Screen Impressionism and Industrial Production Drama in the Film Your Contemporary by Yuli Raisman

Using the methods of film studies, culture studies and aesthetics, the article analyses the formal and substantive aspects of the film Your Contemporary (1967) by Yuli Raisman and Evgeny Gabrilovich. The context of the official reception of the film and critical statements in the magazines Iskusstvo kino (The Art of Cinema) and Sovietsky ehkran (Soviet Screen) is considered. The article also contains the text of a letter in which Raisman’s film is subjected to a detailed review and a strongly negative assessment. The author of the article notes the general gravitation of the film action towards the pattern of wandering characters which G. Deleuze wrote about and which appears to be very typical of Western European and Russian auteur cinema of the second half of the 20th century. The author explores the combination of atmosphere, impressionistic style in the mood of Edgar Degas, industrial and science problems, and diegetic images of everyday life of the mid-1960s. Also, the subject of analysis is the evolution of the male genotype of the three generations of the Gubanovs — the character of the film The Communist (1957), his son and his grandson in Your Contemporary. These central characters correlate with the character of the film A Long Happy Life (1966) by Gennady Shpalikov and with the magazine criticism of excessive uncertainty in the images of contemporaries. The article analyses a range of female characters, artistic fixation of inter-gender issues, and transformation of attitudes towards work and vocational jobs. Conclusions are drawn about the differences in the semantic scope of the film and its representation in the process of official reception and criticism in the central periodicals, and about the lack of uniform viewpoints inside the official and the so-called permitted culture of the Thaw era.