Vol 5, No 1, 2013

The article explores the evolution of screen (audiovisual, electronic) culture as a specific type of the information era culture. Its specific nature lies in the fact that it is closely connected with the development of IT technologies being a ‘product’ of the new “virtual” reality. Special emphasis is laid on the place of the cinema within the context of the new art forms in cyberspace and its prospects.

Russian ethnographic cinema has over a hundred-year history of bright names and classical films. The peak of the ethnographic cinema was in the late 1920s-early 1930s, which was connected with the government order for ‘uniting’ the USSR peoples on the screen. Professional scientists took an active part in the production of the first ethnographic films. The most significant example of such cooperation is the mutual work of the explorer V.K. Arsenyev and the filmmaker A.A. Litvinov in creating films about the nations of the Far East.

The article is devoted to the development of Russian network-based flash-animation and the main trends in organizing its artistic space. The author examines the work of three web artists: A. Bakhurin, N. Belov and O. Pashenko, represented on the site www.koms.ru analyzing its philosophic, artistic and technological aspects. Conceptual web flash animation is considered as one of the ways of the animation evolution in the new environment with its technological potential stressing its dominant tendencies and defining its main directions.

The article deals with the interaction of art and politics. The author shows how this interaction can be modified by the historical and cultural context. The main goals and objectives are targeted either on the preservation of the socium's stability or the radical changes of social and political relations.

The surrealism, while creating superreality for a superman, has overlooked reality and an personality, considering them used materials. But when the superman started conquering the world, wiping off the map cities and peoples, the enthusiasts of surrealism were appalled. The auteur can hardly cope with this madness game, when it is played by politicians. If Peter Greenaway in his Drowning by Numbers (1988), had betaken himself to countdown, he could have made much better use of decomposing reality idea. However, real art, and Drowning by Numbers is a work of art indeed, no matter what manifestoes it is hiding behind, always amasses the reality.

The article, based on the authorial analysis of the post-Soviet documentary film, focuses on the state system of organizational and financial support. It is analyzed in comparison with the Soviet practices of thematic planning, its evolution over 20 years, legal inconsistencies of the transition to market relations, which either casts the documentary film back to the predetermined from above object-matters or presupposes the budget division between interested film producers. Many years’ experience in the Expert Council of the Culture Ministry allows the author to give an outward glance on the problem of the insufficient demand of the documentary cinema.

The present-day television being of fundamental social significance, dramatically anticipates theoretical studies in this sphere. In other words, it is not theory that determines praxis, but vice versa. The author analyzes the method of modeling TV programs and their classifications.

A profile of Rolf de Heer.

The article deals with the historical and cultural genesis of the photogenes phenomenon. The author sees the roots of photogenes not only in the phenomenological philosophy, but also in Berkeley’s perception theory, in the philosophy of the mythos and primeval animism. Having originated in the twenties photogenes proves to be an isolated incident of a particular world perception manifested throughout centuries in various spheres of human activities. The author describes it as a phenomenological interpretation of reality.