The article explores the role of cinema in the formation and consolidation of the key mythology associated with the nation’s heroism during the Great Patriotic War, which underlie collective memory and national identity. The author analyzes both visual and narrative techniques of Russian cinema in constructing a heroic and patriotic image of the war focusing on such mythologemes as the unity of the people, sacrifice and moral superiority. Special attention is paid to the evolution of these mythologies in different historical periods, their connection with ideological policy and their influence on public consciousness.

This article is the first attempt at a general classification and analysis of Boris Vasiliev's filmography consisting of 28 films either written by him or based on his books. The main attention is laid on the ideological and thematic content of the most notable films, as well as the conformity of the screen adaptations with Vasiliev’s artistic concepts, themes and problems. The article is a readers’ tribute to the classic of Russian literature and his cinematic talent, commemorating the writer's centenary.

The author compares the approaches of V.I. Lenin and I.V. Stalin towards religious films highlighting the practical methods of using cinema as an instrument of the government's anti-religious propaganda aimed at eradicating religious conscience of the population. The information is presented as an opposition of Lenin’s and Stalin’s film censorship in an attempt to identify the subjective reasons for the dissimilar policies of the first two Soviet leaders with regards to demonstrating religion on the screen.

The article examines the relevance of archival material in researching the process of making film costumes. By turning to the documents of the “Lenfilm” studio, the author reveals the main production stages of the comedy “Twelfth Night”. The novelty of the research is in the coverage of rare archival data: screen tests of the actors for the main roles, expert board meetings and estimates for sewing period costumes including the choice of the materials based on the 16th century pictorial sources.

This article uses R. Bresson’s film “The Devil, Probably’’ as a case study of a ritual crisis in the consumer society, The researcher looks into the main aspects of the ritual crisis – absence of collective mythology and ritual, loss of connection with the sacred and inability to form a community – through focusing on a character whose goal is to restore connection with the sacred via ceremonial self-sacrifice. As a result, the author of the article comes to the conclusion that the protagonist of the film fails in his attempt, and his striving for martyrdom through ritual self-sacrifice turns out to be just a plain murder.

The article is devoted to the history and artistic features of the cinema of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea). This topic’s relevance is based not only on the strengthening of relations between our countries, but also on the insufficient research of this matter. The novelty of the study lies in the systematic presentation of the key stages of North Korean cinema from its inception in 1949 to the present. The author identifies its main genres and their characteristic features.

The article analyzes the films based on the novels and essays by the modern French writer and poet Michel Houellebecq. This article shows what transformations occur when translating Houellebecq's prose into the film language. The author compares the plots of the literary sources and their adaptations (in particular, finales) focusing on the directorial techniques of transferring literary images into the screen space and discusses the factors that determine the tendency of softening Houellebecq's rigidly pessimistic worldview by strengthening the melodramatic component of the story and introducing optimistic motifs into the finales of their films.

The article addresses one of the main problems of films about musicians, namely, the dramatic and directorial approach to the presenting an artistically authentic, lively image of a musician. A general overview of feature and documentary films about musicians reveals diverse ways of representing individuality and the inner world of a character, as well as identifying a certain personality type. Surveying the images of musicians in a fairly representative number of films, the author proposes a typology based on the protagonist's relationship with music and, through music, with society: creative and innovative (“creators”); performing (“reciters-translators”, “readers-dialogists”, “psychosomatics”, “dictators”, “divas”); intuitive-spiritual (“mediums”).

The crisis of cultural identity in the modern world is a historically determined process. In the context of globalization and the hybrid confrontation of civilizations, cinema is becoming an effective method of manipulating personal identification. Due to its ability to influence a person by creating appropriate artistic images, cinema can affect an individual's self-awareness, ensure and strengthen his cultural identity. The strategic potential of the cinema’s positive effect on a person’s cultural identity lies inter alia in unleashing the power of Russian cinema.

By analyzing promotional materials, or trailers (within their socio-cultural and philosophic contexts), the article demonstrates the adaptive capabilities of the described artistic form (examined as an instrument of representation and expanding the narrative space). It generates the effect of analogy, which in turn determines the introduction of game images (as evocations of the anti-world) into the language and thinking of individuals and groups, interpreted by the author as a form of influence of audiovisual arts on the ongoing convergence of concepts and meanings, stabilizing the mechanisms of social interactions and turning the described category into an integral part of modern information space.

The article considers possible ways of describing the genesis of the form and function of the long take through the preceding experience of working with duration in static images and other media. The long take becomes a form that accumulates the strategies developed for static images: multiple layers, stretching and compressing time and space, contemplative practices, dramaturgy of viewing, and so on, all of which is combined with the expressive potential of the “duration” of the moving image, thus achieving various aesthetic results — intensification of dramatic effect or, on the contrary, complete de-dramatization.

The article examines film commissions as one of the key factors in the globalization of film production. The article provides information about the history of such organizations, their current activities and the prospects for their further development. The article also explores the obvious and non-obvious functions of film commissions in the context of globalization and the structure of the international film location market, of which film commissions are the main liaison. Based on these facts, the author compiles an expanded list of seemingly unobvious challenges facing such institutions. This list can come in handy for developing personnel training methods for such organizations.

This article surveys the work of Victor Braginsky, Honored Artist of the Russian Federation, Full Member of the Russian Academy of Arts, Professor at the Production Design Department of the S.A. Gerasimov Russian State University of Cinematography (VGIK). Braginsky’s artistic manner – intimate feeling, the integrity of artistic images with focusing on individual details, classical compositional clarity and harmonious coloristic patterns – continues the heritage of Russian landscape painting developed within the Moscow artistic school in the late 1800s by Valentin Serov, Konstantin Korovin, Mikhail Nesterov, Vasily Baksheev and others.

The article examines the formation of compositional categories in the Middle Ages. These ideas naturally arose as a reaction to the collapse of ancient philosophy and ethics. The article shows that the image of a medieval composition was primarily a symbol, an attempt to figuratively represent the unimaginable, the transcendental. Medieval images were supposed to bring a person as close to the sense of the Divine as possible by contemplating the entire complex of symbolic images. The concept of light, shadow and color as a philosophical and aesthetic foundation for artistic representation, based on a holographic model of everything that exists, was rather noteworthy during this period. In the medieval composition, the tasks of organizing a plane, space, and plot cannot be considered as independent, since the artists actually didn’t face them.