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ICONOLOGY OF THE PICTORIAL ELEMENTS OF POEMS BY PRINCE VLADIMIR PALEY // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2022. Issue 2 (32). P. 68-87

The collection Poems (1916) by Prince Vladimir Paley does not have a common plot and composition, it presents scattered lyrical impressions. The composition of the collection is organized by extra-textual pictorial elements: headpieces and vignettes. Responding to the collector’s taste of the poet, these elements force one to read his lyrics differently: not as a transfer of personal impressions, but as a complex construction of his own identity based on various cultural languages. The use of the iconological method and appeal to the resources of visual semiotics allow showing how, thanks to the order of illustrations, certain motifs of romantic and modernist poetry cease to be self-sufficient, becoming only moments in the acquisition of a more holistic lyrical position. Such design elements of the book as cartouches with the titles of poems, headpieces with images of landscape and genre scenes, and scattered vignettes were analyzed; the entire volume of the book’s illustrative accompaniment was covered. The article shows that despite the fact that the design of this book is fundamentally restrained, which corresponded to the new settings of the taste of wartime, each type of artistic accompaniment builds its own program for reading these poems, not allowing the content of individual poems to be reduced to the reproduction of romantic, neo-romantic or symbolist motifs. The article demonstrates how cartouches with the titles of the poems allowed educated readers to thematize the relationship between nature and history by de-automating the perception of the title as an indication only of a subject topic. The decor of these elements indicates both the interpenetration of the natural world and the world of culture, and the inadequacy of individual languages or semiotic formations to convey the idea of a person’s metaphysical destiny. Three poems with the cartouches build an independent plot of the presence in nature of not only fatal forces, but also metaphysical insights. Illustrations-headpieces demanded a special interpretation based on knowledge of the realities and conceptual meanings of certain painting genres. The article proves that poems with the headpieces convey the general plot of the independence of an intimate mental life from ready-made patterns of history perception. In these poems, the idea dominates of intimizing history as the only way to comprehend the meaning of historical catastrophes. Finally, individual vignettes allow reading the entire array of the poems in this book as supporting the main idea of accepting natural necessity in order to overcome private ideas about fate, with the necessary Christian reinterpretation of forebodings and individual symbolic indications. Thus, the illustrative mode of the book corresponds to the principles of multilingualism and polystylistics of Russian modern style. The study allows clarifying both the landmarks of the official Russian culture of the pre-revolutionary period and the specificity of the poetic works of Vladimir Paley as one of the most striking cases of supporting the original poetics with the visual semiotics of natural and cultural objects.

Keywords: Prince Vladimir Paley, lyrical position, lyrical hero, polystylistics, iconology, book illustration, emblem

ACTING PERFORMANCES IN UZBEK DOCUMENTARY FILMS // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2023. Issue 3 (37). P. 54-72

Soviet cinema established a specific genre of film portrait, which was supported both by the visual norms of Soviet film production and by the genre specification common to literature and cinematography, aimed at streamlining large arrays of works intended to educate Soviet people. Maxim Gorky and Dziga Vertov played a key role in establishing this genre and legitimizing it as an educational artistic program with its sometimes quite provocative features. throughout the history of Soviet cinema, this genre showed great resilience, which can be explained both by the Soviet viewer’s general conception of progress and its visual representations, and by the canonical nature of the techniques of documentary film portraits. At the same time, the general image of the representation of modernity as the performance of progress prevailed over the narrative, which therefore did not need additional narratives or effects. Acting performances in documentary films were thus either condemned or tolerated as ornamental. The article delineates two types of documentaries, ethnographic and biographical, and shows how the screen principles of Soviet cinema limited the introduction of acting inserts. The collapse of the Soviet film production system significantly changed the audience. First of all, the literature-centrism of Soviet culture, in which narratives about the past and present were generated by literature, disappeared; now the cinema began to develop them independently. Next, audiences themselves began to differentiate their expectations from cinema, projecting onto it the experience of watching television and the experience of encountering Hollywood performing films. Finally, a new generation of filmmakers began to make greater use of acting inserts along with special effects to build a narrative that complemented the national historical narrative and thereby attracted more viewers. At the same time, viewers were not fully accustomed to narratives of things, perceiving them exclusively as documentary evidence. Therefore, the use of acting inserts often undermined the credibility of the film’s historical accuracy and the credibility of new documentary filmmaking in general. Such were the underlying reactions of the audience, which, although not explicitly expressed, were noted by the most perceptive Uzbek filmmakers in interviews conducted specifically for this study. The study of Uzbek films in the last three decades has shown the search for new ways to make film portraits that take into account both the play of narratives and the variability of viewer expectations. Not all of these pursuits have been successful, but they have shown a steady desire on the part of filmmakers to avoid the emotional lethargy characteristic in post-Soviet documentaries due to the lack of a single idea of universal progress that viewers accept as credible. Nation-building requires both a renewal of the idea of progress and a new conflict of narratives with a flawless use of techniques that are not chosen by the director, but entail each other, and create the aesthetics of a documentary with acting performance inserts.

Keywords: documentary, film portrait, director, staging, image, hero, Uzbek cinema

Semiotic treatment of a visual philosophy lecture: The mechanical duck of Descartes // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2024. Issue 3 (41). P. 165-190

Teaching the history of philosophy requires actualization; visual studies provide a distinctive asset for such actualization. The history of philosophy should be conceived as an exposition of a series of issues, each of which can be modeled visually, and more complex models can be reduced to simpler and more precise ones. Each philosophical thesis can then be presented as a use of the view of philosophy itself: the metaphor of sight in Western philosophy turns out to be not only the common denominator of methods, but the semiotically optimal justification for any method new to the listeners or to a professional philosophical readership. The use of images produced by artificial intelligence then proves to be productive for such instantiation. The lecture shows how the history of philosophy and science was not only the exploration of new objects with the help of ontological tools, but also the ontologization of whole areas of consciousness, including imaginary ones. In this way, the discovery of the world was also the discovery of the mirror of one’s own consciousness. Descartes put this experiment in its purest form by establishing an ontology of science. Unlike the usual accounts of new European rationalism, which emphasize the priority of experimental science over theoretical generalization, the lecture provides a more complex view. The Renaissance virtue destroyed the correlation of the ontological tools of human self-justification with the worlds of nature and art, whereas Descartes only completed this destruction. But his voluntarism and teleology were rooted in Jesuit science, and the development first of the Baroque imagination and then of the Enlightenment imagination destroyed the initial self-evidence of Descartes as well. As in the Renaissance, its own ontological domain of signs emerged, only their number became unlimited, unlike the small set of them in the Renaissance rhetoric, and visual semiotics eventually devolved into a romanizing imagination. With the help of illustrations created by artificial intelligence, it has been possible to present in the lecture these complex vicissitudes of imagination and the formation of new ontological domains that can undermine or order other domains of ontology, including the ontology of pure consciousness. The lecture allows us to better understand both the main problem of ontology as a discipline of philosophy and the informational productivity of visual signs produced by artificial intelligence.

Keywords: rationalism, visual research, artificial intelligence, ontology program, ontology of sign, epistemology, visual aid, philosophy of puppet