The article is devoted to a recent sensational discovery made at VGIK during the digitization of its film archive. The presumably lost short film "Andriesh" by S. Parajanov was found. The viewing of the film revealed an obvious discrepancy between its content and the description given by Rostislav N. Yurenev, a renowned film critic, who attended the presentation of the graduation film, in his memoirs "In Justification of This Life" (Р.Н. Юренев, «В оправдание этой жизни», М., Материк, 2007). The authors of the article attempted to research into the history of this mysterious event based on the available archival documents. Although unable to solve the mystery, they managed to discover a lot of interesting material related to this page of the great director's artistic career. 

The article addresses the situation with documentary films in Eastern Siberia from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s, when, in order to expand the geography and subject matter of newsreel footage, an extensive network of news bureaus was set in remote regions of the Soviet Union and schools of regional documentary filmmaking started to emerge. The mechanisms of the spread of ideas and screen documentary principles in multinational creative teams of East Siberian newsfilm bureaus are considered.

The article analyses the newsreel material shot during the Great Patriotic War by documentary filmmakers of the Transbaikal Military District film group, notably, the Belarusian frontline cameraman Y.F. Dovner and his colleagues V.A. Gromadzinskii and V.A. Kashtelyan. Information about a number of issues of the “Eastern Siberia” newsreel dated the first half of the 1950s is presented. 

The article examines the evolution of the on-screen village in Soviet cinema. Two key periods have been chosen for comparison: the heyday of socialist realism in the 1930s and the peak of the Brezhnev era in the 1970s. One of the key factors in the creative reconsideration of the concept of village is urbanization, the beginning of which in the Soviet Union coincided with the emerging of socialist realism, and the peak — with the end of the Khrushchev ‘‘thaw’’. Examples of films from both periods show that from a relevant place of action, the on-screen village turns into a hopelessly lost utopia, deprived of the Soviet ideological context.

The article examines the movie poster as an advertising tool and its role in promoting a movie. Particular attention is given to the dual nature of cinema, which combines features of a commercial product and a work of art, and thus determines the specific approach to its advertising. The main functions and goals of the movie poster are considered, as well as the key features of its evolution in different historical periods. The work provides a comparative analysis of the specific ways of promoting movies within the country and abroad, revealing differences in approaches to creating advertising materials.

The article addresses the imagery of the film “Commissar” by Alexander Askoldov. The author undertakes an episode-by-episode analysis of the film to reveal the use of religious and mythological images and patterns, including cultural phenomena and mythology that originated in the twentieth century.

This article examines the representation of sexuality in Soviet cinema of the 1960s within the context of the cultural changes in the Thaw period. The relevance of the study stems from the insufficient scholarly attention previously given to this subject. The novelty of the research lies in conceptualizing sexuality as an element of the artistic idiom. The article analyzes the evolution of Soviet “sex symbols”, the influence of foreign cinema, and the specific role of the comedy genre. It also identifies the mechanisms by which ideological taboos were gradually challenged and overcome.

The article addresses Todd Phillips' film Joker: Folie à Deux (which is, according to popular opinion, one of the main failures of 2024) in terms of the symbolic-sacred paradigm. Appealing to the archetypes of the Trickster and the Shadow, as well as to the demonic, doppelgänger and Doomsday motives, the author comes to the conclusion that the director not just deconstructs the supervillain narrative, but also consistently unfolds on the screen the story of the overthrow of the anti-messiah who rose in rebellion in the forepart of the dilogy.

With an extensive filmography as an actor and screenwriter, Vahid Jalilvand has attained international recognition most notably as a film director. The authors emphasize that his works manifest the main features of the established national film school, as well as the export potential of the Iranian film industry. In his films, Jalilvand is increasingly exploring the interaction of man and the world on a global scale, which makes them more accessible for the mass audiences worldwide.

The article studies the role of common cultural values in the perception of mainstream pieces of screen by Russian audiences. It analyses the evolution of communicative models to identify the cultural code as an integral component of the cinematic communicative system. Special attention is given to additional philosophical and pragmatic aspects interacting with the cultural code in the process of perception. 

The spread of photographic technology had a significant impact on visual culture, especially on cinema. This paper aims to identify the intercultural foundation for the rise of the expressive language of technological visual arts based on analyzing the early stages of the spread of photographic technology in the West and in China, where the aesthetic potential of photographic images was mastered in very different ways.

The study examines artistic techniques used in cinema and video art to slow down the time. Attention is focused on the dialectical relationship between three aspects of on-screen temporality: runtime, diegetic time, and phenomenological time. The author argues that “cinema of slowness” and “boring” video works, by subverting the conventions of mainstream filmmaking, open up new forms of viewer experience ranging from meditative immersion to existential questioning of the purport of time expenditure. 

This article addresses the dramatic peculiarities of biographical films and the study of their unique structural genre characteristics. The object of the study is biographical cinema as a genre. Given the subject of research is biography itself, it is considered not so much as the primary source of the film, but as a self-sufficient way of formatting the dramatic structure of a cinematic work, which can be found not only in biographical films, but also in a wide range of cinematic genres. 

The article examines the emergence of the concept of “composition” as an artistic and constructive category at the Renaissance. The Quattrocento people came to focusing their attention on the material, the man-created. The basic thoughts of space, time, light, and many more changed. The demand arose for mastering space, time, form, and nature itself. The article shows how all this reversed the approach to the artistic endeavour. The illusion of depth became pronounced in the works of that time. It came into conflict with the plane layout. A need arose to overcome this contradiction, which required new means of artistic expression. Visual art became a learning tool. This brought about the emergence of the category of Mystery taken as an aesthetic, emotional and imaginative limit to artistic activity.