Russian Cinema Research Articles

Italy through Russian eyes: Italy’s evolving imagined geography in Russian cinema

Italy has long been a source of fascination and inspiration for Russian writers, artists and filmmakers due to its extensive cultural heritage. Russian filmmakers have played with how Russians view Italy, and they offer viewers the opportunity to see Italy through Russian eyes. Whether in collaboration with Italian filmmakers or on their own, Russian directors have sought to explore Italy: both its real geography and its imagined one. Imagined geography gives us a new way to examine Russian–Italian film collaboration. By examining the imagined geography of Italy in Ryazanov’s Unbelievable Adventures of Italians in Russia (1974), Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983), Mikhailkov’s Dark Eyes (1987), Kravchuk’s The Italian (2005) and Konchalovsky’s Sin (2021), this article proposes that Russian directors map similarity and inspiration onto Italy to establish an affinity towards Italy that exists beyond the boundaries of the film collaborations.

The journey of a century

This article provides an in-depth look at the work Italia-Russia: Un secolo di cinema / Italija-Rossija: Vek kino (‘Italy-Russia: A century of cinema’), edited by the authors and published in Italian and in Russian under the auspices of the Embassy of the Republic of Italy in Moscow (ABCDesign and PBN Print, 2020). For the first time ever, the book delves with singular purpose into the cinematographic relationship between the two countries and much more. The volume is divided into four sections: the first centres on ‘exchanges, crossroads, and joint projects’ from the early 1900s until the new millennium; the second concentrates on the Venice and Moscow film festivals; the third looks at ‘portraits, frames, hidden dreams’ and the final section features the ‘memories and points of view’ of some of the most significant figures in Italian and Russian film.

ФЕНОМЕН ПОПУЛЯРНОСТИ ТУРЕЦКИХ СЕРИАЛОВ В СРЕДЕ РОССИЙСКОЙ МОЛОДЕЖИ

The purpose of this study is to identify the degree of influence of Turkish TV series on the youth of Russia and to analyze how the love of the Russian cinema audience for Turkish cinema can affect the policy between Russia and Turkey. The object of the study is directly Turkish cinema and Turkish culture. The subject of the study is the Russian audience represented by the younger generation. As part of the work, a sociological survey was conducted among high school students.

New Italian Cinema Events in Russia: Interview with Viviana del Bianco

The New Italian Cinema Events (NICE) was established in the United States in 1990, in 1993 in Russia and, over the years, in many other countries. Viviana del Bianco, artistic director of NICE, illustrates the history of this festival and explains the reasons of the success of the festival which launches young Italian filmmakers, thus giving them the opportunity to establish an international artistic reputation. In this interview, del Bianco also explains the genesis and cultural impact of the Contemporary Russian Film Festival in Florence established in 2019 which promotes the work of new Russian talents in Italy.

The Development of the Russian Film Industry in the Era of Digital Media Exemplified by A. Fedorchenko’s Film <i>Big Snakes of Ulli-Kale</i>

The relevance of this research lies in understanding of Russian cinema as a rapidly developing cultural industry with the influence of digital media on these processes. A clear example of this process is A. Fedorchenkos creative work, including his last major work, Big Snakes of Ulli-Kale. According to the author of the article, digital media, providing new opportunities for creative self-realization, contribute to the directors traditional desire for the most complete control over the means of artistic expressiveness of film production.

The script form in Soviet and Russian film studies

ABSTRACT This article explores the development of the script form in Soviet/Russian scriptwriting, which has drawn particular attention in the 1920s, when a polemic arose among film theorists and practitioners concerning the ‘iron’ and ‘emotional’ script. Sergei Eisenstein and Aleksandr Rzheshevskii, among others, favoured the emotional script with its expressive record of the future film to the rigid production plan of the ‘iron script’. In the 1930s, this polemic was resolved with the emergence of the ‘literary’ script, which united elements of both forms. Valentin Turkin, a pedagogue at Moscow’s Film School and author of the first Soviet textbook on film dramaturgy, played an important role in teaching of scriptwriting. Turkin defined the script as a heterogeneous literary form, an approach that influenced film dramaturgy into the 1960s–1970s, when Turkin’s theses were developed further: the scriptwriter’s work on the future film and on the script’s subsequent screen realisation are fruitful only through the literary script form. This approach dominated in teaching well into the 1990s, until the American format of the script was introduced with the first translations of textbooks into Russian, effectively returning to the ‘iron’ script form.

Main expressive devices of the literary screenplay in Russian cinema of the 1990s

The article explores the means of literary expressiveness used in the literary screenplays of film screenwriters of the 1990s. The literary screenplay, characterized by the extensive use of literary devices, became an educational and production standard of Soviet cinema from the 1930s. All elements of this form are subservient to the goal of subsequent screen embodiment and are directly related to the issues of the future film. In the 1990s, the transition from the state-controlled Soviet film production system to the producer model led to a shift towards the American screenplay, whose dry and concise language was radically opposed to the stylistic uniqueness of the literary screenplay. Some of the last debutants among the graduates of VGIK, who received their education in accordance with the Soviet model of teaching film dramaturgy (P. Lutsyk and A. Samoryadov, R. Litvinova, A. Balabanov), develop in their screenplays a complex set of techniques aimed at reflecting their contemporary issues through the formation of the film's chronotope, speech characteristics of the hero and their image using literary means – syntax, through which the spatial-temporal unity of the screenplay is organized, replicas, the score of the role, and the logic of editing and camera work (scale, angle, point of shooting) are created. These structural elements are inseparable from screenplay as a type of text. The author comes to the conclusion that the development of methods for their presentation in the screenplay text by the authors of the 1990s significantly influences the subsequent development of Russian screenwriting.

A Conversation with Sergei Loznitsa

Abstract Film critic and scholar Jean-Michel Frodon interviews Ukrainian filmmaker about his career, beginning with his training in mathematics and science (and the surprising connections between math and movies), his training at Russian film school, his relationship with various of his teachers, how he finances his films, and of course the films themselves, including Train Stop, My Joy, Blockade, Mr. Landsbergis, The Natural History Of Destruction, Maidan, Reflection, Austerlitz, In the Fog, A Gentle Creature, Donbass, and Babi Yarr Context.

Оптимизм и пессимизм в образах будущего в современном российском кинематографе

The article is devoted to the analysis of Russian films in order to identify optimism and pessimism about the prospects of the future in them. As a methodological basis, we applied our own methodology for the study of feature films. Its application made it possible to consider not only the content (plot) of films, but also their visual range, to focus on the color, light and auditory characteristics of the film. In conclusion, a conclusion was made about the dominance of pessimism in the images of the future in contemporary Russian cinema.

"mama is reading a history of russian death …"

"mama is reading a history of russian death …" Konstantin Shavlovsky (bio) Translation from the Russian mama is reading a history of russian deathI'm reading Paul B. Preciadowe're both preparing to transition at which stage do we turn the page mama it's not black and whitewe're the bad guys, we're foolsit's the phantoms in the kitchencircling around your foot there goes granny with her hornshere comes that faceless auntlittle people, common folkread that tale to the end breathe into the balmy windsave it for a rainy dayone white night a dirty phantomwith the lilacs had his way not at all white, death burns therenot at all bare, life stands there I do not recognize this fatal farethis taste of Pushkin in my mouth [End Page 47] Editorial note: Turn to page 58 to read the translator's biographies. Konstantin Shavlovsky Konstantin Shavlovsky is a poet, cinema critic, publisher, curator, and the founder/executive manager of the Saint Petersburg bookstore Word Order. He has worked as an editor for Seance magazine, published extensively on Russian cinema, and curated multiple interdisciplinary cinema projects. He is the author of two books of poetry and resides in Tbilisi, Georgia. Polina Barskova Polina Barskova is a poet and scholar who teaches Russian literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is author of twelve collections of poetry and two books of prose in Russian as well as of the monograph Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster (2017). Her recent creative nonfiction collection, Living Pictures (2022), was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize. Her collections of poetry in English translation include This Lamentable City, The Zoo in Winter, Relocations, and, most recently, Air Raid. D. Brian Kim D. Brian Kim is a scholar of nineteenth-century Russian literature and the theory and practice of literary translation and cultural exchange. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. Eugene Ostashevsky Eugene Ostashevsky is the author, most recently, of The Feeling Sonnets (2022). As a translator of experimental literature in Russian, he has worked on futurism, the OBERIU group, and contemporary poetry, as well as Lucky Breaks, by Yevgenia Belorusets (2022). Bela Shayevich Bela Shayevich is a Soviet-American writer and translator. Elaine Wilson Elaine Wilson is a writer, literary translator, language instructor, and PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia University. She lives in New York City. Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

The attitude of Moscow youth to the topic of patriotism in domestic cinema

The article is devoted to the theme of patriotism in Russian films from different time periods. The authors point out that such films are being created in order to foster love and respect for the Motherland; however, there is an emerging problem of a decline in the popularity of domestic films on such topics and that of the lack of interest in the topics among young people. The contradiction lies in the fact that such films are becoming increasingly relevant, mainly due to the overall political situation and changes in Russian film distribution. Meanwhile, there is a lot of talk about the quality of domestic patriotic films. Questions are being raised as to which films are of higher quality, what ideas should be popularized among the population, whether such movies really evoke a sense of pride in the Motherland or only ridicule, and whether they are effective in the framework of patriotic education programs. To assess the current situation, the authors of the article collected and analyzed youth representatives’ opinions on the topic of patriotism in domestic cinema. The results of the study allow to form an idea of how works of cinematic art can be used for educating citizens and moving the culture forward.

The Russian Movie T-34: a duel between soldiers and their tanks.

The aim of this essay is to exploratory analyze the Russian film Russian War T. 34, by Alexey Sidorov, as a symbolic duel between two individuals, a Nazi German and the other one Soviet, employing their tanks, their backgrounds, their industrial cultures, and ideologies. The Dominant Explain Comes from the Curzio Malaparte reports that, at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa of 1941, advocated Nazi defeat. We use the works of Steve Zaloga to analyze the use of tanks as a combat machines. John Erickson, Brandon Schechter's reading, explains the victory of the Red Army and the USSR, mobilizing industrial, human, and cultural means employing, according to Lewin, the memory of the Russian victory over Napoleon in 1812. Our Findings indicate that the consolidation of an accelerated industrial mindset produced a new ethics where Tank Crews were soldiers and mechanically inspired and, like an elite, along with industrial technique, employed tricks as a tactic weapon, according to Michel de Certeau. Narrating the dynamic plastic of the battle between tanks, Sidorov's film holds the viewer's attention by employing the narrative aesthetics of silent cinema and visualizing his scenes dispensing with the reading of Russian subtitles. The film puts the tank, the top product of the 1930s and 40s celebrated industrial development, as a complex war tool whose employment requires exceptional individuals endowed with cunning and technique of fighting, simultaneously soldiers and mechanical.

Biopolitics and the Cinema of Extremes

AbstractIn the past few years, a number of scholars have examined Russian culture in a global context, marking a turn toward the transnational in Russian studies. However, scholarship on contemporary Russian cinema has been slow to take up this trend, paying more attention to local and internal aspects of recent cinema than to global socio‐political conditions. This article addresses this issue by focusing on Russian cinema of the 2000s and 2010s alongside two concurrent developments in European film: the French cinéma du corps and the Romanian New Wave. Specifically, it focuses on the aesthetics of the body in Vasilii Sigarev’s Wolfie (2009) and The Land of Oz (2015) and compares it to that of Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day (2001) and Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005). The article argues that the representations of physicality in Sigarev’s films exemplify a cultural response to the rise of biopolitics in Russia, which took place with the spread of neoliberalism to the post‐Soviet space. By considering Russian cinema in tandem with that of France and Romania, the article demonstrates that while the modes of representing the body may differ, all of them seek to create a biopolitical subject as a critique of social conditions that obtain with the global hegemony of neoliberalism. At the same time, they construct a different viewer: while Denis’s and Puiu’s humanistic modernism sees the spectator as a sovereign subject, Sigarev’s postmodernist leaning destroys the possibility of an external vantage point, interrogating the extent to which the biopolitical/neoliberal condition can dominate cultural expression. The comparative analysis thus not only tests the notion of cultural singularity in the twenty‐first century but raises a broader question of how neoliberal subjectivity can be represented in the visual arts.

Transformation of the teacher’s image in Soviet and Russian Cinematography: Intracultural Dialogue

This article examines the structure of the teacher’s image and its semantic content in Soviet and Russian cinema. In the 30s, it appeared to be of a generalizing nature; in the 40s, the teachers were idealized, in the cinema of the “Thaw” period a teacher appears as a person with the entire spectrum of human feelings. In cinematography, the specifics of the teacher’s activity and the demonstration of his awareness of his place in the pedagogical process depended on social attitudes. Thus, each decade has demonstrated a new approach. The relationship between the teacher and the student in the cinema of the 70s–80s of the 20th century was especially complex and multifaceted. In the era of perestroika, in the context of the decline in universal human values, the attitude towards the teacher changed. In most films, a teacher is either the cause of the conflict, or the object on which the student takes out his dissatisfaction with the world.

"...ОН ОТРАВЛЯЕТ ДЕТСКУЮ ДУШУ": УЧАЩИЕСЯ И РОССИЙСКИЙ КИНЕМАТОГРАФ В НАЧАЛЕ ХХ В.

"...ОН ОТРАВЛЯЕТ ДЕТСКУЮ ДУШУ": УЧАЩИЕСЯ И РОССИЙСКИЙ КИНЕМАТОГРАФ В НАЧАЛЕ ХХ В.

The Formation of Russian Genre Cinema at the Beginning of the 21st Century

The problem of genre formation in cinema constantly causes controversy and discrepancies among art historians, since this type of creativity is synthetic, using the creative possibilities of other types of art. Сommon in the definition of the term “genre” is only the provision that a genre is a way of embodying a certain concept of reality in a work, creating an artistic picture or an artistic model of the world, perceived from a certain angle, which implies a limitation in the choice of means of artistic embodiment of the theme of the work. Like any complex concept, a genre should be considered in a system of several coordinates, among which the dominant features inherent in a particular genre play the most significant role. These two dominants are: 1) the emotion that the film should evoke in the viewer (laughter, horror, sympathy, etc.); 2) the theme of the film (historical, military, sci-fi, etc.). When investigating the problem of genre formation, one should also not forget that the genre is a historical category, i. e. the specific period in which it was created plays an important role in determining the genre characteristics of a particular film. Over the past 30 years, Russian cinema has undergone significant changes in the aesthetic and ethical paradigm, including changes in the themes and genre palette of films. This article is the first attempt to analyze the process of mastering by Russian cinematography new genres for it, which were not previously in the repertoire of Russian cinema (fantasy, disaster film, horror, biopic, musical). Having considered the problem of interaction between cultural globalization and national mentality, the author comes to the conclusion that, having survived the period of imitation of foreign models, Russian genre cinema at the present stage has the opportunity to gain self-identification and become an art that is in demand by a wide audience.

The possibilities of modern Russian cinema in the patriotic education of schoolchildren

The possibilities of modern Russian cinema in the patriotic education of schoolchildren

Прецедентность в городской коммерческой номинации

This article, on the one hand, continues to consider precedent names in the urban commercial naming in the cultural and communicative aspect, begun by the author together with Elena N. Remchukova, on the other hand, demonstrates the possibilities of naming research, which combines pragmatic, psycholinguistic and legal perspectives. The possibilities and features of commercial naming are analyzed using the example of strong and weak precedent names used in the names of cafes, restaurants, hotels, residential complexes, shops, beauty salons and other urban facilities. When analyzing the use of the naming model based on precedent names (anthroponyms, toponyms, names of literary works, films, etc.), not only the intentions and motivations of the nominators are taken into account, but also the perception of the names included in the city onomasticon by the addressee —the consumer of goods and services. The article examines the results of an association survey conducted by theauthor to identify “feedback” and determine the precedentiality degree of 150 commercial urbanonyms, summarizes the preliminary results of a psycholinguistic study, indicating the stability of precedent names and precedent statements of the core zone of the cognitive base, learned in the process of mastering the school educational program, and a decrease in the level of precedentiality (transition from strong to weak) of the golden fund of Russian cinema, foreign historical figures, literary and artistic figures. The article demonstrates that a high degree of precedentiality ensures the commercial success of an enterprise but makes it difficult to secure the legal status of a name as a means of individualization, which forces the nominator to widely use non-verbal precedent phenomena as part of a multimodal commercial urbanonym. The low precedentiality degree of the name —the source of the nomination —contributes to greater individualization of the commercial enterprise but narrows the circle of consumers of goods and services.

Начало «Начала». Фрагменты обсуждения литературного сценария Е. Габриловича и Г. Панфилова

The publication is concerned with the discussion of the screenplay (“literary script” in the Russian screenwriting terminology) of the film, which was released in 1970 under the title “The Beginning”. Excerpts from the previously unpublished discussion of the screenplay at the Artistic Council of the Second Creative Association of the Lenfilm Studios on January 14, 1969, in the presence of one of the screenplay’s co-authors and the future director of the film, Gleb Panfilov, shows both the emerging general attitude towards the future film at the studio and the typical objections that fellow filmmakers directed at the theme and the construction of the screenplay. In particular, the very name of the future picture is being analyzed; as well as the division of its plot into “layers” or storylines and, in particular, the “layer” of filmmaking itself (the career of a film actor, the working conditions on set, etc.); the juxtaposition of the heroine and the characters surrounding her, which turns out to be the most important ideological moment of the screenplay for the representatives of Soviet film industry; and, finally, the ending of the film, which has not yet been worked out in the screenplay, but outlines for which, however, are already discernible in the discussion. Such materials relating to the making of key films in the history of Russian cinema help not only to clarify their genesis, but also to visualise the functioning of the Soviet film production system, as well as the formation of its themes and style at a crucial moment of the transition from the cinema of the Thaw to that of Stagnation.

«Экранизация» памяти о советской космонавтике: (вос)производство образов в современном российском космическом кино

This article is devoted to the analysis of the content and pragmatics of the memory of the Soviet space program in contemporary Russian cinema. The relevance of the problem is connected with the fact that in recent years the «cosmos» has again become a stable object of social imagination and an attractive setting for the mass media. Memories of Soviet cosmonautics feature prominently in modern Russian culture. This article, referring to full-length Russian films of the 2010s, considers the cinematographic representations of the Soviet space past as memory practices. Studying them with an emphasis on the semiotic, narrative, and discursive realities of films and images offers interpretations of the past that are relevant in the concrete historical conditions of socio-cultural production. The materials of the study showed that the film history of Soviet cosmonautics has two memory frames. The heroic image of Soviet cosmonautics embodied in a specific formula of historical cinema produces a kind of restoration of the Soviet patriotic canon turning the image into an inspiring symbol of history. The revision of images of the past also leads to the release of symbolic meanings attached to the Soviet space program, which allows film memory to become not a static snapshot of the past, but a dynamic cultural force.