Boris V. ReyfmanRussian State University for the Humanities, Faculty of Cultural Studies, Department of History and Theory of Culture, Russia, Moscow
125993, GSP-3, Miusskaya pl., 6.
Associate Professor
PhD in Cultural Studies
e-mail: brejfman@yandex.ru
Forms of Realistic Generalization in the Soviet Cinema during the Khrushchev “Thaw”: War Films and Films about the “Present”Abstract: The purpose of this article is to analyze the Soviet cinema in the timeframe of the Khrushchev’s “Thaw” period as well as to examine a certain logic underlying the evolution of relations between its two trends, which are conceptualized by the author. On one hand, there was a clear desire in the feature cinema for addressing the self-contained need to produce a typology criteria for the new forms of everyday life as well as to unite contemporary audiences through onscreen demonstration of the recognizable communicative situations via new means of cinematic expression. On the other hand, one can acknowledge the undeniable pursuit to reflect upon reality under the implication of rising above the typifying description, to express strong commitment to the directorial awareness in order to deliver its reality’s polysemic yet holistic meaning to the audience. The tension between these two tendencies towards either cinematic expression of ‘generalization’, recognized as a form of descriptive typification of various reality manifestations, or introspective representation of the global world integrity, was manifested differently in the “Thaw” films that addressed the subject of the Great Patriotic War and in the other films that followed its time. According to the author, the essential factor of their differences can be perceived as a dichotomy of identifying and assigning ‘substances’ of the Italian neorealism that became one of the main ‘external’ sources for the Soviet post-Stalinist filmmaking.
Key words: cinema, Thaw, neorealism, realistic generalization, typical, global, integrity, frame, scene, episode, Andrei Tarkovsky.
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For Citation: Reyfman, B. (2020). Forms of Realistic Generalization in the Soviet Cinema during the Khrushchev “Thaw”: War Films and Films about the “Present”. International Journal of Cultural Research, 4 (41), 40–51. DOI: 10.52173/2079-1100_2020_4_40
DOI: 10.52173/2079-1100_2020_4_40