The article is devoted to the study of screen images of prerevolutionary newsreels, which correspond not to historical reality, but to the viewer’s mythical ideas about it. The pre-revolutionary viewer saw screen reality differently compared to the modern viewer. He believed that screen images would live on the screen in the perception of viewers of future generations, but in fact, the new audience sees these images differently.

The topic of the article is the reflection of the person of I.V. Stalin in Soviet newsreels (newsreels and documentaries, special issues of newsreels, documentaries) in the period from 1930 to mid-1941. Based on a content analysis of a pre-made sample of film documents stored in the Russian State Archive of Film and Photo Documents, the author traces the evolution of Stalin’s screen image from one of the prominent party functionaries – Lenin’s comrades-in-arms to the sole leader of the Soviet people. The subject of a detailed analysis are little-known fragments of newsreels, in which the historically accurate audiovisual image of Stalin, the content and manner of his public appearances make it possible to give a more accurate and objective assessment of not only his personality, but also a number of important historical collisions of the USSR during the Stalin period.

The article is devoted to the topic of the relationship between orthodoxy church and cinema in Russia of the pre-revolutionary period. The author examines the main reasons of the hostility to films of the religious content on the side of priests, first of all Holy Synod is meant. A special attention in the text is paid a position of Russian Tzar. His hesitation and dualism of the personal attitude to the cinema was wrong for the deal of the improvement of mutual understanding between religious institutions and new art.

The article is a content analysis of texts from the magazine «Soviet Screen» dedicated to foreign cinema in the period from 1925 to 1991 inclusive. When presenting the results of content analysis of texts, the study authors used specific units of counting. They became the following semantic units: frequency of publications related to such genres as film reviews, surveys, analytical articles, articles on the history of cinema, creative portraits of filmmakers, interviews; the percentage of analyzed messages, that is, texts about Western cinema in relation to the total text array of a given publication. The counting procedure complied with standard methods of classification into selected groups using the compilation of special tables (including units of analysis and counting, frequency of use).

The article is devoted to the analysis of issues of cultural and historical identification. The author of the article begins his research by turning to the discussions between Westerners and Slavophiles of the 19th century. about the character of the Russian people. The October Revolution and the subsequent Civil War tested the views of Slavophiles and Westerners. In the post-Soviet period, issues of identification again rose with particular urgency, because the country found itself at a crossroads. An indicative example of this kind of reflection is the painting by Konstantin Lopushansky «Role» (2013). According to the author of the article, the key feature of the Russian soul for Lopushansky is the will to death, which a person perceives as his own destiny. This formula contains both the destructive chthonic energy that Westerners dreamed of, and holy obedience, aka sacrifice, seen by the Slavophiles.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the thematic revival in Russian cinema of trends in the positioning of the individual in society. This is manifested, among other things, in the creation of a connection between man and outer space. For thousands of years, people have created a myth about the relationship between life on Earth and the cosmos. This myth is still being created in Russian cinema, which forms the sociocultural paradigm of society.

The article analyzes the image of a rock musician in modern Russian cinema. Having developed a cult status in the mid-80s - early 90s, this kind of character reappeared on the screens in the first decade of the 21st century. One after another, the sequels to the Perestroika hits «2-Assa-2» by S. Solovyov and «The Needle Remix» by R. Nugmanov are released, a number of other notable films featuring this image are produced, but they fail to repeat the success of their predecessors. The author analyzes the cultural codes behind the image of a rock musician in Russian cinema, traces its changes and concludes that the cult hero of the Perestroika and the early nineties nowadays, «rehabilitated» by the silver screen and «polished» by the elapsed time, has acquired a new resonance. If initially a rock musician in Soviet cinema was an opinion maker and an inspiring leader, in modern Russian cinema he has become a sign of spiritual exhaustion and lack of sense-making guidelines typical of the 2000s.

The article analyzes the creative features of Carlos Saura's style. The focus is on dance as a meaning-forming and aesthetic principle. The author of the article explores the issues of expressiveness of dance as an element of photogeny created in the film. Photogeny serves the director as an element that allows him to achieve, as the author of the study sees it, his main task – to erase the differences between the concepts of art and life. The photogeny of dance allows the film to show a certain super-authenticity, which includes various dimensions: from personal to national. Saura achieves a similar effect, among other things, with the help of «defamiliarizing» techniques, the use of which leads to the creation of a special chronotope that expresses that very super-authenticity, connecting both the real and the symbolic.

The article presents an analysis of screen interpretations of the ideas of one of the most important representatives of existentialism, the French philosopher and writer Albert Camus, set out in his novel «The Plague» (1947). The situation of recent years, associated with a number of catastrophic events on a global scale, has actualized the ideas of philosophical existentialism. Using the example of several films embodying the ideas of A. Camus's novel «The Plague», the article shows the possibilities of their interpretation.

This article is an attempt to theoretically comprehend the legacy of the famous canadian animator Norman McLaren, who worked in the field of abstract animation for many years, from his student days in the 1930s to the late 1970s. Apart from a brief creative sketch, this article includes two main sections devoted to the genesis of image and plot in McLaren's works – both animation and «photographic» ones. McLaren wanted to create entirely new film canon, based equally on abstract and realistic basics. Summarized, McLaren works are pivotal in the context of the evolution of avant-garde animation, both in the construction of imagery and in the rehabilitation of narrative, previously almost entirely excluded from the realm of absolute film. McLaren's many years of creative activity are evaluated as a unified ethical and aesthetic doctrine. Along the whole article various critical approaches to his work being observed and analyzed.

The article discusses the dynamic visualization of the space of objective reality with the subsequent demonstration of its image to the television audience. The main direction of the research is the pattern of forward movement of video equipment, shooting objects and their images. Creative techniques for immersing a television camera inside an event are analyzed; the features of intra-frame editing are clarified; The evocative properties of sound in television material are revealed. This study may be useful to specialists in the field of visual arts, as well as of interest to a wide range of readers.

For a film to be created and established as a social phenomenon, it must, to a certain extent, satisfy the needs of not only viewers, but also its authors, distributors, film exhibitors, investors and society. Hence the diverse quality of a film – spectator, aesthetic, commercial and cultural-ideological. From the complex of these qualities and the arrangement of value priorities in him, his integral social quality is formed.