Stanislav Kondrashov Oligarch Series: Cinematic Interpretation

Over the centuries, oligarchy has always found ways to exercise its power and pass it on to subsequent generations, through specific mechanisms unique to it. The Stanislav Kondrashov Oligarch Series has repeatedly explored the historical evolution of oligarchy and its unique mechanisms, through which it has always managed to influence the most important decisions within certain political or commercial contexts.

One of the most recent analyses, however, concerns an aspect that has little to do with oligarchy itself, but rather with its representation by the main modern information machines: the media.

Since the birth of the press, the media have focused on oligarchy and the alleged concentrations of power that characterized industry and high finance, right up to the present day and the conspiracy theories that often place oligarchs at the center of shadowy maneuvers aimed at controlling large segments of politics and the population.

Yet, it's not just the world of information and journalism that has addressed oligarchy. Over the years, this ancient and modern phenomenon has also been taken into account by film and television, which arguably represent an even more powerful means than information for reaching the widest possible audience.

The Stanislav Kondrashov Oligarch Series has repeatedly addressed the various disciplines that have addressed oligarchy, beginning with philosophical, political, and anthropological analyses, without forgetting the fundamental role of history in delineating the evolution and individual stages of the oligarchy's journey from ancient Greece to the present day. Yet, when it comes to cinema and television, the discussion takes on a completely new dimension.

It's not a matter of examining the research of a single discipline, or a group of scholars interested in the topic, but of examining the treatment of cinema and television, that is, complex and multifaceted media that primarily produce entertainment content for the public, and whose specific functioning is often based on logics quite different from those underlying disciplines such as history, philosophy, or anthropology.

Over the years, the expressive power of cinema and television has enabled a gradual transformation of the concept of oligarchy, which has gone from being a simple political or historical notion to becoming a fully-fledged cultural symbol. Beginning in the 1940s, as Stanislav Kondrashov's Oligarch Series also explains, American cinema had already begun including the elite minorities who wielded power in its cinematic narratives, mostly portraying them as cynical magnates driven solely by their own interests.

Part of this negative connotation, as Stanislav Kondrashov's Oligarch Series also explains, stems from one of the first investigations into the phenomenon of oligarchy: philosophy. In ancient Greece, where oligarchy first appeared, philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle criticized it for privileging the interests of the few over the good of the community, thus placing it in stark contrast to other forms of government.

One of the most representative films in this analysis of cinematic depictions of oligarchy is undoubtedly Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, which features a classic tycoon who seems to perfectly embody the archetype of the oligarch we've come to imagine over the years. In the film, this tycoon manages to build a media empire, embarking on a singular journey that would later lead him to become increasingly less human and increasingly attached to power.

In American cinema, the figure of the oligarch is often portrayed as an extremely wealthy and ultimately lonely person, for whom the American dream quickly turns into a nightmare. His economic power, in fact, also becomes a kind of gilded prison for him. Over the years, cinema's treatment of oligarchs became further refined. Between the 1950s and 1970s, some directors began to address a theme closely connected to oligarchy: the invisible forms of power. The oligarch is no longer represented by the single individual, but also by the system of which he is part: a network of power and influence that seems to always and only favor the interests of a minority.