Renata Litvinova’s star persona

Abstract

Despite the attention that scholars and critics have paid to Renata Litvinova, the construction of her performance persona has not been traced diachronically and systematically. This article explores the sources of her images in order to formulate their common signifier, the idea that is essential for Litvinova’s role as a star. In communication with her audience, Litvinova exploits a consciously constructed image of her life to perform in the public sphere. Using a variety of media platforms – films, advertising and music videos, television broadcasting, newspapers, magazines, social events and professional activity – Litvinova has created an image that contains a multiplicity of meanings, combining permanent and changeable notions. In her core meaning, she arguably translates the importance of individuality as well as the existential need to love and be loved, and its inevitable finale – death. Moreover, reflecting historical circumstance, Litvinova’s persona splits into oppositional doubles: the dandy-style figure versus the fashionista. These two images emerge as antonyms in cultural and cinematic texts. The doubling nature of Litvinova’s persona simultaneously brings the audience into past and present, reflecting a historical split: the fall of the Soviet Union and the birth of contemporary Russian culture.

Notes

1. Renata Litvinova’s script Unlove (Neliubov') was first published in Kinostsenarii 6 (1986), followed by multiple other publications in 1991, 1994 and 1997. Seans/Amfora published a separate volume with her texts (Litvinova 2007).

2. The term ‘logocentrism’ is used following Mikhail Yampolsky’s (1994, 12) explanation as ‘Soviet film mentality’. In his article, he argues: ‘Our films traditionally focus on the problems of the hero’s psychology, the nature of social conflicts or narrative collisions – aspects that belong to the literary bases of the film. … Here the influence of our word-focused cultural tradition is felt. Russian culture is verbal rather than visual’ (ibid., emphasis in the original).

3. Peter Brooks underlines that melodramatic individuals aim to express everything about their selves: ‘The desire to express all seems a fundamental characteristic of the melodramatic mode. Nothing is spared because nothing is left unsaid; the characters stay on stage and utter the unspeakable, give voice to their deepest feelings, dramatize through their heightened and polarized words and gestures the whole lesson of their relationship’ (Brooks 1995, 4). So, the law of the genre is to tell everything, but the means of communication appear to be visual: actors’ bodies as signs of ideas, gestures and dances as their relations. In this case, the characters’ bodies and clothes function as statements in the melodramatic ‘text of muteness’ (Brooks 1995, 41).

4. ‘Look’ forms an opposition to the ‘gaze’ introduced by Laura Mulvey (2009). Look includes fashion information and information about a character. When the audience is involved in fashion consumption, they are ‘at least temporarily oblivious to narrative and moral judgments as they process crucial aspects of the character’s manner and appearance’ (Munich 2011, 3). This statement is questionable, but the distinction between the gaze (the term referring mainly to a gendered or social relation from spectator to character) and the look (the term describing a fashion-based message from an actor to the audience) is useful for this research.

5. Nancy Condee (1995, viii) points at this characteristic of Soviet culture: ‘two interrelated features of the Soviet period bear mention here: its strong tendency toward a fixed hierarchy of cultural production and the particular way that it fetishized high culture’.