Dynamics of the cinematic image in the perception of the eastern branch of the Russian emigration

Abstract

Russian emigration in China saw only mass entertainment cinema, but its clichéd plots were used as a facade for the deployment of sorrowful, tragic or tragicomic stories that required an ironic look at the usual visualizations of everyday life. The very historical situation of the Russian emigration demanded that the banal be turned into the starting point of a tragic experience. As the examination of subject-thematic complexes in the literature of Russian China, primarily through the work of Alexandra Parkau, shows, cinema was thought of as a mediator between the experience of the shadows of the past and the perception of contemporary émigré life as unreliable. Parkau reconstructs the image of Russian Christmas with its masquerades, but also creates an image of the sudden changes in the lives of Russians in China. The techniques of Hollywood cinema, both narrative and visual, prove to be the principle that binds together these two imaginative orders, which cannot be reconciled through a conventional narrative.