The Russian Cinema at the Beginning of the New Millennium

Abstract

THE RUSSIAN CINEMA AT THE BEGINNING OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM IN 1998, this journal published my article "The New Russian Cinema and the New Russian Society" (1) which examined the counter-productive impasse reached during the early post-Communist period by the thriving Russian auteur and the nascent experimental cinema. The mainstream cinema lovers became increasingly insensitive to serious art-house films and sought to satisfy their hunger for entertainment from whatever imported genre films were allowed on the chaotic film scene in the early 1990s. Therefore this essay leaves out such significant, internationally acclaimed works of well established auteurs from the former Soviet Union such as A. Sokurov's Russian Ark (2002) and the third part of his dictators' trilogy about Japan's Emperor Hirohito (Sun, 2005); K. Muratova's Second Class Citizens (2001) and Chekhov's Motifs (2002); A. Rogozhkin's The Cuckoo (2002); V. Abdrashitov and A. Mindadze's Magnetic Storms (2003), as well as...