Телекинет (Sep 2022)
Minimalism of Blood in Dynamics from the 1970s to the 1990s: Late Soviet Costume Historical Film and TV Series
Abstract
The article examines the traditions of staging violence scenes in Russian costume historical film with a Western setting. The author seeks to capture the transformation of aesthetics at the turn from the 1970s‑1980s to the 1990s. Focus is made on the functions of an important aspect of the visualization of cruelty, violence, pain and related physiology such as blood. Of interest in the frame space are the amount of blood, its semantics and the overall effect on the style and atmosphere of the film. Blood as a polysemantic symbol associated not only with life, but also with various forms of violence, including ritual one, is an important attribute of adventurous fiction plots. The author states that the tradition of the late Soviet costume historical and/or musical film continues to influence the films made in the second half of the 1980s, and partly in the 1990s. Blood, primarily on clothes,— if it appears — always looks very picturesque and cannot shock. The body in the frame is of interest as the sexual shell of a character, as the function of spectacular fights and chases on the screen, but not as a real physical body with its irrevocable needs and traits, which they have the right to be captured as components of the truth of life and screen performance. At the same time, the relative bloodlessness of battles and murders on the screen may weaken the tension and strength of the illusion of life-likeness, and cause a prolonged escalation of the emotional discomfort of the viewer who does not get visual relaxation and is unable to satisfy the “thirst” for virtual violence. The Soviet costume film about Western history is characterized by the absence of scenes of body destruction and the aesthetics of blood. Whereas the late Soviet films are characterized by almost complete absence of blood in the frame, in the era of perestroika, along with the stereotyped, purely functional and still restrained representation of blood, there arose a number of individual solutions. They have to do not so much with the desire to increase the visual appeal of films, as with the desire to dramatize the conflict of the individual with the state or with political groups.
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