The essay represents the first effort to explore the artistic methods
employed in the TV series about World War II (the Great Patriotic War) and
analyzes four multi-episode TV shows released in 2004. In its own way, each of
these series responded to the new public interest in the less known aspects of
the war. Simultaneously, each of them established a dialogue with the previous
cinematic and TV productions, comprising direct reminiscences to earlier
films, objectivizing the audience expectations formed by earlier productions, or
even arguing with them. This dialogic trend should be considered as part of the
postmodernist framework of contemporary television: reminiscences of popular
post-war films or literal or visual citations from these films become an integral
part of contemporary cinema and television and also act as documentary-like
reference points.
In all reviewed cases, the authors emphasize adventure narratives well suited
for TV presentation and rendered even more spectacular by modern visualization
technologies. The producers are confronted with a contradiction between the
chosen historical context and imaginary plotlines: it is quite difficult to put the
series’ characters within the imaginary space, depriving them of the well-known
facts, especially those propagated in earlier film and TV productions. Inevitably,
each plot is aggressively influenced by the tragedy of the “little man”, in which
the place of the enemy occupied in the Soviet tradition by the Gestapo and the
Abwehr is replaced by the repressive Soviet state security services. Even a decade
after its release, Shtrafbat (The Penal Battalion) plays a major role in the public
and professional discussion on the ethics of war-related films and television
series. Meanwhile, At a Nameless Height, a series which contains even more
reminiscences to Soviet film and television productions, should be regarded as
one of the earliest works in which the sense of authenticity was sacrificed to
the imaginary expectations of the viewers – expectations formed by the Soviet
historical and cultural framing.

The emergence of cinema brought about the issue of forming
a comfortable environment for film screenings. This essay analyzes the
characteristics of the first spaces used for film exhibition in St. Petersburg and
Moscow and the architecture of the movie theaters built in these cities in the first
decades of the 20th century and characterized by a combination of theatrical
architectural traditions, eclectic restaurant design and elements of the fading Art
Nouveau style.
Film exhibition was a profitable business. Initially, screenings were held in rented
spaces but soon specialized buildings were designed and constructed. The essay
looks at the largest and most popular movie theaters built in St. Petersburg’s
main street, Nevsky Prospect, and in the center of Moscow, discussing their
architectural features and their historical development. Thus, during the 1920s
and 1930s, large movie theaters included a foyer with a stage for variety shows
and a theater-like auditorium with a high-mounted, dark-framed screen; the
spectators entered the auditorium via the main entrance and, after the screening,
exited directly to a street or a yard

The documentary by Victor Turin The Steel Way. Turksib (1929)
is analyzed in this essay from the perspective of interaction between nature and
society. The essay compares Turksib with the avant-garde films of Dziga Vertov
and analyzes the language, editing system and poetics of intertitles characteristic
of Turin’s film. It is noted that in the visual structure of Turksib images of the
“sculpting in time” (according to Andrei Tarkovsky) allocate a significant role to
the ethnographic pictures of local people’s life, virgin landscapes and wild and
domestic animals. The accent is put on the emphatic rhythm of the intertitles,
which actualizes the problems of interaction between nature and society. The
construction of the Turkestan-Siberian railway through the Kazakh steppe
and the Siberian forests demonstrates the advancement of scientism whose
proponents are convinced of the inevitability of scientific and technological
progress. The essay shows how the attitudes of the representatives of power, the
transformers of the region lead to a change in value priorities - in particular,
towards “the pacifying of the stubborn nature” with the aim of putting it at the
service of man. The essay ends with an analysis of Turksib’s significance as an
ecological message and concludes that if the ideas and artistic techniques of
Turin’s film were developed further, the history of documentary cinema in the
following decades could include ecology as one of its major directions.

The research is dedicated to the screen adaptations of Fyodor
Dostoevsky’s The Idiot made in Russia in different cultural and historical
periods. Films produced from 1910 to 2003 are analyzed in chronological order,
with the aim of showing the transformation of the image of Prince Myshkin
(Prince Christ), one of the key images of Russian culture 1 within Russian
national consciousness.
The essay analyzes the following films:
1. The Idiot (1910), directed by Pyotr Chardynin
2. Idiot (Nastasya Filippovna) (1958), directed by Ivan Pyryev
3. Idiot (1981), directed by Vladimir Tumaev
4. Down House (2001), directed by Roman Kachanov
5. Idiot (TV series, 2003), directed by Vladimir Bortko
The essay reveals gradual “trivialization” of the image of Prince Myshkin. The
first step down was from the “divine child” of Pyotr Chardynin to the “angel” of
Ivan Pyriev. God placed man above angels, so Chardynin shows Myshkin as a
pure child of the Garden of Eden, the highest among the analyzed screen images
of the novel’s main character. The second step was made from Pyriev's “angel”
to Vladimir Tumaev's “fallen Adam”. In Tumaev’s 1981 adaptation, the image of
Prince Myshkin is still characterized by evangelical parallels but they are absent
in the characters created in the 2000s by Roman Kachanov and Vladimir Bortko.
Ordinary people with varying degrees of mental disorders become substitutes
for “Prince Christ”.

Alienation is a concept interpreted from different angles and
used in various areas of human thought: in philosophy, psychology, sociology,
law, and economics. Some theoretical works and those works of art which
center on the phenomenon of alienation, emphasize three main aspects of this
phenomenon: alienation as the loss of essential connections (identification) with
the outside world (society, social group, nature); with close people (the loved
one, family, friends) and, ultimately, with oneself, the true self. It is these aspects
of the understanding of alienation that can also be seen in cinema — an art form
which, perhaps, responds to the problems and events of contemporary reality
in the quickest and most vivid way. Most frequently, the theme of alienation in
the film is based on the development of the artistic image of one — as a rule, the
main —character. Despite the fact that alienation a priori implies the “alienation”
of the actor’s performance and the minimization of expressive means, the ideas
and deep meanings that are very important for the director, the director’s
aesthetic and ethical principles and his or her interpretation of contemporary
problems are often conveyed through the image of the alienated character. The
essay deals with the visual and sound techniques and the semantics of word and
music employed in the process of creating the inner and the outer worlds of an
alienated film character.

This essay continues the study of the semiotics and synergetics
of Framing in the Art of Cinematography which substantiates the hypothesis
that framing (perspective) constitutes one of the most important codes of screen
communication in its cinematographic and metaphorical contexts. Thus, framing
is represented by two hierarchical levels of representation of contextual semiotic
connections: the connection between mise-en-cadre and mise-en-scène (the
level of the cinematographic form of film sign); and the relationship between
cinematographic imagery, action and meaning (the level of the cinema sign).
Framing consolidates the process of cinematography divided by the artistic and
production dichotomy, which is especially important in the context of mass
culture determined by the total industrialization of all areas of life, including
cinema.
The essay is based on the statement of Sergei Eisenstein that each “high” film
work has the unity of two dialectical categories: the content (abstract language,
part of logical thinking) and the form (emotional language, part of emotional-
sensory thinking). It identifies and analyzes the spatial-temporal and linear-
tonal features of cinematic framing as a method of expressing the metaphorical
existential context of the crisis of Russian self-identification, using as examples a
number of expressive episodes of the documentary film Anna: 6–18 (1980-1993;
dir. Nikita Mikhalkov, DOPs: Pavel Lebeshev, Vadim Yusov, Vadim Alisov, and
Elizbar Karavaev). This film work is explored as a study of the socio-cultural
situation in modern Russia undertaken from a multi-faceted and multi-level
authorial perspective associated with expressive cinematographic framing.

This essay explores the general compositional features by opposing
the common understanding of composition as “an arrangement of the image on
the sheet surface”. An image is essentially a text that conveys information from the
author to the viewer and has no meaning without them. The main premise is that
a semantic compositional unit can be represented by the sequence “conveyor —
image — perceiver”. It is shown that a pictorial text consists of separate elements
with a certain structure (experiments of R. Pritchard). These elements, in turn,
are closely interrelated with each other, and only in this connection can their
artistic meaning be perceived. The perception of meaning is a temporal process,
which is determined by the transition of gaze from one group of elements to
another. In different contexts and with a different “route” of perception, the
same group can carry different meanings. It is important that if the image does
not carry any specific information for us it can nevertheless cause associations
which mostly reflect our inner essence. In this case, the viewer can understand
the original general meaning of the work very subjectively, despite all the efforts
of the author to show a clear structure of the image.
In this regard, the compositional “routes” of the spectator's perception of
pictorial elements can differ greatly from one another, depending on the viewer's
internal presets, which Alfred L. Yarbus proved experimentally back in the 1960s.
The essay briefly discusses some properties of pictorial signs and their impacts
on the emotional sphere of a person.
Finally, several pedagogical conclusions are made, in particular that the
ability of the student to penetrate into the symbolic artistic-semantic structure
requires education and development of his personality. Without this, he will only
glean the surface, the material aspect of the image. That is why an unprepared
student is often fond of "illusionism", of copying. Only serious pedagogical
work that requires knowledge of the fundamental principles of composite image
construction helps to cope with this.

Intensive development of knowledge in the 20th century,
including the emergence of new sciences and humanities, constantly creates a
problematic situation in the sphere of art, shifting art’s designation to what in
the philosophy of science is known as “normal science”. This is associated with
the idea of art as a science that has reached a stage of maturity and consistency
and, therefore, complies with its norms. The concept of art as “normal science”
is characterized by a certain degree of conservatism, as it presupposes art’s self-
protection against deviations from the established methodology.
However, sometimes the artistic processes of modernity require different
approaches. In addition, the emergence of new humanities shifts the already
established methodology of art. This happened in the first decades of the
20th century, in the era of a linguistic turn in the humanities, indicating the
invasion of natural sciences in the humanities; and this is happening today, at
the turn of the 21st century, in a situation of a cultural turn, the emergence
and intensive development of the science of culture. The current turn requires
a deeper understanding of the structure and components of art history, i.e., its
sub-disciplines: art history, art theory and art criticism.
The essay argues that in the situation of cultural turn the theory of art can
carry out functions which the other two sub-disciplines cannot. It propounds
that art theory is able to make a decisive contribution to the elucidation of two
problems: the relationship between art and cultural studies and the problem
of historical time, which is important both for contemporary art and for art
history.

The essay examines the image of the hero in the contemporary
neo-mythological field of mass screen culture. The author identifies the main
features of the ‘hero archetype’ and the core cultural meanings forming this
concept and analyzes images of the neo-mythological heroes of our time,
taking examples of mass cinema and authorial cinema and revealing differences
between these two categories. According to the author, mass culture creates
the hero model according to the principle of ‘bricolage’, remaining within the
framework of the Christian eschatological paradigm and synthesizing it with
scientific and technical progress or other elements but not reproducing the
structure of the archaic myth. When the stereotype of “happy ending” replaces
tragedy, it completely changes the true archetype of the hero more characteristic
of art-house or authorial cinema. Examining the films of Jim Jarmusch and
Alejandro González Iñárritu, the author analyzes the method of deconstruction
in authorial cinema, a cinema which seeks to reveal the meanings of the archaic
hero archetype. If mass cinema acts within the simulacrum system without
transcending its limits — endlessly repeating the same models and often using
only superficial formal properties — authorial cinema tries to explode the
structure in such a way as to widen the boundaries of the senses or to discover
them under the layers of simulacra. Thus, screen culture has the characteristics
of a neo-mythology, forming the neo-myth and developing its elements and
structures, producing a stream of neo-mythological images in the media
landscape. The conglomerate of various structural elements borrowed from
different traditions fully reflects the postmodern situation that turns symbols
and archetypes into a set of simulacra. The era of postmodernism is a stage in
the development of culture characterized by the problem of the impossibility
of creating anything new. Postmodernism is a creative crisis which leads to
excessive visuality and, paradoxically, to visuality’s death.

Films of the Portuguese director Pedro Costa seldom steal the
limelight of cinema scholarship. The specific marginality of his works, the
complex semi-documentary structure of his films and, at first glance, the
social nature of his subjects complicate the analysis of his films. This essay
undertakes a detailed investigation of his films' structures and problematics
in the context of intellectual development in 21st-century European cinema.
Four films by Costa — Bones (Ossos, 1997), In Vanda’s Room (No Quarto da
Vanda, 2000), Colossal Youth (Juventude em Marcha, 2006) and Horse Money
(Cavalo Dinheiro, 2014) are regarded as elements of a single artistic system
that transforms, becomes more complex and absorbs more and more cultural
codes.
The essay defines the motifs representative of the four films, visual metaphors
that refer to sacred texts and the gradual transformation of the director’s
aesthetics. It is motivated by the necessity to carry out a complex research of
all components of Costa’s films from the existential perspective: in the author’s
opinion, such perspective gives the opportunity to define specific features of the
director’s aesthetics. The systemic interdisciplinary approach is determined by
the necessity to expose the aesthetic and anthropological problems explored in
Costa's films and to define their philosophical basis, using a combined historical,
cultural, semiotic, anthropological and hermeneutical approach. The essay
concludes that the core of Pedro Costa’s art relates to existential philosophy and
anthropology and that his main concern is spirituality, a theme realized most
adequately via cinema

The essay analyzes creative problems of the screen language
of Russian documentaries at the turn of the 21st century in the context of the
changed system of film production and promotion, as well as the changed
paradigm of relations between the author and the hero and the evolution of the
expressive methods of the documentary film which took place in that period.
The essay reflects on the problems of the development of Russian documentaries
at a crucial time when the issues of the survival of the documentary, so acute
in the 1990s, have been overcome and are now bringing to the fore creative
searches exploring essential contemporary phenomena. The author sees these
innovations in the new concept of the documentary hero and in the formation
of other authorial tasks and techniques aimed at capturing the uniqueness of
the philosophy of human existence in the circumstances of a new social and
psychological reality. Analysis of such films as Passengers of the Last Century,
Solzhenitsyn. Life Is Not a Lie, Starling, David, Sorry for Living, Just Life, Live and
Rejoice and others reveals the problems of the “homo historicus”, the relationship
between the author and the hero, the new interrelationship between the ethical
and the aesthetic, and the specifics of a human being’s self-realization in a
dialogue with the author. At the same time, the essay emphasizes the continuity
of the creative searches by documentary filmmakers of different generations in
mastering the "human material" of the new reality

The essay analyzes the meaning of the term “immersion” in relation
to its application in modern cinema, explores the significance of physiological
sensations in the perception of artistic and entertaining VR content, and
discusses the main features of the aesthetics of 360° spherical video.
In a state of immersion, a person ceases to psychologically perceive the
screen as a repeater of an artificially created world, actually merging with the
surrounding space. This technology, embodied in VR films, poses many still
unresolved issues: the management of the subject’s attention, the role of editing,
the quality of sound, the use of music, film narration, the participation of the
viewer in a film's events, work with light and color.
The VR video format with a 360° overview is used in many areas: music videos,
virtual tours, documentary travels, independent “dives” into art works, digital
painting, and installations. In all these cases, the viewer feels like an observer,
finding himself in the very center of an infinite, all-encompassing virtuality.
In contrast to the traditional film that appeals to the mass consciousness
of the audience, the viewing of VR content is aimed at the personal self-
awareness of the individual. Images perceived in this format have a potentially
higher impact on the human psyche and the human unconscious because they
are remembered more vividly as a result of the complex involvement in the
personalized experience “here and now”. The ability of the author-artist to create
for the viewer an emotionally saturated “dream” — with the psychological fusion
of the subject and the space takes place — is a qualitatively new quality of VR
dives, a feature uncharacteristic of traditional visual arts.