Media Narratives and their Perspectives in Russia
Narratives have been studied in the USA, the EU countries and in Canada within a number of profile disciplines such as narrative journalism, the theory of intermediality and transmedial narratology since the 1990s. In parallel to theorising, the production of transmedial narratives by combining different media is being explored there. Russian narrative journalism as a discipline in its own right is still in the shell while multimedia projects tend to remain a fairly uncommon practice embarked upon mostly by the initiative groups of documentary filmmakers. The article addresses this issue by analysing some new forms and types of documentary narratives, their role and the ways they affect today’s cultural landscape. By characterizing a number of international and Russian web-documentary projects as a specific genre of narrative journalism, the authors analyse their advantages and limitations and consider some of the factors causing the qualitative and quantitative lag of such practices in the Russian journalism. Drawing on the material under study and on the interview conducted with the Italian photojournalist Giorgio Bianchi, the authors highlight the principles of creating an artistic-documentary project, which include the desire to create an image through which the journalist seeks to express the truth, the sincerity of the emotions generated by reality, the text as a linking element between the image and emotions and the selection of scenes to build a coherent story. The conclusions from the analysis are rather contradictory. On the one hand, narrative journalism and web-documentary projects, as its new transmedial genre, are evolving, seeking to tell the dramas of our era through private stories about an individual’s personal experience, and such stories are in demand as forms of truth expression in the era of “post-truth”. On the other hand, such projects go against the political engagement both in Russia and abroad, and one can only hope that their cognitive potential will be fully realised in the future.