Russian Cinema

Edited by Rimgaila Salys

The early years of the twenty-first century have been an exciting transitional period in Russian cinema, as the industry recovered from the crises of the late 1990s and again stepped onto the global stage. During these years four generations, from the late Soviet directors through post-Soviet and New Russian filmmakers to the Russian millennials, have worked in varying visual styles and with diverse narrative strategies, while searching for a new cinematic language. Financing and distribution models have evolved, along with conservative politics driving Ministry of Culture regulation. This reader is intended both for contemporary Russian cinema courses and for modern Russian culture courses that emphasize film. It does not attempt to establish a canon for the period but seeks to provide undergraduate students with an introduction to significant Russian films released between 2005 and 2016 that are also available with English subtitles. The twenty-one essays on individual films provide background information on directors’ careers, detailed analyses of selected films, along with suggested further readings both in English and Russian.

Learn more & purchase: https://www.academicstudiespress.com/filmandmediastudies/the-contemporary-russian-cinema-reader

In this book, Nariman Skakov explores the phenomenon of spatio-temporal lapse in Tarkovsky's cinema - from 'Ivan's Childhood' (1962) to 'Sacrifice' (1986). He argues that dreams, visions, mirages, memories, revelations, reveries, and delusions are phenomena which present alternative spatio-temporal patterns; they disrupt the linear progression of events and create narrative discontinuity. Each chapter is dedicated to the discussion of one of Tarkovsky's seven feature films and, in each, one of these phenomena functions as a refrain. Skakov discusses the influence of the flow of and lapses in space and time on the viewer's perception of the Tarkovskian cinematic universe. He opens and closes his original and fascinating book on Tarkovsky's cinema by focusing on the phenomenon of time that was discussed extensively by the filmmaker in his main theoretical treatise 'Sculpting in Time,' as well as in a number of interviews and public lectures.

The Empire Strikes Back. Russian National Cinema After 2005The paper provides critical analysis of the latest wave of Russian national cinema (2005-2013), considered one of key instruments of Vladimir Putin’s nation-building cultural policy. The analysis, focused mostly on historical film and war film, reveals the concept of an ‘imperial nation’ as the main concept underlying this policy. The new Russian nation-concept is calculated to binding elements from two former Russian imperial traditions: tradition of the Russian Empire and the Soviet tradition, thus trying to overcome the identity crisis in contemporary Russia. Imperium kontratakuje. Rosyjskie kino narodowe po 2005 rokuArtykuł zajmuje się krytyczną analizą filmów najnowszej fali rosyjskiego kina narodowego (2005-2013), uważanej tu za jedno z kluczowych narzędzi polityki kulturalnej Władimira Putina obliczonej na budowanie narodu. Autorzy artykułu skupiają się przede wszystkim na filmie historycznym i wojennym, odsłaniając p...

In late 1929, as he developed his preparatory notes for a film called Glass House, Sergei Eisenstein considered the material significance of the glass used in the construction of camera lenses. In these notes, he reimagines the history of optics—one not founded upon the placement of an objectif before a camera obscura, but rather one that recognizes the subjective “will and intention” of the one controlling the ground glass device and the film frame (the director).

These thoughts are couched within the director’s ongoing polemic with Dziga Vertov’s kinoki and what Eisenstein saw as their theoretical overinsistence on cinematic objectivity. Against the background of his recently published essay “The Play of Objects,” this essay focuses Eisenstein's insistent slippage from the objective to the subjective through the director's proposal that the objects which fall before the subjective camera lens might be made capable of “acting” and his later writings on Walt Disney's method of animating objects.

«Бриколаж режиссера Балабановa» содержит интервью, документы, воспоминания, а также ряд аналитических текстов, так или иначе связанных с кинонаследием Алексея Балабанова. В книге представлены интервью и мемуары коллег и друзей (Сергея Сельянова, Сергея Астахова) университетских товарищей режиссера, и др. Впервые публикуются фотографии режиссера времен учебы, и некоторые документы, в т.ч. его студенческий аттестат. В стиле бриколажа (создания арт-объекта из подручных средств) книга сочетает документы со статьями разных авторов, посвящённых творчеству мастера. Это сочетание несочетаемого и создает портрет Алексея Балабанова.

Post-Soviet era directors have been searching for the new aesthetic footholds in the images of Gogol’s works. Starting from pure satire denouncing the pre-revolutionary system, they have moved on to the absurdist grotesque. This was significantly influenced by the discoveries of Gogol scholars in the 1990s–2000s and the actualization of the interpretations of Gogol’s works created at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries, which were inconceivable for Soviet literary criticism Screen adaptations have been affected both directly—by theatrical productions of Gogol’s oeuvre, and indirectly—by a long tradition of stage appeals and directors’ decisions on his stories. The transfer of Gogol’s dramaturgy into the 21st century gave film directors and screenwriters the opportunity to maximize the relevance and social sensitivity of the plots. In the 21st century, the theme of an inspection as an image of the Last Judgment has been transformed into a semblance of a police detective. Most of the characters are related to the police or special services, to investigations, to real retribution. While for Gogol the idea of judgement lies in the moral plane, in post-Soviet interpretations it is usually associated with earthly requital, and an extremely explicit one, tailored to a crime TV series audience. Against such a background, Grigory Konstantinopolsky’s film adaptation of Dead Souls summarizes a decade of Gogol film interpretations. The story of Chichikov blatantly accumulates and travesties the previous tradition of presenting Gogol’s detective plots. The film actualizes the issue of a positive hero, the problem of memory transformation, and cinema’s responsibility to the society in the period of
losing its literature-centeredness. The transformation of the spiritual and intimate life of Gogol’s contemporaries, which was the most important theme for the writer, was also updated in a number of motifs: the lack of foundations for understanding between loving people (Marriage, 2009), the displacement of traditional gender roles (Happy Ending, 2010), the privatization of national memory, and summing up the unformed aesthetics of the new Russian cinema by the “lost generation” of the ‘90s (Dead Souls, 2020).
Режиссеры постсоветской эпохи искали новые эстетические опоры в образности Гоголя, переходя от чистой сатиры с обличением дореволюционной системы к абсурдистскому гротеску. Значительное влияние на это оказали гоголеведческие открытия 1990-х–2000-х гг. и актуализация трактовок творчества Гоголя рубежа ХIХ–ХХ вв., неприемлемых в советском литературоведении. Экранизации испытали как непосредственное влияние театральных постановок («Ревизор» Сергея Газарова), так и опосредованное — сложившейся к этому времени традиции сценических решений гоголевских сюжетов. Перенесение драматургии Гоголя на экран в ХХI в. дало режиссерам и сценаристам возможность максимальной актуализации и социальной заостренности сюжетов. Тема ревизии как образа Страшного суда в ХХI в. трансформировалась в подобие полицейского детектива. Большинство героев экранизаций в результате сценарной реинтерпретации оказывалось связано с полицией / спецслужбами, следствием, расследованием, с реальным возмездием. В постсоветских трактовках идея суда, лежащая для Гоголя в моральной плоскости, связывается с проблемой земного возмездия и возмездия предельно конкретного, рассчитанного на зрителя криминальных сериалов. На этом фоне итоговая для десятилетия кинопрочтений экранизация «Мертвых душ» Г. Константинопольского откровенно аккумулирует и травестирует предшествующую традицию представления гоголевских детективных сюжетов. Фильм актуализирует вопрос о положительном герое, проблеме трансформации памяти, ответственности кино перед обществом в период утраты литературоцентризма. Важнейшая для Гоголя тема неполноценности духовной жизни современника, его тотального одиночества также оказалась актуализирована в целом ряде мотивов, таких как: отсутствие основ для взаимопонимания любящих людей («Женитьба», 2009), смещение традиционных гендерных ролей («Счастливый конец», 2010), приватизация национальной памяти и подведение итогов неоформившейся эстетики нового русского кино «потерянным поколением» 1990-х («Мертвые души», 2020).

This paper is a research about Moscow Metro and it narrative through films. The Moscow Metro is well known for it impressive outstanding architecture and interior design. Moreover, it is famous for it engineering achievement- in a matter of only 5 years the soviet government had managed to plan and construct an underground system with 13 stations. This project was also unique in the amount of people it employ- 2500 people in 1932 and around  75,000 workers in 1935. As it was written in Pravda at 1934 “the entire country builds the metro”.
With all mentioned above, it is not surprising that the metro had played an important role in both designing and reflecting the character and the changes that have accorde among the Moscow society. The way that people have referred to the metro had change through the years.
In order to trace the Moscow metro image changes I will follow and compare the metro image in different movies. In the movies that I would analyze,  the metro would play an important role and would be inherent to the movie plot.

The collapse of the Soviet Union, followed by a period of cultural disorientation, and ensuing the rise of unfettered capitalism, offers scholars a conceptual magnifying glass with which to understand radical social change. Contemporary Russian popular culture, emerging in this unique social context, becomes a privileged venue to scrutinize the nature and implications of radical change. This article explores the transformations of intimacy through the lens of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s latest feature film Loveless (2017). This film captures a profound disruption of intimacy in compliance with market principles, technology and social media. Zvyagintsev juxtaposes instances of ruined intimacy with spaces of intimate physical ruins. The article suggests that the cinematic visual meditation on ruins and ruination implicates a more expansive meditation on the transient and permanent aspects of our lives, the intersection between nature and culture, as well as the play between presence and absence. By drawing on Aronson’s (2015) cross-cultural work on emotional frameworks, this article argues that Loveless (2017) shows how Aronson’s regime of (rational) choice colonizes the regime of (passionate) faith, with deleterious consequences.

Co vlastně skrývá pojem socialistický realismus, kterým bývá často označováno sovětské umění v období stalinismu? Je řeč o estetické doktríně? A bylo by možné tuto doktrínu jednoduše redukovat na je jí ideologický obsah? Jaké jso u vztahy mezi teorií a praxí? Co tento termín naznačuje o fungování umělecké sféry? A především, co tento pojem, jím ž se charakterizuje i sovětský film, vlastně přináší? To jsou otázky, na něž se pokusíme stručně odpovědět tím, že načrtneme závěry, které vyplývají z debat a vyjádření ohledně tohoto označení.

The aim of the article is the interpretation of spatial systems which were created by Andrei Zvyagintsev in the film Elena. The analysis shows that the space allows recognizing not only the quality of the relationships existing between the characters but it also encodes and anticipates the fictional pattern of this work of art. The verbal layer seems to play a minor role, i.e. it supplements and modifies observations of the recipient who
uses the spatial code. The meaning is expressed in the juxtapositions of subsequent shots, functioning as assonances or dissonances, as well as in the inner montage of single units, revealing important elements of the film structure. The spatial systems which turn attention to the ambiguous nature of the reality constitute the dominant metaphors of the film, which — together with the play of the light and darkness — can be read
as signum of the disintegration of the contemporary world.

This article analyzes the discourse related to social inequality that appears in the Soviet film Moscow “Does
Not Believe in Tears.” Twenty years have passed since the fall of the USSR. Interviews, feature articles in the press, and
documentaries remind us of the anniversary of that event. Newly published books appear seeking to explore
communism’s historic reach, explain the failure of Peristroika, or shed light upon lesser known aspects of Stalin. This
article aims to analyze, though only in part, the discourse that existed within Soviet society about the phenomenon of
inequality. Our eminently sociological approximation will be based upon a film very popular with the Russian people.
Directed by Vladimir Menshov, it won the 1980 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It tells the story of
three provincial girls in the late 1950s who emigrate to Moscow in search of a better life. Fernando Conde’s “Análisis
sociológico del sistema de discursos” [Sociological Analysis of Discourse Systems], published by the Centro de
Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS) [Center for Sociological Research], will be our guide for the empirical work. We will
be experimenting with this book, originally intended for discussion group and interview analysis, to see how useful it is
when applied to film.

Anton Makarenko's novel „The Pedagogical Poem” was published in 1934-1935; after 20 years it had been filmed („The Pedagogical Poem” by Alexei Maslukov and Mechislava Mayevskaya, 1955). This article is an analysis of a specific relationship between the Makarenko’s text and the cinematic variant of the „Poem”. The nature of transformation of literary text into film text is complex. It requires not only the adaptation of the novel to the linguistic requirements of the movie. The typological distinctions between the language of literary and cinematic „Poems” concern not only two spheres of functioning of these works, but also two types of culture in which they were brought to life. The literary „Pedagogical poem” was created as an autonomous work against totalitarian discourse, however it still participates in it. The key to its reading (which is specific for totalitarian culture) analyzed in this text results from the main function of narratives of this culture, i.e. the transmission of units of its mythological universe.

Plotinus confronts us with a "unification of rationalism and
mysticism" (Bréhier). Also Tarkovsky’s "spiritualist"
penchant flows out of a religious, "non-modern" attitude.
But Tarkovsky and Plotinus are also heirs of a rationalist
tradition strongly marked by scientific formalism. Tarkovsky was well aware of the philosophical problems linked to the subjectivism of perception. He intended to modify the final result obtained by the materialist deconstruction of subjectivist empathy carried out before by the Eisensteinian materialism-formalism. Plotinus was confronted with problems of the same order. He aspires a "mystical union," Plotinus could be classified
as a subjectivist. Still, the "mystical union" of Plotinus’ design is not as simplistic as that which is usually advanced by subjectivism. I detect the development of Russian formalism towards a Plotinian "formalism" realized by Tarkovsky. The conception of the image as "an organic link between idea and form" culminates in an aesthetics of non-symbolic images communicated without passing through the intermediary of the intellect, directly representing the Intelligible.

Andrei Tarkovsky's Sounding Cinema adds a new dimension to our understanding and appreciation of the work of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986) through an exploration of the presence of music and sound in his films.

The first comprehensive study in English concentrating on the soundtrack in Tarkovsky’s cinema, this book reveals how Tarkovsky’s use of electronic music, electronically manipulated sound, traditional folk songs and fragments of canonized works of Western art music plays into the philosophical, existential and ethical themes recurring throughout his work. Exploring the multilayered relationship between music, sound, film image and narrative space, Pontara provides penetrating and innovative close readings of Solaris (1972), Mirror (1975), Stalker (1979), Nostalghia (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986) and in turn deeply enriches critical understanding of Tarkovsky’s films and their relation to the broader traditions of European art cinema.

With the filmmaker’s untimely death in 2013, scholars will now begin to unpack exactly what Aleksei Balabanov achieved with his “cinema about cinema.” Watching Balabanov’s films as a singular postmodern text is important in understanding the entire trajectory of this cinematic narrative. In the films of Balabanov his frequent reflexivity goes beyond a critical consciousness of the lack of ultimate truths and, arguably, is more than ironic self-commentary. These intermedial self-references had become an anticipated characteristic of Balabanov’s films. In fact, Balabanov seemed to be acutely aware of the binary opposition between the sacred and the profane – especially in his later films. Over the course of more than a dozen feature films, Balabanov articulated a position that the technology of modernity refracted a neo-reality, one which further alienated people from the sacred. Russia’s degeneration was rooted in the materialist and political propaganda of the profane. The harmful messages transported by the television and the cinema enhanced the moral vacuity and bestiality of a Godless society – one which was vulnerable to the promises of miracle, mystery and authority by Russian authoritarianism. Balabanov’s “cinema about cinema” was a constant reminder that the simulacra of Russian reality was, in fact, a mediated visual text for interpretation; providing a social and political critique of post-Soviet society.

Tarkovsky claimed that cinema was a medium endowed with a potentially universal capacity of communication, since “An artistic image is capable of arousing identical feelings in viewers, while the thoughts that come later may be very different.” The claim that certain images carry a universally identifiable meaning and a universally shared emotional resonance relates clearly to the concept of archetype and specifically to the definition given by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, for whom such images constitute “universal, archaic patterns and images that derive from the collective unconscious” that often reveal themselves on an anthropological level through “behavior, images, art, myths, religions, or dreams”. Accordingly, Tarkovsky writes in Sculpting in Time that “the author of a film” should share “something in common with the psychologist-screenwriter, and also with the psychiatrist.”

These resources have been developed in response to changes in the content of the AS/A2 curricula
for Italian and Russian, which are effective from September 2017. They have been designed to give
support and guidance to MFL teachers in selecting and teaching the film and literature content of
the curricula.

https://www.academicstudiespress.com/browse-catalog/russian-science-fiction-literature-and-cinema

Since the dawn of the Space Age, when the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite and sent the first human into the cosmos, science fiction literature and cinema from Russia has fascinated fans, critics, and scholars from around the world. Informed perspectives on the surprisingly long and incredibly rich tradition of Russian science fiction, however, are hard to come by in accessible form. This critical reader aims to provide precisely such a resource for students, scholars, and the merely curious who wish to delve deeper into landmarks of the genre, discover innumerable lesser-known gems in the process, and understand why science fiction came to play such a crucial role in Russian society, politics, technology, and culture for more than a century.

Contributors include: Mark B. Adams, Anindita Banerjee, Lynn Barker, Eliot Borenstein, Aleksandr Chantsev, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Stephen Dalton, Dominic Esler, Elana Gomel, Andrew Horton, Yvonne Howell, Asif A. Siddiqi, Robert Skotak, Michael G. Smith, Vlad Strukov, Darko Suvin

Anindita Banerjee is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and a Faculty Fellow at the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future at Cornell University. She is the author of We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity (Wesleyan University Press, 2013), winner of the Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book Prize.

Первой гоголевской экранизацией за рубежом стал фильм «Тарас Бульба», созданный эмигрантской студией Ермольева в Германии и выпущенный на экраны в 1924 году. Более того, это была первая в истории полнометражная экранизация гоголевской повести; первый крупнобюджетный фильм, созданный зарубежной русской студией на русский сюжет; один из первых отечественных «ответов Голливуду» и один из первых полнометражных крупнобюджетных фильмов о казаках, стимулировавший интерес к этой теме у зарубежных кинематографистов. «Тарас Бульба» студии Ермольева задумывался как конкурент популярных европейских и американских лент, с огромным, по меркам тогдашнего германского кино, бюджетом. Создатели фильма надеялись привлечь кинозрителей как на Западе, так и в Советском Союзе сюжетом на основе классического произведения русской литературы, сохранив историческую и художественную достоверность изображаемых событий.

A ‘rites of passage’ movie set in the USSR of the 1950s, Valery Todorovsky’s film Stilyagi (2008) tells the story of the transformation of the hero Mels from loyal member of the Komsomol to stilyaga. For many critics, Todorovsky’s stilyagi are the very embodiment of anti-conformism. And yet to read the film in this way is to overlook one of its key elements - consumption. For in order to acquire their clothes and other accessories, the stilyagi need money. Zooming in (literally) on the financial transactions that these young people engage in with such astonishing regularity, Todorovsky reminds us that without money, there can be no ‘style’, and consequently, no stilyagi. Seen in this light, the stilyagi are not at all subversive, but in fact highly conformist precursors of today’s post-soviet shoppers. It is this paradox at the heart of the stilyagi and their ‘revolt’ as presented by Todorovsky which will be the subject of our article.

Permanent Evolution Selected Essays on Literature, Theory and Film by Yuri Tynianov
Introduced by Daria Khitrova

Yuri Tynianov was a key figure of Russian Formalism, an intellectual movement in early 20th century Russia that also included Viktor Shklovsky and Roman Jakobson. Tynianov developed a groundbreaking conceptualization of literature as a system within—and in constant interaction with—other cultural and social systems. His essays on Russian literary classics, like Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and works by Dostoevsky and Gogol, as well as on the emerging art form of filmmaking, provide insight into the ways art and literature evolve and adapt new forms of expression. Although Tynianov was first a scholar of Russian literature, his ideas transcend the boundaries of any one genre or national tradition. Permanent Evolution gathers together for the first time Tynianov’s seminal articles on literary theory and film, including several articles never before translated into English. 

Learn more & purchase: https://www.academicstudiespress.com/culturalsyllabus/permanent-evolution

ÖZET Andrei Tarkovsky'nin 1979 yapımı filmi Stalker inanç, bilim ve özgür iradenin sonsuz çatışmasına dair müthiş bir film. Arkadiy ve Boris Strugatsky'nin Uzayda Piknik adlı kitabından sinemaya uyarlanan film temelde üç kişinin "Bölge" adı verilen gizemli bir yere yaptıkları yolculuğa odaklanıyor. Yaşadıkları totaliter distopyadan, "Bölge"ye yaptıkları yolculuğun amacıysa bu acayip yerin gizemlerine ulaşmak. Zira iddia o ki, "Bölge"deki bir oda insanların her dileğini gerçeğe çeviriyor. Ancak kim ne istediğini gerçekten bilebilir ve her dileğinin gerçek olduğu bir yerin varlığına yürekten inanabilir ki? Film bu yolculuk ve soyutlama üzerinden son derece gerçek ve sert sorular soruyor. Meşhur dokuz buçuk dakikalık sessiz geçen açılış sekansının ardından Tarkovsky bizi monokrom olarak lanse ettiği yoksul bir adamın, filme de ismini veren İz Sürücü'nün dünyasına sokuyor. İz Sürücü, virane evinde karısı ve küçük kız çocuğuyla yaşayan bir adam. İlk bakışta anlamadığımız olağandışı bir mesleği var. Yaşadıkları totaliter rejimin insanlardan, tüm dünyadan gizlediği "Bölge"'ye gitmek isteyen yolculara rehberlik ediyor, bu yüzden de ona Stalker, İz Sürücü deniyor. O gün yine iki yolcusu var. Birisi bir yazar, diğeriyse bir fizik profesörü. Üçlü bu gizemli mekâna doğru yola çıkıp, birçok engeli aştıktan sonra en nihayet rejimin kolluk güçleri de, gerçek hayatlarındaki çalakalem çizilmiş eskizleri andıran binalar da, monokrom görüntüler de geride kalıyor ve bütün film renklerine kavuşuyor. Burası yemyeşil bir görüntüyle karşılasa da onları, aslen nükleer bir felaketin yaşandığı, bir noktada doğa tarafından ele geçirilmiş endüstriyel bir çöplüğü andırıyor. İlk bakışta mucizelerle, yahut tehlikelerle dolu bir yer gibi görünmüyor. Ancak İz Sürücü bu uhrevi yerin zaman zaman çok tehlikeli olabildiğini söylüyor. Bu noktada filmin tamamıyla din ve rasyonel düşünce arasındaki sonu gelmez tartışmayla sıkı sıkıya ilişkili bir alegori olduğunu söyleyebiliriz. "Bölge"yi tümden bir öte dünya, hatta cennet tasviri gibi yorumlamak da mümkün. Zaten oluşma sebebi de bir nevi kıyamet senaryosuyla, bir meteorun dünyaya çarpmasıyla gerçekleşiyor. Cennet inancının temelindeki "dünyevi sıkıntıları geride bırakma ve sonsuz mutluluğa erişme" motivasyonunun da yine "Bölge"deki bu her dileği gerçeğe çeviren odayla vuku bulduğunu söylemek mümkün. Dini kurumları tamamen reddeden, insan hayatından dinin çıkıp yerini sadece rasyonel düşüncenin ve bilimin alması gerektiğini savunan bir düşünceye karşı, insan doğasının inanca her daim ihtiyaç duyacağını, buna bilimin de ihtiyaç duyacağını iddia eden bir film koyuyor ortaya Tarkovsky. Filmin temel çatışmasının sadece bu olmadığını da belirtmek gerek. Özgür irade ve inanç arasındaki ilişkiyi, "Neye tam anlamıyla inanıyoruz?", "Neye aslında inanmadığımız hâlde inanıyor ön kabulüyle boyun eğiyoruz?" gibi tartışmaları da filmde bulmak mümkün, ama görsel, ama sözlü olarak. "Bölge" bu anlamda insanoğlunun kararsız bir dengede sürekli bilinç dışına attığı bu tartışmaların görsel karşılığı gibi de duruyor. Alıntı: https://www.filmloverss.com/iz-surucu-stalker/

The focus on three Russian films, Andrei Zviaguintsev’s Leviathan, Andrei Tarkovski’s Nostalghia and Kira Mouratova’s Two in one reveals paradoxal bodies. Representative mediation of body as a place for identification mitigates. The body appears as a figural or imaginal (obraznaya to use Eisenstein’s term) towards impressions emanating from the cinematic body (kinoobraz to use Tarkovsky’s word).
It is a matter of showing how bodies’ metamorphoses propel the construction of cinematic spaces, textures and temporalities.
Firstly, we’ll see how the bodies infiltrate cinematic spaces: in Two in One, Renata Litvinova’s body circulates between theatrical and film spaces; in Nostalghia, discontinuous presence of Andrei’s body in the Toscana’s fog; Liliya’s body disperses in different settings of Leviathan like Kolya’s childhood home, ruined church or northern landscape. Then we’ll analyse the body as the mediator of cinematic textures revelation. Litvinova’s body interrogates the authenticity and the fake blasting theatrical and film devices, Andrei’s body becomes the place of sound, visual and semantic overprints, shot reverse of Liliya and the whale prunes the women’s body in glows and sounds of repetitive music. This way, metamorphoses of Liliya’s body, – living body, disappeared body, dead body, cinematic body, – Litvinova’s body, scenarist and actress playing an actress, and Andrei’s body shape a temporality broken up in crystallized moments and forming closed and iterative circuit, discontinuous and elliptic temporality condemned to the eternity.