Movement in Cinema: Features of the Road Movie Genre in Modern Russia

The motive of overcoming the trials is one of the main narrative elements of world and national culture associated with the representation of the road. The road epic, which was born in the era of Antiquity, with the development of cinema has transformed into a special genre – road movie – a journey film, the action of which takes place on the road. In the era of globalization, people are inseparable from movement, both physically and in the virtual world, moving through the spaces and on the long distances has become an immanent feature of modernity. The road and the car in the Western tradition served to talk about gender, politics, national identity, race, and marginality. However, Russian road movies developed along a special path. This paper aims to investigate the development of modern Russian road movies. The core of the sample consists of 40 festival and mass road movies from 1995 to 2019. Using the methods of narrative, content and semiotic analysis, the main features of Russian road movies are highlighted. The road epic of Russian cinema is imbued with a fairy-tale motif; its characters, who have fallen out of the social ties that hold them, gradually find the goals of their wanderings; the way of Wanderers of Russian road movies usually ends in death or getting stuck in metaphysical spaces; and the theme of the relationship between fathers and children has had a significant impact on the transformation of children's and women's images of Russian road cinema. The results of the paper may reveal the importance of investigating the development of the genre in Russia.