Genre and Stylistic Transformation of Magazine Review (a Case Study of Cinema Reviews)

The work is devoted to the genre and stylistic transformation of magazine cinema review. The aim of this research is to trace the genre and language transformation of cinema review over the period from 1970 through 1999. The research material is domestic films reviews of "Cinema Art" magazine over the period from 1970 through 1999.The author explores the main communicative and stylistic features of cinema reviews, picks out the genre and stylistic transformation of cinema reviews during the Soviet period (1970-1985), the period of perestroika (1985-1991) and the post-Soviet period (1992-1999).The research methods are a comparative analysis, a discourse analysis, moreover, the research has partly a diachronic nature.The author proposes the following hypothesis: genre, style, language, communicative goals and purposes, communicative strategies and tactics of review authors have undergone the significant changes over the period from 1970 to 1999. These changes are caused by the changes in the political discourse. The analysis shows that the text of the Soviet cinema review includes the analysis of the ideological and moral content of the film, because ideological and moral education of the reader was the purpose of film criticism. During the perestroika some journalists continue to observe the Soviet tradition, partly retaining the aims of Soviet cinema review, slightly modifying them in the conditions of the new policy. At the same time, the significant part of journalists in period of perestroika includes the author's criticism of the Soviet regime, its ideology and mythology into the text of the review. The post-Soviet Russian cinema review analyzes work of the director, actors, considering the film into the context of art, interprets the director ideas, and joins the reader to the world of cinema.Soviet review includes composition blocks as a retelling of the movie plot, the moral and ideological analysis of the characters and their actions, actualization of picture meaning in terms of matching modernity and etc. During the perestroika period one part of cinema reviews retains this set of composition blocks. On the other hand, many critics of the perestroika period start writing in a new way: as before, the review includes a retelling of the movie plot, but actualizes its meaning from the position of reverse ideology.The post-Soviet review, keeping retelling of the movie plot, includes the new composition blocks: the analysis of the director’s and actors’ work, interpretation of authors’ ideas, the story of the creative and the social context in which the film was produced, assumptions regarding future success or failure of the film.The style of cinema review has undergone the dramatic changes over the period from 1970 to 1999. The language of the Soviet cinema review is generally totalitarian, and the basic tone is serious. The language of the perestroika review is more democratic, and the basic tone is serious, but the frequent use of irony is noted. The language of the post-Soviet Russian cinema review is democratic and maximum liberated; the basic tone becomes stressed ironic.During the three historical periods the genre of magazine cinema review anyway absorbs the features of other genres: the Soviet cinema review had the features of propaganda genres, the perestroika cinema review was maximally politicized, the post-Soviet Russian cinema review acquired the elements of esseizm and moved closer to the columnist genre.To sum up, it can be concluded that genre, style, language, communicative goals and purposes, communicative strategies and tactics of review authors have undergone the significant changes over the period from 1970 to 1999. These changes are caused by the changes in the political discourse: the Soviet film criticism was forced to exist into the totalitarian discourse, the film criticism of the period of perestroika existed into the terms of its destruction, the features of the post-Soviet criticism are caused by the influence of Postmodern aesthetics.