Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transliteration
- Figures
- Introduction
- 1 Abstracted Subjectivity and Knowledge-Worlds: Aleksandr Sokurov's Taurus (2001)
- 2 The Lacking Sense of Cinema: Aleksandr Proshkin's The Miracle (2009)
- 3 Gatekeepers of (Non-)Knowledge: Aleksei Balabanov's Morphine (2008)
- 4 Symbolic Folds and Flattened Discourse: Andrei Zviagintsev's Elena (2010)
- 5 Non-Knowledge and the Symbolic Mode: Nikolai Khomeriki's A Tale About Darkness (2009)
- 6 The World and the Event: Kirill Serebrennikov's St George's Day (2008)
- 7 A Plea for the Dead (Self): Renata Litvinova's Goddess: How I Fell in Love (2004)
- 8 Body in Crisis and Posthumous Subjectivity: Igor' Voloshin's Nirvana (2008)
- 9 The Difficulty of Being Dead: Aleksandr Veledinskii's Alive (2006)
- 10 Intentionality and Modelled Subjectivities: Aleksei Fedorchenko's Silent Souls (2010)
- 11 Abandoned Being: Mikhail Kalatozishvili's The Wild Field (2008)
- 12 Amplifications of Subjectivity: Aleksandr Zel'dovich's The Target (2010)
- Filmography
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - The World and the Event: Kirill Serebrennikov's St George's Day (2008)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transliteration
- Figures
- Introduction
- 1 Abstracted Subjectivity and Knowledge-Worlds: Aleksandr Sokurov's Taurus (2001)
- 2 The Lacking Sense of Cinema: Aleksandr Proshkin's The Miracle (2009)
- 3 Gatekeepers of (Non-)Knowledge: Aleksei Balabanov's Morphine (2008)
- 4 Symbolic Folds and Flattened Discourse: Andrei Zviagintsev's Elena (2010)
- 5 Non-Knowledge and the Symbolic Mode: Nikolai Khomeriki's A Tale About Darkness (2009)
- 6 The World and the Event: Kirill Serebrennikov's St George's Day (2008)
- 7 A Plea for the Dead (Self): Renata Litvinova's Goddess: How I Fell in Love (2004)
- 8 Body in Crisis and Posthumous Subjectivity: Igor' Voloshin's Nirvana (2008)
- 9 The Difficulty of Being Dead: Aleksandr Veledinskii's Alive (2006)
- 10 Intentionality and Modelled Subjectivities: Aleksei Fedorchenko's Silent Souls (2010)
- 11 Abandoned Being: Mikhail Kalatozishvili's The Wild Field (2008)
- 12 Amplifications of Subjectivity: Aleksandr Zel'dovich's The Target (2010)
- Filmography
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The essential premise of my study is that digital technologies have transformed the ways in which film is produced, disseminated and appreciated. As I suggested in the Introduction, contemporary Russian cinema exists predominantly on the internet, forming a new visual environment. Academic literature exploring the impact of such a technological and aesthetic switchover is vast; for example, writing in 1994, Vivien Sobchak notes:
We are all part of a moving-image culture and we live cinematic and electronic lives. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to claim that none of us can escape daily encounters – both direct and indirect – with the objective phenomena of motion picture, televisual, and computer technologies and the networks of communication they produce. Nor is it an exaggeration to suggest that, in the most profound, socially pervasive, and yet personal way, these objective encounters transform us as subjects. (2000a: 67)
Sobchak acknowledges the pervasive nature of visual culture at the turn of the century. While pointing out different technologies and building a genealogy of the technical revolution, the scholar describes an emergence of a new experience which transforms not only the subject matter of culture, but also us as subjects. Twenty years later, it is evident the quotidian experience of visuality has become even more pervasive and prevailing while contemporary subjects display not only technological proficiency, but also awareness as self-motivated agents promoting visuality. While recognising this transformation, I wish to focus on the more abstract means of conceptualising subjectivity that resist determination by the technological transfer.
My concept of film as embodied intelligence encompasses contradictory discourses about film (and, by association, about photography) and particularly its ability to denote loss and nostalgia as well as the accumulation of experience and world-building. In the present era, film as embodied intelligence eschews the status of ‘mummification of reality’ in that it is neither photographic nor cinematic (Sobchak 2000a: 78). Sobchak notes that ‘the electronic is phenomenologically experienced not as a discrete, intentional, and bodily centered projection in space but rather as simultaneous, dispersed, and insubstitutional transmission across a network’ (2000a: 79). In my interpretation, such networks are environments, or worlds, in which current subjectivities manifest their self-presence whereby film as a specific mode of being should be identified not so much in terms of the corporeal setting, but as of symbolic exigency.
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- Contemporary Russian CinemaSymbols of a New Era, pp. 127 - 144Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016