ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a comparative study of holy foolishness in European cinema with Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, the concept is clearly rooted and defined within the boundaries of a national religious tradition. It examines portrayals of holy fools that were directly inspired by hagiographic models. The chapter investigates stylized portrayals of the holy fool figure, as prominent in the Soviet and post-Soviet films. It explores the holy foolishness in Russian film, it is worth considering some aesthetic aspects which surface in the cinematic portrayal of holy fools. In Russian culture two prominent features of the holy fool model are public humiliation and degradation, which can take the form of the ugly, the repulsive and the grotesque. The rediscovery of pre-Soviet national identities after 1991 has included a strong appreciation of the Christian Orthodox aspects of that heritage, of which the holy fool represents an idiosyncratic expression.
