[...] Parallel Cinema

I must admit, the "video community" is not an exact name for Parallel Cinema; the "film community" would be more appropriate here. Be that as it may, history shows that most of the first works created with the help of video belong to the field of alternative cinema, which in those years appeared under the name "Parallel Cinema" (“Cine Fantom” in Moscow, and “Necrorealism” in Leningrad). Among its most active members we should name Cine Fantom founders Igor and Gleb Aleinikov, as well as Pyotr Pospelov, Boris Yukhananov, Yevgeny Yufit, Yevgeny Kondratyev (Moron), Sergei Bugaev-Africa. The Mansion, a three-hour cassette shot with a VHS camera by Boris Yukhananov in 1986, was the very first video created as a part of this "movement."

And yet, the notion of a community manifested itself here in the most subtle form, since the artists, or rather, the directors who created alternative cinema, worked in isolation from each other until November 1987 when the first Cine Fantom festival brought them all together.

Boris Yukhananov's texts devoted to the structure, function and potential capabilities of the video camera, in contrast to the film camera, were of great importance for video's self-determination. Also important were discussions about video as a form differing from cinema which took place at seminars held at Cine-Fantom festivals. This theoretical oeuvre makes it possible to legitimize Parallel Cinema as a video community – or at least as a community that was aware of the importance of video as a means of artistic creation, even if it remained a part of the cinematic discourse [13].

Of course, these works, unlike early video in America, were not born in battles for social change, although they still had subversive value. This was evident in the fact that these works clearly differed from the official mainstream, surfacing and becoming accessible to an audience wider than – as it was at the very beginning – a circle of friends gathering in the filmmaker's apartment. [...]

[13] Essays written by Yukhananov and the discussions of the Cine-Fantom festival began being published in 1987 in the Cine-Fantom (Moscow) and Mitya (Leningrad) magazines.