The experience of periodizing the history of national cinemas

The subject of the research is periodization strategies in canonical works on the history of national cinemas from five representative traditions (French, Italian, Japanese, American, South Korean), differing in terms of industrial organization, cultural-political factors, and intellectual traditions of film studies. The study focuses on identifying implicit and explicit connections in the formation of periodization principles. The reconstruction of connections occurs through an architectonic analysis of the structure of sources: the chronological scope of works, the nomenclature of periods and sections, principles of material division, and the authors' architectonic decisions. Hybrid strategies that combine technological, political, aesthetic, institutional, and conceptual foundations, as well as mono-conceptual approaches (neo-formalist, discursive, studio-institutional) are analyzed. Special attention is paid to the uneven temporal distribution of sections as an indicator of teleological models and the recognition of certain periods as culminating moments in national cinemas. An architectonic analysis of fifteen canonical sources, selected based on criteria of canonical status, institutional authority of authors, and temporal distribution, is conducted with the reconstruction of implicit periodization strategies through the study of chronological coverage, nomenclature of periods, principles of division, and the architectonics of works. The particular novelty of the research lies in the results obtained from a systematic comparative analysis of periodization strategies of five national film studies traditions based on a unified methodology of architectonic analysis of canonical sources. A statistical dominance of hybrid approaches over mono-conceptual ones has been identified; a correlation between the uneven temporal distribution of sections and the teleological models of national cinemas has been established. The following conclusions were drawn during the research: the limitations of traditional approaches (ignoring qualitative transformations in chronological periodization, reducing the artistic process to external events in the political, abstracting from material production conditions in the aesthetic, and being limited by organizational structures in the institutional) justify the need for developing an alternative periodization principle that meets the requirements of immanence to the nature of cinema as a collective creative process, universality of application to various national traditions and historical periods, and systematic integration of institutional, economic, political, and aesthetic factors through a unified analytical framework.