Аннотация
“Where am I?” Childhood Memoirs in the Context of the Cinematic Narrative of Lyubov’ Arkus’s Anton’s Right Here (2012)
This article is focused on the role and the place of childhood memories in the documentary film Anton’s Right Here (2012), directed by Lyubov’ Arkus. The film features Anton Kharitonov, an autistic teenager, living with his mother in St. Petersburg. Four years of their lives, during which Anton’s mother dies of cancer, are captured by the documentary. The article explores the ways in which Arkus’s own traumatic accounts of losing her father as a child are incor- porated into the structure of her cinematic narrative. Various theoretical approaches (Walter Benjamin, Cathy Caruth, and Jacques Derrida’s use of the metaphor of correspondence) are explored to reveal the issue of the coexistence and mutual reinforcement of the visual and the narrative, the questions of death and mourning, presence and absence, the past and the present in the film.