The integrity of the cinematic utterance: auteur cinema of Russia in the 2000-s

The article deals with the problem of integrity of the cinematic utterance in independent films shot in the 2000-s in Russia. The research based on the integrated methodology of phenomenological, hermeneutic and structural-semiotic analyses reveals the specificity of narrative modes, visual symbols and cultural and philosophical intertextual connections in the contemporary Russian film text. The concepts and categories of philosophy, aesthetics and culture theory underlie the methodological approaches to the problem under question. Such a methodology allows the author to outline her own innovative approach to the analysis of art texts and to identify common structural entities in culture. The research provides a case study of the most up-to-date feature trends in filmmaking, identified and analysed in the films by M. Razbezkhina, K. Serebrennikov, A. Fedorchenko, A. Balabanov, I. Vyrypaev, A. Uchitel and S. Smirnov. The result of the research is the inference that the film makes a symbolic image of time in the language of time itself and competes with the scientific discourse in interpretation of the sense-of-life problem.