Балабанов. Перекрестки

Aleksei Medvedev. Balabanov: Genre as Metaphor

Genre and metaphor, it would seem, are non-congruent phenomena. However, in Balabanov’s work genre elements turn out to be not merely instruments to construct a story but precisely metaphorical references to mentalities and mindsets. It is not only, and not so much, a genre irony or an ironic commentary to Russian cinema of the 1990s, that is, not a second reality, but an exposure of rules in accordance with which our reality functioned, and still does. For instance, the moon in “Cargo 200” only at a first glance is a marker of horror, of zombies and vampires to come; it is, in fact, a concise and clear indicator that real ghouls are already here. It is this paradoxial use of genre that the paper is dedicated to.