Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: The article is devoted to the comedy by the Soviet film director Leonid Gaidai. The relevance of the topic is due to the approaching the 100th anniversary of the director’s birth (2023) and his high popularity throughout the post-Soviet years. At the Soviet time, however, criticism and film studies often denied that Gaidai’s films had semantic depth. The novelty of the author’s approaches consists in a detailed unbiased semantic analysis of the visual imagery of the 10-minute film Dog Barbos and Unusual Cross (1961), which previously was considered exclusively as a trick eccentric comedy. The author of the article proceeds from the culturological definition of Gaidai as a director who more explicitly than others rejected the serious and heroic discourse in the popular Soviet cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. The analysis of the images of the natural universe and their interaction with the characters reveals a hidden plot in the film — a journey into the depths of the unconscious and into a transitional zone, an otherworldly reality. The screen life of the characters is only partly a satire on the individual vices of ordinary citizens and an ironic view on the incapacity of the officialdom. The film creates a fantastic reality, which is a kind of privilege of the Coward, the Fool and the Pro. The author comes to the conclusion that Gaidai’s film extends beyond the genre of eccentric comedy and that its aesthetics has deep connections with myth and folklore.
Source: Art & Culture Studies
Author: E.V. Salnikova
Institution: State Institute for Art Studies
Language: English
Topic: Cinema History and Criticism
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4293088246