The Life of Regions in the Screen Embodiment: “Decoding” of Territories

The article discusses the growing role of screen culture and screen methods of presenting the regions' life in Russia. Screen culture, accelerating the dissemination of information, leads to its fragmentation and decentralization. The screen does not literally reproduce reality. At the same time, many people not only actively absorb, but also produce visual information. Although, unfortunately, no one teaches them how to do it. The life of local territories is recorded at different levels: both on professional screens, and in amateur, blogging videos on the Internet. Federal and regional media, as well as documentary filmmakers, are trying to decipher the “cultural codes” of the regions to help “the country meet the country”. Meanwhile, attitudes to the regions from the outside and from the inside are different, and the regional agenda is often on the periphery of the interests of the federal media. Documentary films, in contrast to television's information or “postcard programs” about travels in the regions of the country, rely on problems and life stories, do not confine themselves to rigid formats, do not require voiceovers, and trust images more than words. Favorite “objects” of reflection in documentary films since the time of R. Flaherty are people living in places geographically remote from a large society. The article describes the project of creating a documentary film almanac/film City Code by E. Grigoriev and A. Selyanina, and an educational video sketching project for the City Portrait online edition released with the participation of students of the Department of Journalism of the Ural Federal University. The leaders of the first project conducted classes on screen culture with volunteers from two Russian cities. The most important condition was the choice of people who love their city and do not want to leave it. And the goal was to awaken something personal in them, to give media features to a city, where residents know more about the federal agenda than about their home yard. Professional urbanists and sociologists helped to decode the cities. The second project was a response to the long-overdue need to introduce an aesthetic principle into the coverage of the life of the regions by new media against the background of the activities of traditional regional media. The latter have practically no programs focused on the production of a harmoniously organized urban space, on the formation of identities and creative communities. These media are predominantly aimed at information of a routine, often negative nature, and not at the formation of a positive urban environment. The results of th two projects are encouraging. Video content (both professional and user-specific) is becoming more and more in demand among audiences in large, medium and small cities over time. The media are designed to visually demonstrate as fully as possible the identity of certain regions, their cultural and social characteristics, and this requires special techniques, which were described in this article.

Keywords

Authors

References