Quick eye and speech

It happens that the reviews begin with the words: "This is an amazing book." If the book is not amazing, they distinguish some other sign. In this case, the absence of pronounced signs seems to be the only goal that the author set for himself. The goal has been achieved. Under a gray cover with a dull portrait of Bjork, in the role of Selma from the film "Dancing in the dark," film critic Zara Abdullaeva collected articles published in recent years in the "art of cinema". Articles that correspond to the format of a self -confident semi -glossy magazine for the "intelligent" reader. Which, in general, can report something about the current state of pop magazines. Which finally cause decisive bewilderment as the contents of a thick, well -published book, which occupies a certain place in the new series of the Three Squares. This book has even a pointer of names - a persistent signal of its usefulness for someone’s further work. Does not save.

From the very first phrase of the preface - a ballet of common places, bribing lightness, sweet premanism, intelligible abstractness:

Who is it prescribed to us? > Live in the continuous space of the media. We can say - in a limitless cinema with transparent walls. The gluttonous media virus conquers the last remnants of the private space. And he finishes as a curse, leaving no hopes for intimate - uninfected - zones of existence.

A few years ago, Alexander Etkind complained that the publishers feed the reader with a “secondary chewing gum of Baudrillard”. The “chewing gum” is good that you can endlessly pinch off the pieces and turn them into raw materials for the new “gum”, indifferent - licensed or pirate. This satisfies the needs for “ideas” with cheap improvised ways. This is not at all bad: the playboy magazine is a tolerable source of acquaintance with modern intellectual trends for those who are busy, say, in business. But the chewing gum produced by the Playboy is an honest, clearly oriented product, unlike the equally fashionable but more pretentious chatter from which the book of Abdullaeva Zara consists. Outwardly, the text is very reminiscent of the book of Svetlana Boym about the mythology of Soviet everyday life . They differ in the subject, which, taking into account the identical approach, is not so significant, as well as the fact that Boym counted on an audience that does not own the material or has very peculiar ideas about it. The book "Real Cinema" is written for the domestic market, so the brisk jumps on the encyclopedic dictionary are a consequence of not the desire for accessibility, but unwillingness to do it differently.

The narrator here is a dual figure. On the one hand, a journalist with automatic letters, lightning speed and almost reflexively reacting to the events of cultural life. On the other hand, an adept of scientific criticism (in the sense of Criticism , which is clearly wider than the Russian counterpart), giving footnotes for theoretical work, conducting unexpected and thoughtful analogies. With this second hypostasis, the author has obvious problems. To start a conversation with the fact that modern cinema is a means of holding the aura according to Walter Benjamin, for some reason to bring a meaningless quote from Olga Freidenberg for some reason, hint at the need for a spectator's “co-part” and generously to reduce his audience knowledge with diluted postmodernism-all this is completely not necessary, because it does not give an informational or conceptual growth. In a demonstration of his awareness, a recognizable graphomaniac arrogance shows. The “professorship” discussions, some “Slavists” (thanks to which a good movie turns into “local joys of fashionable people”), then “cultural nobility of the“ Roman ”Pianist”, are easily dispersed in brilliant film adaptation, are remembered. Many sound judgments are simply lost behind this. In addition, a combination of vivid accidents and the prevailing triviality for the ladies, when it enters the book, begins to claim more than only harms the author. The texts suddenly begin to seem impurious and sloppy.

The record holder in this sense is a failed essay onDogville , which opens the book. It was difficult to come up with a more unsuccessful composition. If at the beginning was the section on the “ dogma ” without von Trier (albeit a bitter tasteless trust type like “Dogmu now, at least a pot, is done”) or at least a small chapter about Russian cinema ( Pichul , Zeldovich , Lutsik ), the book would frankly won. But no, because it is necessary to demonstrate efficiency. Festival shows are still memorable, and the reception is already under the book cover. The author, I must say, often discovers a typically journal attitude to time, absolutizing a short memory: an interview with Michael Hanek, published by the "art of cinema" in 1999, of course, "long -standing". As for the essay "Good Man from Dogville", then it is divided into chapters and even interludes, to make a book in miniature. Its main idea boils down to the fact that von Trier focused on Bertold Brecht’s “three -nasty opera” and that he turned over again, repeating the Brechtovsky Complex mechanism (Verfremdung), the old formula of the Six, called the theater the world, and not vice versa. Allegedly, von Trier "for the first time in the cinema" showed the irrationality of the inhabitants of the bourgeois, "not distinguishable from gangsters." Allegedly, for the first time, the director "burns out seduction about intellectuals." Who is burning from? Does the intellectuals themselves? It is difficult to suspect Zara Abdullaev that she did not see the films of Sam Peking or Arthur Penn , and if we talk about European cinema, then, excuse me, Marco Ferreri and, moreover, Fassbinder . So what is meant? There is no answer, everything is sacrificed to hasty generalizations.

For all its friability and verbosity, the book, I must say, is amazingly homogeneous, so it cannot be read in a row. This is the perfect reading for the living room in anticipation of tea. Lies on his coffee table, opened anywhere - closed without a trace. Although the texture that Abdullaeva uses in such an unpretentious way deserves to be treated with great grace. The critic spreads a lot of useful things from memory reserves, and their recognition depends on the ability to separate them on adhesive "chewing gum". For example, the story of the interaction of the Japanese theater canon with international cinematic technology in the "dolls" of Takeshi Kitano (essay "Bathing the Red Horse") consists of valuable observations that appeal to comment. But even links to Japanese literature do not help. Parallels with the "soldiers", the rapprochement of the modern, sterile Japanese design with the archaic of the national costume ends with the following conclusion:

The deconstruction undertaken by Kitano creates a new figurative space cannot do this deconstruction, and should not, read Rosalinu Krauss , it was translated > ... The world is the theater. People are hostages. Dolls are actors. Tikamatsu - Shakespeare. Cinema is a booth.

In this dotted chain of banalities there is something mnemonic. The author reminds himself and the reader not about the secret, but about the hardened. Perhaps the task is this, but the implementation is still tiring. Sometimes the thing comes to the point that other people's thoughts - by the way, are not the deepest - begin to glance strangely in the text. This is the case, for example, with a ridiculous phrase “this is a genuine underground” (about how much it costs, you can cope with the newly mentioned Rosalind Crouss). First, it is given in an epigraph from Leonid Nehler, opening an essay on the "dreams of an idiot" by Vasily Pichula, and after fifty pages the text of Abdullaeva herself begins on the documentary project of Vitaly Mansky. No less persistent than formulating general use, bad secular manners are manifested in the book: Isabelle Jupper went with such and such a tattoo , and the author saw this in Cannes, she watched, of course, in Venice, etc., this does not add anything to the conversation about the cinema, except that the author is entering certain circles. Hence - light, careless knowledge, literal juggling with culture, as its usual props. Closer to the three hundredth page, we will open, for example, the essay about the "dead" Jim Jarmusha :

The 70s is a hangover after the rebellious sixties. "The great ideological refusal of" midnight cowboys, careless riders gave way to a non -illusory life. The ecstatic "way out of oneself" is a broken road to yourself. "End of art" - the resurrection of the author. Counterocultural reductionism is minimalism in art that confront the cultural establishment, but without inviting slogans.

What a richness, the right word. Dennis Hopper and John Schlezinger are in a friendly trep with Herbert Marcuse, Rolan Bart cools the ardor of Jim Morrison and Jackson Pollak, and what does not scatter on the Allusia, it disappears behind the smooth slurry ("Belylling Life" is well said). And this is almost everywhere where the author does not retell the films, but tries to say something abstract. By the way, retelling is not better possible in an example - as they unfold, the author quietly reaches the desired vigilance of the critical look and accuracy of the word (for example, in the case of the "dog heat" Ulrich Zaydl).

Among catchy formulations, sometimes very successful come across, but it is not possible to confirm them and, moreover, is not possible to confirm, because the run of associations is whimsical. You have to be in time for him. The very fact of the existence of the book follows from the idea of ​​the "value" of these associations. Therefore, the book is so chubby - it has a lot of different words that the author boldly operates, running through his eyes a couple of encyclopedic dictionaries. The ability to write quickly and without amending the quality of the final product prevents the intention to comprehend the written, give it some additional dimension. The magazine will do without it, the book is not. Unfortunately, it is impossible to name Abdullaeva, unfortunately.