Things in cinema as a phenomenon of cultural reality

The objects, items, things that are most often used in the film texts of modern Russian cinema require close attention from the film culture point of view. The material world helps to realize the value of an object and its influence on the subject. The attitude to things and objects characterizes modern society from the point of view of order-chaos. Contemporary domestic film texts are interpreted by specialists and spectators, intended for a wide audience of the audience. A person is immersed in a system of symbols, and in cinema he seeks confirmation of this or that stable element of the virtual world, which he correlates with his real experience. Things, objects and objects can tell about the main thing, so they cannot be ignored, pass by this or that symbolic object.

We motif of social violence in the space of cinematic communication

Social violence traditionally has been a constituent in the information flow of artistic communication, of the cinematic one especially. With the language specific to cinema it is easier, than with the languages of other arts, to attract and command the attention of a broad public with the spectacle of violence. Also, as a rule, it is more economical because of the relatively low cost of embodying violence on the screen considering the overall expensiveness of film production. In the West, the filming of practices of violence aimed at entertaining the public, as well as the public concern at the possibility of their negative impact on the rising generation, has a long history. Within the concept of “the audience as the victim” there were thousands of studies conducted, especially in USA. In the USSR cinema of the entertainment orientation was under the ideological ban which put the representation of violence within certain boundaries. In the 1990s the situation of cinema changed drastically. Je escalation of entertainment violence on the screen caused a public concern. Sociologists began to study its perception by and impact on spectators. In this regard, the article considers the experience of conceptualizing the reformatting of its representation after, consequent upon the impact of the last century’s revolutionary violence, cinema had obtained the status of “the most important of all the arts” and “the social significance” of the violence became the cultural code of its representation. But with the transition of Russian cinema to the market, foreign entertainment movies were granted open access to the nation’s film screens. Entertainment violence reached the status of a commercially important communicative attraction. Its effectiveness in this function is viewed in the article based on the materials of sociological surveys conducted among filmgoers of the cities of Kirov and Ekaterinburg. Another side of the issue considered as well is the sociocultural effects of violent images on the rising generation in whose midst there is a “risk group” that merits careful research and preventive acknowledgment in the process of social control.

Role of national cinema in the formation of national identity

This article touches upon the topic of the relationship between national identity and works of art. The author focuses on cinema as one of the most massively consumed and popular forms of art of our time. To uncover this subject matter, the cinema of the USA, USSR and modern Russia are considered. By the example of different movements of various periods of moviemaking in these countries, one can feel the mood and make sense of the views and values of an era in which a picture was created. Thus, films become visual markers of modernity, which allow subsequent generations to find a connection with their past. That, of course, is an important part of the process of forming a national identity. In addition, the author describes how Hollywood conservative cinema of the 40s and 50s differs from the American cinema of the New Hollywood of the 60s and 70s, which was characterized by greater frankness in covering certain topics and problems. Also, the article touches upon how Hollywood returned to traditional values in the eighties during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Furthermore, as an example of how movies capture the zeitgeist the author cites soviet movies of the Thaw and of the Era of Stagnation. Also, this study uncovers the problem of the insolvency of modern Russian cinema in comparison with the Soviet movie industry in relation to its place in the mass consciousness of Russian people and its cultural significance. The author also writes about how the shortcomings of the state management of the modern Russian industry impede the creation of more films that can affect formation of national identity.

First Russian Cyclists and Their Bicycles: Images in Literature and in Cinema

The paper, first, recapitulates the centuries-long history of designing and developing bicycles; in this history, inventors from many countries have taken part. As a result of the evolution of this wheeled transport, bicycles have become the most popular vehicles in cities as well as in villages; in many countries cycling has become the way of life. But, at the beginning, it was quite a problem to get accustomed to the sight of “riders on wheels”, especially if they were women. In capitals and in provincial towns, perceptions were quite different. The Russian cinema has documented the stages of introducing bicycles into the everyday life of the country, from the 1860s up to 1895. The feature films A Few Days from the Life of I.I. Oblomov (1979), The House of the Dead (1932), Man in a Shell (1939), as well as the retro-serial Anna, the Detective (2016–2020) have shown, with more or less details, how this and other European innovations were domesticated in Russia.

Conservative Images of the Future in Russian Cinema

This article is devoted to the study of conservative images of the future in Russian cinema. By examining the film plots and analyzing the visual series, the author attempts to identify the most common elements of the images of the future – conservative elements that ensure their recognition.

Transformation of Masculinity in the Russian Cinema

The article discusses the issues of gender identity and the crisis of masculinity in the Soviet and post-Soviet cinema in comparison with Western films. Social instability becomes the basis for rethinking cultural identity and expanding the typology of masculinity. This imbalance is most clearly visible in the cinema, which is a beneficial environment for actualizing problematic socio-cultural issues and forming some gender stereotypes and normative behaviors that later enter everyday reality. Following the West, the Russian cinema also focuses on the substantive side of the concept of “masculinity”, which is based on the specifics of national identity, traditional goals and social foundations. It is significant that the hegemonic masculinity characteristic of the Western cinema was not basically common in the Soviet era, whose masculinity model was the image of a leader, a worker, and, in the post-war period, a front-line soldier. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the beginning of capitalist relations in Russia caused the overthrow of former cultural values and the crisis of Soviet identity. The suppression of the male characters’ “sensitivity” was replaced by a total emancipation and sexuality, which can be witnessed in the abundance of scenes of a sexual nature in the films of the 1990s. However, in the post-Soviet cinema, the focus on the values of Western culture, in which a crisis of masculinity was already evident, stimulated the interest in the Russian image of masculinity, which initially manifested itself in romanticizing the image of a “fair gangster,” and later — in the appeal to traditional Russian and Soviet heroes. Since the 2010s, the glorification of the Russian criminal past has declined, opening the space for the emergence of new types of Russian masculinity. The general context of these transformations is represented by the changes of masculinity from the Soviet traumatic, through the post-Soviet (crisis) to the contemporary one.