Изграждане на автентичност в условния свят на филма „Лице под маска“ (1970) на Рангел Вълчанов
The construction of authenticity in the conditional world of the film ‘A Face under a Mask’ (1970) by director Rangel Valchanov

Summary/Abstract: In the beginning of the paper, I define my understanding of authenticity in cinema, whose realisation I accept as a fundamental task of the director’s work. I support the thesis that authenticity does not always depend on the stylistic decision of the film and does not always correspond to the true and realistic representation of reality. In my view, authenticity is connected predominantly with the personal truth of the director. The choice to study the film ‘A Face under a Mask’ (1970) by Rangel Valchanov is an attempt to prove this statement. At the beginning of the 1970s, the Bulgarian director is given the opportunity to shoot a film after his own script in Prague. The past decade, prior to the Prague Spring in 1968, is a golden period in the Czech cinema, known as the Czech New Wave, or the Czech Miracle. Rangel Valchanov was deeply impressed by the achievements of the Czech cinematographers. He himself had already experimented with the possibilities of the cinema truths and neo realism in his first films and was on the lookout for new ways of self-expression. He was more and more interested in the accomplishment of a conditional cinema narrative, which, in the director’s point of view, could successfully show the subjective universe of the artist in its entirety. The paper analyses the new approach of directing in the film ‘A Face under a Mask’ and its outcomes with regards to the topic of authenticity. With this film, Rangel Valchanov enters organically the process of ‘the artist’s individualisation’ in cinema, which defines the spirit of the European cinematographer in the 1960s.

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