Theoretical foundations of poetic film

Abstract

The theory of montage by Sergei Eisenstein became an important stage in the development of the concept of representation of "poetic film". In the opinion of the director, the essence of the cinematographic thought is the decomposition of the real existing environment by means of cinematographic means - lighting, angles, views, traveling/movement of the camera - and by "montage" of the elements thus obtained.  This montage series is determined by rhythmic-poetic rules. In this way, cinematography/cinematography is given the opportunity to represent the articulation of complicated important meanings through organic means and procedures.

1. Eisenstein had developed a unique philosophy of film montage - film montage is created as a synthesis of the comparison of two elements, whereby a third "being" is created on the basis of their formal characteristics. These discoveries became an important support for the development of cinematic art as a political text because they placed a special emphasis on the artistic.

From today's point of view, S. Eisenstein has created a strange and unique concept of intellectual film by making it possible to order the terms (contents) according to the individual frames.

Nikoloz Shengelaia was the first director to use S. Eisenstein's "attraction montage" in the Georgian film of the 1920s in his film "Elisso" (1928). The episodes of "lamento" and "dance" are rightly called masterpieces of the "attraction montage". They have long belonged to the cultural treasure of world film history.

With the emergence of the sound film, a whole series of changes took place in Soviet film. As a result, montage, as the most important narrative technique, together with its tropics, cleared the way for realistic narration. The 1930s and 1940s were the years of experimentation in film, dedicated to the realistic (and of course idealistic) portrayal of life. The restrictions that applied to these experiments were similar to those of the pre-revolutionary period. The same was true for the cinematic art of the "Ottepel" ("Thawing") in the 60s. During this period, the tendencies associated with the different assessments of historical events became very clear. The cinematic art had a new spectrum of other principal demands - the cinematic art was obliged to devote "more interest to man and his inner world".

The representation of the inner world of man on the screen had an impact on film poetics. There was a "semantization" (as in the 1920s) of the visual means of representation, which made the use of metaphorical means topical again. It all began with the film by Mikhail Kalatosishvili (Kalatosov) "The Cranes are Flying" (1957).

The "replacement of reality" by director Mikhail Kalatosishvili and cameraman Sergei Urusevsky has nothing in common with the "deformation of reality". Here we are talking about the complete portrayal of those tendencies and those indispensable events that were characteristic of the cinematic art of the 1950s. The "substitution of reality" by the means of cinematographic art testifies to the fact that film has succeeded in appropriating the image of reality and developing further in this direction. "The Cranes are Flying" was a kind of summary of how the Soviet film tried to apply the methods and means of neo-romantic film on the Soviet basis and thus paved the way for the great cinematic art of the 1960s. 

"The Cranes are Flying" corresponds to the montage-like, poetic conception of reality in the film of the 1920s, as well as the artistic capture of the realistic world. This was excellently expressed in the masterpiece of M. Kalatosishvili's early work "The Salt of Svanetia" - by the clear black and white graphics of the mountain landscape, by the expressiveness in the construction of the image and the variety of the landscapes to be photographed, by the hidden romanticism and at the same time by the preservation of the strict cinematic signature.

"The Cranes are Flying" is a film with which everything began and a film with which everything continued. It is precisely at this time that cinematic art renounces the direct literary metaphor and creates its own cinematographic metaphor.

The development of the cinematic language clearly shows that the cinematic art works out its own concept through metaphor. The traditional definition of metaphor in poetry does not always correspond to the events of cinematic art. Metaphor gains new qualities in the art of film.

Apart from screen metaphors - (i.e. those metaphors that are created through the application of cinematic means, such as editing, camera movement, angle of view /french raccourcir- etc.), verbal, acoustic, musical, color metaphors are also distinguished. Thus the film metaphor proves to be a synthetic unit of all these types.

For this reason the general term is introduced into film theory - "the metaphorical in film". This term can be defined as follows: it is the pictoriality/imagery that acquires a transferred meaning through the application of all means of expression of film.

But the metaphor in film is not only an effort to penetrate into the depths of the full picture, but also to expand in space and time.

The art of film has much in common with the expanded metaphor in prose: the simultaneity of the discovery of the development of the subject and its transferred meaning; the necessity of the metaphorical context and subtext (hidden text) for the creation of the metaphor; the transformation of the metaphor into a constructive principle. The extension of the metaphor within the framework of the poetic form could lead to the abandonment of the development of the subject, the holistic narrative line. It was precisely this process that took place in the cinematic art of the 1920s, when metaphorism pushed narrative to second place, and thus the process of diverting attention from the subject began.

Within the framework of poetic constructions, film could not simultaneously show the course of the action and its metaphorical component, but in film, the metaphorical is unthinkable without the narrative. The modern metaphorical film icon cannot exist independently without relying on the narrative.