The Culture of \"Other Films\" (drugoe kino) : Understanding the Art Film Scene in...

The Culture of “Other Films”: Understanding the Art Film Scene in Contemporary Russia

Maxim Kupovykh

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Send your comments and suggestions to maxim.kupovykh@helsinki.fi

If you visit Moscow or St. Petersburg, or even a middle-sized town in Russia, you will probably have a strong impression that this once great film power is back in its movie theaters. The number of domestic box-office hits is growing. The networks of multiplexes and rental video/DVD stores spread far beyond major cities. Russian film festivals are attracting more media attention at home, and select Russian films perform well at the international festivals. This is a striking contrast with the downturn of the 1990s, when people literally stopped going to the movies and films almost stopped being produced.

While the kino-boom of the 2000s is hardly ignored by the researchers in both the West and Russia, the fate of Russia’s ones famous art film scene practically falls through the cracks. This paper aims at filling this gap in research by turning to two major aspects of the present situation of what might be called, along the lines of Howard Becker’s thinking, the Russian art film world.1 One aspect is the notorious lack of developed infrastructure for production, promotion and consumption of noncommercial director’s films (auteur, avtorskoe kino), also referred in Russia as “other films” (drugoe kino) and “films not for all” (kino ne dlya vsekh). Another aspect is the emergence in 2006-07 of a number of tour-de-force conscious efforts to build this infrastructure. As a case in point, I consider the activities of the Artkino Club, established in November 2006 in Moscow. Founded as a social club specializing on “exhibiting, discussing and learning about world film classics,” it has become within a year a rather successful educated-public-oriented cultural enterprise.

There are two related questions that I would address in this paper. (1) Why, despite the traditions of Russian art film and despite the overall renaissance of movie-going, the art film world in today’s Russia is nothing more that the work of a few auteurs, who survive from one one-time grant to another, and a few small personal networks of dedicated “cinephiles” who are willing to put up with their cinemas2 cramped in the basements and with low-quality projection? (2) Is the Artkino project just an abnormality in Russia’s commercialized film world or maybe it indicates some major structural changes in the ways cultural goods are produced and consumed in contemporary Russia?

In effort to address the first question, I consider a few popular answers to it. The weakness of the Russian art film world is usually attributed to the declassifying, or leveling, effects of the market, as opposed to the institutionalized support for film as art under state socialism. By considering the Russian case in connection with the literature on the history and sociology of arts, and art film, in the West, I argue that declassifying dynamics are balanced by, and compete with, other dynamics, like to struggle of the cultural elites toward the independence from the marketplace or the consolidation of social elites as an exclusive status group (Baumann 2001; Bourdieu 1984; 1993; DiMaggio 1986; 1991; Heise and Tudor 2007). Furthermore, I argue that the state patronage of culture under Soviet socialism in fact prevented the formation of an institutionally articulated and economically sustainable art film world. Thus, despite the

presence of the strong tradition of viewing film as art, the institutions able to sustain it in the new, market environment are not in place.

These ideas set the foundation for a study of the Artkino community. Based on semi-structured social surveys, life history interviews, content and discourse analysis, I demonstrate that the Club exemplifies precisely the kind of organizational model that is able to bring about an art film world as, to a degree, a self-sustaining, self-reproducing, and continuously operating social world. I show how, as a multi-media and multi-functional niche-market-oriented enterprise, the Club is able to shape, and cater to, the needs of a number of varied groups among Russian intellectuals, artists and high-end creative workers. For instance, its educational program compensates for the deficiencies of the established educational establishments, which are unable to satisfy the need of Russian economy in the experts—there are plenty of amateurs, of course—on motion pictures and generally images (such as films critics, designers and advertisers). Also, the Club provides with knowledge, skills and channels for self-expression and eventual entrée into the film industry for people without necessary educational credentials or the links to the established old boys clubs and cliques.

I further demonstrate that the Artkino is a part of a larger movement for the establishment of new—“new” at least for Russia—sites of cultural creativity. In the 2000s, cafes coupled with bookstores, night clubs-cum-art galleries and, since recently, cinemas-cum-social clubs and education centers become extremely popular as major sites of cultural consumption and creativity among educated middle class individuals. The emergence and relative success of these organizations, I argue, is an indication of the growing demand among Russian intellectuals, artists, and other high-end creative workers for the culture and institutions that they can call their own. Market- and technology-savvy, these organizations service this demand better than traditional state-governed cultural institutions or the informal clique-like networks, the existing forms of the institutionalization of the Russian intelligentsia’s high culture. As mentioned above, the new sites of cultural production compensate for the deficiencies of the existing higher education system and provide alternative channels for social mobility. These sites bring together creative individuals and their potential audiences. They serve as the “milieus of innovation,” the sites where leisure and consumption are not exterior to “work” but serve as bases for cultural production (cf. Neff 2005). Finally, they promise and, so far, deliver economic sustainability as opposed to the total dependence on the state or wealthy sponsors. In short, they make possible the existence of the independent—from both the state and the marketplace—cultural field, of which an art film world is a part. Film, Art and Market: Toward a Conceptual Toolkit [This is a preliminary summary of the kinds of theories and perspectives I find useful for exploring the character of the contemporary Russian noncommercial film. I plan to drop the numbering in the later versions of the paper]

1. Russian cultural phenomena are often approached solely in the national context, by referring to long-standing domestic “traditions” and “legacies.” An important part of my research agenda is to challenge this long-standing but limiting perspective and to consider the Russian independent film scene in a wider global and comparative context of the conflict-ridden interactions between the arts and the marketplace.

2. In this study, the case of the contemporary Russian independent film culture will be considered in the context of a larger question: Can culture survive in the marketplace? (DiMaggio 1986) For many decades, Russian popular and “high” culture

was largely spared of this question. After the collapse of the system of state support and control of the arts around 1990, Russian cultural industries suddenly had to cope with the pressures of the global market economy. These processes raise the crucial theoretical and practical question of under what conditions can the minority-taste and non-profit-oriented arts and cultural practices be established and flourish in the situation in which seemingly boundless and ever-expanding markets produce a highly privatized and simultaneously leveled (non-hierarchical) cultural field.

3. To address this question, we should briefly turn to the existing literature on the sociology of cultural practices, networks and institutions. This literature will also help us to clarify what it might mean for a particular society to have an articulated and sustainable art film world.

4. The practice of producing artworks for sale to the unknown audience, i.e. as commodities on the market, is characteristic of the workings of art worlds in modern societies. Market has contradictory effects on the arts. On the one hand, it liberates artists from the patronage of kings, aristocrats and the church and arguably allows them the freedom of personal creative self-expression. On the other, the marketplace turns artists into private entrepreneurs or wage-laborers for mass culture industries. In the words of one classic, Karl Marx, “The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo [the occupations of the artists and intellectuals] hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe” (Tucker 1978, 476). Another classic, Max Weber, argues that “market declassifies culture: presenters of cultural events mix genres and cross boundaries to reach out to larger audiences” (see DiMaggio 1991, 378). Yet, this tendency to declassify is not en inescapable outcome of the operation of market economy; it is often balanced by, or competes with, the tendency toward the establishment of “high culture,” or “strongly classified, consensually defined body of art distinct from ‘popular’ fare” (1991, 378).

5. Pierre Bourdieu (1984; 1993) provides some useful conceptual instruments for analyzing this complex situation of art (and generally “intellectual” labor) in market-based society. In particular, Bourdieu distinguishes between autonomy and heteronomy as the major patterns in the relationships between cultural producers and consumers. Heteronomy is the situation when the value of the work of art, as well as what gets to be produced, is determined by consumers. On the contrary, autonomy takes place when the artistic community is able to establish and maintain as legitimate the procedures of consecrating artists and artworks other than commercial success: e.g. festival prizes, critical acclaim, or even “temporal [commercial] failure [seen] as a sign of election” (1993, 40). The struggle for autonomy is the struggle of cultural producers for a degree of insulation from the market forces and the monopoly over what is produced and how it is interpreted (cf. Weber’s “classification”). This is also a struggle for social distinction and high (legitimate) status of the kind of cultural and social capital that the corresponding group is rich in.

Defined by Bourdieu as “scarce resources that are unequally shared,” capitals can be not only economic (economic capital) but also social (relations and networks of influence and support) and cultural (the degree of mastery of scarce and prestigious forms of knowledge, skills and practices). All of these capitals are mutually convertible at historically changing rates, and the command of all of them constitutes the unquestioned elite of society. Yet, Bourdieu argues that the distributions of, in particular, economic and cultural capitals are not identical and sometimes differ widely. Therefore, one can distinguish between (economic) capitalists and “symbolic” capitalists, or the “dominated faction of the dominant class.” While the former are interested in profit, the latter try to achieve a degree of control over the content of

legitimate culture and thus the rates at which capitals are exchanged (e.g. autonomy). The relationship between these “capitalists” is usually complex but the literature allows to single out two major ideal-typical models of their relationships, conflict and alliance. These models are important because they imply different models of how the autonomy of the arts can be organized and maintained.

6. Bourdieu offers the model of conflict. Feeling that their current status of private entrepreneurs or the wage-workers for the entertainment corporations blocks them from pursuing their deeper interests, intellectuals and artists encapsulate themselves into the bohemian enclaves or even turn to political radicalism. In either case, they oppose their distinctive counter-culture to either the high culture of the dominant class or to the kind of leveled omnivorous culture that one can witness, for example, in the US in the early 19th century (see DiMaggio 1991) and in the late 20th century (Gans 1999). This alternative high culture of symbolic capitalists gets often eventually recognized by the state and supported by it. The alternative of this state patronage is either self-support of the artists with elite backgrounds (e.g. aristocratic heirs in early bourgeois society) or the targeting of a particular niche-market. Although still entrepreneurs in the latter case, artists here target the public of consumers who are either other artists or people with similar cultural capital. Within these markets, there is no clear distinction between producers and consumers; both share certain conventions and standards, as well as the language of discussion and interpretation of the works of art (cf. Hirsch 1991, 327-8).

I call this kind of art world “economically sustainable” when artists draw some profit from their niche-market activities and thus able to support their new projects without constantly appealing to private or state patrons. To optimize the opportunities for profit, this art world should be “articulated,” or institutionalized. Based purely on personal networks of acquaintance, bohemian art worlds are usually spatially limited and unable to sustain themselves in the long term. Moreover, they leave too many potential customers and producers outside of the net. Such organizations as symphonic orchestras, with their subscription system, or film societies, with abonnements, publications, regular emailing and events (festivals, Weeks of French Film, etc.), allow to transform personal networks and untapped potential customers into the loyal “public.”

The British film society movement in the 1920s-30s provides an example of the articulated niche market. This movement brought together a variety of social groups—artists, intellectual amateurs, some businessmen and even politicized workers—who sought access to, and understanding of, the films that were not made readily available by the British film industry (mostly French, German and Soviet art films, as well as British non-commercial productions). This shared and rare taste allowed them to establish their distinction from Hollywood-happy masses and the haute bourgeoisie, which was suspicious of film as a vehicle of moral and political corruption. By propagating the autonomy of film as a form of art in their journals, connecting all local societies into a national network, opposing Hollywood and securing support from municipalities, political parties, and the less Oxbridge-type of the educated public, the film societies succeeded in establishing their image of an outpost of national and progressive culture, and, as such, were later sponsored by the British government (Heise and Tudor 2007).

7. If Bourdieu underlines the conflict between cultural producers and the bourgeoisie, American cultural sociologists show that the autonomy from the mass market can be achieved by the alliance between artists and elites. For instance, Paul DiMaggio’s (DiMaggio 1991) famously explains the emergence of non-profit cultural organizations In the 1850-70s America as a result of the convergence between the desire of artists and critics for such organizations that would provide them with some freedom

from market constraints and the desire of the emergent urban elites for a prestigious culture that they can call their own.

Although, unlike classical music or much of the fine arts, film (even art and independent film) may be not eligible for any significant insulation from the market (see Baumann 2001, 421), DiMaggio’s analysis is valuable for us a model of the institutional analysis of high culture. In addition to classification (“the erection of strong and clearly defined boundaries between art and entertainment”) and framing (“the development of a new etiquette of appropriation,” e.g. the reverent silence during the performance), he emphasizes one more project which is involved in the establishment of high culture in the 19th century America, entrepreneurship, or “the creation of an organizational form that members of the elite could control and govern” (DiMaggio 1991, 377). Since, according to DiMaggio, institutional forms make ritual classifications socially consequential, the emergence of the model of a trustee-governed non-profit organization allowed to establish the economic sustainability and the legitimacy of the high culture classifications among other classes and the state.

8. Many of these clues and threads are picked up and consolidated into a convincing interpretation of the transformation of the image of film in America from a form of entertainment to a form of art by Shyon Baumann (2001). Although, as we will see, the conditions and processes of the elevation of film to the status of art in Post-Soviet Russia are quite different from America in the 1950s and 1960s, Baumann provides a concise model of “what to watch out for” when studying these kinds of conditions and processes in various contexts. Also, the value of Baumann’s account for this study lies in the fact that this account provides of model of integrating the ideas and idioms from perspectives outlined above.

Baumann outlines three major factors, or developments, to explain the public acceptance of a cultural product as art. In short, this is opportunity, institutions and ideology (2001, 405). The first factor is the changing opportunity space defined “by the existence of competing or substitute cultural products and the availability of patrons who can bolster a cultural producer’s prestige” (2001, 407). According to Baumann, the opening in the opportunity space for film as art was produced by the advent of television and the increase in post-secondary education. The main form of mass entertainment in the 1920s through 1940s, film industry experienced a dramatic loss in the theater attendance in the 1950s. Yet, as mass demand moved elsewhere, the educated public “discovered” film as a sufficiently respectable form of art. If “perceptions of what is art are directly affected by the status of audience members,” the growing percentage of college-educated people among film viewers made possible for films to be not only enjoyed but also interpreted, analyzed, and appreciated as unique products of a creative auteurs (2001, 408). Furthermore, the expansion of the post-secondary education after the WWII has increased numerically the scope of the public with enough cultural capital to perform these kinds of “rare” and “intellectual” activities, as well as to seek the kind of status honor that these activities bestow.

Baumann also analyses a number of contingent events that contributed to the establishment of film as art in America: the demise of the studio system and the particular vibrancy of the European auteur film scene. He further argues that, to make use of these opportunity openings, one needs institutions, ideologies and collective action to put them all together. He identifies the agents of this action as “symbolic capitalists” and discusses such institutional strategies as organizing film festivals, establishing film studies programs in universities, promoting European imports and propagating the European auteur theory. Finally, by analyzing film reviews over most of the 20th century, Baumann shows the intellectualization of the film discourse over

time and interprets it as critics’ proactive strategy of heightening the status of film as art and creating the appreciative public for art films.

9. Overall, for my analysis of a film art world, Bourdieu provides helpful conceptual tools for analyzing the contradictory and confliction relationships between art and market, and between the bourgeoisie and the cultural producers. DiMaggio’s model of alliance between elites and artists seems to be of limited use for understanding art film world: unlike symphonic music, opera or even (off-Broadway) theater, the film is a technology-intensive spectacle, which is not subject to the same degree of “genre purification” and cannot be run as a trustee-governed nonprofit enterprise (Baumann 2001, 421). The autonomy of film as art has been historically maintained through the operation of the niche-market based enterprises or through the state patronage. Yet, DiMaggio’s account is very helpful in the attention it pays to the role of the institutional systems in establishing and maintaining the art world. Baumann’s account develops this approach to the film world and adds a detailed exploration of the opportunity space for the elevation of film into the status of art in America. Now, the question is to what extent this body of theory and research is applicable to the Russian case and what can this case contribute to this body of literature. The Russian Art Film World Hardly Exists How do the today’s Russian independent and art film scene looks, from the point of view of contemporary cultural sociology? The answer is twofold: although there are clear conditions for the development of the articulated and economically sustainable art film world, this world hardly exists in Russia of the mid-2000s. The first statement will be demonstrated in my empirical study to follow in the last sections of this paper. The second one is an object of this section.

What do I mean by saying that there is no developed art film world in Russia? Indeed, many old and some new auteur’s continue to produce and even win prizes at the national and international festivals. Due to VCR and DVD technology, various types of “other films” are available to those who are willing to make an effort to get hold of them. There are even a small number of theaters that focus exclusively or partially on director’s film and other types of film as art. Nevertheless, the following list of rhetorical questions rings as true, to a large extent:

Why are serious films [in Russia today and possibly elsewhere] are a secret behind seven seals? Why are they only for the chosen few? Why do the theaters of the country demonstrate only blockbuster action movies, thrillers and commercial animation at the time when a person without the means of buying a ‘home theater’ and having a vast video collection can watch Fellini only in the tiny rooms in the basement and with often-poor projection? (hedgehog_inmist, August 1, 2007, Live Journal).

I will go back to the assumption that “serious films” should not be for the chosen few. Yet, for the moment, it is more important to state a number of facts. In Russia, where the number of multiplexes and theater chains is growing rapidly, there are no art film chains specialized on independent and art films, like Lumier or City Screen. In the beginning of the film boom in the 2000s, there was an attempt to establish a number of state-of-the-art cinemas (e.g. Rolan Theater on Chistye Prudy) but they are currently showing mostly Hollywood products and the Russian mainstream. Old state owned institutions, aimed at propagating the art of film, —the Film Museum and the House of Film in Moscow—are constantly in and out of “refurnishing,” which makes them almost disappear from the

mental map of educated, especially young, Muscovites as “places to go” or even “check out.” The Moscow Film Center’s repertoire is very mixed, from the Pirates of the Caribbean to the winners of major Russian and Western film festivals. Even in Moscow, the number of art cinemas is miniscule. Except for one, called the 35 mm, all of them are located in semi-basements, with poor seats and projection.

The non-mainstream directors, even with names and international credentials, carry along from one large one-time grant from a banker or a TV mogul, whom they personally know, to another. Sometimes, they make films with Western money and actors. The state does offer some help, by financing selectively certain productions and buying them for its Kultura TV channel. Yet, in 2002 the tax breaks for charity work has been abolished (presumably because of the a number of money laundering scandals) and thus private capital’s investments in the arts are stifled. Putin’s administration promises some support for private-public endowment-based foundations, which are to support cultural initiates. Yet, the formation of endowments has only started and proceeds slowly. Considering that film art is usually not a priority for trustee-governed nonprofits, the prospects for substantial state support are bleak.

If the state at least acknowledges its obligations toward the national film industry, it clearly refuses to support the distribution of foreign art films. There is a small number, about 10, of private film distributors that specialize on various types of niche products, Russian and Western. Yet, most distributors, theater chains and TV channels hesitate to carry art films and documentaries (Bzhezinskaya 2007). Somehow, there is no understanding that the patterns of promoting these kinds of films are very different. These films do not need costly promotional campaigns and should not be exhibited in regular multiplexes. Although they usually do not collect large box-office within first two weeks of screening, they often pick up later and, as works to be viewed repeatedly, they are long-sellers (cf. Hirsh 1991: 327-8). Finally, art films do not tolerate dubbing, which is a long-standing Soviet tradition.

This lack of interest and trust in non-mainstream film among the key players of Russian film industry may be partially attributed to the lack of public education and propaganda of film as art. Although there are a number of colleges that specifically educate the cadres for Russian performing arts, film and television (e.g. VGIK, or the Russian Institute of Cinematography), they are indeed too few and do not compensate for the lack of Film Studies courses, not to mention programs, in most other higher education institutions (not to mention high schools). Although there is a strong Russian tradition of art film making and scholarship (especially Russian Formalists and Tartu Semiotics), some of the major classical films are simply not available in local prints; they have to be bought abroad.3 Although there is a publishing boom in Russia, Western film theory is not among the priorities. Especially lacking is the literature on niche marketing, on promoting art films, i.e. the branch of economics and business administration, which has been particularly underdeveloped in Russia, because of its socialist past. All these facts help to understand why—despite the “artsy” reputation of Russian film in the world—the government, business world and the broader public seem to agree that film is primarily a form of entertainment and only then art.

The alterative tradition, particularly strong in Russia, has been sidelined together with the massive delegitimization of the high culture of the Russian intelligentsia in the 1990s. Furthermore, the people who currently promote this vision of film do not form “the public” organized through established institutional infrastructure, information transfer and periodic events, along the lines of, for example, the Brutish film societies (Heise and Tudor 2007). Of course, there are tiny clubs of aficionados clustered around VGIK, other institutions of higher education and art cinemas. Yet, the major mode of

organization is loose personal and professional networks, recently enhanced by the Internet (especially LifeJournal personal pages). The information is passed mostly by hearsay or hand written announcements on the universities’ billboards. In Russia, “art house” is not a business, and not even a nonprofit enterprise. It is a confession of faith of a small number of enthusiasts.

There is no lack of effort on the part of these enthusiasts to create an articulate and sustainable art film world. As we know from Becker (1982) and Baumann (2001), festivals are important ways of establishing the autonomy and legitimacy of an art world. There are about 64 (!) large, small and tiny film festivals in contemporary Russia (Bzhezinskaya 2007). The Russian Oscar, Kinotavr (Cinema-Taurus), is awarded since 1991. Kinotavr and few other festivals target art mainstream films, i.e. creative statements with box-office potential. Yet, most festivals target very small niches and audiences, essentially the extended network of a core group of artists. In these festivals, artists select and award each other. These sectarian happenings rarely attract the attention of the media and do not carry much authority for the larger public opinion.

What are the reasons for this situation? This question has not been addressed in the academic literature. This may be partially because the answer seems to be obvious. When this issue is discussed in the media, one explanation is most popular: the lack of articulated and sustainable art film world is due to the declassifying power of the market, especially in our postmodern world (e.g. Bzhezinskaya 2007). Just as the cult of Russian classical literature, supported by the Soviet authorities and cherished by the Russian intelligentsia, fell into oblivion almost overnight after 1991, so did the prestige of film as art. Depending on the value perspective of a journalist or a critic, this can be interpreted differently: as a victory of mass (i.e. “low”) taste and the “tsunami of ignorance,” in the words of one famous Soviet director (Riazanov 2007), or as a healthy “privatization” of taste. Whatever their differences, these interpretations share the same assumptions: that market necessarily “kills” high culture (an empirical implication of this assumption is that there is probably no significant audience for art films in Russia) and that Soviet film industry was, despite all ideological limitations, a paradise for auteur cinema. We have already showed that contemporary cultural sociology does not support the first assumption (we will deal with its “empirical implication” in the empirical part of the paper). The second assumption is to be considered in the next section.

The Russian Film as Art and Industry: Past and Present In this section, I argue that, although Russia is rightly famous—maybe not famous enough—for its long tradition of making and interpreting film as art, it has failed to develop the institutional forms in which film art is to be distributed (and, by implication, produced) in the market economy. What Russia currently has instead are the remains of the film industry, created under the state patronage of the arts, and the extended webs of the personal relations of acquaintance, studentship and patronage, which kept the crumbling Soviet film industry afloat in the 1990s and still regulate access to resources in the current era of this industry’s “renaissance.” Although these organizational forms may have allowed for considerable artistic creativity, as well as the continuity of operations, in the past, they are unable to bring the contemporary Russian art film world out of the state of virtual non-existence.

Now, let me start with an excurse in the social history of the Soviet film. The assumption that the Soviet film industry was a paradise for film as art has indeed some basis in reality. It is true that Soviet politics towards arts can be seen as bold experiment of pushing the demand of artists for autonomy to its extreme. The idea was that a soviet

artist, including a filmmaker, was not to be just insulated from the market, as his American counterpart in a trustee-governed nonprofit corporation; s/he was to be fully liberated by the abolition of market itself (including relative autarky). The idea was that the artist’s duty was not to satisfy the demands of the aristocratic or bourgeois patrons or the mass public but to express the values of the high culture and to shape the tastes of the public accordingly. Bad taste was to be eliminated and demand made to conform to supply.

Stated as such, this agenda proved to be appealing to many artists, filmmakers included. Yet, it had its costs. The place of popularity, or profitability, was taken by narodnost’ (people-mindedness): art was to confirm not to the consumer demand but to the “deep interests of the people,” of course adequately expressed by the Party. After all, Communist ideology was a central aspect of the “high culture” with which people were to be inculcated. Furthermore, the box-office considerations were by no means entirely foreign to Soviet film industry. While Western films were scarcely available, one had to be able to lure people into theaters somehow.

Thus, the ideal was the congruence between exemplary artistry, political correctness and the sales. The Soviet film industry managed to produce quite a few cases when at least two of these factors coincided (among earlier examples, films Chapaev (1934) and Circus (1937)). The film critic Maya Turovskaya (1993, 102) even argues that there was a short period when all of these factors coincided in films like Sergey Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938). However, this “politico-moral unity of society” was temporary and never to be repeated.

In effect, the Soviet film industry, especially in its best years of the 1960s-70s—when it was stably producing 150 films a year and theaters were full—was a peculiar mix of auteur and Hollywood filmmaking, of art and industry. Director’s names often mattered as much as the names of the stars. In even very popular films, genre rules were as much followed s they were subverted and played with. For instance, the popular comedies made by L.Gaidai or E. Riazanov combined light, even silly, humor with sometimes biting social satire. Many films were made both to impress the larger audiences and to satisfy the immediate artistic and intellectual community around the artists (and, since the 1950s, with an eye on prestigious Western festivals). The attitude to the mass public was consistently condescending. As one successful Soviet director (Eldar Riazanov) expressed his—and effectively many other Soviet directors’—guiding principle, “to educate while entertaining and to entertain while educating” (Riazanov 2007).

Furthermore, Soviet directors did not have to worry much about where to get money for a film, and about logistics of production and promotion. Their main concern was how to strike a balance between the demands of authorities and official censorship, and the desire for creative self-expression, for which Soviet artists believed to be entitled. Complex details of theses struggles for authority within the Soviet film world may help to explain how it was possible for such an unorthodox director as Andrey Tarkovsky to make his (often quite expensive) films in the Soviet Union, and, simultaneously, why he made only five films during his 20-year pre-emigration career (Golovskoy and Rimberg 1986).

For us, the important conclusion is that the Soviet industry did not leave much space for the formation of a separate art film world. Tarkovsky’s tour-de-force philosophical dramas were produced by the same studios as Leonid Gaidai’s comedies, and then shown in the same movie theaters. Although there was a concept of film as art, this concept was not monopolized by the “artsy” directors and critics. Theoretically at least, this label was supposed to apply to the whole output of the Soviet film industry.

This is the way in which Lenin was using the term “art” when he famously announced, “film for us is the most important of the arts.” In effect, the alliance between Soviet artists and elites, Soviet-style, may have liberated artists from some economic pressures, but it introduced other, political, pressures by, for example, forcing artists to exaggerate the propagandistic and didactic aspects of their films. Also, ironically, the idea of the universal appeal of “true” art appeared to imply the pressure on the artist to address their films to everyone and no one in particular, to the unknown audience, as any large scale commercial industry does.

Of course, these ironies of the Soviet version of the “autonomy” of the arts could not fail to produce a counter-reaction. Since the 1960s, there was a clear movement for film art that explicitly targets the audience with high cultural capital. The films of directors like Tarkovsky are complex, multi-layered, they refuse to entertain and plead for interpretation. They discuss complex philosophical ideas and emphasize formal visual devices, which comprise this director’s original cinematic language (kinoyazyk). The very act of viewing and appreciating these films sets the viewer apart, makes him/her a participant in a kind of conspiracy, the conspiracy of the “aristocrats of the spirit.”

This emphasis on shared language, or code, is a leitmotiv of the kind of elite intellectual culture that was taking shape within a loose network of the “kitchen salons,” friendly circles and common interest groupings, which were an increasingly important form of sociality among Soviet academics, artists and some high-end professionals in the 1960s-80s (Prokhorova 2005; Yurchak 2006). In fact, this focus on exclusivity and encapsulation was relatively novel for Russian intellectuals. In contrast to the Western tradition, in Russia the intellectual snobbery and the ideas of “art for art’s sake” were always rather marginal. Unlike the 1880s audiences of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and the middle-class members of the Brutish Film Society in the 1920s, Russian intellectuals rarely had to prove their difference, or distinction, from classes above and below them. As harbingers of Western science and culture, they could safely assume their social apartness to the extent of often seeing it as a burden, as a sign of alienation. This apartness brought Russian intellectuals both a fair share of resentment from the rest of the population, but also the indisputable authority—or, in DiMaggio’s words, legitimacy and hegemony—as arbiters of taste and rationality. Even Bolsheviks tried to partake of this cultural hegemony by framing themselves as “the Soviet intelligentsia” and portraying themselves as a cultural vanguard in backward society (Fitzpatrick 1999, 105).

By the 1960s, the situation changed, to some extent. The educated class has grown considerably, due to the expansion of the Soviet educational system first in the 1930s and then in the 1950-60s. Most educated people were now specialists and experts, rather than creative intellectual amateurs. Their condition of life and lifestyle was no longer as different from the rest of the population. The pathos of enlightening the masses subsided and the rituals and symbols that would establish the distinction from these masses became the order of the day. At the same time, the social contract with authorities gradually unraveled: the payoffs of the state’s patronage of arts and sciences was increasingly experienced as not worthy of the limitations imposed by state officials on creative and personal freedoms, as well as on the quality of life. The result of these different processes was the establishment of a kind of “parallel public sphere,” a network based social domain characterized by its own strict (if unstated) rules of entry and gatekeepers, unofficial reputations and authorities, social rituals and foreign contacts, distinctive communication codes and channels (Waldstein 2008). This sphere has been usually described in the context of dissident political activities but it should

also be understood as an attempt to institutionalize the elite (and elitist) status culture, distinct not only from Communist authorities and associated intellectuals but also from “the people,” among whom many “new aristocrats” have been born, and the rank and file “Soviet intelligentsia.”

The auteur film scene was one of the classical arenas of the parallel public sphere. The iconic language, i.e. the language of layered images, visual symbols, daring camerawork, close-ups and blow-ups, was ideal for keeping out the censors and the larger public not in the know. The same applies to watching Fellini, Antonioni or Wenders without Soviet dubbing, as well as to watching any films not released for general screening in the Soviet Union. The culture of auteur film was also a way of dispensing with what was now perceived as the clichés of the traditional intelligentsia’s thinking. The concept of high culture as hegemony, aimed at educating “the people,” was supplemented with the idea of high culture as an exclusive property of “symbolic capitalists.” The traditional concept that film is a lower sort of art, at its best only approximating the great literature, was superseded by the notion that film, or iconic art, is a paradigm of artistic creativity. It is not an accident that another center of the parallel public sphere, Yuri Lotman’s Tartu Semiotics School, followed the footsteps of Russian Formalists in developing the iconic semiotics and an original film theory, which was parallel but not identical to the film theory developed in France, USA and Britain at the same time (see Waldstein 2008).

Thus, in the 1960s-70s, Russian intellectuals were able to develop the kind of “intellectualizing discourse” of film theory and criticism that Shyone Baumann shows to be indispensable for the development of the articulated art film world, at least in the American case. However, this discourse was not accompanied by comparable degree of institutionalization. Of course, as mentioned above, the parallel public sphere was better institutionalized than mere networks of friends and acquaintances. Yet, just like “second economy” was a parasite on the body of increasingly inefficient Soviet economy, the parallel public sphere could only exist in the symbiosis with Soviet cultural institutions: academia, art and literature unions, and the film industry. An auteur was fully dependent on the state-owned studios and distribution system for his or her film to be produced and distributed.

Even in matters of exhibition the enclosure of the art film scene could not be archived. As mentioned above, Andrey Tarkovsky’s films were exhibited alongside with the comedies of Leonid Gaidai. Even more important fact is that the few theaters, where some selectivity was practiced—Film Center, the House of Film, Illusion and a few others in Moscow, —were extremely prestigious destinations for not only intellectuals and artists but also for a larger public of well-connected individuals, including Party officials and black marketers. In the socialist economy of shortages, anything in short supply—including Western auteur productions and particularly unorthodox Soviet “intellectual” films, released in small numbers of copies—was attractive and the access to it meant prestige. Surrounded by the aura of otherness and adorned by the foreign festival prizes (and thus by the approval of “the West”), foreign and Soviet art films were consumed not only by those who “understood” them but also by the people from whom “the aristocrats of the spirit” tried to keep at least symbolic distance. In effect, even specifically professionals-oriented theaters failed to become distinctive institutional sites of the Soviet art film world.

Thus, despite the debates in the media between the supporters of “intellectual” and “popular” film, the auteur film scene was deeply entrenched in the Soviet film industry. Therefore, the fate of the former was, to large extent, sealed by the fate of the latter. Ironically, just before the fall of the Soviet Union, its film industry seemed to

have brought the promise of artistic autonomy, implicit in the socialists system, to full fruition. Indeed, in the late 1980s, under Gorbachev, most of the industry started to work for the artistic expression of the directors more then ever before. The removal of most ideological and moral constraints, as well as the traditional disregard of the mass demand, turned the whole state machine of film production and distribution into a gigantic paradise for artistic experimentation, social critique and highbrow historical reflexivity. Imagine that the Hollywood would totally forget about box-office and provide its facilities to the independent film directors. This is approximately what happened in Russia in the late 1980s. Moreover, this transformation of Soviet film industry into a heaven of artistic autonomy was accompanied by the unprecedented increase in the film output. In the economically disastrous 1990, the Soviet film industry produced twice as many films as it did in more prosperous times (Beumers 1999, 871).

Yet, this exciting period—which some artists nostalgically remember today—brought Russian film a step closer to a disaster. The clear symptoms of the crisis were apparent already in the early 1980s. In 1983, for the first time in decades the industry was working at a loss. The theater attendance started to fall. Although this was later attributed by many critics to some inherent flows of the Soviet system, this was basically the same process that depopulated Western theaters in the 1940s-50s, the advent of the TV as primary mass entertainment (see Beumers 1999). This advent started later and took longer because of the inefficiencies of the Soviet industry, the limited entertainment potential of the Soviet television and the embeddedness of the movie theater in the social routines of Soviet citizens. Yet, once this process started, it was only sped up by the advent of video technologies in the mid-1980s. Later, when as regular suburban movie theaters were full of the “intellectualized” and socially-conscious productions, the regular viewer could satisfy his or her desire for entertainment in a multitude of (de facto privately owned) “video salons,” which mushroomed all over the country due to Gorbachev’s liberalism.

To be fair, the sudden inflow of previously scarce or even totally inaccessible products, including Western and Russian auteur films, did bring people back to the movie theaters for a year of two in 1986-88. People were excited to gain open access to something for which they would have to line up overnight and would have to procure tickets through connections just a year before. Yet, the encounter between mass audience and high art was often highly frustrating. I personally witnessed how, attracted by press publicity and the gravity of previously “forbidden fruit,” people were packing into movie theaters to watch Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia and were then leaving them en masse long before the end of the shows. Even more accessible political and moral taboo-breakers soon lost their appeal. As Soviet directors only timidly experimented with showing naked female body, video salons gave the regular viewer access too much more relaxed Hollywood and B-rated portrayals of human sexuality.

As television and video clubs grew in popularity among mass viewers, the percentage of the educated viewers grew too. This situation is similar to the pattern described by Baumann (2001) with respect to the American film in the 1950s-60s. In America, this rise in the proportion of the educated audience due to the competition posed by other media on the market of entertainment was an opportunity opening for the “intellectualization” of film criticism and the institutionalization of the art film and, later, independent film scene. In fact, in Russia something similar was happening for a short while. In a number of elite universities, first film studies courses were offered around 1990. The first national film festival, Kinotavr, was opened in July 1991 in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.4 In the spirit of DiMaggio’s “classification,” its competition was divided into two streams, “Films for All” (the winner decided by the popular vote)

and “Films for the Chosen Few” (the winner selected by the jury of critics and filmmakers).

Yet, in the 1990s, Russian movie theaters lost not only their mass audience but also any audience whatsoever. In 1994, the theater halls were only 3% full (Beumers 1999, 884). After 1991, as the distribution system was commercialized, movie theaters became private enterprises, which were supposed to sink or swim in the newly established and highly lawless market economy. To survive, the theaters raised prices and filled their screens with Western entertainment and often B-rated movies of popular genres: action, comedy, erotica and thriller. Russian films—both art films and poor imitations of Western popular genres—practically lost their market: even in 2000, only 7% of films shown in theaters were Russian. The production of films plummeted from 300 per year (1991) to 28 in 1996 (Beumers 1999, 871). Yet, this did not save theaters; many of them had to draw most of their income by renting their spaces to car salons and casinos, while others simply disappeared as theaters. In the age of hyperinflation and employment instability, no middle class persons were able or willing to go to unsafe, unclean, poorly equipped and serviced movie theaters. Not many working class people were lured by the populist film fair, either, because this fair was available—with more choice and lower prices—on TV and on video (mostly pirated cassettes). The whole generation, born in the mid-1980s, was growing up without even stepping into a movie theater, which used to be one of the few entertainment venues available to, and indeed popular among, Soviet people for decades (Bogdanov and Provotorov 1995; Dondurei 2001).

What were left of the gigantic director-oriented film industry were dilapidated studios and a number of very good directors and actors. Due to the latter, Russian film industry continued its shadowy existence in the 1990s. Some directors were able to maintain their high government connections and establish new business contacts to scrape modest—although at times not very modest5—sums of money for their individual film projects. They tried to make use of the their foreign contacts, established in the late 1980s, shoot films on Western money, locations, and often with Western actors, mostly for the Western art house audiences. They also survived by making use of their old boys and former “parallel public sphere” acquaintances with those who now became all-powerful oligarchs (Beumers 1999, 881).

Although a few of these films were rather successful (according to the figures of the video cassette sales), all the strategies of survival listed above were based on the old assumption of artistic autonomy. As Eldar Riazanov put it, “every artist should be given an opportunity to express himself, provided that he has something to say” (Riazanov 2007). Noble as it is, this assumption is embedded in the Soviet system and was associated with the disdain for, and ignorance of, the needs and interests of the audiences. In Soviet period, this lack of feedback between film industry and its audiences was, to some extent, neutralized due to the partial autarchy of the Soviet film world and due to the high prestige of film media and theaters as social sites (Turovskaya 1993). Furthermore, the intelligentsia’s high culture and any scarce products enjoyed considerable popular and official status. For the art film scene, the distance between auteurs and their elite audiences was bridged within the networks of the “parallel public sphere.” In the 1990s, neither of these factors was in place. The competition posed by the new media left the dilapidated Soviet theaters empty. Furthermore, with the breakup of the state patronage of culture, both official and informal status of “creative” professions and professionals fell significantly. As a result, it became apparent that the Russian film industry could survive only by reinventing itself from the director-oriented into an audience-oriented and market-savvy enterprise.

The secret of the Russian film industry’s speedy recovery in the 2000s was its ability to find access to the heart of the mass viewer. Of course, there were a number of favorable prerequisites. After the low point of the 1998 financial crisis, the economy recovered surprisingly quickly and soon started to grow for the first time for two decades. According to social surveys and video sales, the market was saturated and the viewers were satiated with cheap Western products on pirated videocassettes. A small but financially capable group of young well-paid professionals was emerging as a new fashion, style and taste trendsetter, instead of the impoverished Soviet intellectuals and the boorish “New Russians,” who set the tone within previous 15 years. The representatives of this new group were interested in watching the newest Hollywood blockbusters on large screens with Dolby-digital sound, comfortable seats, popcorn and drinks in their seats. They also wanted choice, including an option to watch Russian films, but not Soviet films—still the major staple of Russian TV and video market—but new films that reflect their own lifestyles, experiences and dreams/aspirations (Beumers 1999).

To meet these expectations, first in Moscow and then in other major cities, a number of multi- and later megaplexes appeared. This immediately had effect: already in 2000, first 80 new and refurnished theaters were delivering more money than almost 1500 their Soviet-time counterparts (Dondurei 2001). By 2007, the megaplexes—which combine movie theaters, shopping and dining—have arrived to the suburbs. This expansion indicates the growth of the class of people with disposable incomes, who are searching for the sites where they can feel themselves Western-style consumers. This also indicates the trickle-down effect with respect to consumer preferences from trendsetters to a larger public (Simmel 1971, 294-323). As a result, the industry has received a boost of money and trust. If, before 2004, most leaders of sales in movie theaters were Western films, since 2004—when the first Russian Hollywood-style blockbuster Night Watch hit the first line in the Russian box-office charts, —approximately half of the leading 10-20 films are Russian. In fact, the Night Watch was one of the first films for years, which has brought profit and thus enabled the director to finance their next projects without asking the state or private sponsors for money. Nowadays, between working for television channels and producing occasional feature films, commercial directors can not only get by but also flourish.

Of course, the share amount of capital circulating in the industry is bound to have had an effect on less commercially oriented film genres, the “other films.” Indeed, some aspiring auteurs have learned to earn money by making TV series.6 Commercial TV channels and producers are earning enough money to experiment with distributing a number of Western and Russian art films, especially if they have earned some prestigious prizes.7 Furthermore, as the media coverage of film is growing, the general public’s exposure to the names of Russian and international festivals, as well as directors, is growing.

However, what the current captains of the Russian film industry lack is the sense that something like an institutionally distinct art film world can or should exist in Russia. As Sergey Selyanov—a producer of a number of popular films that also have considerable artistic merit—pointed out, the audience of “other films” have not grown since at least 2000 and stays at the number of 50,000 per year (Sel’ianov 2007). He adds that this tiny audience of older intellectuals and young students does not have sufficient financial power to be considered a niche-market able to support the art film world.

It is not exactly clear what the source of this number is but, even if it reflects some reality, I argue that it cannot be interpreted as an evidence of the lack of the social

basis for the existence of the economically sustainable art film world. Yes, there is currently insignificant organized public for art films but, I argue, the potential audience is much larger. Simply, there are no—or, there has not been until recently—institutions that would be able to capture this potential audience and to turn it into an organized “cinematic public,” a basis for a sustainable art film world. The next couple of sections aim at providing the empirical evidence to support these assertions.

A Brief Note on Research Methods and Plans The following sections are based on my original field study of the Artkino Club community. I have interviewed the founders of the Club and distributed via email a semi-standardized questionnaire among the paying members of the Club. In addition to the discourse and content analysis of the Club’s publications in print and online, these interviews and a survey is the basis of the report to follow. Obviously, this is a fraction of the research I am planning to undertake, time and funds provided. I plan to follow up on some of the responses to my questionnaire (out of 48 responses received, more than half of the respondents expressed their willingness to answer further questions online or in person). I also plan to survey about 40-50 non-member attendants of the Club to get a notion of the potential extent and the limits of the art film world in Russia. Ideally, I would also like to broaden the scope of my research to include the patrons of other art film venues and others institutions that target the young educated public. Finally, I plan to connect the results of my research with the research on the conditions under which noncommercial film production and consumption developed in the past and still develops in various national settings, including the USA, England and other countries (e.g. Baumann 2001; Jancovich and Faire 2003; Heise and Tudor 2007). What is Artkino? Inaugurated on November 18, 2006, Artkino is a project, which involves film exhibition (classics, contemporary art film, and experimental low-budget productions), discussion groups and lecture series on film. It supports young directors, screenwriters and cameramen in exhibiting their work and getting attention of the public. Artkino is a brainchild of a young energetic man, Dmitry K., aged 23 (in 2007). A 2001 graduate of Moscow Culturological Lyceum,8 he received a diploma in Personnel Administration from the State University of Management in 2006. While working for more than a year as a personnel manager in a private advertising company, he put together a small team of like-minded young people, which continues to assist him in his Artkino project.

Dmitry and his associates are representatives of the same social strata: children of professionals of rather modest means (Dmitry’s parents are a doctor and an engineer), graduates or students of prestigious enough but not elite (like Moscow University) colleges, with limited foreign language skills and no significant master-student or friendship networks in the art world. At the same time, their consumption aspirations are rather high: they crave for financial independence, a separate apartment,9 foreign travel, as well as night clubs, restaurants, cafes and other trendy hang-outs. They share career and consumption aspirations with the growing strata of young educated Russian people who are making careers in well-paying jobs which involve minimum “office plankton” existence and maximum of flexibility and independence in terms of tasks performed and schedules at work. Ultimately, Dmitry’s mindset has something in common with the one of contemporary “yuppies.” One might ask, what brought Dmitry into the art film world, which is, as we have already seen, not the most apparent place to search for financial independence and upward mobility in contemporary Russia?

The most obvious answer lies in the fact that all members of Dmitry’s team have some history of attempting to express themselves in some form of art. For most of his teenage years, Dmitry was in and out attending various amateur theater groups. He also wrote (and sometimes still writes) quite interesting poetry, which he performed in public and published online. These artistic interests brought him in touch with the film world: in 2003, he starred in a teenage love-triangle drama The Eighteen Moons. Although this film enjoyed some modest degree of popularity—I have personally witnessed how a few excited teenage girls in a café apprehended Dmitry and asked for his autograph, —he recently conceded that this was a poor-quality flick. Indeed, the film brought Dmitry neither money nor fame (in the form of the phone calls from film and TV studios). Yet, according to Dmitry, this was an important step in him realizing that it might be possible to combine his desire for financial independence, his expensive consumption habits and his aspirations for artistic self-expression.10

The encounter with the documentary film director Sergey T. in 2005 triggered the chain of events that brought about Artkino. In his late 30s, Sergey is a director of some renown. His films about early 20th century Russian poets and avant-garde artists are exhibited on Kultura TV channel (a state sponsored commercial-free channel) and have won prizes at small art and documentary film festivals. He makes his films in his private studio, in a small 19th century building in the center of Moscow. This building is also a seat of one of a small number of art film oriented digital cinemas in Moscow, The World of Art (Mir Iskusstva, MI, see www.chronotop.ru). MI has roots in the last years of Gorbachev’s perestroika when Sergey opened a youth club. As did many people in charge of small and large chunks of the state property after the fall of Communism, he privatized the space he rented and became a happy owner of one of the most valuable things in contemporary Moscow, the real estate. For over ten years, he used it as a studio and a site of the amateur children’s theater that Sergey directed.

By 2001, his personal DVD collection of Western and Russian classics, art and independent films, as well as the arrival of the relatively cheap digital projection technology, allowed Sergey to open MI. Its name comes from the name of a famous art modern art circle and journal that flourished in the beginning of the 20th century in St. Petersburg. The MI repertoire fits this name perfectly: in September 2007, you could watch in the theater Fellini’s 8 ½, Wenders’ Der Himmel über Berlin, Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Antonioni’s L'Eclisse, Scorcese’s Taxi-Driver and Buster Keaton’s Three Epochs. No surprise that this repertoire makes MI one of the most attractive cinemas in Moscow among students, artists and academics. As one 25-year-old Artkino Club member put it, “I could easily settle in Mir Iskusstva.” With its small hall, simple chairs, and lack of design, MI cannot claim to be the most comfortable movie theater or even cinema in Moscow. The cinema called 35 mm is much more comfortable and technologically advanced. Yet, MI is cheap, it charges its target audience half-price, 2-3 dollars (the prices in multiplexes are 7-10 dollars and above). The attractiveness of MI is enhanced by its homey atmosphere and the evidence of being a child-friendly place: Sergey continues to screen Soviet and “best” Western feature and animation films for children and teenagers.11

MI has never been a profitable enterprise. Sergey claims that it is sustainable mainly due to his income as a film director (Chekodanova 2007). The ownership over the building and very mild tax burden, 6 % income taxes, also helps immensely. Yet, this does not look like a viable “business model” to be emulated by others. This is not a seed of the Russian art film mini-industry. Or, is it not?

When he met Dmitry for the first time, Sergey was struck by the incredible, almost messianic, enthusiasm of this youth with business-oriented education and

business work experience about the development of independent, non-commercial bit economically sustainable arts and especially film scene in Russia. The vision of this scene that Dmitry presented Sergey with can be summarized as follows. There is a potentially untapped audience for these kinds of arts. It needs to be engaged and, once this succeeds, art film world can become a sustainable niche market, as well as a support network for creative individuals at the earlier stages of their careers. This engagement and, effectively, creation of the “cinematic public” presupposes the establishment of the multifunctional institutional framework, which would include not only the viewing of classical and experimental films but also education (theory, history, master-classes), practical training (directors, cameramen, etc.), social club, and which would eventually expand beyond Moscow in the form of a national framework of theaters, clubs and educational projects.

This vision immediately appealed to Sergey. These were the kinds of ideas that he would entertain by himself but was not able to even attempt to implement without the assistance of a business-minded enthusiast like Dmitry. At the same time, Dmitry needed a person like Sergey not only because of the similarity of their agendas but also because of Sergey’s insider status within influential film-related networks. A graduate of the Higher Courses for Film Directors12 and a student of Aleksey German Sr., an important Russian auteur, he was the man to approach film directors, VGIK professors and film critics for expert support and publicity (as a public relations specialist, Dmitry took non-film media on himself). Moreover, Sergey has a large collection of classical and art film DVDs, which for the time being solves the problem of repertoire and legal rights. Finally, by affiliating with MI cinema, Dmitry’s project automatically inherits the tax breaks that MI enjoys.

Now, what are the proclaimed aims of Artkino? What has been done since its inception almost exactly a year ago? The website of Artkino, artkinoclub.ru, provides quite a bit of often aphoristic manifesto-like statements of its founders’ agenda. The opening paragraph reads as follows:

The Artkino Club is a place where you can have a complete experience of the art of film by means of watching films, studying them and making them. This is a place where, in order to be able to express yourself and create, you do not go through endless competitions and selections (which do not in fact serve as criteria of talent), you do not pay enormous amounts of money and spend your nerve cells to get specialized college education. The Artkino Club is a unique opportunity to get together with your friends and other like-minded individuals in order to do what you are really into... The Artkino Club exists to satisfy the acute need of contemporary young generation in creative self-expression in the art of film.

In another document, “The Agenda for 2007,” Dmitry specifies his Club’s audience as the “intellectual, creative youth,” as opposed to the “practical” youth, which is more into sports, entertainment and business. He portrays his film club as a bulwark against such threats to this kind of creative youth as alcohol, drugs, “annoying advertisements, and stupid and cruel popular films.” To these causes and symptoms of the state of emptiness (or alienation, one might say), which “creative youths” arguably experiences in contemporary Russia, he opposes the communal experience of learning from the Greats, from the “best examples of film art, the authority of which is indubitable.” In the entry “For Film Directors” on the website, we read the following short manifesto of pros and contras:

The Artkino Club is against: first and second movie of the year, Anastasia Zavorotnyuk13 and cheap Russian soap operas, blockbusters and special effects, which substitute simple human feelings. The Artkino Club is for: auteur (avtorskoe), nonstandard and creative film (original highlighting preserved). In his “Manifesto of the Artkino Avant-garde Movement,” Sergey brings

together two main concepts of the Artkino ideology, “the author” and “the language of film” (kinoyazyk):

… 4. We regard film as art, not a moneymaking scheme, and the language of film as a means of conveying artistic messages. 5. The artistic is something that bears a distinct subjective imprint of the author. A film can be called artistic only if it is author-oriented.

This rhetoric may not sound particularly original; it is definitely an heir to the good old ideology of art for art’s sake, mixed uneasily with the French auteur theory and the traditions of the Russian Formalism and Tartu Semiotics. What brings this mix together is the rhetorical work of classification, or the erection of boundaries between art and entertainment (see DiMaggio (1991, 377) on the strategy of classification). Yet, to be appreciated properly, this apparently elitist rhetoric should be seen in the context of the Artkino founders’ analysis of the situation in Russian film industry, they’re proposals and their actual actions. On the website, we read the following short analysis:

The situation that we currently witness within commercial moviemaking leads to the disappearance of independent auteur film. There is simply no place for the latter in the former. Publicly screened is only mass public-oriented commercial films or at best the films that are acclaimed at the film festivals. The author, who does not have a name and laurels has no access to movie theaters and thus to the viewer. However, he has a right to have this access and thus he should be given an opportunity.

To this, Sergey adds in one of his interviews,

In Russia, its own cinematographic culture is lost and we try to do everything to resurrect it. Many masterpieces of Russian film are inaccessible for a Russian public. For instance, Pudovkin’s Mother is still inaccessible in any format. We bought it in France for MI (Chekodanova 2007).

Thus, a certain elitism of the Artkino rhetoric is balanced out by the ideas of diversity, access and equal opportunity. Of course, the separation from less sophisticated consumers is a part of the agenda. Yet, in the situation when so called “elite art” is hardly accessible, when what is financed and exhibited is overwhelmingly mass markets products and the access to the film world is guarded by watchful gatekeepers, the Artkino ‘s “strategic goal of resurrecting the auteur film in Russia” sounds more like a counter-cultural challenge to the “establishment” than as a way of hardening status boundaries by the elite Brahmins, as described by DiMaggio (1991).

These ideological and analytical statements made by the founders of Artkino help to clarify the specific practical steps made by Dmitry, Sergey and their team in

implementing their vision. Artkino was jump-started by renting a 100-seat theater once a week, on Saturdays, in a Soviet-style House of Youth (an entertainment center) in a prestigious area of the Sokolniki Park, and by posting advertisements in popular entertainment guides (e.g. Afisha) and on line. Of course, originally the screen was small and the seats are still not comparable to the ones in multiplexes. There is no Dolby-digital sound or popcorn, so emblematic of contemporary Russian film “renaissance.” What is offered instead is as follows:

(1) The hand-picked repertoire of primarily “film classics,” including not only the French New Wave and Italian Neorealist, so popular among art house fans, but also silent films, Soviet film avant-garde and even select Hollywood classics. Silent films are often accompanied by “life music,” usually of experimental kind. The prices are comparatively low, 5-7 dollars, with discounts for the major target audiences: students, teachers and professors. Originally, the repertoire was quite eclectic but , since September, it is more closely coordinated with the club’s educational program.

(2) The educational program involves lectures, seminars and master classes with leading Russian art film directors and cameramen (there are plans of inviting actors, producers, and critics, too).14 These sessions meet on weekends, for 8 hours on Saturdays and 4 hours on Sundays. Formally speaking, regular classes and master classes are two separate “clubs:” the former takes place in Sokolniki, the latter in the Mayakovsky Museum, the major memorial site of the Russian avant-garde. Yet, most “Club members” attend both by paying about 100 dollars per month. With 35 second-year “students” and the 2007 cohort of 120 (!) persons, this is the main source of financing for the Club at the moment. There is no significant screening for the membership, which is assigned on first come, first serve basis. The professors are Sergey and a number of invited college professors and graduate students, mostly from VGIK (the Institute of Cinematography). Although a total amateur, Dmitry also leads sessions; powered by his endless enthusiasm, he learns along the way.

(3) The website and the LifeJournal page, which work as public blackboards and chat rooms. Here, in addition to the official Artkino postings, practically anyone can post information about other related cultural events, engage in discussions, post film reviews and short YouTube-style clips of one’s own making.

(4) A set of periodic social events, like communal outings to natural and historical site. These outings are often accompanied by the creative games, which involve the task of team making and making use of the knowledge gained in class to make short films. Generally, Dmitry and Sergey make enormous efforts to forge a sense of community, of belonging to some kind of historically significant cultural movement. The cohorts are emphatically called the “waves” (cf. the New Wave) of the “Russian director’s film.” In the summer, Sergey wrote “The Manifesto of the Artkino Avant-garde Movement,” which is available online to be discussed and signed by the members of the Club. To underline the “historical significance” of this short document, it is dated 07.07.07 [I plan to analyze this Manifesto in detail in a later version of the paper].

(5) The Artkino newspaper edited by a group of Club members. The paper publishes information about art film events in the country, reports about master-classes and publishes exclusive interviews with Russian auteurs and other film authorities.

(6) A number of expansion plans that include the library of Russian and foreign literature on film; translation and publication of currently unavailable foreign literature on film; the festival of the films made by young directors; a network of branches around the country, starting with St. Petersburg; and, hopefully, a separate state of the art theater with at least two halls and an inexpensive café/restaurant included.

Some of these plans may sound almost utopian. Yet, the whole project sounded utopian for many just a year ago. Today it seems to be an economically sound project. Although the attendance of films fluctuates from 5 to 60 persons per screening, the number of applicants for membership exceeds the Club’s capabilities. This system of Club membership (and discounted monthly passes) allows for the stability of the Club’s operations. Moreover, considering modest rent prices, charged by the state owned renters (the entertainment center in Sokolniki and a museum), and MI’s tax breaks, the whole enterprise is currently working with a profit. This makes the Club founder look optimistically into the future.

Part of the secret of this success is the very organizational model implemented in the Artkino Club. This is a model of a multimedia and multifunctional (horizontally integrated) cultural enterprise that embraces both artistic autonomy and economic sustainability, exclusivity of a narrow niche market and openness to persons without elite social background and “right” connections. Although quite original with respect to film industry, at least in Russia, this model bears family resemblances to the model of a cultural enterprise already employed in a broader cultural market since 1999-2000 by a number of cafes and clubs, which target educated young people. To provide the Artkino organizational form with context, let us discuss its kin projects in more details.

The most famous among these projects is a United Humanities Publishing House, or “the OGI System” (Itskovich 2005; Prokhorova 2005). Established in 1999 as a bookstore and a small publisher of non-mass fiction and literary criticism, OGI Project was from the beginning designed by its founder, a young literary critic Dmitry Itskovich, as a new kind of cultural space, as a new site of cultural production. New with respect to what?

I have already mentioned that Soviet state cultural institutions (universities, museums, libraries, journals) lost their monopoly on being the only sites of cultural consumption and production long before 1991. Kitchen salons and other “institutions” of the “parallel public sphere” took over many of related functions. In the 1990s, these salons, along with old boy/girl networks, produced a number of independent cultural organizations (e.g. the NLO publishers, NTV channel, a number of newspapers, private galleries). These organizations were not expected to be profitable or even economically sustainable. They were expected to be non-profitable intellectual enclaves to be fully supported by Western foundations (Soros, Ford, etc.) and the “new rich”, who happened to be former intellectuals themselves. Yet, after the 1998 crisis, many (but not all) of these projects disappeared together with their sponsors. The support from Western foundations dwindled too, partially due to the political pressures from the government. The state-owned cultural institutions also failed to change from hierarchical and deeply inbreed into something more dynamic, and thus failed to recover their status of major hubs of cultural production and consumption.

In effect, the centers of cultural creativity shifted to private cafes, galleries, bookshops, glamour magazines and Internet sites. Dmitry Itskovich was one of those who proposed a model of the cultural enterprise that would encompass all of these media. His current chain of sites around Moscow—OGI Project, OGI Street, Bilingua club, a number of Pirogi cafes and more—and a number of publishing projects attempt to provide customers with a vaguely “intellectual”—not stiff and elitist but rather relaxed and carefree—environment. You can search for a “serious” book and get a drink, can check out an experimental art exhibition or chat up a barmen about the latest novel. You can come by yourself or with a crowd of friends. In Bilingua club, you can attend a fashion show or a public lecture of a renowned specialist on art or economy (later published in www.polit.ru). Within the same chain, you can choose a place with no design, slow service but many books and cheap prices, or a place with “cool” design, slightly less books, more glitzy journals and higher prices.15

According to Itskovich (2005), his target group is the “young middle class,” from well-paid educated professionals to not very affluent students, academics and artists. He claims that what brings them together is a distinctive pattern of consumption characteristic for people rich with cultural capital, or “symbolic capitalists” (he adds: as well as for young people who are still not in a mood for saving). As simultaneously producers and consumers of cultural goods, these “capitalists” are looking for sites that allow them to combine leisure and work, hobby and professional activities, relaxation and learning. These are the people who would write a paper in a café or attend in their spear time a lecture in the Biligua Club or watch an art film in the 35 mm. Also, they look for places where they can “bump into” people with somewhat different disciplinary backgrounds and social power. As creative workers, they search for opportunities for networking, which would allow them to go beyond established hierarchical institutions and preexisting cliques and “schools” in science, art or even business (cf. Neff 2005). Yet, this search is premised on a certain degree of social homogeneity guaranteed by these sites. In fact, Itskovich prides his project for an ability to create an atmosphere of comfort, based on the “sense of social closeness” among participants. In his cafes, there are no laud working class kids and no flashy “New Russians,” and this is achieved without intimidating “face-control” or a muscular bouncer at the entrance.

To sum up, the considerable success of the OGI project in attracting the loyal customer seems to be an indicator of the existence of a considerable public of mostly younger people in their 20s and 30s who are, first, interested in the places of cultural consumption, that they can call their own and, second, are able to maintain them by their loyal attendance. The OGI System is not a terribly profitable enterprise but it is not a nonprofit organization supported by one-time donations (as was the case in the 1990s) either. The System earns 70% of its income from restaurant services, while the ambiance and cultural activities are the things that make customers come back. Thus, another lesson of the OGI’s success is that Itskovich and his like may have discovered a kind of organizational model that may pose an alternative to more traditional forms of the organization of Russian cultural life: formal hierarchical institutions and the interpersonal clique-like networks.

Although Dmitry of Artkino Club was not familiar with the details of the OGI operations when he came up with an idea of Artkino, he was a frequenter of the OGI and similar sites and was aware of their prestige among students and high-end creative workers. Thus, there is an element of institutional imitation in his project (Baumann 2001, 407). Yet, the innovative aspect of his institutional design is to put education into the center of it. The task that Artkino faces is not only capturing already preexisting niche-market but also creating it anew. If the entry requirement for the OGI public is

broadly a college-based cultural capital, with the emphasis on the humanities/social sciences subjects, then the full-fledged member of the cinematic public is expected to have a certain specific competence in the aesthetics, technology and history of motion pictures. In Russia, this cinematic competence has never been a necessary aspect of the intelligentsia’s cultural capital and thus cannot be taken for granted. Yet, as the exposure to all kinds of images and the role of related professions has grown recently, the demand in this competence has also increased. The Artkino Club is in for fostering this trend and capitalizing on it. The Artkino Club and Its Members Now, who are paying members of Artkino? Who are these people who are ready to pay about 100 dollars per month for a 10-month course of study and spend their whole weekends (and sometimes weekdays too) watching films, listening to lectures and participating in discussions about film? What needs of theirs do they expect that the Club will satisfy? What follows below is an abridged report of the research in process. The data presented are based on the results of two surveys. One survey, a very basic one, was conducted for internal use by the Artkino founders themselves in May 2007 (46 participants), and the other one was conducted by author of this paper in October 2007 (48 participants). The groups surveyed roughly come from two different cohorts of Artkino members, the ones enrolled in 2006-07 and the ones enrolled in September 2007. Since the results of the first survey are indeed very limited, I will mostly refer to my survey of the second cohort (without mentioning this each time). In case, if there are consistent or conflicting reports from two different cohorts, I will explicitly point to this fact. For purposes of the presentation, I convert most figures into percentages.

The questions covered by my questionnaire fall into four broad categories: (1) social and demographic background; (2) cultural consumption preferences and habits; (3) cultural identity with respect to art film and mass culture; (4) reasons for becoming Artkino members and expectations from its work.

(1) The gender distribution in both cohorts is basically the same, 1 man per 4 women. This fact is not quite expected and requires further research into its contexts. Yet, another finding is more to be expected: all people in both cohorts have or study to have a college education. 25 % of the second cohort are college educated in the third generation, and less than 20% have only one parent with college education or are the first in the family to attend a university or a specialized institute. The cohorts differ in the number of students, 65% in the first cohort and 35% in the second one. Interestingly, this does not affect the age distributions: the largest number of participants are between 19 and 24,16 the rest are rare outliers: 2-3 18 year olds in each cohort, 5 25-26 year olds, and single individuals of 29, 30, 33 and 35. Still, the growing number of young professionals, non-students, may indicate the growing profile of the Club.

About 20% of participants in both cohorts are students or graduates of elite colleges, the Moscow State University’s Faculty of Journalism and Faculty of Philology, and the Russian Humanities University. Six of them have a Kandidat Degree or work toward it. A small number of respondents are associated with VGIK, Moscow TV School, and the Stroganov School.17 Interestingly, about 25% of respondents are students and graduates of the major economics, hard science and technology colleges (e.g. the Higher School of Economics, Moscow Energy Institute-MEI, Moscow Aviation Institute-MAI, etc.). Thus, the Artkino audience is comprised not only of the humanities people—the bookish and artsy types—but also more practically oriented young people. About half of the Club members represent a variety of very recently established

“universities,” the products of the explosive expansion of the higher education since 1990.

Among those who work (including half of the students), the most represented professions include journalists (including internet art critics), website editors and designers, programmers, school and college teachers, TV producers or editors, photographers, managers (various businesses), personnel administrators and consultants, PR specialists, advertisers and the self-employed (including artists, e.g. an animator, and designers, e.g. a landscape designer). Less represented professions and jobs include a school psychologist, a realtor, and a lawyer.

This list shows that there are a growing number of professions and jobs that require people to work with images. Former Soviet specialized artistic colleges cannot accommodate all of these needs and the number of people, which contemporary Russian economy requires. The education you can receive at the Moscow Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) has been traditionally outstanding. Yet, it annually produces only 10 film critics and just 4 of them stay in business (Sel’ianov 2007). Also, its credentials in teaching economics and sociology of filmmaking and distribution are much lower than in more traditional artistic subjects. Although you can study in VGIK for free, the competition to enter it is enormous and still growing, which means that the prices for pre-exam preparation are skyrocketing. Since other colleges very rarely offer any film-related classes and Film Studies programs failed to materialize, this leaves TV and film industries with a very small pool of people to choose from. This scarcity is partially compensated by the personal networks of friendship and acquaintance, which mediate the entrée into the industry for a large number of people, who have no choice but to learn by doing. Of course, a few of them bring fresh nonacademic currents into the professional and old-boyish film world. Yet, as the larger part of the mainstream film and especially the TV products in the 1990s and even 2000s demonstrate, most of them bring their amateurish and B-level tastes. At the same time, a large number of creative people without special education or necessary contacts, are barred from even being considered among legitimate cultural producers. And, those who want to be professional advertisers, designers or other creative workers, who deal with images, have a very slight chance of becoming such professionals. A large number of newly established higher-education institutions attempt to accommodate this demands. However, they are often too narrowly and pragmatically oriented (e.g. “the Moscow University of the Services”). These institutions do not only lack social status, or prestige, to bestow on their students, but they also often lack intellectual resources to produce somebody who is more than just a clerk. All these facts indicate the existence of the yawning gap to be filled by something like the Artkino Club.

Finally, the Artkino members were asked about their own perceptions of their income category. Unsurprisingly, about 60% of the second cohort describes their income as “middle-range.” Predictably, this percentage is much higher the average percentage of Russians who ascribe themselves to the “middle strata.”18 Those 8 respondents who describe their income as “lower than middle” and “low” overwhelmingly represented the former Soviet professional elite, with 2 and more generations of close relatives with higher education, the children of doctors, academics and engineers, and themselves working as journalists, PR-specialists. Among those 7 respondents who describe their level as “higher than middle,” there are a variety of people, from a 23 y.o. man, a programmer, whose father owns a tour firm and who can afford a separate apartment close to the center of Moscow, to a 21 y.o. single mother of 4-month baby with only one parent with college education [I know as much at this time; I plan to follow up on these questions with some of the people]. Obviously, these results

tell more about the disparities in perception of one’s status than about actual disparities in income. In the 1990s, the Soviet high-end professions received the most severe blow to their social status and their children have inherited the bitterness of their parents. Those who did not lose as much, may well judge their current situation more optimistically.

Overall, the members of the Artkino Club are a heterogeneous crowd. They are all college educated (or students) but their family backgrounds, incomes, specializations differ significantly. What brings them together, except for simply “love for serious kino” and the deficiencies of the Russian educational system?

(2) When asked about their hobbies, most members of the Club give answers which can be expected from them as representatives of “the intelligentsia”: fiction, classical music, theater, exhibitions, painting, classic Western and Russian rock, and the “author’s song” (Vysotsky, Okudzhava, etc.). More specific to today’s time and space are a number of practitioners of “extreme sports” (rafting, city orientation). Also, there is plenty of interest in photography and video. There are about 15 respondents among 48 who enjoy or aspire to the coincidence between job and hobby.

The data on movie going is more interesting. When asked about the frequency of watching films on various media today, 5, 10 and 20 years ago, the Club members give answers that remarkably consistent with the statistics of movie-going [cit. to be added]. The respondents in their 20s or younger report starting to attend movie-theaters frequently around 2001. Although all of the watched videos and TV, a few of them never went to the movies before 2001 (!).19 The respondents above 30 were all frequent moviegoers in the 1980s. Later, some of them kept up with this habit, while other practically stopped going. Although most respondents prefer large screens and try to go to the movies at least ones a month or two months, they admit that DVD is more convenient and takes less time. Only about 30% of respondents go exclusively to what they consider as (art) cinemas. Others are more eclectic. As one respondent put it, “You need to rest sometimes, don’t you?” Yet, they often feel dissatisfied with the repertoire: “After Artkino, it is obvious that there is nothing to watch in ordinary movie theaters.” When asked about the state of Russian film industry, they note the modernization of theaters and appearance of a large number of Russian films after a decade-long Western domination of the screens. However, they complain about the commercialization of both film production and exhibition. “Art is no longer art, it is commercialized”; “you can get money only for a project that promises a large box-office.” They also complain about the poverty, in terms of comforts and technology, of most cinemas, including state-owned the House of Film and the Film Museum (the notable exception is a private 35 mm). Many respondents seem to be torn between “comfy theaters and boring audience” and “uncomfortable rooms with exciting people in it.”

Interesting people and ambiance are the recurrent features that attract most Artkino members to a set of clubs and cafes, which bring together decent and inexpensive food, (often) bookstores, periodic art exhibitions and (independent, classic, experimental—depending on the place) film screenings. The names of these places also recur consistently: OGI Project, OGI Street, Pirogi, Bilingua Club, Gogol Club, Cult Club, FAQcafe, the Crisis of Genre Club and a few more. These are the places where, as one respondent put it, “I can eat, talk (obschat’sia), an watch a film.” Others add that these are the places where they can relax among their own kind, without rough and noisy working class kids from the suburbs or the bad-mannered and showy New Russians. These cafes and clubs attract by creating an impression of exclusivity without face-control and high prices.

Thus, for most members of the Club, Artkino is just one—although new and shiny—star in the network of stylistically related locations, all within or close to the center of Moscow, within a few subway stops from one another. With the subway trains running every 3 minutes, the Muscovites do not experience this as “distance.” Therefore, this network maybe said to be characterized by co-location, or clustering in one place. According to Gina Neff (2005), these type of spatially clustered networks of organized public venues characterize contemporary “milieus of innovation,” the kind of networked structures that mediates access to resources (jobs, contracts, publishers, etc.) in the situation when traditional large hierarchical institutions are in disarray or have lost much of their prestige and power. For Russia, at least, these milieus are new sites of cultural production, different both from traditional hierarchical institutions (e.g. universities) and from the private networks of intellectual and artistic bohemia and dissent (the parallel public sphere). The new milieus are genuinely public (private kitchens or apartments are no longer important sites) and they are composed of mostly market enterprises, which survive by targeting those whose major wealth and/or aspiration is their cultural capital.

I would add to this that, by sharing the mental map of the city with OGI, Artkino and similar places as bright spots on it, the frequenters of these sites inadvertently constitute themselves as a separate social category, as people of the same—broad but identifiable—circle, as a status group of sorts. In its turn, this status group requires some clear symbols of difference and identity. The taste for “other films” and the competence in the language of film is recently becoming some of the most distinctive symbols of this kind. While for the Club members this rare taste and competence is more important than for others, they are both objects of more general fascination since about a year-year and a half, as the growing number of the art and independent film screenings in the clubs and cafes listed above indicate.

(3) There are a number of questions that specifically address the issue of whether the members of the Club constitute a certain “taste public” and, if yes, what its characteristics are. Herbert Gans defined “taste publics” as collectives of “users who make similar choices among and within taste cultures,” which, in their turn, refer to “shared or common aesthetic values and standards of taste” (Gans 1999, 6-7). Although this question demands further research, there are some indications that we can speak about a relatively coherent “taste culture” here. In response to a question, “Based on what information do you usually make a decision to go to the movies?” 44 of 48 respondents selected “the director’ name.” This is what Gans calls “an author-orientation,” which is characteristic for high culture taste. Yet, in contrast to the case analyzed by Gans, the status of directors is not extended to the critics: “reviews in press” as basis for choosing to go the movies are selected by only 10%. At the same time, “the opinion of friends” is a second important basis, ahead of “actors,” “festival prizes” and “studio’s brand name.” In this, this “taste public” is closer to Soviet intellectuals than to American readers of the New Yorker: personal networks and oral communication bear more authority than the printed word. The low status of reviews indicate the already mentioned fact that art film world in Russia is still heavily reliant on personal familiarity rather than on institutions and (niche) markets.

Yet, the coherence of the taste culture shared by the Artkino members should not be exaggerated. The answer to another question—What do you usually pay particular attention when you watch a film?—provides a messier picture. Granted, “entertainment” and “special effects” are definitely not what the respondents select in answering this question. Yet, at least half of them rate “realism” (truthfulness to life)

high as an important consideration for them. (Many students of culture may consider Realism a sign of middlebrow taste but happily my respondents were not aware of this assumption of the Western research.) They also rate highly “actors’ play,” “imagery” and “the story.” There is some split in answers between those who prefer “story” and those who value “idea” (philosophical content, ideological message) more. The “director’s work” is valued highly by more than half of the respondents, but so is “psychologism,” that is the ability of the work of art to have strong emotional effect on a viewer. Overall, even if there some kind of coherent taste culture shared by most Artkino members, it is most strongly defined negatively, by what it is not: its members do not value films for their ability to entertain, even if they may privately still enjoy the products of the entertainment industry.

This finding is confirmed and specified by the answers to the question, which asks the respondents to provide (not definitions of but) their intuitive associations with respect to a list of terms provided below:

‘Art house’ Director’s films Film Avant-garde Film Classics Other films (drugoe kino) Intellectual films Independent movies Films not for everyone (kino ne dlia vsekh)

Popular films Hollywood Commercial films Entertainment films Blockbusters

Obviously, the options are not ordered in these two columns in the questionnaire.

The respondents were asked to presume that there are no synonyms here. In effect, all of them did their best to differentiate their associations by assigning different adjectives and examples of films to different categories [an example to be provided]. Yet, if we compare different answers, we discover that these associations freely migrate from category to category, but, in 90% of cases, only within the columns above. For instance, one respondent associates Tarkovsky’s name with auteur cinema, while another one with intellectual film. However, these intersections rarely happen across the columns. On the contrary, clear or explicit oppositions are frequent: if many categories on the left are consistently associated with the values of originality and auteur-orientation, then the categories of the right clearly lack these qualities. As one respondent put it, “the Hollywood film is the one where you are not interested in the name of the director, even if you know it.” The right column is also closely associated with box-office and predicable storyline, the image of the factory and with the star worship.

This, however, does not mean that the Artkino members unquestionably identify with the right column and consider everything pertaining the world of entertainment “poor taste,” “mass taste” and alike. They are not fuzzy about the existence of two worlds, art and entertainment, but they are much more flexible about making their value statements and about where to locate certain names and films. Of course, most examples are “typical cases”: the place of Tarkovsky or Bergman is clearly on the left. Yet, a recent film by the Russian director Pavel Lungin The Island has been classified as both “director’s film” and “popular film.” That is, for some respondents, “popularity” is not necessarily a symptom of light and commercial art.

Furthermore, a group of 6 respondents is quite explicitly stating that their tastes do not automatically follow the distinction between art and entertainment. They not only argue somewhat defensively “we have to have fun at times” but also, for example,

praise the Hollywood for professionalism: “even mediocre Hollywood films are professionally made.” The same person argues “Before criticizing Hollywood, we need to learn to shoot films the way they do it in Hollywood… The ideal film, from my point of view, is a director’s film of the Hollywood quality…able to tackle deep human issues and able to touch the soul of [not only intellectuals but also of] an uneducated grandma from a remote village” (Lika, 26 y.o.). As these respondents “rehabilitate” mass culture, they criticize a number of aspects of art film culture. These are some of the incisive remarks, which are marked by this agenda:

Many films of the ‘other film’ series are excessively cruel…[and]

pretensions: behind style and artistic devices, they hide the fact that they have nothing to say (Lika; the example she gives is Mudisson’s The Container).

Art house means attention to form and orientation on aficionados. This is often a cover for inability to find either money or adequate form for expressing what you have to say (__)

‘Art house’ is art without harmony and order (__) ’Intellectual film’ covers the range of films from impossible boredom

(Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad) to the work of genius (Alain Resnais' Hiroshima, Mon Amour) (___)

Independent film is as utopia, just like communism (__) Films not for everyone? Well, it is sad that they are not for everyone…

Porno is also for a narrow category of people… (__) Thus, although the official position of the Artkino founders—the strict distinction and clear value hierarchy between art and entertainment—is not openly disputed by the members, it is clearly only one in the spectrum of positions articulated by the respondents. We have heard voices of those, which pointed out the penetrability of the art/entertainment boundary and even the idea that the concept of “high quality/value” is not identical with the one of “art.”

These different ways of positioning, in part, reflect the variety of artistic discourses made available to the Artkino founders and members by the education and media in Russia. Terminologically, different positions are often expressed in the choice of the term of preference, e.g. auteur films or “other” films. For definition of the latter, I have checked the website of a leading Russian film distributor, Carmen Video, which launched a series under this name. According to www.drugoe-kino.ru,

“Other film” is not a synonym of director’s or avant-garde films. … Other films are the ones that do not address everybody and nobody in particular; not the ones that use genre clichés for the sake of hitting box-office; not the ones that claim to express the ideals of the majority or even the priorities of some organized minorities; not the ones that slavishly follow the codex of political correctness. Other films can be commercially successful but they do not manipulate masses. They deal with single individuals who may choose to get together in groups of more than 3 according to their common interests but who stay independent individuals. In principle, almost all members of the Artkino community could sign under this

definition. Yet, for some, it may sound controversial because it advocates a broader, more inclusive definition of the “canon.” For instance, it includes the works made in the genre known as “trash.” A month ago, there was a debate on the Artkino website about

the legitimacy of this genre. Some supported Dmitry in welcoming everybody, “except for trash-makers and nationalists.” While there was no debate about “nationalists,” some argued that “trash” could be a legitimate artistic genre. As a result, Dmitry added a proviso: “except for those who make trash for the sake of trash.” He added: “They do not need our club, anyway.”

Yet, despite all these differences, there is no argument about the basic assumptions on which the club is founded: there is a distinction between art and entertainment—even if it is “a matter of taste, not [absolute] value”(___)—and it is worth being emphasized. “We” can be open to learning from “them” (entertainers, Hollywood) but, this way, the difference is only underlined. As the next section shows, the differences within this consensus are due to specific practical and social needs that bring different categories of respondents into the Club. (4) What reasons do the members of the Artkino Club give for joining its events? There are three types of reasons:

(a) The access to art products in scarce supply and of high value (financial and aesthetic);

(b) The hope to learn practical skills of “reading” and making films and other motion pictures products (e.g. commercials);

(c) Simply “people,” or a creative environment for personal self-realization and self-development.

Indeed, as already mentioned in before, films that that cannot be called blockbusters and cannot be assigned to any entertainment genre are not readily accessible even in Moscow, not only in theaters but also even in DVDs. Of course, there are a number of cinemas and DVD-stores in the city center of Moscow, which people access mostly through personal connections. Yet, DVDs are expensive—$10 is money for a student or even a young professional, —DVD rentals are even less available and hard to handle—no everyone can spend 2 hours every second day to borrow and return a film, —and many cinemas are not very comfortable or technologically advanced. These are, of course, important considerations for people who answer the question about the meaning of film for them by saying that “good films” make them “grow,” “think,” “broaden consciousness,” “make life more meaningful,” that film is a “means of visualizing imagination,” “an opportunity to live many lives at ones” and even a “path toward the liberation from the fear of death.” For these people, the opportunity, offered by Artkino, to have access to exemplary works of film art is of high value. This is especially that this access, in Artkino, is not limited to the act of watching but involves active learning and discussion as well as a prospect of making it with their own hands.

Leaning the art of filmmaking and understanding film is particularly important for over half of the members of the Club who claim that film is “the cause of [their] life,” “the part of [their] work” or their “future profession.” For some of these persons (about a quarter of all members), Artkino is primarily and emphatically an educational opportunity, that is something they have or had no chance of learning in their colleges. They want to learn the languages of film and film criticism. They want to learn “how to build the visual narration from plane to plane,” how camera and light work in the course of shooting, how to promote and advertise the product of their creativity. Thus, whatever their ultimate goals—shooting a commercial or “a film which I will not regret,”—the immediate aims of these people are quite pragmatic. This pragmatism causes some of them to be rather skeptical about some of the aspects of education process as Dmitry and Sergey currently run it: they demand “less symbolism, more

[artistic and technical] devices,” “more practical exercises.” A few are very skeptical about the need of discussions at all. As one of such skeptics—a journalist specializing on film industry—put it,

In my work place, I have enough of discussions of film. I am tired of them. Usually, the normal dialogue does not happen, this is more about posing and showing off. It makes sense to discuss only in the circle of like-minded people, who are ready to listen and have a common cause. Otherwise, the thought expressed is a lie (Anastasia, 25 y.o.)

Notice that Anastasia is not in principle against open discussion of art but reserves it to the community of friends, of equals. Yet, this is precisely the aim of Artkino, to provide a public sphere in which a multitude of atomized individuals can turn themselves into a community of equals. The community in which people are comfortable with each other, the community that is free from formal hierarchies and competition, the community where differences are celebrated. The community in which persons can form multiple overlapping collaborative circles and thus form the alternative (to state and private establishment) sites for cultural production and consumption.

So far, only a month into Artkino sessions, Anastasia have not bought into this foundational utopia of the Club. This is because she considers it solely as a way of filling the gaps in her education and gaining knowledge she feels she needs for her work as a journalist and a film critic. Yet, most other Club members, of both cohorts, seem to be willing to give Dmitry and Sergei the benefit of their doubt and show their readiness to participate in the game. These Club members see in Artkino not only another—whatever attractive—form of formal education but a creative milieu and a social club.20 They repeatedly emphasize that “people” and “communication” (obshchenie) are absolutely necessarily aspects of the attractiveness for them of the Artkino project. They claim that the Artkino-moderated debates make them think out of the box, that single mind and a pair of eyes do not notice everything there is to notice in the film, that discussion is essential for learning and “having ideas.” They seem to consider and enjoy Artkino an important node in the network of vaguely alternative young-educated-folks-oriented social hangouts, like cinemas, cafes and clubs discussed above.

This attitude is expressed, in particular, by college students who have all reasons to be dissatisfied with the social atmosphere in Russian colleges and universities. Located usually in dull buildings, with makeshift dining facilities, lack of social spaces and often unpleasant guards at the doors, Russian colleges are rarely more then place for taking classes. Therefore, it is not surprising that Artkino is often perceived, by present and former students alike, as a kind of ideal school that they have never had, the school where learning (without grades) is embedded in strong rituals of solidarity.

Overall, although a part of the web of independent cultural institutions that emerged in Russia over last 10 years, Artkino is a special case. In contrast to mere cinemas, including MI, Artkino allows for prolonged personal exposure and for the establishment of more than fleeting social ties. It does not only cater to the fragmented networks of individual cinephiles but also works on transforming these loose networks into competent cinematic publics. In contrast to other independent clubs, Artkino focuses on film and everything that goes with it. As the educated public, together with the rest of the society, becomes more visual, rather than textual, in its modes of perception and thinking, the role of cinematic competence in expressing and shaping the social identity and difference increases. Thus Artkino’s work of forging the cinematic public may have a larger significance than just the establishment of another niche

market may suggest. If such organizations as Artkino proliferate in at least the major cities of the country and succeed in establishing the economically sustainable national infrastructure for art film production and the reproduction of its artistic cadres and audiences, then the Russian art film world may well become a model and a key symbol of the contemporary intelligentsia’s high culture. This is especially likely considering the growing depolitization of the Russian civic life, which is a result and a reaction to the consolidation of the current authoritarian regime. After all, the focus on the “language of film” allows Artkino people to disregard (the critique of) the ideological message in such famous works of art as Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. Conclusion In the mid-2000s, we may be witnessing the beginning of the establishment of the institutionally articulated and economically sustainable art film world in Russia. Following Shyon Baumann, we can summarize the conditions for this process as a coincidence of three factors: opportunity openings, institutions and ideology. Russian intellectuals and artists were among the pioneers of the “intellectualized discourse” of film as art. Russian artistic and intellectual resources to be mobilized for the establishment of a separate and prestigious art film world are enormous. Yet, Russia lacks institutions that can effectively promote this view of film, as well as define and support the corresponding body of work. Or, rather, the existing institutions are either in disarray or they simply do not fit the market environment. By combining institutional innovation with the imitation of the forms tried out in other cultural domains, the founders of Artkino have come up with an organizational model, which seems to be able to combine artistic autonomy and market-savvyness. Their model of multi-media, multi-functional niche-market-oriented enterprise may serve as an institutional backbone of the independent art film world to come.

My conclusion that Artkino is not an exceptional case but a part of a trend, which has future, is based on the existence of a number of opportunity openings for the establishment of an art film world, which is distinct from the commercial film industry. One of these openings is economy’s demand for image specialists, the demand that Russian educational system is unable to satisfy adequately. Anther opening is a result of the 1990s expansion of the system of higher education. A growing number of educated people, who graduated from non-elite institutions, find themselves outside of the established cliques and old boys clubs and search for alternative entrees into prestigious domains of art, film and cultural entrepreneurship. Yet, even more important is the growing demand, articulated by various factions of the educated middle class, for the kind of cultural sites and symbols that can set this class apart from both “the people” and the ruling elites.

The similarity of these demands to the ones of the 1960s-70ss generation is only apparent (see Prokhorova 2005 for an opposite view). The present movement for creative culture is more massive and socially diverse. As the overview of the OGI and Artkino audiences shows, this movement is not limited to cultural elites. Also, in comparison to the elite intelligentsia’s “salons” and circles of the past, the independent cultural projects of today exhibit considerable sophistication in fundraising and niche marketing, as well as in the creative usage of contemporary video-recording and communication technologies. The culture of “close watching” and paying attention, propagated by Artkino, is no longer opposed to drab Soviet modernity with its perceived homogeneity. The contemporary creative culture deals with the “postmodern” world of disposable feelings and artificial stimulations, of multi-tasking and insecurity, of “being wired” and “plugged in.”

Despite calling itself “avant-garde,” the Artkino community does not seem to try to rebel against or insolate itself from the marketplace, mass media and popular culture. Rather, it tries to make itself inaccessible for them by taking charge of them. Instead of exercising their illusory right to “choose freely” on the receptive side of the media chain, the Artkino people follow Dziga Vertov’s advise to take media (e.g. movie-camera) into their hands and become “kino-eyes.” In practice, this means becoming film directors, cameramen, as well as makers of commercials, visual designers, or even film critics. This means doing anything that allows a certain distance from the market, media and popular culture, and thus being to some extent in change of them. This is the core of the creative culture, of which Artkino is a part and an important actor.

*** On November 18, 2007, to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Artkino, the first “festival of young directors” has opened in Sokolniki. It features 10 short 6-9 minute films made by the members of the “first wave of the Artkino movement” (the second year members of the Club). Thus, one more item on the “to do” list of the Artkino Club has been put into practice. I still do not know how this festival went or even who was invited to serve on the jury (it is a surprise!). I do not know what will happen to the participants and the winners of this festival, to their works, or to the festival itself. Everything I have said so far is not a prediction of the imminent success of the Artkino. The project is still highly vulnerable and its success so far is heavily dependent on various contingencies, from tax breaks, which Sergey’s workshop enjoys, to Dmitry’s inexhaustible enthusiasm and energy. Artkino, and similar cultural initiatives in film and other cultural domains, certainly need grants from both the state and private foundations. Yet, these grants should not be just based on personal connections but rather on the detailed analysis of the importance and the potential of the independent culture in Russia. This paper has been an attempt to contribute to this largely untapped field. 1 Howard Becker defined “art worlds” as the “networks[s] of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joined knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produce the kind of artworks that art world is noted for (1982, x). By turning attention from idiosyncratic self-expressions of the creative genius to art as collective practice, to networks and institutions, in and through which works of art are produced, distributed and consumed, Becker laid the foundation for the contemporary sociology of art. 2 In what follows, I use the American distinction between “movie-theater” and “(art) cinema” as, correspondingly, the sites for exhibiting primarily mainstream and art films. 3 Despite the existence of the state-sponsored Film Museum, there are currently no publicly available film libraries and archives. For the recent exhibition of the Cold War propaganda animation in Barcelona, Russia refuse to offer any films, and all Russian exhibits were brought from the USA. I do not think that this is a matter of some strange censorship. Most probably, the storage conditions in Russia make many invaluable film rolls simply impossible to transport. 4 The festival has survived the downfall of the Soviet film industry. In the 1990s, it acquired an official status (see http://www.kinotavr.ru). 5 Produced at the lowest point of the Russian film industry, Nikita Mikhalkov’s The Barber of Siberia (1997) is the most expensive Russian film ever made. Yet, the commercial performance of the movie was quite mediocre (Beumers 1999, 881). 6 This is a story of Andrei Zvyagintsev, one of the key models of a contemporary Russian auteur for the Artkino community. Zvyagintsev’s first movie, The Return, won

him the Venice Festival’s Golden Lion in 2003 and thus immediately brought him out of complete obscurity into the ranks of the best Russian film artists. 7 E.g. Pavel Lungin’s The Island, a controversial moral tale of treachery and repentance, has not only earned a prize at the Kinotavr Festival but also ranked high in the TV viewers’ survey in early 2006. 8 One of the more successful of the new types of high schools founded after 1991. In the late 1990s, it attracted some of the most promising young intellectuals (some of them now teach in the West) and hosted master-classes by leading Russian scholars and artists. 9 A key symbol of independent status in one of the most expensive cities in the world, where even a Moscow University full professor earns 400-500 dollars per month. 10 Personal communication. 11 The screenings for the children from nearby orphanages are for free. The orphanages agree to repay in kind, by minor services, repair, etc. 12 Vysshie rezhisserskie kursy, founded in 1964, is arguably the second (after the Institute of Cinematography) most important place to get an education of the film director in Russia. 13 A sexy star of contemporary Russian popular TV series. 14 The most recent master-class in November 2007 was offered by Sergey Makovetsky, a renowned Russian actor who recently starred in Jos Stelling’s Dushka. 15 An OGI joke: Itskovitch opens a bordello, in which you have an honor of being served by the students of the prestigious Russian Humanities University, even though they do everything slowly and not exactly what you ask for. 16 Cf. the usual age of college students in Russia is 17 to 22. 17 A respectable school of applied arts and design, founded in 1825. Under the name of VKhUTEMAS, it hosted such avant-garde artists as Lisitsky, Rodchenko and Tatlin in the 1920s. The current official name is Moscow State Artistic-Industrial University. 18 About 42% (Mironova 2007). 19 This is also true with respect to Dmitry K, a founder of the Club (personal communication). 20 In one of the most recent postings (November 18, 2007), dedicated to the first anniversary of the Club, Dmitry prides his creature for the fact that “many members became friends and even started building families.” This matchmaking role of Artkino and similar organizations needs further exploration.

References Baumann, Shyon, “Intellectualization and Art World Development: Film in the United States,”

American Sociological Review, 66, 3 (2001), pp. 404-426. Bogdanov, A. L. and V. A. Provotorov, "Kinoteatr kak sociokul'turnyi poligon dosuga,"

Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, ? (1995). Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1984. ----, The Field of Cultural Production, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Becker, Howard S., Art Worlds, Berkeley, CA, 1982. Beumers, Birgit, "Cinemarket, or the Russian Film Industry in 'Mission Possible'," Europe-Asia

Studies, 51, 5 (1999), pp. 871-896. Brzhezinskaya, Mariia, "Art-trek," Profil', 37 (October 8, 2007). Chekodanova, Veronika, "Kino bez popkorna," Novaya gazata, 56 (July 26, 2007).

DiMaggio, Paul, "Can Culture Survive in the Marketplace?" in P. J. DiMaggio (ed.) Nonprofit

Enterprise in the Arts: Studies in Mission and Constraint, New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 65-93.

----, "Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston," in C. Mukerji and M. Schudson (eds.) Rethinking

Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, pp. 374-331.

Dondurei, Daniil, "Novye zriteli bez novogo kino," Iskusstvo kino, 5 (2001). Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Everyday Stalinism, Oxford, 1999. Gans, Herbert J., Popular Culture and High Culture, New York, 1999. Golovskoy, V. S., and J. Rimberg, Behind the Soviet Screen: The Motion Picture Industry in the

USSR, 1972-1982, Ann Arbor, MI, 1986. Heise, Tatiana, and Andrew Tudor, "Constructing (Film) Art: Bourdieu's Field Model in a

Comparative Context," Cultural Sociology, 1, 2 (2007), pp. 165-187. Hirsch, Paul M., "Processing Fads and Fashions: An Organization-Set Analysis of Cultural

Industry Systems," in Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, ed. C. Mukerji and M. Schudson, Berkeley, CA, 1991, pp. 313-334.

Itskovich, Dmitry, "The New 'Moscow Kitchen,' or the OGI System," Kultura (Bremen), 1 (2005), pp. 7-9.

Jancovich, Mark, and Lucy Faire The Place of the Audience: Cultural geographies of Film Consumption, London, 2003.

Mironova, Iulia, "Bogach tot, u kogo bol'she 20 tysiach rublei," Izvestiia, http://www. izvestiya.ru/obshestvo/article3109444/index.html

Neff, Gina, "The Changing Place of Cultural Production: The Location of Social Networks in a Digital Media Industry," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 597 (2005), pp. 134-152

Prokhorova, Irina, "Heirs to the Underground, or What Keeps Russian Culture Going. Eye-Witness Notes," Kultura (Bremen), 1 (2005), pp. 3-7.

Riazanov, Eldar, an interview with the BBC Russian Service (October 2007). Sel'ianov, Sergei, "Kino 2000-h," http://www.polit.ru/lectures/2007/07/05/cinema.html Simmel, Georg, On Individuality and Social Forms, Chicago and London, 1971. Turovskaya, Maya, "The Tastes of Soviet Moviegoers during the 1930s," in Late Soviet Culture:

From Perestroika to Novostroika, ed. T. Lahusen and G. Kuperman, Durham, NC, 1993. Robert C. Tucker, ed. The Marx-Engels Reader (New York, 1978). Waldstein (Kupovykh), Maxim, The Soviet Empire of Signs: A History of the Tartu School of

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