A look at Marina Chuvailova's documentary films through the prism of aesthetic categories

Abstract

This article focuses on films by documentary filmmaker Marina Chuvaylova, the relevance of which is driven by changing gender relations in contemporary society. This is reflected in women adopting male professions, sharing their lifestyles and nature of behavior, and increasingly taking on responsibility for family and personal fulfillment, even becoming filmmakers. At the same time, our view of documentary film is also changing, serving as a segment of a media system whose boundaries, according to scholars, are becoming increasingly complex due to the ongoing transformation of both the media system itself and our perceptions of it. The aim of this study is to uncover these changes by examining the ways in which women's themes are embodied in this female director films, a representative of the Ural (Yekaterinburg) School of Documentary Film. This article draws on the work of scholars whose fields of interest include media (documentary film), aesthetics, gender issues. The main research methods are observation and comparative analysis of documentaries representing different models of the “feminine world”: one, addressed to the spiritual sphere of human existence, another – to the physical space of life, the third – combining both models and the “feminine” world in interaction with the “male” one. It was found that the models described in this article are linked to aesthetic categories – "sublime," "beautiful," "comic," "tragic" and "tragicomic"– which largely accounts for these screen works success with a wide audience.