Russian Formalism and The Poetics of Cinema

 OPOYAZ (Society for the Study of Poetics Language) (St. Petersburg)   Victor Shklovsky

  Boris Eikhenbaum

  Osip Brik

  Yury Tynyanov

  The Moscow Linguistics Circle   Roman Jakobson

The Poetics of Cinema (1927)

  “Preface.” Kirill Shutko

  “Problems of Cine-Stylistics.” Boris Eikhenbaum

  “The Fundamentals of Cinema.” Yury Tynyanov

  “The Nature of Cinema.” B. Kazansky

  “Poetry and Prose in the Cinema.” Viktor Shklovsky

  “Towards a Theory of Film Genres.” A. Piotrovsky

  “The Cameraman’s Part in Making a Film.” Mikhailov & Moskvin

Basic concepts of Formalism

  The Formal Method, or “scientific” study of language and art.

  The distinction between practical and poetic language.

 Motivation and aesthetic unity

  The “dominant” as the principle structural feature of a work of art.

 Art as the defamiliarization of perception.

Formalism and The Poetics of Cinema

  The Formal Method in the study of language and meaning.   The “scientific” study of aesthetic language and practice as

“social phenomenon, sui generis.”

  Practical and poetic language.   “Art lives by being abstracted from everyday use in that it has

no practical application. . . . If art does employ everyday things then it is as material—with the aim of presenting it in an unexpected interpretation or displaced form . . . .” (“Cine-Stylistics” 7).

  The work of art has no “practical” function save that of play: “the discharging of those energies of the human organism which are excluded from or find only partial application in everyday use” (“Cine-Stylistics” 7).

Formalism and The Poetics of Cinema

 Motivation and aesthetic unity.   Every individual part of the work

of art is invested with meaning and intentional form, and the parts are always interrelated in the on-going development of the whole, giving the work unity.

Formalism and The Poetics of Cinema

  The dominant “may be considered the focusing component of the work of art: it rules, determines and transform the remaining components. It is the dominant which guarantees the integrity of the structure" (Roman Jakobson).   The dominant as a characteristic quality of individual

arts   Photogeny or “cinegeny.”   The cinema displaces the dominant feature of theatre—the

audible word—with a new dominant: movement observed in details.

  Study of the dominant as study of “devices”: characteristic strategies or structures of an aesthetic form.

  The dominant may also be the lead device or ‘hero’ unifying the development of an individual film.

Formalism and The Poetics of Cinema

 Art as the defamiliarization of perception.   Zatrudnenie (“making difficult”) and

ostranenie (“making strange”).   Photogeny as the “trans-sense” essence

of cinema.   “The principle of ‘photogeny’ has

defined the basic essence of cinema as being a totally specific and conventional one. From now on the deformation of the real world has assumed its natural place in the cinema, as in the other arts” (17).

The nature of “film language”   Semantics of the frame and semantics of

montage.

  The shot as a polysemantic “cine-word.”

  The basic units of articulation: the cine-phrase and the cine-period.

  “Inner speech” and the film spectator.

The nature of “film language”   Semantics of the frame.   The shot as a “lexical unit.”

The nature of “film language”: semantics of montage

0. Film frame: film strip passing through projector

1. Movement in frame as film "atom"

2. Montage frame or shot

-----------

3. Cine-phrase: group of a-temporal elements clustered around an accentual nucleus.   Regressive type   Progressive type

4. Cine-period or segment: linkage of phrases and the problem of punctuation marks (fades, dissolves, etc.)   Temporal constructs: simultaneity and parallelism   Symbolic constructs

-----------

5. Construction of internal speech

Inner speech and the film spectator   Inner speech as “thinking in space.”

  Lev Vygotsky: “While in external speech thought is embodied in words, in inner speech words die as they bring forth thought. Inner speech is to a large extent thinking in pure meanings. It is a dynamic, shifting, unstable thing, fluttering between word and thought.”

  Inner speech as active interpretation or the construction of sense by the spectator.   "The crux of the matter is that every scene is presented to the

spectator in pieces, in jerks. There is a lot which the spectator does not entirely see--the intervals between the jerks are filled up with internal speech. But for this internal speech to be constructed and for it to give the spectator an impression of fullness and logicality the jerks must move with a certain defined linkage and the transitions must be sufficiently motivated" (27).