Performative modeling of the effects of the transcendent in Andrei Konchalovsky's film "Paradise".

In the last quarter-century, a significant number of cultural phenomena have emerged, which have been interpreted by philosophers, cultural theorists, film scholars, and literary critics from various countries within the framework of anti-postmodernist or post-postmodernist vectors in contemporary culture. One such phenomenon in Russian culture is the film "Paradise" by Andrei Konchalovsky, whose affiliation with the post-postmodernist era has never before been the focus of researchers' attention, except for a single article by the author of the philosophical and cultural theory of performatism, Raúl Eshelman. The subject of this study is a continuation of the analysis of the aforementioned film from the perspective of the performatist post-postmodernist concept. The aim of the article is to attempt to supplement the analysis of Konchalovsky's film "Paradise" previously conducted in one of Eshelman's articles from the viewpoint of performatist ethics and to answer the question of how in this cinematic narrative the formally mediated modeling of the effects of the transcendent arises. As a methodology for analyzing the film's narrative, some principles of film narrative analysis proposed by film scholars David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, as well as Peter Verstraten, were initially employed. Subsequently, the characteristics of the organization of the film narrative were correlated with certain performatist strategies that had not previously been considered by Eshelman in relation to this film. The results include the observation of the impossibility of unequivocally attributing the transcendent in the film "Paradise" to what occurs at the diegetic level, which is a consequence of the non-literal, audiovisual modeling of the effects of the transcendent by the "superior narrative agent" in the terminology of the German researcher Peter Verstraten. The novelty of the findings allows us to assert that the transmission of transcendent effects to the recipient in this film is formally mediated. This makes it appropriate to relate the discussed audiovisual modeling of the transcendent to such performatist strategies of film narrative as "double framing," "theist narrative," and "theist plot." The results obtained allow for the enhancement of the conclusions drawn by Eshelman in the analysis of this film and can be used for the analysis of other contemporary films from the perspective of the cultural-philosophical theory of performatism.

Performatism, post-postmodernist film, film narratology, effects of transcendence, Culture theories, Philosophy of culture, Contemporary Russian Film, Paradise, postpostmodernism, superior narrative agent