Multimedia attributed to the culture of classical cinema in the spotlight of the Presidential Library’s cinema club

The Presidential Library hosted a cinema club meeting, where video works by students of the Faculty of Arts of the St. Petersburg State University were viewed and examined. Lyudmila Nikitina, senior lecturer of the Department of Information Systems in the Arts and Humanities of the Faculty of Arts of the St. Petersburg State University examined the films together with novice filmmakers and the audience of the cinema club.

Lyudmila Leonidovna is a screenwriter, one of the leading masters of documentary and popular-science films in Russia and abroad. She made more than 40 films and TV programs awarded with prizes of national and international festivals and competitions, organized the first Heritage non-governmental film studio in Russia (1990–1992), and hosted the programs “For Those Who Love Cinema” on Channel Five of Leningradsky (St. Petersburg) television.

“Our department graduates the specialists of a high professional level”, - said Lyudmila Nikitina in her opening remarks. - When we talk about multimedia in conjunction with the culture of classical cinema, then this is primarily associated with life on a film set of the person we are interested in and its material background. If both of these components are connected “seamlessly”, thanks to accurate calculation and an established installation culture, then substantial works such as the debut pictures of our students that are being presented to your court today are released”. 

The film by Artyom Bulakh “Spaces of Eugene Titov” opens with a screening of films that immediately captivate the viewer with a whirlpool of indigenous village life, where collective peasant labor is interspersed with holidays, public labor is lyrical. Before us is the author of this distinctive world - the artist Yevgeny Titov, who uses the style of lubok in his works, having his own style that attracts the viewer.

At the beginning of the film, the fisherman carries a pike caught in a small hole on the snowy ice of the Neva - and the fish will be bigger than him! A man walks, and his prey moves a little, glistening with scales! …According to Lyudmila Nikitina this seems to be an inconspicuous, but such a spectacular combination of IT-technologies with a picturesque canvas that enlivens the film. Cinema is “moving pictures”, built by the director through editing in a certain logical series in accordance with his plan. 

The romance to these verses, written by composer Rimsky-Korsakov, in the film by Daria Novik is performed by the brilliant Galina Vishnevskaya, whose young director wanted to show the difficult life without cuts, starting from her orphan childhood in pre-war Kronstadt. The film was made in the form of a dialogue between a young singer, dreaming of a stage, and an opera diva, who has come a long way in art, strewn with not only roses. Galina was 14 years old when the war began, in the first year of the siege of Leningrad her grandmother died, the only family person...

But the fate of the great singer is not an end in itself of the author of the film, noted the master of the workshop Lyudmila Nikitina. Daria Novik, who has simultaneously mastered two professions - a vocalist and a media designer - and is at the point of choice in which direction to move and develop, addresses this question to her heroine, for which she “enlivens” her in the corner mirror of Vishnevskaya’s St. Petersburg apartment. And she shares the words from the pages of her book with the aspiring singer about her difficult career as an opera prima...

Elena Baturina’s film “The Alphabet”, about butterflies and bugs flying around the screen representing the letters “B” and “Zh”, the “U” is about the technological methods of new media for the audience of the Presidential Library’s cinema club. They are studied at the Faculty of Arts of the St. Petersburg State University so that its graduates with innovative technologies, can make new Russian cinema in the foreseeable future.