The essential premise of my study is that digital technologies have transformed the ways in which film is produced, disseminated and appreciated. As I suggested in the Introduction, contemporary Russian cinema exists predominantly on the internet, forming a new visual environment. Academic literature exploring the impact of such a technological and aesthetic switchover is vast; for example, writing in 1994, Vivien Sobchak notes:

Sobchak acknowledges the pervasive nature of visual culture at the turn of the century. While pointing out different technologies and building a genealogy of the technical revolution, the scholar describes an emergence of a new experience which transforms not only the subject matter of culture, but also us as subjects. Twenty years later, it is evident the quotidian experience of visuality has become even more pervasive and prevailing while contemporary subjects display not only technological proficiency, but also awareness as self-motivated agents promoting visuality. While recognising this transformation, I wish to focus on the more abstract means of conceptualising subjectivity that resist determination by the technological transfer.

My concept of film as embodied intelligence encompasses contradictory discourses about film (and, by association, about photography) and particularly its ability to denote loss and nostalgia as well as the accumulation of experience and world-building. In the present era, film as embodied intelligence eschews the status of ‘mummification of reality’ in that it is neither photographic nor cinematic (Sobchak 2000a: 78). Sobchak notes that ‘the electronic is phenomenologically experienced not as a discrete, intentional, and bodily centered projection in space but rather as simultaneous, dispersed, and insubstitutional transmission across a network’ (2000a: 79). In my interpretation, such networks are environments, or worlds, in which current subjectivities manifest their self-presence whereby film as a specific mode of being should be identified not so much in terms of the corporeal setting, but as of symbolic exigency.