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Videography of Love and Marriage Order
The chapter is about staging a collective utopia of romantic love through a marriage ceremony. On the one hand, cultural rituals of love as a marriage ceremony meet national values, on the other hand, they are influenced by a wide range of modernization trends (from social demography to market influence and digitalization). Presented study is focused on the so-called outdoor wedding registration as a relatively new and expanding wedding trend in the Russian cultural context. As such a decoration, the author has chosen the Tsaritsyno Park (Tsaritsyno is a palace and park ensemble in the south of Moscow, founded by order of Empress Catherine II in 1776. It is an architectural and historical monument of the so-called “Russian Gothic”. It was built by architects Vasily Bazhenov and Matvey Kazakov) located in Moscow, which sets its spatial and visual logic for the wedding narrative and its documentation with visual means. The theoretical focus of our research is on the dynamics and possible convergence of the pragmatic and romantic aspects of the modern phenomenon of love and marriage order which are embodied in media representations of changing, but preserving, traditional national moments of rituals. The empirical focus is actually on of the triad: the video media product, the opinion/ position of the professionals creating it, and the opinion/reaction of customers. The marriage ceremony as a counterpoint in the love story of the couple acquires in the process of production of a media product—a wedding video—not only a documentation of the most important life event. Thanks to the video, a love couple now identifies their wedding ceremony experiences and feelings with a commercial product. This media product delivers the narcissistic joy of reflection and recognition and thereby generates a modified reverse perspective on one’s own lifeworld.
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