Irina Proskurina

Pushkin Leningrad State University, Russia

Today movie trailer is an artistic genre balancing on the edge of cinema, packaging design and advertising business. In this unique art form visual information can be viewed as a text whose meanings are apophatic and “read” on the basis of interpreting enigmatic images with the help of cultural and artistic associations.
At first glance, the age-old history of a trailer — a “herald” of a forthcoming film — has not altered either its functions (advertising and informational) or its objective (financial). But is actually this true?
During its century-long history trailer has evolved from a preview dominated by the text and meant to “sell” the actors starring in the film to the special work of a director with a laconic formulation of a message of the film.
Analysis of stages of a movie trailer development, in course of which its styles, techniques and meaning were changed, demonstrates that it eventually evolved into a product of web-design and cinema and a sort of ontological frontier of cinema narrative, beyond which a viewer loses a psycho-­emotional capacity of logical perception of a visual image.
However, any text, including that of a trailer, in order to be a text should contain meanings, acting necessarily in a system that is defined by a certain type of a worldview. In my opinion, a fundamental form of transmission of meanings for cinema is hypermyth. Though this is a recent phenomenon in culture, it is the result of centuries of transformation of a traditional myth reflected in various art forms. The report traces main stages of transformation of a traditional myth (neomyth, hypermyth), as well as mechanisms of constructing cinematic meanings by means of hypermyth. Being a genre of hyperreality a trailer is apophatic by its very nature as it is based not on narrative logic, but on configuration of a hypermyth.
Thanks to the rapid spread of new technologies and programs to create trailers in the last ten years this form of cinema art has become a form of mass video creativity. Movie trailers, which originally emerged as a “virtual package” and a financial motivator, have become a form of digital folklore, with all the specific features of folk art.

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Vladimir Koshaev

Moscow State Stroganov Academy of Industrial and Applied Arts, Russia

Art as spiritual purity comes from a paradise garden — a secret desire of a creator to achieve a revelation, i.e. to open boundless worlds of love and to make a human immortal. Immortality is acquired through Salvation, inseparable from repentance, a sacrifice and communion as a reverse side of beauty and joy. An artist brings Gifts of the Holy Spirit to restore the spiritual fullness in human’s mind, to print the expression of divine beauty.
The core of the ontology of art and artistic life of a spiritual truth is sacrificial predetermination, in which cult permeates art, showing relations of the natural and the supernatural. The ontology of art is a sacred experience (of God) gained through the re-creation of the image of the atoning sacrifice and fulfillment of the covenant of the Lord’s Supper “Given me his body as food”. Recreating of the Feat promoted the development of the confessional canon. Things and actions, space inside and outside the temple represent the feat.
People take their liturgical experience beyond the walls of the temple, and an adopted sacrifice holds the Christian world with the grace of God, which can be used as a method of art to reveal human divinity expression in the world.
Artistry in the performance of the universal moral law in Christianity aspires to connect a human to the transpersonal Son of the God. Art contributes to the transformation of a subject into an object, into the inseparability of the total creation. One discovers the latter in the works of St. Basil the Great (4th century): “The essence has no independent existence, but is seen in person”. Interpretation of inseparability of nature and a thing inside an object is in sacrificial manner the ontological content of art, including contemporary one:
• ontology as a sacrificial predestination of the relationship between the God and a human;
• a sacrifice as the rule of art: the subordination of a “text” to the voice of the divine Will;
• the identity of the sacrifice and plastic ways of a composition (lines, colors, spots, spaces), their specifics in the post-Soviet time;
• the image as a divine prototype of notions not only in art, but also in public enlightment, education — the fundamental principle of ethical word-meaning sacrificial predestination;
• examples of religious themes in the post-Soviet art.

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Galina Skotnikova

Saint Petersburg State University of Culture and Arts, Russia

The Church of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God, constructed in St. Petersburg upon the project of an outstanding architect V. A. Kosyakov, is a unique example of Byzantine style in Russian architecture. Ecclesiastical architecture of 6th-century Constantinople as though came alive in early 20th century St. Petersburg. Employing the method of archaeological imitation, the architect used the Church of St. Sergius and Bacchus in Istanbul as a base for his work. The ecclesiastical art of the “golden age” of Justinian the Great manifested the archetypes of Orthodox spirituality more accurately and deeper than anything else created by Byzantine artists of other epochs. It was the time when the main architectural concept of Eastern Christian Church — creating a centrally-planned building topped with a dome — was crystallized and implemented.
Today the Church is consecrated and magnifesently restored. Numerous recently published reference and art history books mention the Church of the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) in Istanbul as its architectural model, which is absolutely incorrect. It suffices to say that, unlike Hagia Sophia, both the church in St. Petersburg and Church of St. Sergius and Bacchus are octagonal inside, with a two-tier gallery around and alternating rectangular and semicircular niches, and their architectural concept create a distinctly Byzantine sense of rhythm. In such a space an individual perceives himself as the only solid body, the centre of impenetrable perfection of the world which is incessantly created by the heavenly Wisdom.
Byzantine and Russian styles developed in Russia within the framework of historicism in art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries on the basis of government order and presented the manifestation of civilizational foundations of Russian culture and embodiment of Orthodox succession between Byzantium and Russia. The most important component of such a succession was the idea of a human being, the purpose and meaning of human life, and human place in the Universe.
The Orthodox medieval art cannot be interpreted in the same way as modern European: it has a different nature — not aesthetic, but ascetic — and is fed not by mundane, but by heavenly Beauty.

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Veronika Barysheva, Larisa Zhelondievskaya

Moscow State Stroganov Academy of Industrial and Applied Arts, Russia

The 20th century changed the system of art expressive means and techniques, which had been formed in the bowels of realistic and ethnic art for centuries. New approaches to shape, color and design were expressed in the concepts of suprematism, constructivism, rationalism. The avant-garde determined the vector of development of visual culture of the next century. The digital revolution has become a new milestone in the project technologies. United communicative space of the 21st century and functionalism of the international style have led to the loss of cultural national identity.
The environmental problem is multifaceted. The concept of project ecology, as defined by its authors, is human ecology in living environment from the perspective of culture and historical affinity to a certain place. The term “cultural ecology” was coined by Dmitry Likhachev and expounded as a scientific and educational concept of the preservation of national culture.
Human environment in urban space is naturally moulded by a number of factors. Design idea implies integration of natural, historical and cultural heritage into a correlation system and creation of new design objects on their basis. According to O. I. Genisaretskij, while forming the space of life, it is necessary to include in it new and new pronounced social and cultural layers, so as to turn the soil from conditions of existence into a symbol for the spiritual life.
The perception of numerous areas in Russia today is an echo of distant associations formed over decades and sometimes even centuries ago. In terms of the national culture it is an outdated legacy hardly or not at all perceived by the young generation. Thoughtless copying and endless quoting of museums’ classical samples without searching for new meanings and forms of design leads to the absence of self-identity and interest, and as a result abscence of love and affection of a person to a particular place in his yard, in his street and in general to the lack of pride in belonging to a certain cultural community. Consequently, it is necessary to move to a new level of understanding and styling, in which fundamental qualities are upgraded to the new degree of generalization within the scope of the modern language and the latest technologies of communication.

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