The semiotic anthropology of Soviet film culture, 1960s-1990s

This thesis, entitled "The Semiotic, Anthropology of Soviet Film Culture, 1960s--90s", is an interdisciplinary, ritual-centered study of Soviet cinema based on the methodology of semiotic anthropology (study of cultural codes, meanings and symbols in the context of ritual processes and national values). The dissertation shows socio-cultural meanings as a system connected to the fundamental ritual needs of society, and explores transformations of ritual symbols during the turbulent changes in twentieth-century Soviet history, with the focus on 1960--90s. The dissertation has three goals: (1) to provide a theoretical basis for the anthropology of cinema, by summarizing key points of the semiotic of ritual, (2) to outline ritual symbolism and the aspects of metatextuality in Soviet antitotalitarian films of 1960--1990s, by analyzing selected filmtexts, and (3) to elaborate an interdisciplinary approach---a synthesis of anthropology with semiotics in the study of cinema and culture---by integrating theory with discourse analysis. Ritual is considered in the dissertation as one of the metalanguages of culture, and it is precisely on this basis that a comparative study of ritual and film is introduced in the dissertation.;The thesis consists of the introduction, with outline of theoretical sources, Part I, Part II and the conclusion. Part I is focused on theory and consists of the following chapters: "The Subject of Ritual" (on Bakhtin's concept of the Collective Body to be discussed as an integral protagonist of the Soviet film culture), "The Ritual Action" (on the paradigms of ritual theory, in particular, the works of Turner, which are especially important to the study of cinema), "From Ritual to Film" (a discussion of the interdisciplinary approach toward filmtext from the perspectives of interpretive and semiotic anthropology). Part II presents discourse analysis, a typological rather than chronological study of the following films in the context of anthropology and ritual studies: Commissar, Little Vera, Repentance, Scarecrow, Freeze-Die-Revive!, The Viola Sonata, Scorpion's Gardens, Prison Romance and Andrei Roublev.