DOI: 10.35852/2588-0144-2021-3-128-141

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Violetta D. Evallyo

PhD in Culture Studies, Senior Researcher, Mass Media Arts Department
State Institute for Art Studies
Moscow, Russia
E-mail: amaris_evally@mail.ru
ORCID: 0000

The Aesthetics of chaos in Kira Muratova films of the 1980th – 1990th

Abstract

In this article, Kira Muratova’s films are considered according to the fixing and reflecting the dichotomy of the chaos and the order. They were represented in the intraframe matter of Asthenic Syndrome and Sensitive Policeman films. The chaos in character’s worldview contrasts with the orderliness of the Soviet system, its clear-cut regulation of all spheres of life. The destructiveness symbolizes the absence of a universal common principle, which characters have to look for on their own, individually. The poetics of these films stands as a symbiosis of various aesthetics. They are the recognizable elements of silent cinema, and theatricalization, exaggeration of the problems raised, grotesque, postmodern accents, and documentary realism of the everyday life image. Both The Asthenic Syndrome, and The Sensitive Policeman seem to be created with scattered artistic elements, it is like a “patchwork” of the emerging new sociocultural paradigm. In the simulated cinematic space, Kira Muratova rigidly outlines the late Soviet reality, packing it into the metaphor of a maze city inhabited by victims and predators, strangers and broken ones. The director seems to be creating a chronicle of the destructive processes of our time, though at the level of artistic language they are ordered and systematized by the director’s will. The chronotope of Muratova’s films combines the material signs of both perestroika person admiration with the Western culture and the rapidly aging elements of the established Soviet world. The unattainability and impossibility of a full-fledged spiritual life, according to the director, causes the mental destruction of the personality. Kira Muratova captures the specifics of the consciousness of the perestroika society, in a modernized form she shows the “aliens” who feel uncomfortable in the transition period reality.

Keywords

Kira Muratova, The Asthenic Syndrome, The Sentimental Policeman, Perestroika, post-Soviet era, cinema language, postmodernism in cinema, social art, chaos

For citation

Evallyo V. D.The Aesthetics of chaos in Kira Muratova films of the 1980th – 1990th. In: Theatre. Fine Arts. Cinema. Music. 2021, no. 3, pp. 128–141.

DOI: 10.35852/2588-0144-2021-3-128-141

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Received: 19.04.2021

Accepted: 11.08.2021