Russian Notebook 2: Television Continued, Kultura

I'm currently in my father's home town, Rostov-on-the-Don, a hilly city built along the banks of a river in the South of Russia.

I watch television here on the Panasonic in the living room. It has a rabbit ear antenna. Usually I sit on the couch, which at night folds out into a bed. The apartment is on the fourth floor and the living room windows look out on one of the busiest intersections in the city. Across the street, there's an office whose windows are level with ours. I've recently noticed that a young woman who works in the office watches me when I play the living room piano. We keep the windows closed, so she can't tell that the piano is badly out of tune and that I can't play it very well.
In all, the television recieves 11 channels, though many of them are repeats. It recieves several I can't get in Moscow, including regional stations and MTV, whose modest local offices are a block up the street from our apartment.
The Panasonic does not get Kultura (Культура), which broadcasts Soviet films in the day time and symphonic concerts and foreign films in the evening (in the my first week, I saw an Oshima, a Moretti and a Jancso). The Soviet films are the real treasure--many of them pre-war, all of them in original aspect ratios, not just well-known pictures (next week brings The Mirror and Cranes Are Flying) but obscure and underrated ones as well. Musicals, lavish period films and war pictures are all shown without repeats and with minimal commercial interruptions. Silent films are not shown.
It's a challenge figuring out what the movies are at times without a steady Internet connection. There're plenty of television listings in the right-wing weeklies, but I'm little too embarassed to buy them or even be seen paging through one at a newstand. I keep a little red notebook into which I jot showtimes as they're advertised. I've turned into a serious television viewer, setting aside evening hours, looking forward to marathons, double-checking my daily Kultura itinerary.

Russian Notebook 1: Crime Television

I'm living the month of August in Russia. One of my intentions was to try and document as much about Russian film culture as I could, but very early on I got sick and ended up bed-ridden for a while. During that time, I found myself watching a lot of Russian television.

1. "Crime" shows dominate Russian television; they've been on top for quite a while, a decade maybe--enough for people to be long tired of them. But they're cheap to make and easy to advertise, so it's unlikely they'll leave airwaves anytime soon. In fact, their prevalence and interchangeability make them the defining genre of Russian television; it's often difficult to figure out which show you're watching--switching between channels seems more like intercutting than. The remote control becomes a method for home editing: from car chase to assassination to a busy street corner to car chase again without ever breaking continuity.
   
2. "Crime" shows are both documentary and fiction-based (in Russian, fiction films are refered to as artistic films), though there's very little difference in content and presentation between the two. "True crime" shows often center around sensationalistic "investigative journalism" peppered with shots of real-life deaths, dramatic re-enactments and flashy graphics that resemble the credits and intertitles of the "fictional" crime shows (or is it the other way around?). The host of one show, which focues almost exclusively on bloody traffic accidents in Moscow, carries a small Handycam as a prop, pointing it at the proceedings; we never see what he's recording and can assume that the prop camera is never turned on.
   
3. Despite being shot exlusively on video (shooting on film is very rare in Russia, where theatrical features are almost exclusively shot on HD), almost all fictional crime shows use post-synced dialogue. There is something fascinating about handheld, often rough images combined with calm, crisp sounds. On television, Moscow is the quietest city in the world, and the wind is never blowing in the country side. Foreign films and programs, which make up a sizeable portion of Russian television, are always shown dubbed, so this forms an odd aesthetic continuity.