April 13, 2026. Nostalgia for the Grand Style. Why Has Cinema Traded Meaning for Popcorn? An Editorial Column by the Editor of Mosfilm.ru

Before talking about the sunset, let’s recall the origin. When did the Great Style form? Here it is absolutely impossible to bypass the figure with which cinema itself ceased to be a fairground booth and acquired bronze muscles and art. Sergei Eisenstein. “Battleship Potemkin” is not just a film; it is an act of creating a new visual language. Eisenstein proved that montage is not gluing frames together, but a collision of meanings capable of generating in the viewer’s mind images that are epic, almost biblical. It was he who laid the very “vertical” of the Great Style, where a person is not just a character but an atom of History.Without this foundation, neither Bondarchuk’s battalion epic nor Tarkovsky’s symphonies of meaning would have been possible. Yes, Stalinist cinema had its own scale, but the style there was more bronze and ritualistic. But the “Thaw” and the late “Stagnation” gave rise to a surprising hybrid in our cinema — the finest lyricism and epic scale of thought simultaneously.

In our cultural code, the Big Style in its mature form is, of course, the product of Soviet cinema of the 1960s–1970s — with its meticulously crafted unique school. Remember Ozerov’s “Liberation” or Bondarchuk’s “War and Peace”? These are not just films; they are geopolitical gestures filmed on a grand scale! But the focus is that mass (not epic) cinema also breathed the same air. Look at any ordinary industrial drama like “Taste of Bread” or “Awards.” There are no battle scenes there, but there is a sense of distance.There is a feeling that behind the scene there is not simply a conflict involving a specific foreman or chairman of the collective farm, but something much bigger — the fate of generations, the future of the country. The viewer was going to the cinema not just to “relax,” but to compare themselves with the scale of the personality on the screen.

When did this “column hall” originate? A refuge of the 1980s–1990s. The so-called “black wave” that came with perestroika could not physically exist within the framework of the Big Style. The crisis was not even political, but… anthropological. Some kind of sudden “catastrophe of the mind”! It was replaced by the “document of the era,” spiced with postmodern irony. Either a deliberately empty genre cinema. Although it is worth mentioning that both during and after that time, there were films that could rightfully be called art. However, this was more likely the result of the powerful inertia of the Soviet film production system and the talent of individual creators.

We have now come into the realm of total “serial optics.” The content received—the language refuses to call this “cinematography”—is designed for viewing on the screen of a smartphone or tablet. A large style there is simply impossible. It requires a close-up of a speaking head and an endless “attraction”—laughter, screams, profanity, and so on—to hold attention. It’s as if, having completed a certain circle, cinematography has returned again to the same point—a banal fairground entertainment. There is a certain irony in this, isn’t there?

Undoubtedly, in this ocean of secondary and semantic emptiness, the islands of art remain. Directors of the Soviet school — the last of the Mohicans, for whom a long panorama, sliding over a field or a ballroom, is not a formalism but the only possible way to breathe life into a film. They have something to lose in a world where the success of a series is measured by the number of views of the first episode. They can afford not to focus on trends, because their name itself is a symbol. “Solar Strike” or “Anna Karenina.””The History of Vronsky” is not a mass product, but rather culturological gestures, an attempt to capture the living nature. Genuine Service to the Art of Cinema.

Skeptics, by the way, shouldn’t look to the West. We observe this situation not only in Russia. Hollywood, the forge of world cinema, is stuck in the same “pit,” only with more expensive decorations. Where is the Grand Style in “The Avengers”? This is not style, it is a sum of technologies. Cameron’s “Avatar” is a marvel of engineering, but in essence, it is more of a very beautiful computer game. In the overwhelming majority of Western films, we mostly see technological experiments rather than a thoughtful understanding of human existence through cinema.

Is a return of the Grand Style possible? A rhetorical question. The Grand Style, it seems, will return when there is again a demand for global meanings. “What is a human?” “What is the meaning of life?” “Where are we, humanity, heading?” When the viewer gets tired of their own reflection in the serial mirror and once again feels themselves a speck of sand under the vast sky of the universe. When life is perceived not as endless pleasure, but including pain, doubt, thirst for search that cannot be healed by another comedy sketch about infidelity in Moscow-City.

It does not depend on money. Money is just fuel. For this, courage is needed. It depends on whether you will leave the emergence of a new “aristocracy of the spirit.” And so far, such a desire on the horizon is not particularly visible — neither among spectators, nor among most authors, nor among the authorities — we will continue to chew popcorn under the rustle of a dying greatness of cinema in a repeated film hall.

The author’s opinion may not coincide with the position of the Mosfilm.ru editorial office