Cultural Modus from the Perspective of the Semantic Content of the Film Shot

Abstract

The article examines the reflection of cultural codes in a film’s visuals. This issue needs a closer look in view of the growing globalization process, and especially its current stage defined as glocalization. The author presumes that, semantically, a new language of the global community is being formed with the features of diverse cultures as its signs and “letters.” Therefore, it seems important to explore the ways these cultural codes are represented on the screen.
The article presents “Anna Karenina” (dir. C. Brown, 1935) as a case study. This adaptation was chosen for several reasons: firstly, it was made when cinema was not yet so heavily complicated by the auteur’s vision and fairly accurately reflected the emotional experience of the American nation; secondly, in Brown’s film Russian and American codes are interwoven, which provides an insight into the interaction of different cultural modes on the screen.
The analysis of several scenes of the aforementioned film shows that the visual aspect of the film is infused with meanings that were topical for the US people at the time of the film's production (the mid-1930s). For example, Anna’s position in relation to Vronsky in the frame depicts the problem of women’s status in American society during the Great Depression. Even the attempt to borrow Russian cultural codes (for example, the use of traditional clothes, folk songs and dances) ends up mirroring President Roosevelt’s New Deal. It was concluded that a careful study of the film’s mise-en-scene allows us to enter the cultural field of the producing country.
In order to discover the cause-and-effect relations and principles according to which the features of a particular culture are manifested on the screen, in other words, to partially solve the problem of decoding “letters-cultures” through the visual space of cinema, the author suggests using Yury M. Lotman’s method, which consists in combining local observations and perception of global knowledge, which organically comports with the phenomenon of glocalization.