Author(s): Dilek TUNALI
Russian woman director Anna Melikian has been rewarded in important international film festivals and she has made a name for herself as a talented director. Her films are about actual and realistic stories of New Russian Society and New Russian People in which motifs from popular tales and Slav mythology has gathered. Within Perestroika atmosphere, positive and negative moves on behalf of cinema had happened in company, directors in pursuit of novelties had experienced separations and reunions while trying to break taboos of Soviet cinema. New film-makers in dilemma of Slavism and Occidentalism had created a specific type of aesthetic and a discourse having been effected from internal and external situations, contradictions and slippery slope. Melikian is placed in the last ring of this chain. Even though New age Soviet cinema has been refused and the rules of this cinema like story, character and form have been tried to demolish; this tradition of revolution carried on its effects in new era as well. Melikian's Rusalka (Star) filmed in 2007 and Zvezda (Star) filmed in 2014 carries inspirations respectively from Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid and Charles Perrault's Cinderella tales. They are independent adaptations of tales, mythological motifs and Russian literature inspirations. Films could be evaluated as anti-fairy-tales by their ends and evolutions. Women characters are raising girls, they are in initiation period as characters in the tales. However, this initiation state is represented in films as societal and economic challenges that New Russia and New Russian people come across in post-Soviet era. All effects of wild capitalism, gap between classes, a jerry-built metropolis (Moscow) within a view of constant worksite, each man's getting his share from advertising and consumerism, emptiness in ideological and religious subjects, fabulous-like but anti-fairy-tale adventure of young generation who experiences vagueness and futurelessness are subjects of her films' stories. Desperate people profiles suffering from internal and external wars, explosions, destructions and natural disasters are partly included in scenes. In both films which rich is represented as prince and poor is represented as candidate princess, what really matter is heroes' perceiving eye-brightening capitalism as "magical universe". This method that heroine’s perceptions of cruel and rigid world as fabulous and magical is intentionally chosen by the director. From this point of view, the creation of an illusion opening from a fabulous factualness to a factual fable has been visualized in both films.
The Journal of International Social Research received 8982 citations as per Google Scholar report
