Overcoming History. Centripetal Models of Film’s Artistic Space

Abstract

The article examines the strategies of modern mass cinema in relation to history, aimed at displacing the historical content while directly referring to the past. It reveals that for this purpose the method of reducing the historical time right down to freezing it is used, so that the historical reality is presented in the film as a static “picture”, a motionless visual image, endowed with super-realistic features.
Scrupulous study of the subject environment, its "authenticity" allow to create a kind of visual attraction that always wins the acclamation of the viewers. Recognizable touches of the past vividly convince the audience of the historical veracity of the vision.
On the other hand, the centripetal spatial model effectively works to displace history so as to focus the viewer's attention on the main event of the story, its bright dynamic climax, which develops rapidly within the "empty" core, in the center of the space completely free of history. Here comes the time of Kairos, the god of fortune. The hero achieves victory by the grace of providence. This is a special trick of modern mass culture, convincing the average man that anyone can draw a winning ticket. Thus, the main event of the film, its climax turning around the hero’s fate has nothing to do with History. That is how, for instance, the film "Upward Motion" by Anton Megerdichev is structured.
The article offers a film analyzing methodology which combines the analysis of the film’s artistic space with the temporal analysis based on understanding history as a process.
Thus, when identifying the centripetal model of space in the structure of a cinematic work, it is important to pay close attention to the core, the center of attraction of the main story lines. In the auteur cinema, centripetal models are used to displace history, but here the historical is displaced by the sacred. This hypothesis requires a separate study.