Timur Bekmambetov and screenlife. A new language of storytelling?
St Petersburg University and its Representative Office in Barcelona invite you to the online lecture "Timur Bekmambetov and screenlife. A new language of storytelling?". During the lecture, we will gain insight into the specifics of this relatively new format of film narrative using the films Unfriended (2015) and Profile (2017). The lecture will be delivered by Liubov Bugaeva, Professor in the Department of the History of Russian Literature at St Petersburg University, author of Literatura i rite de passage (2010) and more than 200 articles on the theory and history of literature and cinematography.
Screenlife is a format in which your computer or smartphone screen becomes the main setting for a film. The idea for screenlife came from director Timur Bekmambetov, known for his films Night Watch (2004), Day Watch (2006) and The Irony of Fate 2 (2007). In 2012, during a Skype conversation with a colleague who at one point forgot to turn off her screen-sharing, the director witnessed her screen life for a few minutes. It was at that moment that he realised that this format could be used to show the character’s life from the inside. The desktop is a window into the character’s world, and word choice, typing speed, mistakes, omissions, deleting of what has been written are means of characterising the character.
According to supporters and fans of screenlife, it is not just a new format, but a new cinematic language that gives the director unlimited possibilities. Timur Bekmambetov argues that screenlife makes it possible for the director to capture a process of moral decision that cannot be shown in any other way. ‘If someone sends me a message: ‘Look, help save the world’, I make a moral decision, even if I ignore it,’ the director and producer Timur Bekmambetov claims. At the same time, screenlife has its own rules and limitations. What are they? We will find out during the lecture.
The lecture will be held online in Russian with simultaneous interpreting into Spanish.