vivian Sobchack, whose formula "transcendence in immanence" is foundational to Medieval Screens (16); by focusing on the fact of being tethered to the body while also transcending its material borders, the screen has a similar propensity as extasis (ek-stasis), or the standing aside of the spectator in their own body. This theme is revisited throughout the work, particularly in chapters Two and Three. [End Page 87] Spencer-Hall dedicates a large portion of Chapter One to an examination of photography and divinity. "Photography was hailed as an 'apparitional technology', allowing spirits and mystical forces to be made visible," explains the author, who goes on to observe how "the tradition of [nineteenth and twentieth century] spirit photography lives on in the twenty-first century in the form of tribute photography" (67). Spencer-Hall asserts that "the 'truth claim' that underpins photography's ability to produce proof of the divine and...

Color Management for Cinematic Immersive Experiences

Immersive technologies offer new approaches for engaging audiences and providing visual information, whether for entertainment or more practical applications. To ensure that the content maintains the intended appearance across different devices and environments, one of the key challenges is accurate color management. In this paper, we discuss the challenges that have to be overcome to create color-accurate immersive experiences at a cinematic quality level. We propose workflows for efficiently characterizing different virtual and augmented reality devices and review their color reproduction capabilities against current display standards.

Toward a Model of Distributed Affectivity for Cinematic Ethics

Many contemporary applications of theories of affect to cinematic ethical experience focus on its consequences for empathy and moral allegiance. Such approaches have made advances in bridging phenomenological and cognitivist approaches to film-philosophy, but miss the importance of complex affects that problematize empathy and moral judgment. For example, the rendering of trauma in Aimless Bullet (Hyun-mok Yu, 1961) involves aesthetic shifts that reframe its depiction of postwar experience and build a complex emotional picture of sociopolitical conditions that affect individual and community life. In this article, I argue that to understand the ethical significance of complex cinematic emotion we can develop an account of how affective-aesthetic affordances establish distributed spaces for dynamic affective engagement. To do this, I draw upon theories of scaffolded mind, classical Indian rasa aesthetics, and phenomenological aesthetics. This hybrid account will allow us to articulate the ways that film can help us comprehend the ethical significance of complex affective situations.

Guest Editor's Introduction

Since the early 1990s, phenomenology and cognitivism have become influential strands of inquiry in film theory. Phenomenological approaches remain focused on descriptive accounts of the embodied subject’s experiential engagement with film, whereas cognitivist approaches attempt to provide explanatory accounts in order to theorize cognitively relevant aspects of our experience of movies. Both approaches, however, are faced with certain challenges. Phenomenology remains a descriptive theory that turns speculative once it ventures to “explain” the phenomena upon which it focuses. Cognitivism deploys naturalistic explanatory theories that can risk reductively distorting the phenomena upon which it focuses by not having an adequate phenomenology of subjective experience. Phenomenology and cognitivism could work together, I suggest, to ground a pluralistic philosophy of film that is both descriptively rich and theoretically productive. From this perspective, we would be better placed to integrate the cultural and historical horizons of meaning that mediate our subjective experience of cinema.

Elemental Imagination and Film Experience

In an age of ecological disasters and increasing environmental crisis, the experience of any cinematic fiction has an intrinsic ethical potential to reorient the spectator’s awareness of the ecological environment. The main argument is that the spectator’s sensory-affective and emphatically involving experience of cinema is essentially rooted in what I call “elemental imagination.” This is to say, first, that the spectator becomes phenomenologically immersed with the projected filmworld by a cinematic expression of the elemental world, and second, much like there is no filmworld without landscapes, the foundational aspect of elements are revealed as preceding and sustaining the narrative and symbolic layers of film experience. While suggesting the existential-ethical potential of this fundamental process of film experience, the second aim of this article is to show that this form of elemental imagination complements more mainstream “environmentalist” films, such as climate change documentaries and blockbuster apocalyptic genre films.

The visibility and arrival of the transnational new Sikh middle class in the cinematic experience of the turbaned hero Diljit Dosanjh: Its implication for emerging Sikh identity politics

ABSTRACT The paper attempts to understand the emergence of a New Sikh middle class in Panjab and its growing, transnational visibility in a transnational spread through the kaleidoscope of Panjabi cinema. The paper seeks to map this new middle class both locally and globally with the emergence of the icon of the New Sikh middle class, the turbaned Diljit Dosanjh. His persona and the popularity of his films give a vivid portrayal of the visibility of this transnational New Sikh middleclass, the imagination of which transcends local, national and transnational borders.

From Paine to PlayStation

In Assassin’s Creed Unity, the historical narratives of Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, François Furet, and Peter McPhee are presented in a way that capitalizes on the virtual and tangible characteristics of gaming. By isolating the historical accounts of the French Revolution, Ubisoft Entertainment has created a stimulating and cinematic experience that challenges the unwavering pedagogy of French historiography. Due to the nature of videogames, Assassin’s Creed Unity serves as a gateway to understanding the French Revolution through the immersive qualities of simulation. The game safely navigates around the historicity of the event by recreating the vibrant landscapes of Paris and filling its streets with believable characters, models, player-driven decisions, and a historically-rich narrative. To this effect, Assassin’s Creed Unity inevitably collides with the opinions of several historians in a way that passively educates its audience on the overall history of 1790's France—making the game an invaluable tool for learning about the French Revolution.

Aprendizaje y enseñanza del diseño de experiencias centradas en el usuario

Diseñar experiencias (UX)[1] innovadoras puede permitirle a los usuarios abrir nuevas dimensiones a las vivencias cotidianas, e ir más allá de las experiencias familiares basadas en diseños de pantalla. Si bien, la mayoría de los métodos para aumentar los conocimientos básicos de un buen diseño de UX todavía tienen sentido en pantallas bidimensionales, los métodos de aplicación de estos principios heurísticos cambian en el nuevo paradigma de las experiencias de realidad virtual y realidad aumentada.
 De esta manera, para cada experiencia digital, el diseñador debe iniciar con una idea para mostrar un conocimiento y luego deberá ampliarla a nuevas superficies y soportes. Cada UX requiere crear un viaje para el usuario (UCD)[2] dentro de la idea. El diseñador decidirá qué debe automatizarse y qué debe controlar el usuario. Para comprender mejor, en el presente artículo se analizará el diseño de la experiencia cinematográfica en una sala de cine que presenta una plataforma única donde el diseñador debe pensar más allá de la interfaz. En este medio, la narración de historia es muy importante y no debe ignorarse. Como docentes de diseño es necesario conocer las posibilidades del medio para crear un entorno inmersivo en lugar de solo una interfaz. Para este aprendizaje es necesario también el conocimiento de la psicología, la arquitectura, el diseño de sonido, el diseño de iluminación y la física. En la actualidad, estos diseños de experiencias se esfuerzan por acercarse a las vivencias de la vida real; pero con el tiempo, el contenido y el uso creativo del contenido evolucionarán hacia ofrecer una nueva realidad.
 
 [1] UX: User Experience Design o Diseño de Experiencia de Usuario.
 
 [2] UCD: User Centered Design o Diseño Centrado en el Usuario.

“A World Complete Without Me”: Writing Cinema in Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions

ABSTRACTPaul Auster’s creative practice involves a tendency to transcend the boundaries between different mediums, as exemplified by his cinematographic fiction. Although relevant research has started to gain traction in recent years, there are still few in-depth analyses of the medium of film, its implication in the verbal medium, and its connection with the themes explored in an individual novel of Auster’s. Drawing on Stanley Cavell’s film philosophy, the present essay attempts to explicate the meaning and function of writing cinema in The Book of Illusions. Starting with several fundamental issues concerning viewing and writing—including the philosophical basis on which cinematic experience and its expression can possibly be construed—this essay delves further into their connections with one of the ethical questions presented in the novel: how can and should one relate to another’s life and work? From the viewpoint of Cavellian film philosophy, the question may be phrased this way: how can and should I, a viewer, respond to “a world complete without me”?

Retrieving trauma, overcoming trauma: Erice’s cinematic poetics

Abstract This article examines Haunted Memory’s overall structure and how the voice-over commentary both caresses the images as treasured objects and inscribes new meaning. Thus, the video essay goes beyond paying homage to the celebrated film director and considers the universality of the experiences of trauma and cinema.

Effects of frame rate on vection and postural sway

The quality of stereoscopic 3D cinematic content is a major determinant for user experience in immersive cinema in both traditional theatres and cinematic virtual reality. One of the most important parameters is the frame rate of the content which has historically been 24 frames per second for movies, but higher frame rates are being considered for cinema and are standard for virtual reality. A typical behavioural response to immersive stereoscopic 3D content is vection, the visually-induced perception of self-motion elicited by moving scenes. In this work we investigated how participants’ vection varied with simulated virtual camera speed, frame rate, and motion blur produced by the virtual camera’s exposure, while viewing depictions of movement through a realistic virtual environment. We also investigated how their postural sway varied with these parameters and how sway covaried with levels of perceived self-motion. Results show that while average perceived vection significantly increased with 3D content frame rate and motion speed, motion blur had no significant effect on perceived vection. We also found that levels of postural sway induced by vection correlated positively with subjective ratings.

Walking as transgenerational methodology

The embodied practice of walking is said to make the city a cinematic experience that carves a path through to be read in multiple ways by future mobile bodies. De Certeau’s (1984) undifferentiated practitioner has been critiqued, with, in particular, alternative gendered accounts of the mobile body (Grosz, 1998; Collie, 2013). This research note seeks to add to such accounts through exploring the walking body that is differentiated according to generation and then through suggesting a transgenerational walking methodology. The article articulates a methodological approach developed as part of a European Research Council funded project on transgenerational cultural transformations of the sensory between 1950 and 2020. Through a series of transgenerational sensory walks – a younger person (sometimes a child) and an older person – the project examines changes in and multisensory engagements with local environments in three national contexts: Turku (Finland), Brighton (UK), and Ljubljana (Slovenia). This paper introduces the project and considers the role of generation in determining mobile space, and hence determines a rationale for a transgenerational methodological approach intersecting several disciplines. We ask the following questions: how are the bodies of different generations written in mobile space? and how does ethnographic sensory walking with different generations offer particular understandings of mobile space?

The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor by Jennifer Rhee

655 BOOKS IN REVIEW This concern aside, Reddell’s book is a highly informative and thoughtprovoking read. It is a wonderful contribution to sf cinema, cinematic sound analysis, and, more generally, an understanding of the sf cinematic experience in various periods and countries. Reddell deftly articulates the profound intellectual and experimental dynamics that make up what is often considered to be a secondary element of the cinematic experience. Further, he greatly expands the examination of how, in concert with broader technological forces, the explorative and innovative nature of sound technologies circumscribes conceptions of possible futures and of potential interactions with the indeterminacy of the alien and of outer space.—Dylan Cree, Concordia University Distance and Intimacy. Jennifer Rhee. The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2018. 240pp. $108 hc, $27 pbk. The mechanisms we humans use officially and circumstantially to judge another’s humanness emerge from the realms of care work, domestic work, and emotional labor. Such work tends to operate under two interwoven rules: distance and intimacy. Both must be present to counterweigh the work of the healthcare assistant, the childcare provider, or the mental health counselor. Too little contact and we accuse our caregivers of bitter medicine; too much and we might feel the need to reciprocate the care we have received. Another way to frame the central problematic here might be to suggest that whoever gets to be the one in need is the one we describe as human. Now imagine that the caregiver is a robot giving off an electric hum and emoting according to cybernetic protocols. Jennifer Rhee’s The Robotic Imaginary explores the human as a conceptual category in search of the mechanisms of humanness and dehumanization. The book introduces many robots across its four chapters. Readers will meet ELIZA. Designed by Jospeh Weizenbaum in 1966, this screen-interface AI was used to emulate a therapist. It would first ask leading questions and later reference past user inputs to perform conversational acuity (33-37). Readers will meet Shakey, a robot designed by a team led by Nils Nilsson at the Stanford Research Institute between 1966 and 1972. Shakey uses a programmed map of a more-orless empty apartment along with basic sensory input to navigate. Shakey malfunctioned often and was a very early prototype for the robotic vacuum (7075 ). Readers will also meet Kismet, a robotic head programmed to learn from conversational inputs. Kismet’s speech patterns, inquisitiveness, and appearance are all designed so that conversation partners will underestimate the robot and treat it as a child, mentee, or dependant (101-105). The pattern of introducing uniquely likable robots designed for care, domestic, and emotional labor stops when the book returns in the fourth chapter to the subject with which it opens: drones. Rhee begins her study by comparing the dehumanizing experience of Yemenis living under the threat of drone strikes with a related yet distinct manner of dehumanization exhibited by drone operators in the United States. Rhee’s epigraphs include a statement by Yemeni Ezzaldeen Tuaiman, “They’re going to kill me next,” beside another made by drone operator Michael Haas, “Ever step 656 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) on ants and never give it another thought?” (1). Here two forms of dehumanization have taken effect, mediated by drone ballistics, flight tech, hardware, and software. Such dynamics are taken up in great detail in “Dying,” the book’s fourth chapter. But first Rhee offers a thoroughgoing elaboration of the cultural history of robotics and artificial intelligence, interspersed with excursions into robot aesthetics and cybernetic art. Rhee offers much more than a cultural history of robotics. The book focuses on history, but it does so in order to attend to the robotic imaginary, which Rhee defines as “the shifting inscriptions of humanness and dehumanizing erasures evoked by robots” (5). Robots call to mind certain figurations of both the human and the inhuman. For Rhee, the work of the robotic imaginary is simultaneously about forming humanizing connections between otherwise differentiated entities and dehumanizing divisions between otherwise similar entities. The robotic imaginary operates in the realm of metaphor and anti-metaphor, and such connections and disconnections...

A Global Cinematic Experience: Cinépolis, Film Exhibition, and Luxury Branding

A Global Cinematic Experience: Cinépolis, Film Exhibition, and Luxury Branding

Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera by Gundula Kreuzer

Reviewed by: Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera by Gundula Kreuzer Nicholas Vazsonyi Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera. By Gundula Kreuzer. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. Pp. xix + 348. Cloth $70.00. ISBN 978-0520279681. Gundula Kreuzer has written an imaginative, highly original, and stunningly researched book. It is not just about Wagner, but is instead a minihistory of selected technologies employed by European theater going as far back as the baroque and right up to our own time, where Wagner serves as a fulcrum and point of constant reference. Wagner is also the frame, more specifically, of Robert LePage's controversial 2010 production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen at New York's Metropolitan Opera. The star of that production was a giant mechanical contraption, dubbed "the machine," that was a permanent fixture on the stage and, because of its capacity to have its contours almost infinitely varied, could, in theory, be made to fit all the various locations of Wagner's seventeen-hour epic. Kreuzer's selection of LePage's production is a master-stroke, because, as she shows throughout her book, his decision to make a piece of technology the visible centerpiece of this production harkens back to the original conceptual and practical problems Wagner faced when he first staged the Ring at his purpose-built theater in Bayreuth—except in reverse. How was Wagner to create the realistic illusion of his multifarious worlds without revealing the ponderous mechanisms of doing so? While Wagner wanted to mask the use of technology as much as possible, his theater ironically became quickly known as marking a seismic leap in the use of technologies for the creation of a sort of natural realism that would ultimately require film technology to be fully realized. So, in a sense, Wagner failed twice over: he neither managed to conjure the kind of other-worldly realism he sought, while at the same time he was unable to fully conceal his methods for trying to do so. By contrast, LePage made technology his centerpiece and also proudly declared that, in so doing, he was being faithful to Wagner's original intentions. Not only was LePage's contention a complete distortion of Wagner, but, as Kreuzer deftly shows, an artistic failure reminiscent of the first Bayreuth to boot. Each of the terms in the main title—curtain, gong, and steam—is given its own chapter, but preceding them is a section on Wagner's opera Tannhäuser, with particular focus on the famous Venusberg scene that opens the work. In a remarkable and inventive reading, Kreuzer suggests that Venus, who stages an alternate reality [End Page 375] that entices and captivates Tannhäuser, is actually anticipating what Wagner aspired to achieve on stage, especially with the Ring. Venus creates a perfected world of total illusion that fully masks the source of production which, in this case, is magic. Wagner used technology to attempt the same effect, but ultimately failed. This is in many respects the central thesis of the book. However, I am not really doing full justice to Kreuzer's intricate and extended reading of Tannhäuser, and so simply recommend it as required reading for anyone who is working with this opera. In any event, only with the advent of the cinematic experience has Wagner's vision of the Venusberg been realized. One would think this puts Kreuzer in the camp of those who have long claimed that, had Wagner been alive in the twentieth century, he would have been a filmmaker. But in her epilogue, Kreuzer again surprises by arguing, and convincingly, that, on the contrary, Wagner was committed to the idea of three-dimensionality, to the physical presence of people on the stage. The chapter on "curtain" sets Kreuzer's general approach, which is executed similarly in the following two chapters on "gong" and "steam." It opens with an at-once broad but also quite detailed history of the curtain in European theater. Kreuzer also looks carefully at the scores of dozens of operas both preceding and concurrent with Wagner, to explore how the timing and speed of curtains both at the beginning...

Information and communication technologies of teaching Russian literature to students-foreigners in the higher education practice

The article presents a comparative analysis of the results of the use of information and communication technologies in 6 groups (120 people) of Ukrainian and foreign students which was obtained by means of methods of questioning and interviewing. After assessing the results of the introduction into the practice of teaching literature to Ukrainian and foreign students with the use of demonstration computer programs (films, video fragments) we ascertained that the traditional (full-time) form of teaching using ICT and blended education was equally organic for the modern educational process in the higher education institutions of Ukraine; сomparison of literary works with Russian and foreign film versions is optimal for Ukrainian students and appeal to the Soviet-Russian interpretations of literary masterpieces only – for foreign students. This is due to foreigners’ insufficient competence in the Russian language, the difficulty in reading large enough volume Russian texts of the XIX century as well as lack of basic knowledge of Russian history, culture and filmography. Reference to the famous and high-quality film adaptations at training sessions stimulates cognitive interest, intellectual and creative potential, enhances the motivation of foreign students to study Russian language and literature. It is difficult for foreign students to perceive a large number of diverse textual and audiovisual information, to make a qualitative comparison of Russian and foreign cinematic experience due to their unformed linguistic and cultural basis for multi-level multi-dimensional comparative analysis of works of different types of arts.