A FILM CRITIC'S VIEW VERSUS A HISTORIAN'S VIEW ON SOVIET HISTORICAL MOVIES

Abstract

The article analyzes Yuri Tsivian's book “On the Approaches to Carpalistics. Movement and Gesture in Literature, Art, and Film” (2010), which is a continuation of an earlier project of the famous Russian and American film scholar and a representative of the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School and Film Studies at the University of Chicago – the study “Historical Reception of Cinema: Cinematography in Russia, 1895–1930” published in Riga in 1991. Tsivian introduces the notion of “carpalistics” into cinematography to denote one of the fundamental and formative principles of cinema – gesture. The author investigates the history of gestures in art, especially in the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s. The Soviet avant-garde cinema, in contrast to the pre-revolutionary anti-montage cinema, was dominated by montage, but it was too early to bury the gesture. The article compares, on the one hand, the approaches of historians who analyze the ideologemes and ideological markers of historical films and identify the “second” mythological film-reality of Soviet history (a vivid example of such optics is the study “Museum of the Revolution. Soviet Cinema and the Stalinist Historical Narrative” by Evgeny Dobrenko), and, on the other hand, the approaches of film scholars who work with film-frames and sources of film-making (ego-documents, scripted variants, montage sheets, film versions, etc.). On the example of the analysis of Sergei Eisenstein's films “October” and “Ivan the Terrible”, Tsivian shows the author's meanings, independent from the state order, in the rich system of references in films, and sees the secret writing of historical and cultural contexts inherent in them.