The cine-eye goes digital: Vertov, Paradjanov and the poetic database

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Content THE CINE-EYE GOES DIGITAL: VERTOV, PARADJANOV AND THE “POETIC DATABASE” by Daria Shembel _____________________________________________________ A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (SLAVIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES) May 2009 Copyright 2009 Daria Shembel ii DEDICATION For my grandparents, Salme and Victor. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I thank first and foremost my committee chair and adviser, Marcus Levitt, who was extremely generous and supportive throughout the entire process and to whom I owe much of my growth as a scholar. I deeply appreciate his intellectual acuity, solid professional advice and kindness. His meticulous attention to my writing went far beyond academic obligation and helped me not only to constrain the syntax of “lyrical excitement” but also to organize my thoughts and clarify my arguments. I extend my gratitude to my dissertation committee members, Sally Pratt, Alik Zholkovsky and Aniko Imre. I thank Sally Pratt for providing invaluable support and constructive critique along the way and for helping me to transcend my childhood fascination with binary structures. Alik Zholkovsky, whose articles on Pasternak I read when a child, was the reason I became a scholar of poetics and came to study literature to the US. I thank him for having always challenged and pushed me further in my thinking about this project, which made it better than it would otherwise have been. I want to thank Aniko Imre for sharing her profound knowledge of film theory and for suggesting the framework of “poetic database” which allowed me a new “defamiliarized” look on the convergence of poetry and new media that was crucial for iv finishing this thesis. In very different ways I benefited intellectually from the graduate seminars at USC Slavic Department and would like to extend my thanks to Jenifer Presto, John Bowlt, Nikoletta Misler, Roumiana Pancheva, Boris Wolfson and Tom Seifrid. I want to thank Kirill Postoutenko for his mentorship during my first several years at USC whose breadth of knowledge in disparate fields has continued to inspire me throughout my graduate studies. I am indebted to Tania Akishina who introduced me to language instruction in the US, and who has always shared her insight on teaching and has provided unwavering support to me for many years. I thank Susan Kechekian for her unmatched generosity and encouragement, and for never growing tired of answering my countless questions on navigating USC. I owe special thanks to several individuals from USC School of Cinematic Arts: Priya Jaikumar, Dana Polan, David James, Marsha Kinder from whom I learnt a great deal about film theory and experimental cinema. I am in debt to Jon Wagner from Film Critical Studies whose brilliant insights have helped me to shape the project at the early stage of its development. Lev Manovich from UCSD introduced me to digital scholarship and provided very useful feedback at various stages of my project. My gratitude is due to my colleagues at San Diego State University. v I have been fortunate to teach under Veronica Shapovalov, whose continued support has been much appreciated. I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Joseph Goring for reading and commenting upon many pages of this dissertation. His caring words, generosity, and unique sense of language have helped me tremendously. My sincere thanks go to my dear friends Eric Robinson and Don Wetzel for their tireless readings of drafts and offers of suggestions and encouragement. I would have also never been able to finish this project without the support of my friends. Katia Kudriavtseva, who has been writing her thesis hand in hand with me, has been the best friend anyone can wish for and made sure that we both keep our good spirits throughout. For the many conversations about art and poetics, I thank Stas Tkachenko who has profoundly shaped my outlook on life. To my girls back home who encouraged me to follow my dreams and proved that friendship never ends, even when they are Transatlantic, thank you. My academic endeavors would not be possible without the support of my family. I cannot imagine completing this dissertation without Dmitry Avrorin whose brilliance and imagination has been a continuous source of inspiration to me, and whose love, patience and humor has helped me overcome what seemed to be hopeless impediments along the way. He has vi read and commented on every page of this thesis and this is as much his success as it is mine. I thank my mother, Catherine Okulov, who has always been my intellectual example, and who has engendered in me creativity, curiosity, and love for language, poetry and arts. Finally, I would not have been able to accomplish anything in my life without love and wisdom of my biggest supporter, my grandmother, Salme Sarapp, whose sense of humor knows few boundaries, and whose cheer and energy inspire me every day. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication ii Acknowledgements iii List of Figures ix Abstract xi Introduction 1 Chapter 1: “Poetic Database” in Dziga Vertov’s Cinema 19 The Cine-Eye as a Pre-Electronic Database 24 Vertov and the Contemporary Poetic Experiments 31 The Cine-Eye and the Literary Artels 33 Vertov and the Formalists 38 “Poetic Database” at Work: A Sixth Part of the World 46 Creating a Poetic Database 52 The Comeback of “Newsreel Poetry” in the Age of New Media 58 Gilles Deleuze’s Re-Reading of Vertov 59 Vertov and Database Aesthetics: the “Tangled Rhizome” or the “Solvable Maze” 67 Chapter 2: Poetics of Cinema as a Poetics of Database 79 Poetic Films and the “Plot Machine.” 81 From Verse Theory to Cine-Semiotics 89 Poetic Signification in Film 95 Envisioning the Poetics of Database 99 Chapter 3 “The Cinema of Poetry”: “Poetic Database” As a Rhizome 104 “Il Cinema Di Poesia”: the Theory. The Origins of the “Poetic” for Pasolini 106 viii The Free Indirect Subjective and the Bakhtin Circle 112 The Power of the “Cinema of Poetry” 122 Gilles Deleuze’s Re-Reading of the “Cinema of Poetry” 123 Tom O’Connor’s Poetic Acts and New Media 128 The “Cinema of Poetry” and Interactive Database Narratives 132 Chapter 4: Poetry in Catalogues? Artefacts against Semiology in Paradjanov's The Color of Pomegranates 141 Sayat Nova in Production: The Complexity of Tableaux 141 Representation in Terms of Pictorial Art: Self-valued Art 148 Works in The Color of Pomegranates The Free Indirect Subjective in The Color of Pomegranates 171 Deleuze’s “Time-Capsules” on Paradjanov’s Tableaux 186 Paradjanov’s “Poetic Database” 196 Conclusion 203 Bibliography 214 Appendix A: Literary Scenario of Sayat Nova 228 Appendix B: Shooting Scenario of Sayat Nova 230 ix LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: The Poetic Database of Formal Properties in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin developed at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at USC 2 Figure 2: Frames from the Second Reel of A Sixth Part of the World 50 Figure 3: Frames from A Sixth Part of the World 57 Figure 4: NASA Monitor Wall 66 Figure 5: Still Lifes From the Opening Sequence of The Color of 152 Pomegranates Figure 6: Miniatures from the Illuminated Manuscripts Featured in The Color of Pomegranates 154 Figure 7: Frames from the Novella “You are Fire” in The Color of 159 Pomegranates Figure 8: “Khakuli Triptych” 161 Figure 9: Two Consequent Shots of King Irakli from The Color of 175 Pomegranates Figure 10: Two Consequent Shots of Princess Anna (The Color of Pomegranates) 176 Figure 11: Dream Sequences of Sayat Nova (The Color of Pomegranates) 191 Figure 12: Inventory Sequences from The Color of Pomegranates 199 Figure 13: A Laser Scanned Image from “House of Cards” 204 x Figure 14: User-generated Versions of “House of Cards” 205 xi ABSTRACT This dissertation provides a revisionist study of poetic film through the concept of “poetic database” and examines how the theory and practice of poetry/film convergence laid the groundwork for the development of new media “database aesthetics” (Manovich). The project focuses on the experimental cinema of Dziga Vertov and Sergei Paradjanov and explores how the search for poetic sensibility in their works has led to the strategies of interchangeability, interactivity and virtuality that represent an essential part of their “poetic databases” and further define the logic of digital environments as a whole. Sustaining the links between theory and practice of poetic cinema, the films of Vertov and Paradjanov are placed within the specific theoretical approaches: the Formalist (pre)-semiotic and Western “ocularcentic” tradition (Pasolini, Deleuze) that inform the sources of their “poetic databases” and provide the basis for the narratological and rhizomatic methods of the analysis of digital environments. The study also investigates the tension between totalizing ideology and the utopian liberation of perception in Vertov’s work and the paradoxical effect it has on limitations that cultural production encounters in xii the age of digital media. My approach is partly based on the film theory of the late French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whose analysis of virtuality and the senses is applied to Paradjanov’s tableaux aesthetics, while Deleuze’s work on de/re-territorialization, in collaboration with Felix Guattari, is used to underscore Vertov’s conflict between liberated perception and the politics of form. By examining how different approaches to poetic cinema led to the logic of the “poetic database,” the dissertation reveals the internal paradoxes within the database culture: on the one hand, it may release new creative energy and freedom, and, on the other, due to its reliance on the maximum efficiency of communication, it could just as well function as the source of new restrictions. 1 INTRODUCTION My first encounter with a poetic database occurred in 2004 when I was involved in a research project on the compilation of Rhythmico- Syntactic Dictionary of Iambic Tetrameter, which resulted in the development of an Interactive Multilingual Database of Formal Properties in Indo-European Poetry: POETICA. 1 The project was designed with the conceptual and technical support of the USC Institute for Multimedia Literacy and, for the prototype, focused on a single dataset of all surviving iambic tetrameter texts published in Russia in the 18 th century. I have been compiling this data for five years working in the Special Collection Departments of the four major state libraries in Moscow and Saint- Petersburg. While still a project in progress, POETICA aims to enable students, teachers and researchers to browse through whole texts, search for specific keywords, arrange materials by an author, genre, year, or look for common rhymes, rhythmic patterns, syntactic constructions, phonic similes, lexical repetitions, etc. 2 1 The project was initiated by Prof. Kirill Postoutenko (Smolny College, Saint-Petersburg, Russia). 2 The poetic media reliance on a constant (e.g. the use of a specific meter) and multiple variables has always provided evidence for the search for interchangeable units and their combinations 2 Figure 1: The Poetic Database of Formal Properties in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin developed at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at USC within the structure of poetic texts. The first examples of “algorithmic” poetry date back to the oral tradition and Homeric epic. As Albert Lord has demonstrated in his study The Singer of Tales, the Homeric poems show traces of a bardic verse-making tradition that entailed a highly formulaic principle of composition. Lord describes how oral poets used a large repertoire of alternative stock formulas at many levels of composition (depictions of generic actions, e.g. rescue, returns, capture of cities; common beginnings and endings of songs; ready-made digressions, e.g. the catalogue of the ships) that were interchangeable and could be used in a variety of recitations. Extensive research has been done by theorists of verse on the derivation of semantic invariants within one metrical pattern (R. Jakobson, K.Taranovsky, M. Gasparov) or on thematic and structural invariance within the author’s “poetic world” (A. Zholkovsky, Iu. Shcheglov). 3 Figure 1, Continued In this work, however, I will use “poetic database” as a conceptual tool to analyze poetic value in cinema. More specifically, I intend to apply the concept of “poetic database” to the revisionist study of so-called poetic film and to trace how the cinema’s appropriation of poetic sensibility and structure has been instrumental in creating the new modes of cinematic expression that are being realized in the art of digital media. 4 The meaning of “poetic film,” incorporating several theoretical perspectives, has evolved over time. One of the limitations to the present study is that it does not attempt to embrace the entire history of the relations between poetry and cinema, but focuses on prominent examples that demonstrate how the search for poeticism in cinema laid the groundwork for the development of the new media database sensibility (Manovich). 3 Thus, this dissertation explores the art of “cinematic poetry” that led to the creation of “poetic databases” in the works of the Soviet directors Dziga Vertov and Sergei Paradjanov. Sustaining the links between theory and practice of 3 In The Language of New Media (2001), Lev Manovich discusses how the principles involved in computer software and hardware interfere with the cultural logic of the production of new media objects. Among the computer operations affecting the new media cultural production, Manovich lists programmability, modularity (fractal structure), automation (e.g. Photoshop can automatically modify images), variability (the end product may be altered as in non-linear editing), and transcoding, which involves the inclusion of cultural and computer layers into the structure of a new media object. The most important computer technology infiltrating the realm of aesthetics involves the database, which emerging as an application for computer data access and organization, has been elevated to the status of a “new cultural form in its own right.” Database logic defines the principles of the new media production, which are based on selecting (the artist doesn’t create from scratch but selects from the menu, e.g., the bank of effects and database of stock footage; selecting objects’ metadata) and compositing (combining multiple images into a single object, e.g. inserting a live performance of an actor into a virtual set) among other operations. Most importantly, the database has also become a cultural form in the age of digital media. “Choosing values from a number of predefined menus” shaped a new type of aesthetics that uses explicit and implicit forms of data organization and retrieval. Serving as a structural principle for some of the new media objects (multimedia works, e.g., virtual museums, educational CD-ROMs, internet), the database also redefines the creative process, assuming the possibility of the application of multiple interfaces to the same material. Manovich contends, “Regardless of whether new media objects present themselves as linear narratives, interactive narratives, databases, or something else, underneath, on the level of material organization, they are all databases. In new media, the database supports a variety of cultural forms that range from direct translation (i.e., a database stays a database) to a form whose logic is the opposite of the logic of the material form itself – narrative” (228). 5 poetic cinema, the films of these two directors will be placed within the specific theoretical approaches to poetic film that inform the sources of their “poetic databases.” I will examine the Formalist “scientific” semiotic approach to the question of poetic film genre and structure, developed by the Russian theorists in The Poetics of Cinema (1927), and the Western ocularcentric 4 tradition in the application of poetic ideas to film initiated by Pier Paolo Pasolini in his 1965 programmatic article “The Cinema of Poetry.” The development of Pasolini’s ocularcentric approach to poetic film is also explored through the works of Gilles Deleuze (Cinema 1, Cinema 2) and the contemporary media scholar Tom O’Connor (Poetic Acts and New Media, 2007). Throughout the history of film studies, the convergence of cinema and poetry has proven to have significant and far-reaching effects on the development of the cinematic medium and has opened new avenues in film 4 I borrow the term “ocularcentric” from Martin Jay’s study Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. He uses “ocularcentric” to designate image- oriented approach to film. He argues that, starting from the early sixties, there emerged a backlash against phenomenological tendencies in film theory repudiating the primacy of visual perception over cognition and denying the medium’s capacity to reproduce reality. Specifically, he mentions that there was a growing debate over cinema and ideology, and a critique of the spectacle that contributed to the negation of an idealized concept of purity of vision and passive spectatorship, e.g. in the theory of Guy Debord. It is important to note that Pasolini’s “cinema of poetry” insists on cinematic ocularcentrism, whereas the contemporaneous film theory takes an entirely different direction, moving away from the models of the “visible.” 6 theory and practice. Thus, applying the study of verse semantics to cinema, the Russian Formalists made pioneering contributions to cine-semiology (Metz, Eco), while Pier Paolo Pasolini’s concept of the “cinema of poetry” laid the groundwork for exploring virtuality and the senses in film (Deleuze). In fact, cinema literally may be said to have emerged out of poetry. For example, the early Russian cinema was almost exclusively based on the adaptations of short lyric and narrative poems, which remained popular types of production until the Soviet montage era. Starting with the first Russian feature Stenka Razin, released in 1908, which was an adaptation of the popular Russian song “Iz-za ostrova na strezhen’,” the Russian silent cinema adapted every longer poem written by Pushkin, more than ten poetic pieces by Lermontov, twelve poems by Nekrasov, and more than thirty folk songs and romantic ballads. 5 Though Russian adaptations of poetry lost their actuality during the political era that harnessed cinema for the service of the Revolution, the appeal of poetry as the source of inspiration for cinematic theory and practice has never stopped. For example, Sergei Eisenstein used the ideogrammatic principle of combination 5 This is based on research I conducted in 2005 on pre-revolutionary Russian adaptations of poetry in the Russian State Film Archive (Gosfilmofond) at Belye Stolby. 7 in Japanese tanka and haiku poetry for the development of his dialectical montage (Eisenstein, “The Cinematographic Principle and Ideogram,” 1929); Dziga Vertov applied the Formalist study of the rhythmico-syntactic structure of verse to the principles of rhythmic montage in his “Theory of Intervals”; the Russian Formalists based their analysis of film on the study of poetic function in verbal arts (The Poetics of Cinema, 1927); the poet, film-director and theoretician Pier Paolo Pasolini appealed to poetry as a core element of his visual, oneiric cinema and based his inquiries into cine- semiotics on the study of poetic value in cinema; American post-war experimental filmmakers (Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopoulos) largely turned to the Romanticist dialectics of seeing and subjectivity in poetry, 6 as well as to Imagist aesthetics in creating their “trancist” 7 and “single-central-image films.” 8 6 Discussing the primacy of lyrical voice in American experimental cinema, the Avant-garde film scholar David James makes an analogy with the aesthetics of Romanticism. Arguing for the primacy of social motives in American avant-garde filmmakers’ internalization, the scholar comments on the 18 th century shift in the cultural production paradigm, which confronted a poet with the commodification of his work – the process conditioned by the forces of urbanization and industrialization in the late 18 th century. In consequence, the cultural authority of poetic voice was dismantled, and the mediating power of the poet was displaced from the position of commentator on the social processes and interpreter of common experiences resulting in the foregrounding of the poet’s individual consciousness (James 36). 7 “Trancist” film refers to a dreamlike narrative containing the elements of ritual, dance and sexual metaphor, attributing a specific quality to its protagonist who “passes in visibly among 8 The fact that the search for poetic sensibility in film continues into the digital era is suggested by the recent symposium “In the Vernacular. Poetry and Experimental Film” organized in the Fall 2007 by the USC School of Cinematic Art as part of the USC Arts and Humanities Initiative “Visions and Voices.” The event aimed to bring together poets and filmmakers, as well as film and literary scholars to explore the question of “how [does] poetry [provide] a model for filmmakers who aspire to make work that is more intensely sensual, imaginatively rich, metaphoric, and self-conscious of the medium than the ‘prosaic’ narrative film” (Visions and Voices 13). As the symposium organizers David James and Daniel Tiffany noted, this event was an attempt to historicize the conjunction of poetry and film that had become the theme of a major conference for the first time in the 1953 at the historic meeting “Poetry and the Film” held by the influential North people, through dramatic landscapes toward a climactic confrontation with one’s self and one’s past.” (Sitney 18). 8 In his article “Imagism In Four Avant-Garde Films,” Adam Sitney discusses examples of the imagist film in American experimental cinema (Kenneth Anger’s Eaux d’Artifice, Charles Boultenhouse’s Handwritten, Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man: Part One and Maya Deren’s A Study in Choreoraphy for Camera) saying that their overall structures hinge upon the idea of the central image functioning as the film’s thematic core. For example, Deren’s four-minute short depicts dancer Talley Beatty performing leaps and pirouettes through spatially disjunctive images of woods, a living room, and a museum. An uninterrupted flow of the dancer’s movements restores the discontinuity created by the disjunctive sense of space and provides the narrative with unity. Sitney’s “single-central-image film” is essentially an elaboration of the imagist ideal of poetry expressed in the notions of exactness or concreteness of the image. 9 American film society Cinema 16 in New York City; the USC Symposium could be considered its long-belated sequel. Despite the gap between the two meetings, the symposium suggested that there has been continuous interest in the relations between poetry and film, and that the problem of poetic cinema has become even more topical in the age of digitally expanded cinema. The idea of using the “poetic database” as a conceptual framework for my analysis of film poetry was driven by critics’ recent rediscovery of Dziga Vertov as a database filmmaker. It has been argued by New Media scholars that earlier cinematic forms were instrumental for the creation of the art of digital media (Kinder, Manovich, Murray). It is particularly interesting that some of the prominent “film-poets” including Dziga Vertov, Luis Bunuel, Peter Greenaway, and Agnes Varda have been viewed among those most profoundly affecting the formation of the language of new media. Thus, Marsha Kinder explores how the “database narratives” of Lois Bunuel’s films have incorporated the principles of virtuality and interactivity crucial for new media production. Kinder suggests that his cinematic legacy provides great potential for advancing the interactive database narratives of 10 digital media art. 9 Without exploring the implications of the “poetic” in Dziga Vertov’s oeuvre, Lev Manovich considers him to be the precursor of digital culture’s database sensibility and examines how some of the strategies of the cine-eye have become vital for the principles of gaming software and computer programming. In The Language of New Media, Manovich suggests that in The Man with the Movie Camera (1929) Vertov, instead of creating a linear structure based on plot, uses the strategy of ordering and re-ordering pre-existent footage, which is similar to the computer-based logic of data management. Drawing objects from the database of recorded footage becomes the film’s central method. This is also rendered in the sequences depicting the editor Elizaveta Svilova working with recorded footage as she catalogizes the material according to specific categories: “physical exercise,” “the movement of a city,” “machines,” etc. (239). At the same time, Dziga Vertov’s oeuvre represents one of the most convincing examples of poetic sensibility in film. Vertov’s interest in poetry dated back to his grammar school years, when he began to write poetry, and, 9 See, for example, “Hot Spots, Avatars, and Narrative Fields Forever – Bunuel’s Legacy for New Digital Media and Interactive Database Narrative.” 11 as he himself recalls in a 1935 speech, he always used rhythmical patterns for memorization of factual material (Feldman 10). When Vertov entered the music academy in his native town of Byalistok, Poland, he pursued his interest in rhythm by experimenting with the montage of stenographs (verbatim records) – an avocation that carried him to the Russian avant- garde scene when his family settled in Moscow after the outbreak of the First World War. After resuming his higher education in Russia at the Petrograd Psychoneurological Institute, Vertov continued experimenting with rhythmic montage of sound patterns, this time already under the influence of various Futurist groups that resided in Petrograd, and he established a “Laboratory of Sound” in his apartment (Feldman 12). The purpose of the “laboratory” (whose equipment consisted of one pathephone) – to record natural sounds, break them up into separate constituent elements, and reorganize the components into a new work – reveals a direct connection with Vertov’s later (database) cine-eye method of recording “life-facts” and subsequently re-organizing them into “film-things.” 10 Vertov effectively pioneered the genre of “cinematographic poetry” realizing it in A 10 For more on Vertov’s early sound experiments, see Feldman 11-14. 12 Sixth Part of the World (1926) whose principles inform his entire corpus. He authored numerous scripts in verse reminiscent of Mayakovsky’s metric technique, supplemented his theoretical manifestoes on cinema with poetry (e.g. “Appeal at the Beginning,” 1922), and created a filmic adaptation of song lyrics in Three Songs of Lenin, 1934. In his writings, Vertov always referred to himself as a “film-poet” who creates not documentaries but “factual poetry.” Moreover, all his work appears to be driven by a rhythmic effect. He was involved in producing a special rhythmic type of editing, drawn, among other things, from the formal techniques of poetic speech. The convergence of poetry and cinema triggered the most innovative developments in cinematic thinking and inspired filmmakers to break with the conventions of contemporary representational forms and to introduce strategies of filmmaking that prefigured the logic of contemporary “database culture.” I intend to illustrate how Dziga Vertov’s work in film derived from the key concepts of Russian Avant-garde verse theory and practice. Vertov’s close collaboration with the Formalists and Futurists began when he founded the Council of Three, a group of filmmakers that included, besides Vertov himself, his brother Mikhail Kaufman, a cameraman, and his future wife Elizaveta Svilova, an editor. In 1922, the Council began to publish articles 13 and manifestos in the futurist magazine LEF edited by Vladimir Mayakovsky, Nikolai Aseev and the literary scholar Osip Brik 11 (Michelson xxiv). I will examine Vertov’s “poetic database” at work in one of the most under-researched of Vertov’s films, A Sixth Part of the World (1926), which represents Vertov’s only example of a newsreel carrying the label of “cinematographic poem.” Vertov’s cine-eye relied on the major Formalist tenet of a systemic approach to art and their conception of both poetry and film in terms of sign- oriented behavior. Thus, the Formalist insights into the poetry/film conjunction, as well as their comparative semiotic analysis of poetry and film undertaken in The Poetics of Cinema will be used to underscore the poetic origins of database cinema in Vertov. In their analyses of poetic and filmic discourse, the Formalists understood cinema as part of a linguistic system, accentuating syntagmatics and the “narrative grammar” of film juxtaposing it to the language of poetry. The political failure of revolutionary avant-garde experiments made post- war cinematic poetry turn to subjective and visual modes of expression. The 11 Vertov’s 1922 address to the filmmakers “Appeal at the Beginning,” and the 1923 theoretical manifesto “Kinoks: A Revolution” were published in LEF. 14 rejection of linguistic models in Western post-war accounts of poetic film brings us to the question of ideological implications of the “poetic database.” Dziga Vertov’s “newsreel poetry” was a highly politicized project that needed the rigidity of poetic speech and the strategies of effective data management to achieve the maximum efficiency of cinematic communication and to teach the audience to experience the world anew. The cinema of the sixties, on the contrary, in its backlash against logocentric montage forms in film, appealed to the “poetic” in order to liberate the spectator from the oppression of the signification process. In his elucidation of the “cinema of poetry” Pier Paolo Pasolini rejected the use of linguistics as a valid tool for the investigation of cinema and dwelled upon the pregrammatical, subjective, and visual dimensions of oneiric film-poetry. Pasolini’s “cinema of poetry” proved to be highly influential for the discussion of sensory phenomena and virtuality in cinema (Deleuze), which were further appropriated by new media scholarship (e.g. virtual simulations in Tom O’Connor’s Poetic Acts and New Media). In my thesis I suggest that the “cinema of poetry” is also relevant to Marsha Kinder’s notion of interactive database narratives, which provides us with 15 more evidence to posit the poetic database as a productive framework for a revisionist approach to “poetic” film. If Dziga Vertov could be seen as a bridge, a middle ground between “poetic" and “database,” there is yet another prominent visionary film-poet in Soviet cinema, Sergei Paradjanov, whose cinema went even further in terms of anticipating the principles of contemporary digital filmmaking and moving toward the computer-generated technology of the creation of virtual worlds. Unlike Dziga Vertov, the work of Paradjanov has not yet been examined in relation to new media. It is my intention to explore the strategies of database filmmaking in The Color of Pomegranates (1968) and to show the points of contact between Paradjanov’s poetic methods and the database imagination. While Paradjanov’s links with poetry seem less straightforward in comparison to Dziga Vertov’s, The Color of Pomegranates, a biopic of the eighteenth-century Armenian poet Sayat Nova, is a work inspired by Sayat Nova’s poetry rather than the biographical facts of his life. Furthermore, Paradjanov was the originator and the leading filmmaker of the so-called “poetic school” of Soviet Cinema that emerged in 16 the sixties and marked an emphasis on national specificity in the cinemas of the Soviet Republics. 12 I am going to demonstrate how the sources of the poetic in The Color of Pomegranates derived from the concept of “cinema of poetry” introduced by the Western ocularcentric school of thought (Pier Pablo Pasolini, Gilles Deleuze) but also, paradoxically, recreated Vertov’s catalogues of reality. By examining how different approaches to poetic cinema led to the logic of the “poetic database,” this thesis attempts to trace the internal paradoxes 12 The period of the sixties and seventies saw a great proliferation of work in a lyrical or poetic direction in Soviet cinema. The term “poetic school” usually refers to the new wave in the cinemas of the Soviet Republics (mainly Ukraine and Georgia), although some scholars include Tarkovsky (Lawton, Kinoglasnost 33) and Kalatozov (Steffen, A Cardiogram of the Time 33) as the auteurs of lyrical cinema. The poetic movement is believed to begin with the production of Paradjanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Dovzhenko Studio, Ukraine, 1964) and include among others such directors as the Ukrainian Yuri Ilyenko (On the Eve of Ivan Kupala, 1968; The White Bird Marked with Black, 1971) who also worked as cinematographer in Shadows, Leonid Osyka (Stone Cross 1968; Zakhar Berkut, 1971); the actor and director Ivan Mykolaichuk (Babylon Twenty, 1980); the Georgian Tengiz Abuladze (The Prayer, 1969; The Tree of Desire, 1978), Otar Iosseliani (Georgian Ancient Songs, 1969; Once Upon a Time there was a Singing Blackbird, 1970; Pastorale, 1975). Grouped together under the umbrella term “poetic school,” the films are thematically diverse. Despite the fact that it was not a unified movement, it is possible to identify the main strands. Firstly, most of the directors worked outside Moscow and Leningrad, in the Soviet republics, where censorship was generally less restrictive. Furthermore, the beginning of the Brezhnev era was characterized by a loosening of “the merger of nations” and a party policy of “one Soviet people”(Nebesio, Questionable foundations), which allowed the directors to freely incorporate national and ethnographic explorations into otherwise ideologically appropriate projects. The poetic school’s focus on folkloristic and ethnological material was an attempt on part of directors to collect and disseminate the legends and tales of national folk imagination, trace out its mythology and explore the nations’ ethnic specificity. Secondly, the folkloric material of poetic school films was transposed into an overtly visual mode of representation (expressed among other things in costumes, locations, and sets) with loosened narrative structure, which gave the school its alternative name of “plastic school,” “cinema of the images” (Vronskaya) or “painterly cinema.” 17 within the “database culture.” On the one hand, the database may release new creative energy and freedom, and on the other, due to its reliance on the maximum efficiency of communication, it could just as well function as the source of new restrictions. The dissertation consists of four chapters. The first chapter will analyze poetic origins of Dziga Vertov’s “database” cinema and discuss Vertov’s theory and practice of film-poetry within the context of the contemporary Avant-garde literary scene, as well as Vertov’s recent rediscovery as a precursor to digital media. The Deleuzo-Guattarian frameworks of rhizome and de/re-territorialization will be used to underscore Vertov’s conflict between liberated perception and the politics of form. The second chapter examines the theoretical foundations of the Formalist study of film and shows how their systemic approach to art laid the foundation for the emergence of Vertov’s “poetic database.” The third chapter considers Pasolini’s search for poetic sensibility in film and discusses the derivation of his “cinema of poetry” from the concepts of prosaics advanced by the Bakhtin group. It also demonstrates the power of the “cinema of poetry” by examining how it crosses over into some of the crucial concepts of new media. The fourth chapter offers an analysis of 18 Sergei Paradjanov’s The Color of Pomegranates and demonstrates how in a decisively visual turn away from Soviet logocentric filmmaking, Paradjanov’s creates an oneiric tale whose aesthetics of inventory surprisingly also reveal the underlying database logic. 19 CHAPTER 1: “POETIC DATABASE” IN DZIGA VERTOV’S CINEMA As database began to emerge as a new genre in contemporary media studies (Liu, Folsom) and New Media scholars became involved with the issues of continuity between “old” and “new” media (Kinder, Manovich), Dziga Vertov’s oeuvre have been rediscovered as “the most important example of a database imagination in modern media art” (Manovich 239). At the same time, Dziga Vertov’s cinema represents one of the most prominent examples of poetic sensibility in film. This chapter intends to analyze the phenomenon of “poetic database” as illustrated by the example of Dziga Vertov’s “newsreel poetry” and to examine how the “database” logic of cine-eye data collection and organization was influenced by contemporary poetic theory and practice. Furthermore, the chapter seeks to discuss Vertov as a precursor to digital media and to explore how the tensions between the politics of form and utopian perceptual formations in Vertov’s “cinematographic poetry” exemplify the potentials and limitations of digital culture as determined by database logic. 20 We should not take the definition “poetic” as it applies to Vertov’s cinema for granted. Vertov’s understanding of “poetic” in film is derived from the specific traditions of contemporary Russian Avant-garde culture, and also relates to Vertov’s quest to transcend the cinematic medium and reach a kind of pure vision through the liberation of the cine-eye. It is important to bear in mind that Vertov self-consciously refers to himself not as a film-director, but as a film-poet: “I am a writer of cinema. I am a film writer. A film poet. I write not on paper but on film” (From Notebooks, Diaries 199) and admits that he creates “newsreel poetry” rather than documentaries, applying this term to the entire corpus of his work in film (From Articles, Public Addresses 145). Vertov was certainly one of the first multi-media artists whose work on the poetry/film conjunction included writing film scripts in verse (e.g. The Girl at the Piano, Letter From A Woman Tractor Driver, A Sixth Part of The World), adapting song lyrics to the screen (Three Songs of Lenin (1934)), and pioneering a new genre of a “cinematographic poetry” which was realized in his first cine-poetic project A Sixth Part of the World (1926). Vertov’s choice of becoming a film-poet, not a film-director, was predicated in part on the superior status of the poet as prophet, as a hero of 21 revolution and innovator in the shaping the new Soviet culture. In Avant- garde culture, poetry in particular became the vehicle of radically new artistic expression. The poetic medium became the subject of formal experimentation and a rigid analysis by a variety of traditions in modernist Russian culture spanning from the experiments of Zaum’ poets to Formalist developments in poetics of verse, and LEF reinvention of poetry as a powerful propaganda tool. In the same way as different artistic alliances offered diverse accounts of the identity of poetic language, poetry for Vertov certainly implied more than one meaning. There was, however, one general concern that united diverse pre- and post-revolutionary verbal poetic experiments and also had a great impact on Vertov’s work in film: the desire to revolutionize form and destroy the old for the sake of new creation. Mayakovsky’s espousal of poetry as a proletarian art with its own rules of production had one of the strongest influences on Vertov’s conception of film-poetry. Vertov dreamt of becoming the Mayakovsky of cinema and once said about him, “Mayakovsky is a kino-eye. He sees that which the eye does not see” (From Notebooks 180). Mayakovsky’s constructivist approach to verse influenced the cine-eye method to explore and rationalize reality. In “How Are Verses Made,” Mayakovsky argued that 22 poetry should represent “the essence of facts,” and that it should “compress the facts to produce an essential, concentrated economical formulation.” Furthermore, it was Mayakovsky who provided the cine-eye with the database logic of constructing an object of art from a set of available tools. Uncovering the processes of “poetic production,” Mayakovsky insisted that it is possible to “produce good poetic work to order only when you have a large stock of preliminaries behind you” (34, 31). Vertov, almost verbatim, applied this model to the cine-eye: “Poetical work of excellence can be completed on time only if one has a large supply of poetic stock. This is essential under the kino-eye system” (From Notebooks 176). Vertov’s understanding of cinematic poetry drew on more than one Russian modernist poetic tradition and embraced the experiments of early and late Russian Futurists, as well as the Formalist study of the rhythmico- syntactic structure of poetic texts. While Vertov’s connections with the poetic literary scene are crucial for understanding of his conception of film poetry, they certainly do not exhaust it. Vertov’s contribution as a film-poet to the field of cinema was to renew forms of cinematic perception and transcend the boundaries of linearity and false (bourgeois) ideology in contemporaneous cinema. Furthermore, as a film-poet and the revolutionary 23 of form, Vertov appeared to be a hundred years ahead of his time: in his cinematic poetry Vertov created visual metaphors that presaged the logic of digital environments and became a precursor of the database sensibility defining today’s digital culture. Thus, if the first part of the present chapter focuses on the analysis of Vertov’s theory and practice in context of contemporary political and aesthetic currents, the second part explores Vertov’s rediscovery in the age of “database culture.” I will examine the phenomenon of “poetic database” in Vertov’s work by (1) expanding on the analysis of Vertov’s “database” cinema 13 : I will demonstrate how database logic was relevant to Vertov’s cine-eye method as a whole, and how it was part and parcel of the contemporary socio-political processes of rationalized building of the new society; (2) exploring Vertov’s connections with the contemporary traditions in the theory and practice of poetic language; (3) showing how “poetic database” works in practice in A Sixth Part of the World. As the chapter progresses, I will use Gilles Deleuze’s “rhizomatic analysis” of Vertov’s cinema to analyze the complex perceptual formations of the cine-eye ethnographic travels. Furthermore, I will apply Deleuzo- 13 Lev Manovich’s analysis of Vertov’s database aesthetics concerns only Vertov’s 1929 film The Man with the Movie Camera. 24 Guattarian mechanisms of “de/reterritorializtion” in order to examine Vertov’s conflict between liberated perception and the politics of form. Finally, Lev Manovich’s study The Language of New Media will be applied to illustrate the re-discovery of Vertov’s poetic cinema within the database logic of digital culture. The chapter seeks to explore the tension between the politics of form and utopian perceptual formation pertinent to Vertov’s poetic cinema, and to consider the role of this tension in Vertov’s recent re- envisioning as a database filmmaker. The Cine-Eye as a Pre-Electronic Database Vertov’s rediscovery as a “database filmmaker” followed almost immediately upon the emergence of the database as a new genre in contemporary media studies. The theory behind Vertov’s “newsreel poetry,” the cine-eye method and its technical implementation – the theory of intervals – represent the very embodiment of database logic and hinge on a two-step filmmaking process that involves collecting and organizing data. The advent of the cine-eye coincided with the explosive spread of mass communications media during the formative years of the new regime, which featured the expansion of the press network, radio broadcasting, 25 telephone lines, postal services, as well as an unprecedented growth of transportation systems. For instance, the number of newspapers, as Mark W. Hopkins’ statistics in Mass Media in The Soviet Union indicates, increased from 889 in 1918 to 7,536 in 1932, reaching record high of 10,688 in 1934, while total circulation rose from 1.7 million to 34.7 million during the same period. The first radio broadcast was made in Russia in 1920 and by 1933, there were 60 operating radio stations, and about 1.3 million government- registered receivers and wired speakers (93-94). In 1928, the first transmission of a moving image was achieved with the help of an electronic telescopic device in Tashkent, while already in 1937 the first TV-center was organized in Shabolovka, Moscow, which began regular broadcasting in 1939. The necessity for efficient data storage and cataloguing, as well as rationalization of information management, was prompted by the new regime’s need to deal with tremendous increase in the flow of information. For the Russian Avant-garde artists, the world outside the new Bolshevik state was seen as chaotic (Groys 21), which they felt destined to rationalize by organizing the streams of information according to the ideology of the new political order. With the implementation of five-year plans, the whole 26 country was engaged in rationalization of production to promote efficiency and combat the chaos and unpredictability of market vagaries of the NEP. As part of overall rationalization of production, and with a pragmatic point of view towards labor, Taylorism was introduced into the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Alexei Gastev, the head of TsIT, the Central Institute of Labor, was its most ardent proponent and succeeded in justifying the ideological compatibility of capitalist ideas of scientific organization of labor with communist economy. Gastev argued that under the purview of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the implementation of Taylorism is a purely technical assignment. 14 He adopted the main principles of Taylorist methodology, demonstrating how the analysis of particular labor operations (e.g. rubka zubilom, or chisel-cutting was a “hallmark” of TsIT (Sochor 251)) could eliminate superfluous gestures and ensure the overall efficiency of labor. The Taylorist system of breaking down production into separate elements and reconfiguring them for high efficiency echoes the cine-eye 14 For the discussion of the implementation of Taylorim in the Soviet Union see Zenovia A. Sochor, “Soviet Taylorism Revisited.” 27 aesthetico-political agenda, 15 given that Vertov always considered making documentaries as a production process not much different from assembly line production of, say, tractors. Rationalization of newsreel production in the interest of efficiency was Vertov’s contribution to the construction of socialism. In his proposal “On the Organization of Creative Labor,” Vertov developed ten objectives on the rationalization of every stage of documentary productions, from recruiting cinematographers to highly strategized editing work of the director, in order to eliminate inefficiency and to implement a comprehensive approach to working with raw materials of a film archive. Formulated for the first time in “We: Variant of a Manifesto” in 1919, the cine-eye method provided the basis of Vertov’s newly-developed genre of “poetic documentary.” It assumes two major procedures: shooting authentic factual material (“life-facts”) and its subsequent organization into cinematic phrases (“film-objects”). The first stage of shooting “life-facts” required sending kinoks (a group of cinematographers) to film the raw material, which would then be kept and catalogued in a film-archive. The 15 For Vertov and Taylorism see, for example, Malcolm Turvey, “Can the Camera See Mimesis in “Man with the Movie Camera.” 28 second stage, which involved the work of the director on the organization of the raw material into “film-objects,” presupposed breaking down the footage into smaller montage units and their further re-configuring according to montage principles of the “theory of intervals.” The idea of the cine-eye rests upon the assumption of the imperfection of the human eye and its inability to exploit visual phenomena with the same precision and order as the mechanical eye or camera. Vertov repeatedly refers to the chaos absorbed by a human eye, as opposed to processes of systematization “inaccessible to the normal eye,” and organization of the cinematic material performed by the mechanical eye (From Articles 19). The presumption of the camera’s superiority on which the aesthetics of the cine- eye is built hinges upon camera’s limitless mobility and power to select and organize the material. One of the ways to approach rationalization for Dziga Vertov was the thematic categorization of footage and applying the principle of editing to filming itself: “Kino-eye plunges into the seeming chaos of life to find in life itself the response to an assigned theme. To find the resultant force amongst the million phenomena related to the given theme.” Vertov underscores the necessity of the cine-eye “To edit, to wrest through the camera whatever is 29 most typical, most useful from life” (88). It is noteworthy that unlike Eisenstein and Kuleshov, Vertov assigns the transformational capacity of the cinematic medium not only to editing, but rather to all stages of the film- making process, starting with choosing the location or, as he puts it, “orienting the unaided eye” (72). In his detailed account of cine-eye editing techniques, consisting of six stages, the first three concern the preparatory steps of the production (editing during observation, editing after observation, editing during filming), while only the last three stages describe editing in its conventional sense of organizing the footage (72). Furthermore, the cine-eye’s information rationalization during the post-production stage presupposed breaking down the archival footage into smaller segments “bytes of information” available for re-ordering according to the demands of “party instruction.” Vertov’s commentary on the possibility of using the same factual material for different purposes reveals the underlying database logic of the cine-eye: “Film-Truth is made of material as a house is made of bricks. With bricks one can make an oven, a Kremlin wall, and many other things. From the filmed material, one can construct different film-things” (45). The idea of building a film-archive with stock footage available for different kinds of queries was pre- 30 determined by the new regime’s quest to re-organize and structure reality according to political needs. If initially conceived as a rhythmic project, “the art of organizing the necessary movements of objects in space as a rhythmical artistic whole” (8), by 1925 the cine-eye program was re-defined within the new, deeply politicized context: “The objective of ours we call kino-eye. The decoding of life as it is. Using facts to influence the workers’ consciousness”(49). At the same time, Vertov consistently claimed the strong reliance of the cine-eye on an improvised method, the primary function of which was to show the spectator the real world as it is. This principle of the cine-eye – “life caught unawares” – assumed the authenticity of filmed material and required shooting on location with the use of real people whose work routine is not interrupted. This contradictory tension of filming “unawares” and subsequent “decoding” by multiple reorganization of the footage can be apprehended by the core values of Marxist dialectical cognition in its effort to substitute the passive apprehension of reality for a dialectical construal of it. Thus, the cine-eye underlying logic of gathering and organizing data reflected the socio- political processes of technological change and 31 rationalized building of the new world, to which Soviet Avant-garde artists and film-makers strived to contribute. The objective of the cine-eye was to search for the essential symbols of the new world, reveal the process of their interaction through organization of “life facts” into “film-objects,” and create a precise, well-determined and yet inspiring map of new reality. The revolution itself became instrumental in creating new symbols and signs: it blew up life into ready-made “blocks of communication” and Vertov seemed to capture and realize this phenomenon in his “newsreel poetry.” Vertov and Contemporary Poetic Experiments In this section I will attempt to illustrate the literary origins of Vertov’s database filmmaking and will focus on how the theory and practice of Vertov’s cine-eye method relate to Formalist research into poetic diction, as well as to Futurist experiments in factual poetry. Vertov collaborated with the representatives of both the theorists and practitioners of Russian Avant- garde poetic culture, and their influence illuminates different aspects of Vertov’s oeuvre: if the former inspired Vertov’s appropriation of poetic rhythmico-syntactic structure to his montage theory, the latter provided support for the ideological realization of his methods. The current study 32 departs from the previous scholarship on Vertov’s connections with contemporary poetic scene 16 by examining how the convergence of poetry and cinema laid the foundation for the cine-eye database logic of gathering and organizing data. Thus, in the section “Vertov and the Futurists,” I will explore how the late LEF collectivist model of art expressed in the creation of literary artels, factual writing and writers’ de-professionalization inform the strategies of Vertov’s “poetic database.” The section “Vertov and the Formalists” will focus on Vertov’s “poetic” ways of ordering “film-facts” 16 There are two principal studies that directly deal with the issues of Vertov’s links with poetry: Anna Lawton’s 1978 article “Rhythmic Montage in the Films of Dziga Vertov: a Poetic Use of the Language of Cinema” and a section in Vlada Petric’s monograph, The Man with the Movie Camera: Constructivism in Film (1987) that discusses the influence of Mayakovsky’s poetry on Vertov’s oeuvre. Lawton was the first scholar to apply some of the concepts of Formalist verse theory to Vertov’s montage principles. She suggests that in his “cinematographic poems,” Vertov draws on the Formalist understanding of rhythm as the fundamental principle of verse structure. In her close reading of The Man with the Movie Camera, Lawton discusses how the feature of rhythmic parallelism, executed through (1) rhythm within a phrase (e.g., the progressive shortening of the shots in the last sequence of part I, featuring machinery, people, and city traffic that reach a climax when the shots are barely perceptible) and (2) visual rhyme (analogy in frame composition, e.g., random movements of the crowd on a busy street in part I that correspond to the same random movements of the crowd on a beach in part II), serves as a major organizational force of the film. In Constructivism in Film, Petric discusses Vertov’s engagement with Russian Futurism and situates him within the Constructivist movement. He argues that juxtaposition of different materials employed by Vertov in The Man with the Movie Camera reenacts the key principle of Constructivism to produce a more meaningful structural whole (4). Citing the sources of Vertov’s factography, Petric discusses Aleksei Gun who in his 1922 book Constructivism was the first to proclaim cinema as a “factual art” (13). The scholar also examines Mayakovsky’s strong influence on Vertov, pointing out that Vertov’s use of a single frame as a montage unit resembles Mayakovsky’s ladder technique, in which sometimes only a part of a word constitutes a poetic line (27), and points at Mayakovsky’s essay “How Are Verses Made,” in which he discusses “transitional words” that connect one line with the next as a possible source for Vertov’s intervals. 33 into “film truth” and will investigate the appropriation of Formalist concepts in Vertov’s theory of intervals. The Cine-Eye and the Literary Artels When Vertov appeared on the Soviet artistic scene after the Revolution, the goals of the Futurists had become politicized, as they accustomed themselves to the idea of becoming active participants or even leaders in the formation of the new sociopolitical structure. 17 The late Futurists seriously re-assessed the concept of creativity by purging the subjectivity of its adepts in favor of rationalization of the artistic processes, as well as by the establishment of goals and methods of art construction (Dobrenko 58). The newly emerged Futurist groups Comfuts and LEF reoriented their work on verbal experimentation toward utilitarian models of life-building activities. Despite constant efforts to transcend their early trans-sense 17 Despite a certain general agreement, Futurism in Russia was a very heterogeneous phenomenon comprised of many artistic alliances, such as the Cubo-Futurists, Ego-Futurists, Mezzanine of Poetry, the Centrifuge that emerged before the Revolution. Only the first group survived the Revolution and generated the post-revolutionary Futurist alliances of the Communist Futurists (Comfuts), Left Front of Arts (LEF) and New LEF. For comprehensive coverage of pre- and post- revolutionary Futurist groups see Russian Futurism through its Manifestoes, 1912-1928 ed. Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle, and Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History. 34 apolitical linguistic experiments 18 and justify their usefulness in the new social context, the post-revolutionary Futurists retained from their early work the novelty of poetic idiom, experimentation with the metric system and rhythm, fascination with technology, urbanism, and the Gesamtkunstwerk principle. There are several aspects of early Russian Futurism that lie at the heart of Vertovian aesthetics as well – an emphasis on kinesthesia, condemnation of the culture of the past, urbanism, and an enthusiasm for the integration of art with technology. However, it was the late LEF reorientation of literary politics toward the “literature of fact” that shaped the cine-eye pursuit of fact gathering and organization. In the manifesto by Vladimir Mayakovsky written in collaboration with Osip Brik, Our Linguistic Work, the members of LEF proposed to further work on poetic diction: “We work on the organization of language sounds, on the polyphony of rhythm…, on the accuracy of verbal expressiveness, on the manufacture of new thematic devices”; on the other hand, they stressed that “All this work for us is not an aesthetic end in itself, 18 Before the Revolution, the Cubo-Futurists published two programmatic manifestos Slap in the Face of Public Taste (Burliuk, Kruchenykh, Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, 1912) and Declaration of Word as Such (Kruchenykh, 1913), which crystallized their radical intent to overthrow the dominant bourgeois culture by advancing a new word-oriented diction. 35 but a workshop for the best expression of the facts of the contemporary era” (Brik, Mayakovsky 203). 19 Precisely the same two components of LEF tactics – the work with facts of real life and the experimentation with form – became the cornerstone of cine-eye identity. Being committed to the creation of a “film factory of facts,” Vertov uses the Futurist rhetoric of a radical break with pre-revolutionary art and insists on purging the old, corrupt, bourgeois, acted film and “imaginative literature” in favor of factual reporting. In his 1926 proposal “The Factory of Facts,” he discusses the ways how the cine eye is forcing the “acted,” “actor’s” film “out of cinema,” and states: Not FEKS, 20 not Eisenstein’s “factory of attractions,” not the factory of doves and kisses (directors of this sort have not yet died out), and not the factory of death… Simply THE FACTORY OF FACTS. Filming facts. Sorting facts. Disseminating facts (From Articles 58- 59). The kinship between the strategy of LEF and Vertov’s method of facts’ organization are most evident when Brik in the article “Blizhe k faktu” 19 The “literature of fact” created a strong bond between the Futurists and Formalists. In Literatura fakta, Viktor Shklovsky observed that the “traditional psychological novel” with its plot formulas was inapplicable to the shaping of new literary material of the revolutionary epoch which called for fact and reporting (qtd. in Barooshian 136). 20 Factory of Eccentric Actors – an avant-garde film-studio organized by Kozintsev, Yutkevich and Trauberg in Leningrad in 1921. 36 employs the same conceptual framework of “fixation and montage of facts” when discussing how this would affect the reader better than “imaginative literature” (82). 21 The analogy could be also traced in their efforts at legitimizing the manipulative aspect of montage by dwelling on the audiences’ open access to the “facts of reality.” The LEF concept of the “literary artel” also reveals a striking similarity to Vertov’s idea of embracing the idea of group authorship in the work of kinoks. As part of polemics with RAPP (The Russian Association of Proletarian Artists) who insisted on the individualist nature of creativity, LEF advocated a “collectivist” model of artistic creation, which broke the artistic process down into collecting material (by “specialists of an extraliterary sort” and “transcribers” [fiksatory]) and literary re-working of it (by “literary formulators” and “experts”) (Dobrenko 66). The workshop principle of the cine-eye laboratory assumes even stronger “de- professionalization” of cinema workers. In the organizational utopia of the cine-eye, the place for “experts” is reduced to a minimum. Vertov suggests “to pass on the skill and technical experience [of the “Council of Three”] to 21 For more on the “literature of fact” see Vahan D. Barooshian, Russian CuboFuturism 1910 – 1930 A Study in Avant-Gardism (128). 37 the rising generation of young workers” and to distribute the work in the “film factory” amongst 1. kinok-observers, 2. kinok-cameramen, 3. kinok-constructors [designers] 4. kinok-editors (women and men) 5. kinok laboratory assistants (75) Similarly to the LEF’s objective to reduce individual writers’ political mistakes by advocating a collectivist approach to literature (Dobrenko 66), Vertov sees in this approach to art a more efficient way to break with pre- revolutionary artistic traditions in cinema: “This departure from authorship by one person to mass authorship will, in our view, accelerate the destruction of bourgeois, artistic cinema and its attributes: the poster-actor, fairy-tale script, those costly toys-sets, and the director- high priest.” Not only does the Taylorist logic of the LEF “literary artel” exactly correspond to the collectivist model of the cine-eye laboratory, the LEF idea of “artistic reworking” and “formulation of plots” informs Vertov’s envisioning of the cine-eye method as the organization of filmed material into “film-truth.” Both Vertov and the Futurists seemed to agree on the assertion that “facts” constitute the empirical reality of the actual world and 38 should be the basis of the new art of Bolshevism. Sadly, this was one of the last attempts to prove their usefulness before they were condemned for the “Formalist distortion of facts” by the regime with which they wanted to ally so desperately. Vertov and the Formalists There are major points of contact between the OPOIAZ 22 studies of the rhythmico-syntactic structure of verse and Vertov’s position on rhythmic editing in his montage theory, the theory of intervals. The application of the Formalists’ linguistic models to cinematic montage was facilitated in Vertov’s case by his personal contact and close collaboration with one of the most prominent OPOIAZ members, Osip Brik. Vertov and the Council of Three 23 published their articles and manifestoes 24 in the Futurist magazine LEF under the editorship of Brik and the poets’ Mayakovsky’ and Aseev. It is during the second stage of the cine-eye production process – concerning the organization of raw footage into “film objects” – that the 22 The Leningrad “Society for the Study of Poetic Language.” 23 A group of filmmakers consisted of Vertov, his brother Mikhail Kaufman and Vertov’s future wife and lifetime editor Elizaveta Svilova. 24 See Michelson xxiv for Vertov’s LEF activities. 39 major Formalist concepts of dynamization, interactivity of elements, and de- automatization were employed in Vertov’s cine-eye method. Vertov used rhythm as a powerful structural device for mobilizing the highly politicized content of his documentaries in order to endow them with ideology. Rhythm was also an important means for data rationalization – by means of montage rhythm, Vertov’s cine-eye organizes the somewhat incidental impressions of the human eye into an orderly and regulated visual study. Vertov’s insights on the application of poetic rhythm to cinematic montage found their way into his theory of intervals –the montage theory that provides a technical basis for cine-eye data organization. Formulated for the first time in “We: Variant of a Manifesto” (1919), the theory of intervals represents Vertov’s contribution to the theories of montage elaborated by the such Soviet Montage School filmmakers, as Eisenstein (dialectical montage) or Kuleshov (montage of linkage). Vertov defined the interval as the “transition from one movement to another,” positing it as a differential unit which registers an alteration in quantity or quality of a movement in the image in relation to other images. The most frequently used “collisions of intervals” in Vertov’s work involve changes in shot duration, resulting in a gradual increasing of the montage 40 tempo, as well as the correlation of framing distances (close-up, medium- shot), e.g. as shown in the first reel of A Sixth Part of the World. Very often Vertov combines several types of such correlations, as demonstrated in the “Street and Eye” sequence of The Man with the Movie Camera, where the correlation of directions (eyeball versus camera movements) is juxtaposed with the correlation of graphic patterns (the circle of the eye versus the straight lines of the traffic’s movement), as well as with the gradual reducing of the shot length to one frame per shot. 25 One of the most significant functions of the interval is to produce a “kinesthetic” effect upon the spectator: the viewers’ sensory-motor system responds to the on- screen motion as if their bodies were in a state of movement. Vlada Petric observes that Vertov sometimes makes the viewer physically experience the interval, especially when employing the “phi-effect” 26 in order to strengthen the “kinesthetic” impact. 25 For detailed description of graphical patterns in The Man with the Movie Camera, see Petric, Constructivism in Film: The Man with the Movie Camera: a Cinematic Analysis. 26 The phi-effect is a perceptual illusion produced by a successive projection of two images, which due to the persistence of vision generates an effect of their superimposition. This differs from mechanical superimposition (i.e. the simultaneous appearance of two images) due to the stroboscopic pulsation of the interval between the shots (Petric, Constructivism 139). The phenomenon of the persistence of vision and the impression of continuous movement results from the ability of eye to retain a perceived image on the retina when the perception is over. 41 Despite Vertov’s search for “kinesthesia” and a purely optical approach employed in the theory of intervals, his montage method clearly demonstrates the appropriation of the grammatical parameters of cinema: “The organization of movement is the organization of its elements, of its intervals, into phrases. In each phrase there is a rise, a high point, and a falling off of movement. A composition is made of phrases, just as a phrase is made of intervals of movement” (From Articles 9). The theory of intervals is deeply involved with the issues of the organic unity, the systemic approach to a work of art, and the notion of defamiliarization, which divulge the strong links between the Formalist ideas about the structure of verse and Vertov’s theory of montage. One of the central concepts that governed the Formalists’ work on poetic diction, and that infiltrated cine-eye theory and practice, is the concept of dynamism of form. The Formalists’ concern with the dynamization of a poetic form ensued from the search for de-automatizing strategies that underpinned their early writings. In “Rhythm as the Constructive Factor of Verse,” Tynianov noted that “a static quality closely connected with spatiality invariably creeps into the concept of form instead of our perceiving spatial forms as dynamically unique” (Rhythm as the 42 Constructive Factor 127). The discussion revolved around the phenomenon of isochronism or equal time intervals between rhythmical signals in poetic or prosaic discourse. 27 The Polish Formalist Franciszek Siedlecky argued that rhythmical isochronism would not differ from the static inertia of ordinary speech and could lead to automatization, if not for the sporadic deviations from the norm, which Jakobson calls “moments of frustrated anticipation” (Erlich 214). The same preoccupation with dynamism is central to Tynianov’s concept of the constructive principle of verse. Starting with the presumption that “the concept of poetic line or stanza is imperceptibly removed from the dynamic category” because of the symmetry of repetitions, Tynianov posits that the unity of the work is revealed not through the addition of its elements, but through the “unfolding dynamic integrity” expressed in the correlation or interaction of the work’s constituents: “dynamic form is not the result of uniting or merging [different aspects of a word], but rather the results of their interaction which enhances one group of factors at the expense of another” (Rhythm as the Constructive Factor 128). 27 See, for example, Tomashevsky’s analysis of regular stress distribution in Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades. See Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History –Doctrine, 213. 43 Thus, both of the mechanisms (de-automatization and interaction of elements within a system) that, according to the Formalists, engender dynamism in poetic form can be found in Vertov’s theory of intervals. Tynianov’s concept of dynamic integrity, linked to the central Formalist discovery of artistic means working in combination with each other as a system, parallels Vertov’s thesis on the interactivity of cinematic elements within the overall composition. Elucidating the theory of intervals in “From Kino-Eye to Radio-Eye,” Vertov, for example, identifies “the visual relation between adjacent shots and of each individual shot to all others engaged in the ‘montage battle’” (From Articles 91). It follows that exploring the issue of dynamism, both Vertov and the Formalists are concerned with the problem of perceptibility versus automatization, and both treat dynamism in terms of the dialectical evolution triggered by modifications in their structures. Tynianov proposes that of all characteristics of verse language that can create the sensation of perceptibility rhythm is the main factor in the evolution of form. Vertov’s vision of dynamism hinges upon the concept of the interval, which constitutes the kinesthetic unfolding of the cinematic images. The modification, albeit even temporary in the structure equilibrium, is what 44 creates the dynamism in each media. Vertov’s idea of intervals of vision presuming recurring reversals that interrupt the “lines of succession” leads to yet another overriding concept of the Formalists – the process of deautomatization. In their description of the dialectical character of literary tradition, Shklovsky and Tynianov suggest that the old forms become perceptible again if they are put into a new, “unfamiliar” context. They look at parody particularly as this emancipating force, which is both destructive and constructive, for it de-automizes the outworn devices by stimulating the re-organization of the material, or as Tynianov puts it: “re-grouping of the old elements” (qtd. in Erlich 259). 28 Not only Vertov’s notion of interval carries the same logic of displacement, the very essence of his aesthetics relies on the re-arrangement and re- ordering of the existent material – re-grouping of old stock. He repeatedly argues that a multi-leveled reorganization of authentic film material is needed for creating a new unity imbued with a particular ideological meaning. Vertov acknowledges the necessity of de-automatizing devices in an artistic work: justifying the absence of the narrator in The Three Songs of 28 For more on the Formalists’ research into parody see Erlich 258-259, Steiner 118-119, David Duff, “Maximal Tensions and Minimal Conditions: Tynianov as Genre Theorist” (554-555). 45 Lenin, he notes that with the voice-over, “the diversity of perception would be stifled” (From Notebooks 260). The cine-eye thus demonstrates a strong reliance on Formalist verse theory and draws on their concepts of de-familiarization, dynamism of form, the constructive principle of verse, as well as on their understanding of the evolution of literary genres. Vertov identifies cine-eye creation (kinochestvo) as “the art of organizing the necessary movements of objects in space as a rhythmical artistic whole in harmony with the properties of the material and the internal rhythm of each object” (From Articles 8). The network of relationships constituting film rhythm is understood by Vertov as a complex, unified whole to which heterogeneous parts are related. This infers that the same basic tenets Victor Erlich defines as pivotal for the Formalists’ studies of rhythm – the notions of the organic unity and dominanta (212) – appear to be the founding constructs in Vertov’s exploration of cinematic rhythm. It should be noted that reliance on intervals in Vertov’s montage theory constitutes a peculiar type of relationship between whole and parts. Explaining his montage techniques as a “higher mathematics of facts” when discussing the composition of The Man with the Movie Camera, Vertov 46 asserts that that Each item or each factor is a separate little document. The documents have been joined with one another so that, on the one hand, the film would consist only of those linkages between signifying pieces that coincide with the visual linkages and so that, on the other hand, these linkages would not require intertitles: the final sum of all these linkages represents, therefore, an organic whole (From Articles 84). This means that Vertov’s approach does not assume the totalizing holistic relationship based on the integration or subordination of the constituents to the whole, but rather allows him to play with an endless multiplicity of techniques (superimpositions, micro-photography, reverse actions, split screens) to demonstrate how the cine-eye is empowered to arrange the life- facts in endless ways. In his insightful discussion of Vertov’s montage technique in Cinema 1, Gilles Deleuze summarizes this point as follows: “The result in his work was that the whole merges with the infinite set of matter” (Cinema 1 40). “Poetic Database” At Work: A Sixth Part of the World One of the reasons why I decided to illustrate the conjunction of database mode and poetry in Vertov’s oeuvre with A Sixth Part of the World (1926) is that this is Vertov’s only film that manifestly carries the label of 47 “cinematographic poem” following its title, while its inter-titles may be read separately as a poetic composition. Furthermore, the database logic of data agglomeration and systematization becomes the principal method of A Sixth Part’s structure: on the one hand, the film progresses by listing items from an immense catalogue of people and places and takes the form of an inventory-like recounting of ethnic groups, names and activities, territories, Soviet totems, means of transportation and communications which make up the “sixth of the world.” On the other hand, the film reveals how these myriad scattered phenomena become synthesized in a rigorously formalized montage design that governs its narrative structure and organizes the “film facts” into “cine-truth.” A shot of a plane flying over the “sixth of the world” in the opening sequence of the film reveals at least two of the cine-eye’s intentions: it makes communication itself the subject of art, and it points to the fact that, by bringing together the furthest possible sites of the “sixth of the world,” the cine-eye resolves the problem that the Soviet authorities experience with the dissemination of information across the country’s vast geography. 48 A Sixth Part of the World consists of six parts, echoed in the title, and this stands along with other symmetries operative in the film. The first reel is made according to the principle of juxtaposition of two codes of economics, reflected as moral systems in the film – Capitalism and Socialism. Its formal structure is based on antithetical parallelism, which in turn rests upon contrasting images featuring “capitalists” with shots of workers and “slaves” in Europe and Africa. Montage sets up patterns of repetition, enumeration and juxtaposition of the two systems. The criss-cross patterns of the central juxtaposition are rather intricate and actualize Vertov’s theory of intervals through a number of correlations involving those of speed, planes and graphic representation. The reel catalogues shots of varying framing distance featuring bourgeois men and women entertaining themselves in cabarets, restaurants, clubs. Medium close-ups and close-ups of their faces, hands, and feet are intercut with images of workers, slaves in the colonies, heavy machinery, plants, industrial objects, African huts, as well as black dancers and musicians on stage. The second reel is based on the enumeration of diverse Soviet ethnic groups and their activities. Multiple images are spliced together in a montage pattern of a very high predictability, which brings the shots 49 together by a symmetrical ordering of short sequences that identify a particular group using an inter-title (e.g. YOU: TATARS, BURIATS, UZBEKS, KALMYKS etc.,) and is then extended to show the locale and activities of these people. The camera darts around the sixth of the world that was the USSR, exploring and observing the rituals and everyday activities of its inhabitants, including a goat-tearing festival in Asia and a reindeer race of Inuits. The reel culminates in a meta-cinematic moment incorporating spectators into this catalogue of people and places. Viewers are depicted sitting in a movie theater watching the beginning of the same reel that the spectator is watching, while rhythmically emerging closing titles read: IN YOUR HANDS/ IS THE SIXTH/ PART/ OF THE WORLD. The circular execution of the montage sequence (we are returned to the beginning of the second part of the film via the invitation of the spectators into the text) is another formal pointe in the totalizing symmetry of the segment, which reminds us of the realm of the artifact in which we are residing. 50 Figure 2: Frames from the Second Reel of A Sixth Part of the World The compositional principle of the third reel rests upon the documentation of vast territories of Soviet space synthesized within the overall design of the segment by the inter-titles FROM-TO, e.g. “from the Kremlin” “to the Chinese border,” “from the lighthouse beyond the polar circle” “to the Caucasus mountains,” and later in the sequence by presenting Soviet totems, linked by the inter-title YOUR: your factories, oil, sheep, wool, butter, fish, tobacco, etc. The exploratory narrative of Vertov’s ethnographic travels spans the landscapes and natural environments of distant northern and Asian regions, industrial zones, as well as urban vistas of city centers communicating the complex activities of industrial spaces, 51 featuring various forms of heavy machinery, clusters of the factory pipes, oil pumps, etc. The fourth sequence begins with five-second long shots of trains, horses, and oxcarts carrying goods along Soviet terrains. The opening images are followed by a series of shots cataloguing various kinds of vehicles and people preparing goods for transportation, synthesized in the structured sequence with an anaphoric IN THE PLACE WHERE (“nomads driving their herds,” “the fruits are packed,” “the cisterns and tanks of vegetable oil are sitting” etc). The fifth reel is a panegyric dedicated to the State Trade Agency supervising the export of Soviet manufactured goods to capitalist countries and their subsequent exchange for heavy machinery needed for Soviet industry. The overall montage trajectory of the sequence provides effortless shifts from rural collective farms to industrial zones, from Tunguses, Samoyeds and Inuits to the bourgeois browsing in Leipzig’s trade exhibition, thus moving across geographical, national and ideological boundaries. To emphasize the contrast between the two opposing systems, Vertov incorporates a short sequence from the first reel featuring the shots of European “capitalists” dressed extravagantly. 52 The final reel documents the immense leap the country has made from the backwardness of pre-revolutionary culture: shots of women in veils, shamans’ occult dancing, oriental men counting beads, Arabs going to mosque, etc. are followed by an elaborate sequence with an icebreaker, shot at a heroic high-angle, and rhythmically intercut with the emblematic entities of Soviet industry, grain and heavy machinery. Creating a Poetic Database Actualizing the cine-eye process of data organizing with the help of poesis and using a complex network of montage rhythms and techniques, Vertov creates the structured space of the “sixth of the world” – “entering” the particulars of the vast expanses of the Soviet Union into his “poetic database.” A Sixth Part directly realizes the mechanism of a poetic text through an ordered system of interconnected comparisons, contrasts, unfolding symmetries and rhyming effects. The Formalist-systemic approach is revealed here through multiple effects of compositional parallelism, such as the intensification of the montage pace and its subsequent relaxation in all six reels, as well as the circular execution of every other part of the film. Individual shots and sequences besides their 53 own narrative value are involved in a complex network with all of the film’s other elements (montage, graphic representations, recorded speed, filmic devices) whose synthesis provides compositional and thematic closure. Most importantly, though, is that it is exactly through the totalizing quest of Vertov’s rigid montage that the operation of converting “life-facts” into “film-truth” is executed. It is through the organization and juxtaposition of myriad authentic facts that Vertov developed his technique of the cine-eye, and it was rhythmic parallelism that gave the spectators a chance to juxtapose and compare several “facts” leading them to a certain conclusion. In this complex, politico-aesthetic structure, Vertov’s interstice or interval of vision is not just a point of kinesthetic resolution, but also serves as a unit of the conversion of image into truth or of life caught unawares into ideological content. At the same time, the film’s poetic execution anticipates some of the functions of a contemporary electronic database. For instance, it foresees the ability of a digital database to produce new data and data combinations using the same interface. The film’s montage structure demonstrates how one and the same structural pattern (e.g. the intensification of montage pace by gradual decreasing of the shot’s length) may be used for ordering different 54 film-objects, or how one montage unit (e.g. a close-up of a spinning train wheel) could be combined with a variety of different shots within the film’s interchangeable structure. The development of the principle of interchangeability was crucial for the Avant-garde artists’ determination to create “factories,” “artels,” or “workshops” of artistic production. Vertov repeatedly pointed at the utilitarian foundation of his “film-poems”: “the experience of The Man with the Movie Camera, A Sixth Part of the World, of Enthusiasm and The Eleventh Year were of great help to our production group. These were, so to speak, ‘films that beget films’” (From Articles 122). The question of cinematic reflexivity becomes paramount in constructing the truth in A Sixth Part. It also foresees the principle of interactivity pertinent to digital databases, which functions not only as data storage but allows the user to interact with a media-object. Vertov’s preoccupation with the forms of cinematic reflexivity purports to show the spectators how cinema is made so that they understand the process and it becomes accessible to them. Vertov is overtly concerned with the reflexive techniques in filmmaking when in his commentary to A Sixth Part, he speaks on the fact of the audience-placement within the film text in terms of 55 practical resolution of “the most difficult theoretical question of the eradication of the boundary between viewers and spectacle” (Shestaia chast’ mira 182). Exploring the question of reflexivity in anthropological and ethnographic films in “Exposing Yourself: Reflexivity, Anthropology and Film,” Jay Ruby suggests that through technological demystification of the creative process and through revealing method and technique, filmmakers may show their quest to be scientific while researching into a scientific subject of anthropology. When at the end of the second reel of A Sixth Part the spectators are portrayed as a part of the narrative of the film, this is Vertov’s way of engaging them in the process of truth-construction. They cease to be the mere referents of the socio-political message and are transformed into the agents of the creation of meaning. Describing the principle of interactivity in the new media, Lev Manovich suggests that the users become the co-authors of the work, for they themselves choose which elements to display or which paths to follow, thus generating a unique experience (55). The interactivity of A Sixth Part of the World is based on the same principle: by transforming his audience from passive viewers into active participants, from external observers into 56 insiders, Vertov grants agency to the spectators. This also reveals a major theoretical postulate of life caught unawares, suggesting that nobody is directing the film. This points at Vertov’s way of disavowing authority of the film-maker; the director should not loom larger than the subject itself. The principle of “interactivity” in A Sixth Part bears an important ideological function: Vertov’s inscription of the viewer onto the screen simulates the interaction of the perceiving subject with the other images, which is meant to secure the objectivity of cine-truth; the truth is viewed by someone who is part of the truth. Even though Vertov lacked machinery to make his “poetic database” physically “interactive,” he certainly succeeded in creating a visual representation of the user interface structure. Thus, A Sixth Part of the World demonstrates how a “cinematographic poem,” built according to the principles of poetic text structure, in fact outlines a model of a pre-electronic database. It also foresees some of the important functions of contemporary digital databases, anticipating the new media principles of interactivity and interchangeability. Vertov’s poetic database does not simply list data, but employs rigid classificatory mechanisms to stratify and organize “recorded life facts” into “film-truth.” And this is where the rigidity of poesis becomes most useful as 57 a propaganda tool, for it provides rhythmical collision and ordering of separate life facts into an organized and meaningful ideological message, thus postulating the importance of the politics of form for Vertov’s poetic database. Figure 3: Frames from A Sixth Part of the World 58 The Comeback of “Newsreel Poetry” in the Age of New Media Vertov’s conception of “cinematic poetry” may not be reduced to his engagement with contemporary poetic theory and practice, whether LEF factography or Formalist poetics. In spite of Vertov’s overall focus on film syntagmatics expressed in rigorous syntactic organization of the cinematic rhythm, the main incentive of his poetic quest was first and foremost to refresh perception (to implement “defamiliarization”) within the cinematic field. One of the most important objectives of the cine-eye was to liberate older forms of film representation corrupted by “bourgeois ideology,” and to establish a new kind of perception suitable for a “new world.” The very name of his montage method “cine-eye” indicated significance of perceptive mechanisms in his oeuvre. No other scholar has delved into the problem of Vertov’s perceptual formations more deeply than Gilles Deleuze, whose elucidation of the “perception-image” based on the example of Vertov’s cinema will be analyzed below. In the next section I will focus on how Vertov’s ideas of transforming perception in his utopian dream of total coverage enter into conflict with the poetics and politics of form, predefined by the social institutions that try to control this very perceptual freedom. 59 Furthermore, despite the fact that Vertov was unable to predict the political situation several years ahead of him and ended up as the “Trotsky of cinematography” whose career as a film-maker was virtually halted after the release of Three Songs of Lenin, his poetic and deeply political cinema has re-emerged in a most unexpected context as the precursor of digital media and an early prototype of the “database sensibility” defining today’s mass culture (Manovich). My goal here is to investigate the tension of the politics of form and perceptual formations in Vertov’s poetic cinema and the paradoxical effect it has on limitations that cultural production encounters in the era of “database culture.” Gilles Deleuze’s Re-Reading of Vertov Although Vertov’s “newsreel poetry” was deemed heretical and was largely condemned by his contemporaries, 29 it has found justification in the 29 The Soviet reception, reducing documentary to mere factography and poetic to formalistic embellishment, assessed Vertov’s poetic techniques of structuring the facts as distortions of the real. The critic Grigory Beliansky, when commenting on the composition of A Sixth Part, stated that “It is absolutely not newsreel. Nor does the term ‘revolutionary-emotional hit’ define it. It’s more like a poem, a poem about the Earth, about its two gigantic struggling blocks” (qtd. in Tsivian 199). The writer and theatre critic Osip Beskin, making the same point, commented negatively on the poetic quality of A Sixth Part, specifically emphasizing the fact that Vertov, who considers himself a “pioneer of film fact,” produced a film representing solely “lyrical aestheticism” (qtd. in Tsivian 205). Regarding the film’s poetic qualities, many commentators did recognize the film’s association with the genre of poetic cinema, however, not necessarily in 60 contemporary debate over the nature of documentaries. As the definitive factor of documentary’s discursive nature has gradually shifted from concentration on the ostensible truth and representation of the historical real towards the “creative treatment of actuality” (Grierson 147), film theorists today debunk the existing fallacies of documentary theories which claim that documentary should avoid the use of expressive techniques for shaping its rhetoric. Having undergone a double assault in the label “plotless dramaturgy” that was assigned to it during the political decade of the late twenties – thirties, Vertov’s “cinematographic poems” enjoy a separate category of “city symphonies” in modern typologies of documentaries. 30 And it is not the only sphere of aesthetics where Vertov’s cinema was much ahead of its time. The late French philosopher Gilles Deleuze set Vertov free from the logocentric bias of the Formalist experiments and used his oeuvre laudatory terms. A few commentators disapproved of Vertov’s poetic usage of intertitles, saying that they were “executed in the style of bad prose poems” (Beskin qtd. in Tsivian 204), that the intertitles were “boring” and “monotonous”, and that “they make the film a collection of moving photographs” (Bleiman qtd. in Tsivian 207). 30 See, for example, Patricia Aufderheide, who cites Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera as one of the first “city symphonies,” along with Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s Manhatta (1921), and Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), from which the “city symphony” was given its name. Interstingly enough, Aufderheide defines “city symphonies” as “visual poems” that narrate about “industrial enterprise of the modern city” and “coordinate many individual expressions into a whole” (Aufderheide 15). 61 as one of the founding reference points for defining the “perception-image” in his Post-Structuralist classification of cinematic movements. Deleuze proves to be one of the most perceptive commentators on Vertov who in his Cinema books conceives of Vertov’s oeuvre as the illustration of a certain type of “a-centered” perception that he describes on the basis of Bergson’s philosophy of duration. It is not surprising that Deleuze who is looking for cinematic ways of transcending human perception based on a privileged, fixed point of view, chooses Vertov as his principal reference, for the main goal of cine-eye aesthetics was to eliminate the boundaries of limited human perception by extending it by technological means. In Cinema 1, Deleuze appropriates the Bergsonian thesis that the entire universe is made up of images and intervals. Deleuze follows Bergson in his two-sided taxonomy of perception, and, in contradistinction to limited human perception, distinguishes another state of a-centered perception, which refutes the privileged perceiving subject in favor of universal variation and interaction between moving signs and images. The interaction between signs within the a-centered assemblage of movement-images emerges through the principle of reciprocity, the universal exchange of 62 images’ actions and reactions (e.g. a dog is bitten by a flea, after which there is a delay in the dog’s neural system before an external movement is generated 31 ). It could be also exemplified by Pavlov’s experiments with dogs, which would salivate when they received a certain outside signal. The interval becomes a crucial component to every perception image, for it is a point where the exchange of incoming and outgoing impulses takes place. It appears that the Bergsonian thesis on movement was not only the basis for Deleuze’s typology of movement images, 32 but also corresponds to Vertov’s idea of the interval of vision, the underpinning of his montage theory. Deleuze states that the same principle operative in Bergson’s thesis on movement finds its expression in Vertov’s theory: What happens and what can happen in this acentered universe where everything reacts on everything else?... at any point whatever of the plane an interval appears – a gap between the action and the reaction. All Bergson asks for are movements and intervals between movements which serve as units – it is also exactly what Dziga Vertov asked for, in his materialist conception of the cinema (Cinema 1 61) 31 This example is taken from Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Cinema (30). 32 In Cinema 1 Deleuze argues that the incoming and the outgoing sides of the interval correspond to perception and action-images, whereas a third type of image in the taxonomy – an affection- image – functions as a link between these incoming and outgoing movements or perceptions/actions. 63 Appropriating the Bergsonian thesis of universal interaction, Deleuze claims that the human eye’s immobility and its central positioning in relation to the rest of the images makes it inferior to the type of perceptual state achieved by Vertov’s camera-eye which is capable of infiltrating any point of space. The cine-eye aesthetic purports to overcome the limitations of the human- eye by liberating the act of seeing by means of the camera’s capacity to infiltrate any point of the universe transforming it into a point of view and converting perception into matter. As Vertov points out, The kino-eye lives and moves in time and space; it gathers and records impressions in a manner wholly different from that of the human eye. The position of our bodies while observing or our perception… are by no means obligatory limitations for the camera… (From Articles 15) Most importantly, though, (for otherwise the scope of camera’s recording ability would be rather limited as well) Vertov endows the camera with the power of editing. Vertov’s aesthetics, in general, questions the capability of the cinematic medium to access reality without the interference of montage at all stages of the film-making process. The equation “the montage = I see” (37) or conferring the transformative capacities of the cinematic apparatus 64 upon the camera-eye allows the cine eye to cross over to a type of a- centered perception described by Deleuze: …if from the point of view of the human eye, montage is undoubtedly a construction, from the point of another eye, it ceases to be one; it is the pure vision of a non-human eye, of an eye which would be in things… What montage does, according to Vertov, is to carry perception into things, to put perception into matter, so that any point whatsoever in space itself perceives all the points on which it acts, or which act on it, however far these actions and reactions extend. This is the definition of objectivity, to see without boundaries or distances (Cinema 1 81). Of primary interest to Deleuze in Vertov’s theory of intervals is that in its actualization of the Bergsonian schema of reciprocity, Vertov’s interval operates as a generative unit of movement’s modification and, instead of distancing images, provides correlation and interaction between them: for Vertov, the most important thing was to restore the intervals to matter… The interval is no longer that which separates a reaction from the action experienced, … but, on the contrary, that which – an action being given in a point of the universe – will find the appropriate reaction in some other point, however distant it is (Cinema 1 82). In A Sixth Part of the World, Vertov’s ethnographic explorations cover the most distant areas of the Soviet Union and beyond, spanning the landscapes and natural environments of remote Northern and Asian regions to industrial 65 zones and the urban vistas of city centers (Novorossisk, Moscow, Leningrad) representing an immense catalogue of people and places. Deleuze maintains that even Vertov’s freeze-frames do not halt a movement, but bring the motion into the point where it gains new energy for proceeding into the next level of generating movement. It is exactly on the basis of this “interactive mobilization of all points within a set” of Vertov’s montage that Deleuze contends that his method corresponds to the specific kind of “gaseous” perception marked by the “free movement of each molecule.” The “gaseous” perception or the state of universal variation only becomes possible within the “a-centered,” “pure” perception carried out by Vertov through the cine-eye, whereby the subjective privileged center is overcome and becomes part of the dynamically moving set. This explains Vertov’s unsettling relationship between the seer and the seen, for he often inscribes the spectator into the screen space making him part of the montage assemblage. As we saw, the second reel of The Sixth Part of the World culminates in meta-cinematic moment showing the spectators in a movie theater watching the beginning of the same reel that we are watching. To better illustrate the complex schema of the cine-eye at work, we might think of a multi-screen projection of a space shuttle takeoff mission video- 66 recording: a video system consisting of multiple cameras installed at various external and internal points to provide views of the environment inside and outside of the aircraft; the monitors in the control room would display concurrently multiple images in separate windows. Vertov’s cine-eye exactly renders this model of multiple projection, however, in addition to images showing the aircraft from all possible angles, the cine-eye would also incorporate those who are in charge of monitoring the video information, and us, the audience, who observe the entire process. Figure 4: NASA Monitor Wall 67 Thus, Vertov’s technique actualizes Bergsonian “a-centered” perception at all levels: the cine-eye liberates the human eye from its relative immobility and allows it to travel “in itself of the image” (Deleuze, Cinema 1 81) where it interacts with the rest of the sign-images via interstices of movement and engages in a constantly evolving universal flux of dynamism “[reaching] to the genetic element of all possible perception, that is, the point which changes, and which makes perception change, the differential of perception itself “(83). This gaseous state of perception pertinent to the cine-eye and described by Deleuze in Cinema 1 corresponds to the DeleuzoGuattarian concept of rhizome – a tuber root system that connects “any point to any other point” and represents a heterogeneous, non-closed system. I am going to return to this rhizomatic analysis of the cine-eye, but first I will discuss Manovich’s consideration of Vertov in the age of new media. Vertov and Database Aesthetics: the “Tangled Rhizome” or the “Solvable Maze” Deleuze treats cinematic signification as an analogue to information systems. Moreover, his description of cinema as a discrete form of 68 representation – a “set which has a great number of parts, that is of elements, which themselves form subsets,” (Cinema and Space: The Frame 173) — foresees cinema’s database logic. Taking into consideration that he describes Vertov’s cine-eye within the framework of informational analysis (film as a dynamic set in which the actors, sets, locations, techniques are presented), it would be appropriate to note that Deleuze was the first Western scholar to re-discover Vertov’s oeuvre in the digital age. However, the most forceful endorsement of Vertov as the precursor of digital media was presented by Lev Manovich in his 2001 hit The Language of New Media. In the prologue to the study, Manovich says that he will use Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera as a guide to the language of new media, and publishes stills from the film to illustrate the main principles discussed in the book. In the course of the study, Manovich argues that some of the principles of the new media originated in cinematic ways of seeing and structuring its material. He refers to Vertov’s techniques to illuminate how the Avant-garde director predicted the New Media sensibility. Thus he compares Vertov’s ubiquitous camera-eye to the incorporation of a virtual camera in gaming software and Vertov’s use of the loop as a narrative device to operations in computer programming. Another similarity involves 69 Vertov’s montage-within-the shot and contemporary techniques of assembling layers within a single shot. These techniques are symptomatic of the overall transition of digital editing from the temporal to the spatial montage. However, Vertov’s greatest relevance to digital media concerns the fact that his cinema serves as an example of database imagination. Alongside Greenaway, Manovich considers Vertov as a major twentieth century database filmmaker and refers to the key strategy of the cine-eye method to order and re-order pre-existent footage: in contrast to standard film editing that considers of selection and ordering of previously shot material according to a preexistent script, here the process of relating shots to each other, ordering and reordering them to discover the hidden order of the world constitutes the film’s method (240). This database logic of his cinema is epitomized in one of the sequences from The Man with the Movie Camera that features Svilova in an editing room working with a database, as she sorts the recorded footage from multiple boxes and shelves marked “machines,” “the movement of a city,” “physical exercise,” etc. Manovich suggests that similar to the hierarchical structure of new media (interface –content, operating system –application), The Man with the Movie Camera operates on three levels that deal with the production process (the cameraman’s shooting the footage); film reception 70 (the spectators in a movie theatre: the meta-textual level), and the film itself (footage recorded in Moscow, Kiev and Riga: the textual level). This complex multivalenced system parallels the multiplicity of shooting and montage techniques from which the filmmaker draws the one that he needs at any particular point. Manovich observes that the film is “not only a database of film techniques, and a database of new operations of visual epistemology, but also a database of new interface operations that together aim to go beyond simple human navigation through physical space” (276). In Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Janet Murray distinguishes between two types of new media interactive environments: the “solvable maze” and the “tangled rhizome.” Their structures offer two very different configurations: the former is driving the interactor “toward a single solution, toward finding the one way out” (e.g. a treasure hunt game concludes with finding the treasure), while the latter represents a complex, non-closed environment with limitless connections that offer no way out (e.g. the videogame Civilization). Notably, Murray uses the Deleuzian “rhizome” as a metaphor for an open-ended digital labyrinth of the latter kind. 71 Murray’s typology of interactive environments perfectly renders the tensions within Vertov’s “poetic database.” Since Vertov’s cine-eye has been viewed as a precursor to new media sensibility, the question is raised what kind of digital environment Vertov’s quest for the perception liberation may inform – the “solvable maze” or the “tangled rhizome”? Vertov’s utopian dream of total coverage and emancipated perception that strives to transcend time and space connecting “any point to any other point” certainly reveals the configuration of a rhizome. This is how Deleuze described the complex perceptual formations of the cine-eye: gaseous perception is a rhizome. The privileged position of the subject is eliminated in Vertov’s a-centered purity of vision, while the relations between the seeing subject and object are modified. Thus, in Vertov’s utopian communist world the distance between the man and the rest of the world is liquidated. But how free does this make Vertov’s poetic cinema? If in Cinema 1 Deleuze is concerned with the perceptual mechanisms and sensory-motor dimensions of Vertov’s cinema, another Deleuze study, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, written in collaboration with Felix Guattari, suggests how the liberating capacities of the cine-eye 72 contrast to the logocentric rigidity and manipulative politics of Vertov’s rhythmic montage structures. Deleuze and Guattari describe rhizome as a heterogeneous space that establishes infinite connections linking “any point to any other point” of the social world via the processes of assemblage. These consist of the movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization: Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc., as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees. There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of rhizome. These lines always tie back to one another. That is why one can never posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and the bad. You may make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still a danger that you will reencounter organizations that restratify everything, formations that restore power to a signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject – anything you like from Oedipal resurgences to fascist concretions (9). Thus, on the one hand, there exists a plane of instability, an a-centered assemblage (facing “a body without organs” (4)) which seeks to destabilize and suffuse the given entity by enabling the signs to scatter and ceaselessly interact with each other within multiple locations via “lines of flight” – the process of deterritorialization. On the other hand, there is a reversible procedure of reterritorialization – when the assemblage “faces strata” again 73 and restores coding and control via the processes of segmentation that purport to re-establish social structure and cultural practice within a certain institutional framework. Functioning as a montage assemblage, Vertov’s cine-eye consists of “directions of motions” and connects “any point whatsoever” with another given point in the universe, thus constituting a heterogeneous space and representing a cinematic realization of the rhizomatic model. A rhizome also exists “between things” and represents a place where “things pick up speed” – “a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away” (25), in a manner similar to the kinesthetic charge that Vertov’s images receive in the interval. Thus, Deleuze’s elucidation of the cine-eye as an “a-centered” vision that goes beyond the confines of the privileged human viewpoint and fuses the subject with matter describes the process of deterritorialization within a rhizome. However, this movement of deterritorialization only divulges one aspect of Vertov’s cinema – its utopian liberation of vision, transcending convention and erasing the boundaries of subjectivity. But the modes of de/reterritorialiazation, as argued by Deleuze and Guattari, cannot be separated form each other. The freedom epitomized in liberated vision in 74 fact is hinged on power over others. Vertov’s quest for a rigid poetic form and his use of montage as a tool for making an impact upon the spectator actualize the organizational resources of a rhizome and serve as the forces of reterritorialization. In the 11 th plateau of A Thousand Plateaus, “Of the Refrain,” Deleuze and Guattari propose the concept of a refrain that brings forth the systematic quest for re-territorialization, arguing that rhythm and refrain represent those forces of the social world that tend to organize the given space by coding it through mechanisms of periodization. I would suggest that Vertov’s cinema fulfills the criteria of a DeleuzoGuattarian refrain, which constitutes a link between the poetics and politics of Vertov’s montage. The DeleuzoGuatarian refrain epitomizes the processes of territorial assemblage in the social world whose space it organizes/territorializes through the use of systemic stratifying efforts of rhythm, e.g. bird sings in order to mark its territory. Purporting to establish a link between rhythm and space, the refrain provides a theoretical explanation how Vertov’s ethnographic travels became politicized through the poetic efforts of rhythmic montage, as well as how the totalizing efforts of linearity gain control over the imagocentric liberating forces of the cine-eye. 75 Travels around Soviet Asia were central in the production of both Vertov’s cinematographic poems: A Sixth of the World and Three Songs about Lenin. Vertov’s visual refrain stratifies the ethnographic multiplicity featured in these works by reducing it to two main socio-economic systems: capitalism and communism. His rigid rhythmic stratification is used simultaneously to erase and create boundaries within and outside of the Soviet space: by resorting to rhythm Vertov inscribes the Soviet Other within the homogeneous construct of the inhabitants of the “sixth of the world,” and at the same time construes a new boundary which would separate the secured strata from the new Other embodied in the western institutions of capitalism. The rigidity of Vertov’s rhythmic patterns gives consistency to the myriad distant unknown places shown to us. But one can hardly travel beyond the rigid confines of Vertovian cine-space. His rhythmic structures are circular and do not provide one with an outlet for departure or escape – thus a constant return to the inside of the “sixth of the world” is an important aspect of Vertov’s poetics and politics. The cine-eye, starting its journey by transcending the limits of centered perception and traversing into things, as well as deterritorializing images towards the dimension of universal 76 variation, now makes a full rhizomatic circle by creating new boundaries for itself via systematizing and stratifying cinematic and social space. By introducing rhythmic forms into his politicized content via the cyclic, rhyming structure of shots within his montage assemblages, Vertov mobilizes the propagandistic power of his documentaries. Re-territorialization, the process of imposing rigidity and stratificatory coding, which Deleuze and Guattari argue is immanent to the refrain, becomes the dominant force in Vertov’s aesthetics. Vertov utilizes linguistic models for structuring his cinematographic poems, which he extrapolated from contemporaneous verse theory. The power of the refrain in Vertov’s oeuvres places an emphasis on rhythm as a major intellectual and progressive dialectical tool of his montage structures. Since it is possible that Vertov’s “tangled rhizome” could as well be a “solvable maze,” the question arises about the identity of new media itself, whose database logic was foreseen by the film-poet Vertov. Arguing that all modern-day media is governed by database structures, Manovich on the whole is rather optimistic about this new identity of artistic production. He particularly emphasizes how it transforms all culture into an “open source” 77 and points out that “this opening up of cultural techniques, conventions, forms and concepts is ultimately the most promising effect of computerization” (333). However, some of the influences of computer ontology on cultural logic may also seem, to say the least, alarming. Manovich himself seems to be aware of that, observing that “authentic creation has been replaced by selection from a menu” (124), and commenting that through the use of pre-developed data and interfaces “new media technology acts as the most perfect realization of the utopia of an ideal society composed of unique individuals” (42). A particular issue that arises in the context of database sensibility is thus whether in the “open-source” aesthetics of master narratives, predefined meta-data and pre-developed algorithms, all the selections have been already made for artists whose choices become more and more restricted in the era of cinema’s convergence with new media. Hence, Vertov’s rediscovery as a forerunner of digital sensibility proves to be a rather ironic development: once a film poet whose cinema of illusionary freedom and multiplicity was predicated on the power over others, Vertov envisioned the database imagination that in contemporary culture controls the generation of artistic production on an even more restricting “molecular” level. The question is 78 whether it is now the database’s turn to embark on its re-territorializing circuit of flattening multiplicity and whether this could occur within the strict logarithms of computer programming or the controlling logic of the commodity spectacle in today’s consumer and media society. Having come full circle, from poetic cinema to mass culture, Vertov’s database sensibility may call for a new poetic resistance in the beginning of the 21 st century. 79 CHAPTER 2: POETICS OF CINEMA AS A POETICS OF DATABASE An attempt to find a “scientific” approach to the question of poetic film genre and structure was undertaken by the Russian Formalists in their collection The Poetics of Cinema. No other tradition in the history of poetic cinema explores the issue of the poetry/film conjunction in such detail and with such analytical rigor. The Poetics of Cinema was published in Leningrad in 1927 under the editorship of Boris Eikhenbaum and included articles by Iu. Tynianov, V. Shklovsky, B. Eikhenbaum and B. Kazansky. The publication of the volume coincided with the gruesome circumstances of the abolition of the Philology department of Leningrad State University (Gurevich 156), thus literally remaining the first and the only attempt of Soviet scholars to undertake a common effort in applying the formal method to film. Much of the discourse on the conjunction of poetry and film in The Poetics of Cinema attempts to provide a genre definition for “poetic” cinema, as well as to do a comparative semiotic analysis of poetry and film. Despite various controversial statements made by the Formalists concerning the relationship of film and literature – at different points of time 80 affirming and negating the possibility of inter-media comparison 33 – the Formalists’ film theory and criticism was inextricably connected with the basic tenets of the Formal method in literary scholarship, which provided them with conceptual tools, methodology and sometimes fully elaborated theories for analyzing film. Such is the case with Tynianov’s theory of verse semantics, whose basic principles were reapplied almost verbatim to film syntagmatics. 34 By the time of the publication of The Poetics of Cinema in 1927, all of the contributors were well-established scholars, while the major tenets of the Formalist school of Russian literary criticism had already been formulated. Thus, the Formalist inquiry into the structure of poetic film derived directly from their literary scholarship and hinged on such notions as 33 In his 1919 article “On Cinematography,” Shklovsky asserted that “younger” art forms (i.e., cinema) should neither borrow nor take the form of the “older” ones, literature and theater (O kinematografe 15). However, in his 1926 essay “Literature and Cinema,” Eikhenbaum maintained that although “Cinema seeks material in order to utilize the methods and potentialities of its own language,” “literature is [still] the richest source of this material” (Literature and Cinema 124). 34 Tynianov’s “On the Foundations in Cinema” shows how densely Formalists’ revelations in literary theory are interwoven into their work on cinema. Large sections of the essay are dedicated to literary issues, including the discussion of Shklovsky’s plot/story differentiation and its connection to the problem of stylistics in literature. As the Tynianov scholar Sandra Rosengrant has observed in her “The Theoretical Criticism of Jurij Tynjanov,” “On the Foundations in Cinema” represents one of his “most literary articles and it throws a great deal of light on his theory of literature as a whole” (370). 81 de-automization; the unity and tightness of the poetic line; the differentiation between ordinary language and artistic discourse; the plot/story dichotomy; and the theory of the constructive principle of rhythm. The Formalist understanding of literariness in terms of a system which focuses on the relations among linguistic signs in a given artistic work influenced their semiological approach to poetic film. In looking at poetic cinema as a “modular” structure in which discrete elements are available for (re)combination, the Formalists laid the theoretical foundation for what I call “poetic database” in cinema, anticipating the work of Vertov and providing all the necessary “tools” and “interfaces” for the creation of his “database newsreel poetry.” Thus, this chapter will focus on the theoretical foundations behind the Formalist notion of poetic cinema, as well as on their elucidation of poetic signification in film, and will underscore how the Formalist examination of poetry/film relationship laid the groundwork for a rudimentary conception of database cinema. Poetic Films and the “Plot Machine.” 82 Vertov referred to himself as a “film-poet” and was considered as such by the theorist of poetics Victor Shklovsky, who was the first in Russian film scholarship to single out poetic film as a separate generic category. In “Poetry and Prose in Cinematography,” which is the only article of The Poetics of Cinema that is entirely dedicated to the question of the genre of “poetic” film, Shklovsky differentiates between poetic and prosaic cinema: there are two types of film, the prosaic and the poetic, and [they] represent the two basic film genres. They are distinguished one from the other not by rhythm, or rather, not by rhythm alone, but by the fact that in a poetic film technical-formal features predominate over the semantic features. The composition is resolved by formal techniques rather than by semantic methods. Plotless film is poetic film (130). As an example of the formal resolution of a poetic work in verbal arts, Shklovsky cites the Onegin stanza and suggests that the final rhyming couplet resolves the composition by disrupting the rhythmic system and taking on a somewhat parodistic character (129). He finds the same kind of formal resolution in cinema in Dziga Vertov’s A Sixth Part of the World, whose overall composition is based on rhythmic parallelism and rhyming. Shklovsky categorizes Charlie Chaplin’s film A Woman of Paris as “prose” 83 because of its “clearly articulated semantic values,” and Pudovkin’s Mother as a mixture of prose and poetry because of its gradual substitution of “realistic” situations by purely formal intensification of montage: “The film begins as prose…and ends with purely formal poesy. Recurring frames, images and their transformation into symbols, support my assertion that this film is poetic in nature” (130). In spite of the seemingly simple definition of poetic film as one that privileges form over content, Shklovsky understanding of the poetic genre in cinema extends deep into the methods and devices of plot composition in the literary text and leads to his strikingly modern description of what we may see as a database structure as it exists in digital media art. “Poetry and Prose in Cinematography” is the shortest contribution to the collection and it certainly cannot be interpreted outside the context of Shklovsky’s works on literary theory. By 1927 Shklovsky had established himself as the leading scholar of the poetics of prose. His groundbreaking contributions to the Formal method included the concept of defamiliarization; the differentiation between practical and poetic language, as exemplified in “Art as Technique” (1917); and the distinction between plot and story as shown in “On the Connections Between Devices of Siuzhet 84 Construction and General Stylistic Devices” (1919), “Sterne’s Tristam Shandy,” and “Literature Beyond Plot” (1921). In Theory of Prose, Shklovsky delineated the difference between plot and story (fabula and siuzhet), and, following Veselovsky, proposed that there exist a certain number of ready-made motifs that can be grouped together in plots (Sherwood 33). He argued that the basic distinction between story (“the sum total of events”) and plot (“the artistically constructed distribution of events”) 35 lies in the aesthetic function of the latter to challenge the natural unfolding of actions by means of various “devices of construction,” such as staircase-like structure or retardation, which open avenues for renewed perceptibility. As Richard Sherwood observes, the story for Shklovsky represents a kind of the pre-aesthetic material at the writer’s disposal (material which he may not even have created himself) that is to be used for plot composition (33). The idea of siuzhetnost’ (plot embodiment), Shklovsky’s neologism to designate the actualization of the totality of stylistic and compositional devices employed 35 These definitions are given by Tomashevsky in Teoriia literatury (134,136). 85 in an artistic work, becomes central in distinguishing between the generic peculiarities of poetic and prosaic cinema. Shklovsky’s definition of the poetic genre in cinema implies a type of film which is form-conscious and in which “stock” material of the story is arranged into an aesthetically perceptible construction. According to him, poetic film is based on the techniques of siuzhetnost’ and its narrative devices acquire a status more central than “semantic values.” One can assume then that “prosaic” film relies upon the principles of fabula construction, as marked by strong narrative links, natural chronology, and logical cause-effect sequences. 36 Transferring the literary principle of using ready-made stock material for the construction of plot to cinema, Shklovsky comes up with a uniquely prophetic vision of database narratives: Imagine a row of films wound on special spools. One of the reels contains people’s professions, the second one – countries of the world, the third one – various ages, the fourth one – human acts (for example, kissing, climbing a pipe, knocking someone down, jumping into the water, shooting). A person takes hold of the cranks leading to these reels and spins them (Plot in Cinematography 42). 36 It is important to note that Shklovsky follows the same method for the taxonomy of genres as the Formalists applied to the works of fiction as a whole, in which the pivotal genre criterion is not thematology but the architectonics of an artistic work. 86 Similarly to literature, films could be made out of “non-aesthetic” stock footage, as it is described in Shklovsky’s “mashinka dlia siuzhetov” (“plot machine”), as he calls it. The vital factor for poetic film is to make use of the “plot-machine’s” raw materials in such a manner that their arrangement in plot makes the story material aesthetically perceptible. There is a certain ambiguity to the scholar’s equation of poetic film with plotless works in “Poetry and Prose in Cinematography,” for, as discussed above, he sees plot embodiment as an integral part of poetic sensibility. It appears that Shklovsky’s essay “Literature Beyond Plot” contains the key to the meaning of plotless in this context and shapes Shklovsky’s definition of poetic film in terms of modular structure. Here the scholar investigates instances of plotless literature, analyzing the works of Vasily Rozanov, whom he considers an outstanding innovator of the Russian novel. The discussion revolves around the looseness of novelistic conventions in Rozanov’s prose marked by the disruption of cohesiveness and thematic logic, vast digressions on a variety of topics, the sacralization of byt, and stream of consciousness. He particularly focuses on the “splintering” devices of plotless literature (razdroblenie, stupenchatoe postroenie) that fracture and distort the unified material of the story making 87 it perceptible. Shklovsky is interested in how Rozanov restores the novel back into its raw materials – what Frederic Jameson calls a “linguistic collage, made up of journal entries, newspaper clippings, letters, entries noted on stray envelopes and scraps of paper” (The Prison-House of Language 78). Plotless, understood as fracturing the story and making the individual elements and the principles of composition perceptible, is exactly the character that Shklovsky ascribes to poetic film. In plotless film, however, similar to plotless works of fiction, the formal actualization of plot (the principle of siuzhetnost’) is of primary importance. 37 37 Shklovsky’s application of plot/story theory to the genre of film in “Poetry and Prose in Cinematography” can also be read as a response to the questions posed by Tynianov in “On the Foundations of Cinema.” At the end of the essay Tynianov points out, “In this article I want only to pose the following questions: (1) What is the relationship between plot and style in cinema? (2) Are cinematic genres based on the relationship between plot and story”? (99) What precedes this inquiry is Tynianov’s argument about the role of stylistics in the clarifying a semiotic model for cinema. He maintains that “the semantic correlativity of the visible world is rendered by means of its stylistic transformation.” The fact that he connects the notion of stylistics with the correlation of cinematic elements might be explained by the Formalist treatment of style in terms of “teleological unity of devices” (Erlich 233). In “The Aims of Poetics” Zhirmunsky defined style as “the totality of devices employed in the work of poetry, the underlying esthetic principle which insures the unity of the whole and determines the function of each individual part” (qtd. in Erlich 233). Such an understanding of the role of style in poetry permits a comparison with Shklovsky’s notion of plot as the “sum-total of devices,” which Tynianov actually points out in “Foundations,” suggesting the connection between the two concepts and saying that style is “the principal mover of the plot,” especially in works with weakened fabula linkages. He then establishes another major cross-disciplinary link between cinema and poetry, maintaining that the “cine-novel” actually bears similarity to the novel in verse, for the role of style in the relationship of story and plot is particularly perceptible in the two types of work, in which stylistic changes influence semantics. In conclusion, having recognized the relationship of the film plot to the story as an important value for defining film genres, Tynianov makes a connection between the narrative with maximum emphasis on plot and the genre of cine-lyric. 88 The database awareness of the discrete elements available for combination within a larger system – that is implied in Shklovsky’s discussion of poetic film – takes its origin from the Saussurian tradition of linguistic analysis that was appropriated by the Russian Formalists for the study of poetics as a whole. Saussurean theory envisioned language as a functional totality of linguistic signs that have no fixed meaning in themselves but acquire meaning when combined with other elements of the same language system (Stam, Burgoyne, Flitterman-Lewis 6). The twofold identity of a linguistic sign presupposed its interaction with other signs of the system on paradigmatic and syntagmatic planes, which defined the linguistic sign’s property of being open to multiple significations. Saussurian principles of the fractal dimension of language were adopted by the Russian Formalists whose “morphological” method emphasized the literary work and its constituent parts, as well as on the principles of the literary work’s construction (Erlich 171). 89 Such “reading in detail” is symptomatic of the Formalists’ singling out the object of their study – not literature as a whole, but only that which makes a certain text a work of art. As Frederic Jameson suggests the Formalists began, as did Saussurean linguistics, with the isolation of the intrinsic itself, with the disentanglement of their specific object of study from those of the other disciplines, with a systematic examination of what Jacobson called literaturnost, the distinguishing element of literature itself (The Prison-House of Language 43). The Formalist concept of cinema as a “modular” structure is vital for their definition of poetic film, as well as for the actualization of Vertov’s “poetic database” which supports the idea of individual elements’ combinability according to the laws of poetic speech organization. In the next section I will trace the formation of this concept in Formalist scholarship on the conjunction of poetry and film. From Verse Theory to Cine-Semiotics By the time of The Poetics of Cinema publication in 1927, Formalist verse theory had already made two important revisions of their early understanding of poetic language. They had repudiated earlier consideration of poetry in terms of purely euphonic characteristics in favor of investigating 90 the links between phonetics and semantics. Also, the understanding of poetic discourse was re-evaluated from merely envisioning the poetic work as a sum-total of devices towards a more systemic approach, according to which the elements of different strata (phonetic, semantic, morphological, syntactic) were interconnected and subject to control by an overriding constructive principle (dominanta). Both of these developments in verse theory found reflection in the Formalist exploration of poetic signification in film. Yury Tynianov, who played the largest role in revising the Formalist approach to versification from the consideration of form toward semantics and structure, employed the cinema-poetry analogy much more extensively than any of other contributors to Poetics of Cinema. He suggested cinema’s similarity to poetry on several linguistic levels, including the stylistic, semantic and syntactic planes. Tynianov’s concepts of deformed semantics, orientation toward the neighboring word, and the “constructive principle” formulated in his 1924 monograph The Problem of Verse Language became the chief principles for the elucidation of film syntagmatics for the Formalist theoreticians, and in The Poetics of Cinema were also applied by Eikhenbaum and Kazansky. Being by far the main paradigm in Formalist 91 writing on film, Tynianov’s theory did a great deal for working out the basic principles of montage for Russian film-makers, conceptually uniting Kuleshov’s experiments, Eisenstein’s dialectical montage, and Vertov’s cine-eye method. Based on the assumption that poetry is a construction in which all elements are closely interrelated, one of the main theses introduced by Tynianov in The Problem of Verse Language is that the meaning of a word in poetic speech undergoes specific changes depending on contextual circumstances. For example, the chapter “The Meaning of the Word in Verse” introduces four factors of rhythm that affect the words’ semantics within a poetic text: (1) the unity of the poetic line represents a marked unit which can make words at its boundaries perceptible; (2) the compactness of the line makes words enter into “deforming” relations with the neighboring words; (3) the “dynamization” of poetic speech reveals the meaning of the word in response to the rhythmical significance of the entire poetic work; (4) the successiveness of the poetic line affects how the semantics of one word may influence the meaning of the rest of it. Central to Tynianov’s application of the theory of verse semantics to cinema is the analogy between a verse line and cinematic shot. Anticipating the work of cine- semioticians, the Formalists designated the shot as a minimal unit of 92 articulation that consists of smaller segments – elements of the shot, such as representations of people, objects, as well as the stylistic techniques of mise- en-scene – lighting and camera angles. Tynianov suggests that in the same way as the “orientation toward the neighboring word” makes word meanings overlap, the unity of the shot is produced by the meaning of all its signifying elements, as they semantically interact with each other: “One shot follows another bearing the semantic sign of its predecessor, [and] it is colored by it semantically throughout its duration” (On the Foundations of Cinema 84). Tynianov argues that within the tightness of a poetic line words reveal the “wealth of their lateral meanings” similar to the objects within the shot. He writes, In poetry, even the auxiliary words and all those other inconspicuous lexical items of secondary importance become highly prominent and take on significance. So it is in the shot: its unity changes the meaning of all the things [within it], so that each one is correlated with all the others and with the shot as a whole (91). He further mentions that the cinematic “requirement” for the elements of the shot to interrelate is the quality of differentiation, which may be achieved by the stylistic means of mise-en-scene – such as movements within the shot or camera angles: “in order to interrelate with one another, the “heroes” of a 93 shot, like the words (and sounds) in a verse line, must be differentiated, distinct” (91). Tynianov’s foregrounding of the principle of stylistic markedness to sustain the poetic interaction of the shot’s constituents indicates his inclusion of the dichotomy between ordinary/poetic speech into the Formalist definition of “poetic” in film. The Formalist differentiation between ordinary discourse and poetic language became the pivotal force driving the advancement of the conception of poetic cinema in Formalism. This opposition, set forth already by the first OPOYAZ publications (Jacubinsky, Shklovsky), marking poetic discourse as aesthetically perceptible, influenced the Formalists’ treatment of both the definition of poetic as a cinematic quality as well as Shklovsky’s description of the poetic genre. 38 38 In “Problems of Cinema Stylistics,” Eikhenbaum also applies the opposition of ordinary and artistic perception to film, suggesting that the relationship between photography and cinema is similar to that between everyday and poetic language: “Against the background of cinema, simple photography finally defined itself as elementary, everyday, applied. The relationship between the photograph and cinema is something of the nature of the relationship between practical and poetic language” (56). Central to both dichotomies (everyday versus poetic speech and photography versus cinema), Eikhenbaum posits the notion of defamiliarization: in the same way as ordinary speech does not make use of phonetic texture, semantics or syntactic nuances (the qualities that acquire primary importance in poetic speech), cinema can be distinguished from photography by the notion of “photogenicity” – the way objects are transmitted to the screen, acquiring expressive character. Thus, he builds his understanding of poetic cinema on the concept of the “photogenic,” which represents the “transrational” cinematic quality and hinges upon the employment of stylistic means of mise-en-scene. 94 Tynianov’s ideas on cine-semantics and elements’ interdependence within the internal montage of the shot are based on a semiotic understanding of cinema as a sign system in which various semantic, syntactic and stylistic units coexist in an interactive environment. “The visible world is presented in cinema not as such, but in its semantic correlativity, otherwise cinema would be nothing more than live (or still) photography” (On the Foundations of Cinema 85), maintains Tynianov, deriving this model of semiosis for cinema from verse, which he defines as a “construction in which all of the parts are mutually interdependent.” What differentiates the work of the Russian Formalists from the work of film-semioticians is that they insisted specifically on the kinship of the filmic sign with units of poetic articulation. Thus, in “Problems of Cinema Stylistics,” Eikhenbaum (who similar to Tynianov states that a shot corresponds to a poetic line) proposes a further segmentation of the filmic unit of articulation – the shot – into its minimal technical units – frames. For this he uses an analogy with poetic enunciation. He suggests that cinematic frames bear similarity to feet in poetry: both of them represent “mechanistic, abstract segmentation” which is not perceptible, and “not an articulation,” but they constitute the basis of their respective artistic languages: 95 In terms of perception what really exists are not the feet, but groups of elements unified and juxtaposed to one another by rhythmic accents…the celluloid frame is for the viewer an imaginary, abstract segmentation – a kind of atom of the film…Obviously, what has fundamental significance for the question of articulation in film language are not the photographic or celluloid frames, but the montage shots, because precisely these are perceived as real units (71). Poetic Signification in Film Envisioning cinema as a discourse, and analyzing the shot as a primary unit of filmic signification, the Formalists were also the first scholars to consider cinema’s syntagmatics – the organization of shots into larger syntactic units or segments of articulation. Eikhenbaum extrapolates Tynianov’s law of deformed semantics, operative within the boundaries of the shot, onto the level of filmic syntax or montage. He suggests that Tynianov’s theory of basic and secondary semantic meanings is better applicable to montage than the shot, for only a sequence of shots engages every individual shot to reveal their semantic nuances: in cinema we have the semantics of the shots and the semantics of montage. Taken in isolation, the semantics of a shot as such really stands out... But of course, the basic semantic role belongs to montage, since it is precisely montage which colors the shots with definite semantic nuances in addition to their general sense. There are well-known examples of film editing where the very same shots, 96 placed in a new montage “context,” take on completely new meaning (78). The Formalists’ inquiries into issues of poetic signification in film were inspired by the shift that the Formal Method underwent in the mid-twenties from poetic euphony towards the study of semantics and syntax. Earlier preoccupation with phonetic clusters and sound repetitions gave way to the issues of organization of euphonic material in verse, i.e. analysis of metrical patterns, grouping of words, classification of rhythmico-syntactic units (Zhirmunsky, “Composition of Lyrical Verse,” 1921; Eikhenbaum, “Melodics of Verse,” 1922; Jakobson, “On Czech Verse,” 1923; Tomashevsky, “Russian Versification,” 1923). Analyzing larger units of cinematic enunciation (film syntax), Tynianov argues for a “vertical” type of filmic articulation and consistently employs the analogy with poetic signification for describing the film medium. For example, Tynianov suggests that, as in poetry, the technique of close-up in cinema carries the synecdochic function of singling out a detail for the whole. The close-up shot is based on the operation of replacing of what is meant with what is shown, which also corresponds to a metaphoric function in cinema: “a given action is transformed from a principal to its 97 counterpart: instead of people kissing, we see a pair of turtledoves”(On the Foundations 87). The procedure of replacement or substitution leads to a specific type of poetic signification in cinema, according to Tynianov, which he formulates in his discussion of cinematic montage. Stating that “cinema jumps from shot to shot, just as verse does from line to line,” Tynianov argues for the structural equivalence of poetic and filmic syntax, which are distinguished by a markedly non-sequential character and hinges upon the replacement of units within a larger syntactic form. He insists that “if one is to draw an analogy between cinema and the verbal arts, then the only legitimate analogy would be between cinema and verse, not prose” (93). In “Is the Cinema in Decline?” Roman Jakobson develops Tynianov’s argument on the synecdochic nature of film, emphasizing the importance of this function in envisioning cinema as a semiotic system : “pars pro toto is a fundamental method of filmic conversion of things into signs.” Unlike Tynianov, he doesn’t speak of the principle of replacement as the exclusive form of filmic communication, but argues that metonymy and metaphor represent “two fundamental kinds of cinematic structure” (162). Since, in his study of Pasternak’s prose, Jakobson develops a strong link between metonymy and prose, and between metaphor and poetry, it is possible to 98 suggest that by “two kinds of cinematic structure” Jakobson refers to prosaic and poetic types of cinema. In “Marginal Notes on the Prose of the Poet Pasternak,” he argued that metonymy characterizes the domain of prose, for in prose the basic impulse of narrative moves from one object to an adjacent one on paths of spatial and temporal contiguity; while metaphor may be more commonly attributed to poetry, for images in poetry are linked according to the principle of “similarity or contrast” (Jakobson, Zametki o proze poeta Pasternaka 329). In “Is the Cinema in Decline?” he speaks of the technique of jumpcut particularly as of a metaphoric/poetic device that eliminates a part of the action and joins two scenes “not by contiguity but by similarity or contrast (the person occupies the same position in both scenes).” Jakobson also points at a definite tendency towards linearity or “prosification” in contemporaneous cinema, comparing this phenomenon with the natural evolution in literary arts: “As soon as an inventory of poetic devices takes root and a model canon is established so thoroughly that the literacy of epigones can be taken for granted, then, as a rule, a striving toward prosification usually develops” (165). As contrasted to cinema built according to the syntactic principles of prose, Jakobson speaks of the direction assumed by the plotless cinema of Eisenstein, Chaplin and Bunuel, 99 characterized by “purposeful looseness,” “intentional rawness,” and “sketchiness as a device.” In his definition of the plotless film as poetic, Jakobson closely follows Shklovsky’s understanding of the poetic genre in cinema and underscores the major principle of poetic film to reveal its individual elements as well as to expose the principles of their combination. Envisioning the Poetics of Database Defining poetic film in terms of the actualization of its “modular” structure, in which discrete cinematic elements may be combined according to the laws of poetic speech organization, results from the Formalist envisioning both poetry and film in terms of sign-oriented behavior. The name of the collection The Poetics of Cinema in a way anticipates the prominence of linguistics in the Formalists’ analysis of film, for the employment of linguistic models was central to their research into poetics. In Roman Jakobson’s words, “Language is the symbolic expression par excellence and all other systems of communication are derived from it and presume its existence” (Jakobson, Main Trends 32). Thus, the issue of cinema and language, and, more specifically, the poetic function of language, became particularly salient for Poetics. 100 As Eikhenbaum stated in “Problems of Cinema Stylistics,” “Any art whose perception proceeds through time must have some kind of articulation, since it is, to a greater or lesser extent, a language” (70). The Formalists developed a strong analogy between cinema and language, trying to establish the minimal units of cinematic articulation on the basis of how a natural language is constructed, and put a special emphasis on film’s syntagmatics and narrative grammar. In their investigations of how “cine- speech” is formed, they proposed an analogy between sentence building blocks and “cine-phrases” and “cine-sentences.” Camera positioning and framing, according to Eikhenbaum, “function as the fundamental structural law of the film phrase,” according to which medium close-ups and close-ups can be equated with the subject and predicate of the film phrase with the medium shot representing an “adverb of time or place.” The Formalist focus on the constitutive elements of a literary work and the principles of their combinability, besides relying on “scientific” Saussurian analysis, also drew on the trans-rational experiments of early Futurists. Victor Erlich observes that “[Xlebnikov’s] favorite procedure was to break down the familiar words into their morphological components which he then reshuffled at will and reintegrated into new verbal units” (46). 101 The Russian Formalists were among the first cine-grammarians (together with Louis Delluc and Bela Balazs), who by stressing the analogy between cinema and natural language pioneered cine-semiology. However, they definitely were the only ones who insisted on the parallel between filmic and poetic signification in comparing film with verbal art. If the majority of cine-semiotic researches have dealt with the legitimacy of comparing linguistic word to cinematic shot (Metz, Eco), the Formalists were the only theoreticians to argue that a filmic shot, as a minimal unit of cinema, operates similarly to a poetic line. They proposed that it could be further broken down into technical units of frames, similar to feet in poetry, and finally, that the larger cinematic units combine to form the equivalent of stanzas or narrative poems (Eikhenbum, Tynianov). They were the only theorists to argue the film/poetry analogy on the basis of their similar articulation. The Formalists defined poetic film as one that makes the form perceptible by revealing its “filmicness” or the mechanisms of its construction (plot-actualization). Thus, Shklovsky’s incorporation of the principle of siuzhetnost’ into the basis of the poetic genre classification relies on the perceptibility factor of “laid-bare” formal devices. This definition 102 comes close to contemporary discussion of database narratives by Marsha Kinder who suggests that database cinema is based on the technique of conscious exposure of “the dual process of selection and combination that lie at the heart of all stories and are crucial to language” (Designing a Database Cinema 349). Furthermore, the Formalist research into the poetics of film provides ample material for describing the “database” aesthetics of the early Soviet film-making, and, especially in the work of Dziga Vertov, whose cine-eye method largely derived from Formalist verse theory. The idea of interchangeability and combinability of elements in a cinematic work, appropriated by Vertov, derives from the major Formalist tenet of a systemic approach to art. Most importantly, Formalist research into narratology and the first attempts at “generative poetics” laid the foundation for the industrial approach to art assumed by Russian Avant-garde artists. Shklovsky’s “mashinka dlia siuzhetov” (“plot-machine”) intended for cinematic mass- production definitely inspired Vertov’s attempts at creating “films that beget films” and may be seen as a symbol of the Avant-garde utopian conception of collectivist creativity. The Formalist examination of the poetics of cinema and poetic signification in film underscores once more the poetic origins of 103 database cinema and shows that some of the characteristic properties of digital environment, such as modularity, refer back to the Formalist “morphological” approach to a work of art. 104 CHAPTER 3: “POETIC DATABASE” AS A RHIZOME Inspired by the post-revolutionary rationalized building of the new world, Vertov’s “poetic database” relied essentially on the efficiency of communication and evolved from the Formalist “scientific” approach to poetry which provided Vertov the necessary linguistic models for the construction of his “newsreel poetry.” The search for the “poetic” in cinema continued after the experimental era of the Soviet Montage School. The cause of the turn to poetic sensibility expressed in prioritizing the subjective in the post-war European Art film is identified by film historians as a direct reflection of the collapse of the formal and ideological revolutionary aspirations of the world experimental cinema of the twenties-thirties under the emergence of the Hollywood Studio Age, which caused film-makers to resort to personalized expressions. 39 Making cinema “poetic” for the post-war Western film- 39 Thus, founding editor of journal October Annette Michelson argues in “Film and the Radical Aspiration” that in Europe this moral frustration was displaced into existential angst expressed in the essentially self-reflexive cinema of Nouvelle Vague, e.g., in Alan Resnais’ films where stylistic discontinuity articulates itself through the poetic trope of caesura, pervasive visual and rhythmic gaps that express the filmmaker’s intentional political “aphony.” In American post-war avant-garde film, this disassociation from political discourse is taken even further in the “aesthetic of autonomy” that also operates as a defense mechanism in reaction to the failure of revolutionary euphoria of fraternity among film-makers of the 20s-30s. This solitary vision in American independent cinema, however, reaches the point at which the modernist concept of the cine-eye is substituted with the camera’s serving as the extension of the film-maker’s body or 105 makers and theoreticians meant the subversion of the signification process, which made them argue against the use of the linguistic codes in film semiotics that were instrumental in the coercion of spectators. It was the Italian filmmaker and theoretician Pier Paolo Pasolini who explicitly refuted the logocentric tradition in cinema and looked at the conjunction of poetic perspective and film as a route out of it. Poetry was seen by him not as a linguistic utterance, but rather as a type of intuitive, imagistic and irrational form of thought, while the convergence of film and poetic sensibility, surprisingly (in so far as poetry belongs to verbal arts!) led him to embracing a decisively visual, image-oriented approach to film. Pasolini’s image-oriented approach to “poetic” film, formulated in his concept of the “cinema of poetry,” to a greater or lesser extent, concerns the following issues: it gives preference to visual signifiers as opposed to positing linguistics as the master pattern for cinema semiotics; and it dwells upon the pre-grammatical, oneiric, intuitive dimension of cinematic perception that underlines cinema’s poly-voicedness. even of his nervous system, thus leading to a “crude automatism.” In these films’ proclivity for the elimination of narrativity for the sake of visual logic and dense imagery, Michelson sees a certain affinity with abstract expressionist tendencies in contemporary painting. 106 Pasolini’s insights into the issues of split subjectivity and the oneiric nature of the “cinema of poetry” turned out to be extremely influential in exploring cinema’s ability to generate virtual sensations, which was elaborated, among other studies, in Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema books, and Tom O’Connor’s Poetic Acts and New Media (2007). Furthermore, much of the “cinema of poetry” strategies exemplify Marsha Kinder’s description of “database narratives,” which provides us with more evidence to argue for the application of a poetic database framework to the study of the poetry/film conjunction. This chapter will examine the theoretical framework upon which Pasolini’s convergence of cinema and poetic sensibility is built and will investigate how the “cinema of poetry” became instrumental in the formulation of some essential new media concepts, such as “virtual becomings,” “crystalline regimes” and “database narratives.” “Il Cinema Di Poesia”: the Theory. The Origins of the “Poetic” for Pasolini Pasolini formulated his insights on the intersection of poetic language and film in the essay “Il cinema di poesia” (“The Cinema of Poetry”) which was delivered as a lecture in June 1965 at the New Cinema Festival at 107 Pesaro. In this work he questions the applicability of the system of linguistic signs derived from structural linguistics to the study of film and links the issues of image discourse with a “poetic” perspective. He draws a strict line between linguistic signs and im-signs (imsegni, i.e. image signs), which he claims are specific to cinema, and are of the same nature as visual images that pass through our mind during dreaming or memorization. Arguing against a controlling syntactic code in film, he emphasizes the oneiric nature of cinema, for cinema’s operating with im-signs makes it rely on pre- grammatical and pre-morphological codes of the subconscious – “the world of memory and of dreams” (Pasolini, The Cinema of Poetry 544). Pasolini asserts that the markedly expressive nature of cinema, its dream-like, essentially metaphoric quality makes it first and foremost an artistic and not a philosophical or instrumental medium and argues that the power to communicate by means of images equates cinema with poetry. He states the language of cinema is fundamentally a “language of poetry.” Quite on the contrary, historically, in practice, after several abortive attempts, the cinematic tradition which was formed seems to be that of a “language of prose,” or, at least, of a “language of narrative prose.”… This means that cinema has undergone a violation which was moreover rather foreseeable and unavoidable: everything in it that was irrational, oneiric, elementary and barbarous has been kept this side of consciousness… there was quickly constructed a whole 108 narrative convention which has authorized useless and fallacious critical comparisons with the theatre and the novel (547). Similar to Jakobson, 40 who argues about the tendency to linearity that cinema developed over time, Pasolini points to certain “prosaic” constraints that were historically imposed on the cinematic medium through its comparison with the theater and the novel. Thus, Pasolini’s concept of the “cinema of poetry” is, in a way, a strategy of defamiliarization from the conventional expectations of narrativity, which should renew the processes of seeing and sensing the world and reject the cinematic oppression created by the tendencies of “prosification.” As for the definition and characterization of poetic language, Pasolini’s approach greatly diverges from the Formalists’ “scientific” method, which defined poetic speech in terms of linguistic structure. Pasolini considers the subjective and irrational to be the most important 40 Pasolini was familiar with the Formalists’ studies of cine-poetics. He edited an anthology of Formalist writings on cinema entitled I formalisti russi nel cinema (Milan, 1971). Although he never explicitly cites the Russian Formalists, some of their theses, such as Shklovsky’s differentiation between poetry and prose in cinema, Jakobson’s argument on the imposition of prosaic constraints on film narrative, and Eikhenbaum’s suggestions on the correspondence between internal speech and cinematic discourse are easily recognizable in Pasolini’s writings. For a brief discussion of Pasolini’s use of the Formalists’ postulates, see Naomi Greene, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy (110-111). 109 markers of the “poetic.” Although the definition of “poetic” is never stated directly in any of Pasolini’s critical works, in the essay “The Screenplay as a ‘Structure That Wants to Be Another Structure,’” which was written in the same year as “Cinema of Poetry” (1965), Pasolini notes The distinction between the “language of prose” and “the language of poetry” is an old concept among linguists. But if I had to point to a recent chapter of this distinction, I would suggest a few pages dedicated to this topic in Writing Degree Zero by Barthes, in which the distinction is radical and electrifying (The Screenplay as a Structure 194). In Writing Degree Zero, Barthes argues for the self-sufficiency of formal expression in modern poetry (“[modern] poetic words exclude men”) and contrasts it with content-oriented classical poetry which “postulates the possibility of dialogue” (50, 49). He opposes classical poetry to modern poetic language, suggesting that in classical understanding “poetic” entailed merely an idiosyncratic technique of expression and wasn’t a different language, but an “ornamental variation of prose.” Modern poetry, on the other hand, functions as a sufficient, separate language and “does not need to signal its identity outwardly” (42, 43). The main difference between the two stems from the reversed relation between the signifier and signified: 110 in classical art, a ready-made thought generates an utterance which “expresses” or “translates” it… In modern poetics, on the contrary, words produce a kind of formal continuum from which there gradually emanates an intellectual or emotional density which would have been impossible without them (43). Barthes divests contemporary poetry of its communicative goal, but at the same time argues that if classical poetic narrative is not capable of rendering the uniqueness of an individual expression, contemporary poetry, deprived of humanism, is left with idiosyncratic style and poetic subjectivity. Similar to Barthes, Pasolini ascribes poetic quality to im-signs, for their archetypes, “the images of memory and dream,” are only capable of establishing communication “within oneself.” This internal mode of communication leads to the formation of subjectivity which characterizes im-signs and serves as an essential marker of the poetic for Pasolini: …archetypes of im-signs are the images of memory and dream, that is, the images of communication within oneself…These archetypes consequently give an immediate basic of “subjectivity” to the im- signs, the mark of belonging totally to the poetic. So that the tendency of the cinematic language should be expressly subjective and lyrical (The Cinema of Poetry 548). The “cinema of poetry” means for Pasolini the rejection of conventional archetypes (e.g. the “flight of excited or peaceful doves that are supposed to 111 render a character’s torment or joy” (549)), which have been developed in film from the very emergence of the medium when it was forced into the constraints of narrativity preventing a filmmaker from truly imaginative acts. Pasolini’s conception of syntagmatic representation as an obstacle en route to creativity also resonates with the ideas of Barthes in Writing Degree Zero: In classical speech, connections lead the word on, and at once carry it towards a meaning which is an ever-deferred project; in modern poetry, connections are only an extension of the word…Here, connections only fascinate, and it is the Word which gratifies and fulfills like the sudden revelation of truth. To say that this truth is of a poetic order is merely to say that the Word in poetry can never be untrue, because it is a whole; it shines with an infinite freedom and prepares to radiate towards innumerable uncertain and possible connections. Fixed connections being abolished, the word is left only with a vertical project…Thus under each Word in modern poetry there lies a sort of existential geology… instead of a chosen content as in classical prose and poetry (47-48). By making a distinction between horizontal syntagmatic writing in classical poetry and vertical “geology” in modern writing, Barthes suggests that the paradigmatic shift spurred by modernist discontinuous narrative liberated poetic discourse from a simplistic communication model and opened the way towards a multiplicity of perspectives that comprise modern poetics as a separate universe and not just “an ornamental variation of prose.” A similar connection between poetic word, paradigmatic representation and poly- 112 voicedness is assumed by Pasolini, who believes that one of the most important markers of the “cinema of poetry” liberated from syntagmatic constraints and prosaic conventions, is the use of the “free indirect subjective” described in the next section. 41 The Free Indirect Subjective and the Bakhtin Circle Pasolini’s model of poetry and film originates from the Surrealists’s “poetic” approach to cinema. According to them, the two media had something in common in terms of their understanding of the artistic (poetic and cinematic) image as a reflection of the mysterious world of the subconscious, which seeks to debunk habitual perception. Luis Bunuel in his 1953 work “Cinema, Instrument of Poetry,” notes, “The cinema seems to have been invented to express the subconscious life, whose roots penetrate so deeply into poetry” (68) He clarifies the meaning of the “poetic” earlier in the essay: “all that word can imply of the sense of liberation, of subversion 41 A link between syntagmatics and expressivity in poetry has been made in the study of poetics elsewhere (Donald Davie, H.M McLuhan). For instance, the English Movement poet and literary critic Donald Davie argues that one of the most important symbolist innovations was to liberate poetic form from syntax “as understood by logicians and grammarians” and “[to abandon] even the appearance of syntactical arrangement” in favor of free juxtaposition of images (Davie 323- 327). 113 of reality, of the threshold of the marvelous world of the subconscious, of nonconformity with the limited society that surrounds us” (66). Bunuel’s elucidation of the poetry/film analogy on the basis of the media’s oneiric nature, mimicking the subconscious, invoking social implications, and exhibiting disregard for temporal and spatial causality, became the basis for Pasolini’s ocularcentric approach to the cinema of poetry. The theoretical foundation of the “cinema of poetry,” however, would not then be radically different from the approaches to film envisioned by the Surrealists’ reliance on the subconscious if not for one major innovation on the part of Pasolini. He claims that the ocularcentrism of the “cinema of poetry” relies on the technique of free indirect discourse, which assumes a kind of split subjectivity or a contamination of the character’s and authorial gaze. To elucidate the “cinema of poetry,” Pasolini examines the works of Antonioni, Bertolucci and Godard that exemplify the emergence of the new “school of the Look” in cinema. Discussing the technical means of the “cinema of poetry” which allow filmmakers to transcend the conventions of narrativity, ensuring the priority of visual expression, he poses the question: how can the “language of poetry” be theoretically explainable and practically possible in cinema? I would like to answer this question by exceeding the strict domain of cinema, by widening the issue and 114 profiting from the liberty which my particular position – between cinema and literature – assures me. I will therefore, for the moment, transform the question: “Is the ‘language of poetry’ possible in cinema?” into this one: “Is the technique of free indirect discourse possible in cinema?” (549) Pasolini’s argument takes a rather unexpected turn as he reveals the theoretical model through which he will access “the cinema of poetry.” If one of Pasolini’s central concerns is to expose the technical machinery of a new cinematic school which is capable of breaking the narrative conventions established by prose, why would Pasolini turn to a prose technique, in particular, free indirect discourse, to elucidate the “cinema of poetry”? Theoretical interest in the technique of free indirect discourse was revived by the studies of the Bakhtin circle and was at the heart of their conception of “prosaics” as one of the most important ingredients of dialogic novelistic discourse. For the Bakhtin circle, “prosaics” came to replace the Formalist notion of “poetics” that applied the analysis of poetic devices to the study of the novel. Paradoxically, Pasolini turns to the study of prosaics to describe poetic sensibility in film. The “cinema of poetry” draws upon the social implications of dialogized discourse and uses the blurring of boundaries 115 between the author’s and character’s speech to describe “double subjectivization” in poetic cinema. The issue of socio-linguistic diversity in novelistic heteroglossia as delineated in Bakhtin’s theory becomes central to Pasolini’s discussion of free indirect discourse in cinema. Speaking of a character’s speech act as of a fundamentally social phenomena, imbued with the character’s class identity, Pasolini asserts that The characteristic of all re-lived discourses is that the author cannot abstract from them a certain sociological consciousness of the milieu he is evoking: the social condition of a character determines his language (specialized language, jargon, dialectal language) (550). It is the social implications of heteroglossia that allow Pasolini to transpose Bakhtin’s conception of dialogization from literature onto film. Free indirect speech in literature presupposes a narrative technique which purports to convey a character’s inner consciousness, mental language and psychology through the narrator’s discourse. If this operation bears a sociolinguistic function in literature and the writer “re-lives the discourse” by steeping herself in the language of the character, the linguistic factor may cease to be of importance in film. When the filmmaker immerses herself into the 116 character and is capable of seeing, of looking through the character’s eyes – the technique of free indirect discourse bears an entirely visionary, pictorial character – the sequences of images, which according to Pasolini, represent “the cinema of poetry”: It is evident that the “look” directed by a peasant (the more so if he comes from an underdeveloped region) and by a cultivated bourgeois upon the same object embrace two different realities: not only do the two men perceive two different “series” of things, but also, the same thing offers two different “faces” to the two “looks”… the difference which a director can encounter between himself and his character is psychological and social, but it is not linguistic (Pasolini’s italics) (551). Besides attributing the importance of the social factor to the filmic free indirect subjective, Pasolini argues that the operation of the conveyance of the authorial and character’s points of view hinges on the “look” and re- establishes film’s exclusively visual status, its oneiric, pregrammatical nature. The visual character of the “cinema of poetry” is emphasized by the elimination of the linguistic allusion: Pasolini substitutes cinematic “free indirect subjective” for the literary term “free indirect discourse,” arguing once more the non-linguistic technical base of cinema manifested by such things as the subjective shot or shot-reverse shot technique. 117 Furthermore, analyzing examples of the “cinema of poetry,” Pasolini uses Voloshinov’s taxonomy of the relationship between the reported and reporting utterances 42 to distinguish between three different types of the free indirect subjective. The type of technique used by Antonioni is based on the stylistic mechanism of substituting the character’s vision for the vision of the author: “he [Antonioni] looks at the world at one with his neurotic heroine, re-living it through “the look” of this woman… he has substituted, wholly, the world-view of a sick woman for his own vision” (553). The technique of 42 In Marxism and the Philosophy of the Language, Voloshinov distinguishes between two main tendencies within reported speech: the linear style, in which the boundaries between the reported and reporting utterances are very clearly articulated, and the pictorial style which tends to weaken and obliterate the borders between the author’s and the character’s speech. The second direction may be further realized in two ways, depending on the level of control granted to the reporting or reported context. Based on these principles, Voloshinov draws a very elaborate classification of direct, indirect, and quasi-direct (free indirect) discourses, specifying the protean forms of inter- orientation between the reported and reporting utterances. Thus, for instance, analyzing the possibility of analytical processing of information by the agency of the indirect discourse, the texture-analyzing modification is contrasted with the referent-analyzing modification of indirect speech. The former type concentrates solely on the thematic level of the message and is usually used in scientific or philosophical discourses, which provide explanation or analysis of the reporting speech with a strong demarcation line between the authorial and reported contexts. The latter modification, on the other hand, is concerned primarily with rendering the subjective and stylistic overtones of the reported message. The shift in emphasis between the two speech acts may result in authorial control over the character’s speech and contaminate it with the author’s intonation – irony, humor, etc; or may introduce a reverse case when the reported speech acts take over and are more forceful than the authorial speech, which may lead to the author’s replacement by the narrator. Shifting dominance is a marker of intense discursive interaction pertinent to mixed forms of reporting or the acts of “speech-interference,” which “display mutual exchange of intonations, a sort of reciprocal infectiousness between the reporting context and the reported speech” (Voloshinov133). The forms of speech interference can infiltrate both direct and indirect discourses and create situations of utmost dialogized ambiguity and “double-voicedness” (Bakhtin’s equivalent of Voloshinov’s speech interference). On Bakhtin’s double-voicedness see Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin Creation of a Prosaics (169). 118 Bertolucci, on the other hand, is based not on the substitution, but on the “contamination” of the character’s perception by that of the author, resulting in the fusion, the amalgamation of two styles into one. In the case of Godard, Pasolini speaks of the extreme case of Bakhtinian polyvoicedness – heteroglossia or narrative cubism, when the agents of free indirect subjective are surrounded by a myriad of perspectives and voices and are viewed through the eyes of each other: Behind the narrative of his films, behind the long “free indirect subjectives” which imitate the characters’ state of mind, there always unwinds a mechanical and asymmetrical film, made for the pure pleasure of restoring a reality broken by technique and reconstructed by a vulgar Braque (555). Pasolini describes several cinematographic procedures employed by Antonioni, Bertolucci and Godard through which poly-voicedeness can be technically and stylistically achieved. One of them is a sequential use of two point-of-view shots (“the close follow-up of two viewpoints, scarcely different from each other, upon the same object” (552)), which can give the viewer access to two different perceptions – the author’s and that of the character, or even confuse viewers by letting them understand that what seemed to be an objective shot was actually a shot from the character’s 119 perspective. Another technique is “obsessive framing,” described by Pasolini as “having characters enter and leave the frame” that allows a realization of the free indirect subjective, though in a more complex way: the montage is the succession of a series of pictures… into which the characters enter; so that the world appears as ordered by the myth of a pure pictorial beauty, which the characters invade, it is true, but while submitting to the rule of this beauty instead of profaning it by their presence” (553). The dialogism of the free indirect subjective is derived here from the dual perspective of the protagonist entering the frame on the one hand, and that of the author expressed through the aesthetic effects of the carefully constructed mise-en-scene, on the other. As a semiotician, Pasolini treats the spatial setting or landscape as a text (or even as the authorial voice). Thus, to elucidate the “cinema of poetry,” Pasolini deploys Bakhtin’s theory of novelistic heteroglossia, which served the Russian scholar as the founding principle of the tradition of prosaics. 43 At the same time, Pasolini claims that cinema needs to be liberated from the conventions of prose, and 43 If one of Pasolini’s central arguments is to expose cinema’s potential for poly-voicedness as a harbinger of poetic sensibility, Bakhtin is rather categorical about the monologic quality of lyric on the whole: “The world of poetry, no matter how many contradictions and insoluble conflicts the poet develops within it, is always illuminated by one unitary and indisputable discourse” (286). He emphasizes the authoritarian and even utopian quality of poetic language by suggesting that the poet is so enclosed in his own poetic universe that he is deaf to any socio-stylistic variation of the language around him; he will “sooner resort to the artificial creation of a new language specifically for poetry than he will to the exploitation of actual available social dialects” (Bakhtin 286-287). 120 argues that the “cinema of poetry” is capable of attaining this. It then certainly looks as if Pasolini liberates cinema from the constraints of prosaics with the help of prosaics itself. Moreover, if on the whole he argues against the Formalist approach of prioritizing the linguistic code in cinema, he concludes his essay with the statement that an overall value for the new cinematic movement of the “cinema of poetry” consists in “laying bare the device” – the Formalist concept of defamiliarization which lies at the heart of their method. It follows that Pasolini’s differentiation between prose and poetry in film, similar to the Formalist foregrounding of the poetic function of artistic discourse, does not coincide with the definition of genres of prose and poetry in verbal arts, but rather serves to highlight the ability of the “cinema of poetry” to undercut the rational narrative impulse of conventional cinema. However, Pasolini’s method of “defamiliarization” is fundamentally different from those of the Formalists and relates to his different approach to the “poetic.” The threat of arbitrariness fostered by the inclusion of subjectivity, the psychology of social considerations, and the complete dismissal of Potebnia’s understanding of poetry as “thinking in images” led to the 121 Formalists’ concentration on the issues of rhythm and syntagmatics in poetic speech and film. For Pasolini, the poetic function radically undermines formal oppression in favor of the individual freedom of subjectivity, foregrounding issues of point of view, visual presence, and the dreamlike nature of cinematic images. Pasolini argues that this new poetic school of cinema, the “school of the Look,” emerged only with Italian Neo-realism and that classical films were not truly poetic for “their poetry resided elsewhere, considered as linguistic technique.” This is exactly what Deleuze argues in Cinema 2 when he suggests that the “cinema of the seer” came to replace the classical model of the cinema of the “agent” only with the emergence of Neo-realism. If the “cinema of poetry’s” theoretical antecedent, the conception of heteroglossia, has been used to accuse Formalism of ignoring the social implications of language and concentrating solely on the texture of a literary work, its cinematic heir strove to liberate film from the domain of linguistic form and the monologicity of poetic language, insisting on its hallucinatory, dreamlike quality. For the “cinema of poetry” it doesn’t seem to matter that Bakhtin dismisses poetic language as monologic because it doesn’t seek film’s affinity with the verbal arts. The “cinema of poetry” is a heteroglossal 122 domain representing a rebirth of visionary, oneiric, premorphological cinema. It strives to dismiss the linguistic codes taken as monological points of view in film. It fluctuates between dream and reality, has dispersed subjectivity, and is not confined to the logic of “fixed connections,” but rather aspires to Barthesian understanding of poetic consciousness as a “vertical project,” a kind of “existential geology.” The Power of the “Cinema of Poetry” Pasolini’s “cinema of poetry” with its potential for plurality embedded in the heteroglossia of the free indirect subjective has given rise to a number of theoretical discussions of the virtual image, including Gilles Deleuze’s “crystalline regime” and Tom O’Connor’s “virtual simulations.” What is of significance for our work is that the image-oriented, oneiric, polyphonic cinematic domain assumed by the “cinema of poetry” is also highly relevant to Marsha Kinder’s account of interactive database narratives. Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of cinema’s “virtuality” could be considered as one of the earliest searches for the origins of the new media in “old” cinematic forms. In the next section I will discuss how some of the crucial aspects of Pasolini’s “cinema of poetry” were incorporated into 123 Deleuze’s exploration of virtual images’ formation. Since a recent work of Tom O’Connor, Poetic Acts and New Media (2007) further develops both Deleuzian virtual images and Pasolini’s free indirect subjective, the analysis of Deleuze’s appropriation of the “cinema of poetry” will be followed by the discussion of O’Connor’s “poetic simulations.” I will then proceed by examining Marsha Kinder’s notion of “interactive database narratives” and its relevance to the “cinema of poetry,” and also discuss an alternative approach to the “poetic database” that derives from the concept of rhizomatics rather than Formalist narratology. Deleuze’s Re-Reading of the “Cinema of Poetry” One of the most militant opponents of applying linguistics as a master pattern for cine-semiotics, Deleuze uses Pasolini’s “cinema of poetry” extensively to support his elucidation of Pierce- and Bergson-based paradigms of classic and post-war cinema in his Cinemas. Pasolini’s free indirect subjective undergoes serious scrutiny and is developed in Deleuze’s Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, which place special emphasis on the development of the ocularcentric tendency in post-war film, as well as on the notion of dispersed subjectivity. 124 It is through the Bergsonian metaphysical concept of the universe as an open flow of de-centered images that Deleuze approaches Pasolini’s insights into cinematic “double subjectivization.” He reassesses the conventional dichotomy of the objective versus subjective (point-of-view) shot taken from the character’s optical position, commenting on the ambiguous status of what we see as “objective” perception. Deleuze follows Jean Mitry in advancing the idea of “semi-subjective” image, which suggests the possibility that the first image in the shot-reverse shot construction is already subjectivized within the camera’s consciousness, while the second image might not necessarily be executed from the viewpoint of the character shown in the first image. He finds Pasolini’s free indirect subjective to be an important framework for double subjectivization, although, he questions the necessity of two opposite poles for the enactment of the “cinema of poetry”: Of Pasolini’s extremely important thesis we retain only this: that the perception image might find a particular status in the free indirect subjective, which would be like a reflection of the image in a camera- self-consciousness. Knowing whether the image is objective or subjective no longer matters: it is semi-subjective, if one wishes, but this semi-subjectivity…no longer marks an oscillation between two poles, but an immobilization according to a higher aesthetic form (76). Instead of free indirect subjective, Deleuze borrows a term from Pierce’s 125 semiotics – a “dicisign,” which comes to designate the cinematic mode of “perception of a perception.” Similarly to Pasolini, who speaks of the emergence of a new tradition in the cinema of Italian Neorealism, in Cinema 2 Deleuze points out that post-war cinema brought to an end the sensory-motor schema of the movement-image which defined classic cinema. In this new cinema, montage, which before was the driving force of action advancement, gives way to a new element that is “to prevent perception being extended into action in order to put it in contact with thought.” Deleuze uses an example from Rosselini’s Umberto D, in which a maid, after performing a series of mechanical insignificant gestures during a cleaning routine, suddenly stops and stares at her pregnant belly. The theorist maintains that this “purely optical situation” of seeing and contemplating prevents her from action – giving birth to the “cinema of the seer and no longer of the agent” (2). The characters of neo-realism “[have] learnt to see,” as Deleuze puts it. The situation with the spectator’s response has also changed dramatically in this new type of cinema, for the spectator is no longer engaged in sensor-motor identification with the character (exactly what Vertov was trying to achieve through kinesthesia) but rather she registers, observes and perceives the 126 images displayed on the screen. This means, Deleuze argues, that “the identification is actually reverted: the character has become a kind of viewer” (3). Thus, in post-war cinema the sensory-motor schema of movement- images is replaced with subjective images, i.e., dreams, memories, fantasies – pure spectacle in which the character does not act, but rather sees herself acting while dreaming or fantasizing. Paramount importance is given to the presentation of time in modern cinema, for it becomes the only coordinate that “gives what changes the unchanging form in which the change is produced” (17). In this cinema of idleness, sensory-motor activity gives way to a more acute perception of time and thought “to make them visible”(18). Deleuze claims that a new, “a whole cinema of time” has emerged, in which the function of montage has been reversed from one that was subordinated to movement to one subordinated by time. Deleuze further suggests that that the ocularcentric tendency in post- war cinema expressed in various dreamlike narratives, recollections and hallucinations gave rise to films that deliberately obliterate the boundaries between modes of the actual and the virtual. Blurring the planes of the real/imaginary, objective/subjective, and physical/mental, these films strive 127 to achieve “a point of indiscernibility.” He says, “We are in the situation of an actual image and its own virtual image, to the extent that there is no longer any linkage of the real with the imaginary, but indiscernibility of the two, a perpetual exchange” (273). This fusion of the modes makes the cinema of the sixties different from classic cinema, in which the transition from one mode to another was usually formally marked by various special effects, such as dissolve. The Deleuzian time-image is deprived of linearity and is capable of placing the past, the present and the future on the same plane. Deleuze suggests that classic cinema made a transition from an organic (kinetic) regime to a “crystalline” regime. In post-war time-blending narratives, i.e., Last Year in Marienbad and Hiroshima, Mon Amour (Alain Resnais) the characters interact in the present moment which serves as a meeting point of their recollections and accounts of their past, passing from one state to another in a seamless stream: “the present is the actual image, and its contemporaneous past is the virtual image in a mirror” (79). Furthermore, Deleuzian crystals or the tendency towards indiscernibility give rise to the blending of the true and the false thus generating falsifying narratives. If Euclidean chronological time is dismissed, and the past is not separated from 128 the same plane where the present is residing, it leads to a crisis of cause- effect sequences and tends to succumb to the “power of the false”: moments from the future, present and the past cannot be all true simultaneously. Tom O’Connor’s Poetic Acts and New Media Pasolini’s free indirect subjective and Deleuze’s crystalline regime inspired the recent work by Tom O’Connor Poetic Acts and New Media (2007) which discusses the phenomenon of “media poetry” in contemporary Hollywood films. Through close readings of David Lynch’ Mulholland Drive (2001), Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky (2001) and Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (1999), O’Connor formulates the notion of “Hollywood of poetry” and examines popular Hollywood productions from the perspective of “poetic simulations” that they generate through the subjective narratives of their protagonists or “authors-simulators.” Retaining Pasolini’s idea of double subjectivization or assembled enunciation, the “Hollywood of poetry” inclines more towards Deleuzian “points of indiscernibility” within the trajectory of shifting attitudes, or, more precisely, Deleuzian “falsifying narratives.” Similarly to how “the power of the false” obliterates the boundaries between the true and the false, 129 O’Connor’s media poetry tends towards the overall replacement of “representational realism” with the creation of hallucinatory, dreamlike narratives which allow one to read entire films as virtual simulations – reenactments of poetic sensibility. O’Connor regards David Lynch as one of the exponents of such poetic sensibility and an explorer of “the power of the false.” Thus, Mulholland Drive does not provide the audience with a single event or a character that could be easily verifiable as real or imaginary. The characters assume multiple identities (Betty/Diane, Rita/ Camilla), the story presents manifold versions of events occurring in co-existing pasts and presents, while the second part of the narrative (after Betty and Rita visit Club Silencio) reveals that Betty’s story, which constituted the first half of the film, is a fantasy (simulation) of a desperate unemployed actress named Diane. O’Connor’s objective is similar to that of Kinder’s who is looking for ways to analyze new media productions through earlier art forms. In “Hot Spots, Avatars, and Narrative Fields Forever,” she poses the question, how can we create engaging interactive narratives that provide an array of pleasures both emotional and intellectual, that don’t have clear-cut beginnings or endings and are full of interruptions, and that still offer a satisfying sense of drama and still make us want to return to them again and again? (8) 130 If Kinder suggests that cyberspace could dramatically benefit from European Art film directors’ experimentation with nonlinear narratives, O’Connor turns to verbal arts, specifically to poetry. He argues against the isolated status of contemporary poetry and its disassociation from the cultural makings of mass media (xxi). Discarding the idea of the ontological purity of the medium and opposing the romanticist stance towards poetry as elitist art, he suggests that particularly the poetic view of mass media productions, blending the “secondary orality” 44 with poetry, represents the most productive way for revealing the critical potential of popular media art. Thus, he argues that in Mulholland Drive, David Lynch carnivalizes the seemingly glamorous world of Hollywood through Betty/Diane’s distorted mediation, which is expressed in the simulated narrative or “story-poem” generated by her illusionist standpoint. Similarly, the simulated experience of traveling into Malkovich’s body portal in Being John Malkovich (a desire to experience the world through a privileged identity) offers a critical stance toward the mass-media’s obsession with Hollywood celebrities. 44 The term was coined by Walter J. Ong who asserted that mass media culture is post-literal in its simultaneous dependence on and difference from written language. Ong's major study on the subject is Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. 131 O’Connor follows Pasolini in assigning subjectivity or looking at the world through the irrational power of the “first person singular” to the “Hollywood of poetry,” suggesting that the poetic quality of Mulholland Drive hinges on the “entirely-subjective narrative,” the “singular, simulated perceptions” of Betty/Diane, which “generate poetic descriptions/ simulations that operate within and transform the appearances of the actual world/ reality-studio around her” (48). However, he takes Pasolini’s stance on poetic heteroglossia of the free indirect subjective in film even further by conferring simulative power on media poetry. Appropriating the Deleuzian thesis on “points of indiscernibility” within the crystalline regime, he sees the potential for poetic sensibility in the liberation of the imaginary and fictive perceptions that it generates. Furthermore, alongside Pasolini’s free indirect discourse that allows the “cinema of poetry” to transcend cinematic conventions, and the Deleuzian time-image that brings the realm of narrative clichés to a demise, O’Connor argues that by means of subjective perspectives/poetic simulations media poetry “[re-mediates] mainstream ideology” and subverts representational realism. 45 45 Regarding the question on what grounds O’Connor treats Hollywood “virtual simulations” as re-enactments of “poetic” sensibility, I suggest that the theory of poetic film as accounted by 132 The “Cinema of Poetry” and Interactive Database Narratives In “Hot Spots, Avatars and Narrative Fields Forever – Bunuel’s Legacy for New Digital Media and Interactive Database Narrative,” Marsha Kinder argues that the database structure is fundamental to the entire class of “oneiric” cinema coming from post-war European directors, including, among others, Luis Bunuel, Agnes Varda, Alain Resnais, Wojciech Has and O’Connor (and derived from the free indirect subjective and crystalline regime) is also closely in tune with the post-structuralist rediscovery of poetics. Recent developments in the theory of poetry are informed by the issues of selfhood in the poetic text or, as Joane Feit Diehl puts it, “whether a poem accurately represents the voice of a singular unified authorial imagination or whether the poem comes from a ‘subject position’ and denies its author the status of an identifiable, writerly self” (Diehl 89). In all the accounts mentioned above, the poetic function in film draws on the concept of dispersed subjectivity: the contamination of the authorial and the character’s voices is the overriding concept of Pasolini’s free indirect subjective, Deleuzian dicisign, and O’Connor’s “virtual simulation.” Poetry theorist Marjorie Perloff considers the dismissal of voice in contemporary poetics within the post-structuralist critique of authorship that emerged in the sixties with Roland Barthes’ seminal publication “The Death of the Author” (1968) (See Marjorie Perloff, “Language poetry and the Lyric subject”). If the egotist, the distinctively pronounced identity of the poet, was central to the poetics of Romanticism and Modernism, post-modernism, per Perloff, occludes the necessity of asking “who is speaking” and makes authorial “signature” superfluous. After all, Derrida ends his essay "Signature Event Context, ” with a counterfeit signature (Perloff). “The alienation of the subject is displaced by the latter’s fragmentation” as cultural theorist Fredric Jameson points out in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). Perloff stresses that signature altogether disappears in the work of LANGUAGE group whose poems don’t have an “identifiable lyric subject.” LANGUAGE poets see agency as a fluid and interactive concept, which is bound not to the poet’s identity but rather to the historical context in which the poem is written (Perloff). Moreover, in their manifestoes, the LANGUAGE poets insist that the first-person lyrical model is characteristic of mainstream poetry. The absence of the authoritarian figure sets in question the relationship between the poetic text and reality. The LANGUAGE poet and theorist Charles Bernstein suggests that LANGUAGE poetry reconsiders language as a medium of simulation, not representation (O’Connor 9). It follows that the post-war theories of poetic film have reflected and responded particularly to the assumptions of postmodern readings of the lyric, for dispersed subjectivity or a shifting point of view, drawing attention from cognitive to visual experience and imagination, as well as undermined representational realism, characterize all the accounts of poetry/film conjunctions discussed above. 133 Chris Marker. Working on the theoretical foundation of “database narratives,” Kinder is preoccupied with issues of continuity between the “new” and “old” media which might contribute to advancing the art of new media productions. Especially important to my discussion of the relevance of “cinema of poetry” to database narratives is Kinder’s postulate that the work of Bunuel is a perfect example of how database sensibility takes root in cinema. At the same time, Bunuel’s observations on the convergence of film and poetic sensibility were crucial to Pasolini’s theory of the cinematic poetry and pre-figured its definition as a distinctively visual, oneiric medium. Kinder considers the strategies of virtuality, interactivity and dreamesque narrative – which she finds in the films of Bunuel – to be essential components of database cinema. These strategies also lie at the heart of the “cinema of poetry.” Defining database narratives as those that openly expose and address the dual processes of selection and combination, Kinder emphasizes that “such narratives reveal the arbitrariness of the particular choices made, and the possibility of making other combinations, which would create alternative stories.” The underlying mechanism of the “cinema of poetry” – the free indirect subjective – operates according to the 134 same principle and promotes the arbitrariness of choice as the film’s diegetic force: its internal dialogism creates the ground for generating alternative views upon the same events, thus questioning the “truthfulness” of the stories told by the film. Suggesting that the tensions between the disruptive power of dreams and attempts of the narrative to organize their content are often present in Bunuel’s films, Kinder argues that dreams are “the ultimate model of interactive database narrative”: in dreams, we are nightly bombarded by a random firing of neural signals generated by the brain which the cerebral cortex must interpret. It performs this interpretive task by drawing selections from our internal databases of imagery, which contain virtually everything we have absorbed from our cultural dream pool, and we reshuffle these selections to generate new combinations that we narrativize when we awaken (14). Freud’s insights on the interpretative mechanisms of dreamwork – which Kinder considers to be embraced by Bunuel and other Surrealists – became apposite for Pasolini’s “cinema of poetry.” Positing the oneiric nature of the “cinema of poetry,” Pasolini points at the potential of dreams to prefigure cinematic communication: “all dreams are a series of im-signs which have all the characteristics of the cinematic sequence: close-ups, long-shots, etc” 135 (Pasolini, The Cinema of Poetry 544). Pasolini’s proposal to conceive of the “instrumental foundation” of cinema simultaneously in terms of reality and of “the world of memories and dreams” (the objective versus the subjective) is clearly discernible in Freud’s materialist treatment of dreams as the re- working of everyday activities, as well as in the Surrealists’ aspirations to eliminate the borders between dreams and waking life, and between art and the subconscious. The Surrealists applied the mechanisms of the work of the subconscious, uncovered by Freud, such as displacement, condensation, and symbolization, to artistic practice, starting with experiments in poetry and later moving on to the domains of painting and film. Another narrative strategy discussed by Kinder in relation to database cinema and yet pertinent to the free indirect subjective, is “interactivity.” Kinder argues that despite the fact that interactivity is characteristic of all narratives in the sense that their meanings are resolved from the collaboration of the author and the audience, database narratives have stronger interactive potential for they “create the illusory ‘impression’ of an infinite database from which the user’s choices are actually being drawn” (4). 136 Besides constantly providing the spectator with alternative points of view, the interactive potential of the “cinema of poetry” is intensified through the liberating power of split subjectivity. The viewer’s impossibility of identifying with one coherent, singular subject within the polyvoicedness of the free indirect subjective emancipates the looks of the spectator, which would otherwise be inevitably absorbed within the signifying machinery of the suture system as it existed in classical Hollywood narrative. In “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” Jean-Louis Baudry argues for the creation of a “transcendental” subject by means of cinema’s projection operation that inscribes the viewer’s eye onto the screen and reduces multiple points of view to produce an impression of a singular subject within the “space of an ideal vision.” The formation of the transcendental subject takes place under the condition of continuity that results from the technical advantages of the projection mechanism that eliminates discontinuity inherent to camera and individual images on film, as well as from the narrative continuity of the diegesis. The effect of the optical machinery’s coherence is what Braudy calls the “the double identification” of the spectator with the gaze of the protagonist and with the 137 camera/projector – the cinematic apparatus itself. 46 Baudry believes, however, that there are cinemas capable of resisting the power of the suture apparatus. He sees the technique of laying bare the device as the main mechanism of identification prevention: “Both specular tranquility and the assurance of one’s own identity collapse simultaneously with the revealing of the mechanism.” (312) In Pasolini’s “cinema of poetry,” besides the technique of “naked cinema,” the effect of split subjectivity leaves the spectator to oscillate freely between multiple visions of the director and of the film’s protagonists. Since Pasolini argues for “the freedom of the author and the liberation of the spectators” (Heretical Empiricism 267), he would rather make the spectator the second author than sew him up within the system of suture. Pasolini scholar Robert S.C. Gordon suggests that his films 46 Daniel Dayan also theorizes the suture effect of the shot-reverse shot mechanism in narrative cinema, founding his argument on the Lacanian model of ego formation. Following the theses of Jean-Pierre Oudart, the theorist asserts that in classical cinema, images that do not represent someone’s point of view occur rather rarely. Rather, this “absent” field is followed by a revealing of the owner of the gaze – the character of the film whose look was presented in the first place. Even if the “empty” frame discomforts the spectator by making him question who authorizes the image or why this particular frame is chosen, the subsequent reverse shot produces a soothing, therapeutic effect of restoring the spectator’s ease. The look of the spectator is not absorbed into the imaginary and thus liberated in the absent field only to be manipulated and “sutured” back into the film’s narrative. A crucial moment in this theory is that the shot-reverse shot system regulates the production of meaning within the film and represents its signification: the filmic image (the signifier) signifies the presence of another field (the signified) from which a character looks at the field represented in shot one. The effect is that there can hardly be a statement made in classic narrative cinema that is independent of the meaning of the subsequent shot, whose “censorship” becomes inevitable. 138 abound with situations of “incompleteness, abrupt shifts and transversal structures” that “invite the spectator to attempt to complete the picture, to write over the gaps, to re-organize or re-edit their vision, having first perceived its incompleteness” (Gordon 256). It follows that the key strategies of database narratives delineated by Kinder (virtuality, interactivity and the dreamesque) apply to Pasolini’s “cinema of poetry,” and could be viewed as brought forth precisely by the exploration of poetic signification in cinema. Thus, the “cinema of poetry” represents an important addition to the examination of digital media as deriving from earlier cinematic forms: the free indirect subjective initiated the first discussions of the old media’ potential for virtuality and simulations (as reflected in Deleuze’s Cinema books), which in their turn became the essential features of new media production. The poetic quest of the “free indirect subjective” to liberate cinema from the constraints of linearity expressed through giving the spectators access to multiple alternatives (or viewpoints) compares to Kinder’s concept of database cinema, which also seeks to subvert the narrative predictability of most Hollywood productions. Kinder sees the database narratives as 139 fraught with infinite possibilities – a kind of digital labyrinth with no end point. This account of database cinema derives not from Formalist narratology but from non-hierarchical, non-totalizing post-structuralist methods of analysis that use the metaphor of rhizome (Deleuze/Guattari) to offer an alternative way of engagement with new media technology. In The Arc and the Machine, Caroline Bassett observes that the new media work has been recently accessed through both narrative models – i.e. the structuralist narratology (e.g. Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory; Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace) and rhizomatics (e.g. Suhail Malik, “Is the Internet a Rhizome?”). Considering structuralist linguistics to be ill-equipped to grapple with new technology, as it reduces complex machine architecture (including AI) to narratology, Bassett herself proposes to use the Voloshinov/ Bakhtin theory of dialogics as a possible route out of structuralist accounting of new media. She writes, “Voloshinov and Bakhtin work through dialogics, binding the signifier to the shared referents of social relations, but also opening up the possibility that this binding process is continuous and without closure” (26). 140 This brings us back to the power of the “cinema of poetry.” Choosing free indirect subjective as its driving force, Pasolini already then appealed to Bakhtin’s social heteroglossia in order to combat the linearity of cinematic narrative, which also provided ground for the Deleuzian rhizome. It is through the Bergsonian metaphysical concept of the universe as an open flow of images and Pasolini’s double subjectivization that Deleuze described the “gaseous” form of perception in cinema as a field of non-totalizing multiplicity (rhizome) of visual signs. Again cinematic poetry stands ahead of its time revealing the mechanisms and strategies that were to become essential for contemporary analysis of new media technology. 141 CHAPTER 4: POETRY IN CATALOGUES? ARTEFACTS AGAINST SEMIOLOGY IN PARADJANOV’S THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES In this chapter I will continue my inquiry into the concept of “poetic database” in cinema, this time turning to the analysis of Sergei Paradjanov’s The Color of Pomegranates (1968). My goal here is twofold. In order to define “poetic” as it applies to The Color of Pomagranates, I will investigate the sources of poeticism in Paradjanov’s cinema using the concept of the “cinema of poetry” introduced by Pier Paolo Pasolini in “The Cinema of Poetry” (1965) and developed by Gilles Deleuze in his Cinema books. Second, I will explore the strategies of database filmmaking in The Color of Pomegranates and will indicate points of contact between “poetic” cinema and database concepts. Sayat Nova in Production: The Complexity of Tableaux By the time he began making Sayat Nova, Paradjanov was already an internationally acclaimed director, whose feature The Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964) had brought him to the attention of prominent western film-makers. At home though, the closure of his first truly auteur production 142 Kiev Frescoes 47 at Dovzhenko studio in 1966 halted the development of his career as one of the leading Soviet directors 48 (Steffen, A Cardiogram of the Time 148). Although enthusiastically received at first, Paradjanov’s tableau- based, visually-oriented project about the life of Kievites on the day of the commemoration of victory over Nazi Germany on May, 9, 1965, attracted more and more hostile criticism after the shooting script was submitted to the studio. The feature was canceled altogether by Moscow and Ukrainian officials on the basis of ideological and aesthetic shortcomings after the screen tests were conducted (it was criticized for inadequate depiction of the Great Patriotic War, full frontal nudity, lack of dramatic structure, radically avant-garde imagery). 49 When Paradjanov’s directing career was jeopardized because of this scandalous incident with Kiev Frescoes at Dovzhenko Studio, he was invited to make a feature at Studio Armenfilm. The officials of Armenfilm hoped to improve the studio’s lowly status by bringing in an 47 Paradjanov wrote the screenplay for Kiev Frescoes which is published in the collection of Paradjanov’s screenplays Seven Visions (ed. G. Ackerman). 48 A truly exhaustive study on the production details of all Paradjanov’s films is carried out by James Steffen in his recent dissertation “ A Cardiogram of the Time: Sergei Parajanov and the Politics of Nationality and Aesthetics in the Soviet Union,” which remains the only monograph on Paradjanov in English. 49 For complete account of Kiev Frescoes’ shut-down see Steffen, A Cardiogram of the Time (148-203). 143 internationally acclaimed talent (Steffen, A Cardiogram of the Time 207). Paradjanov proposed to make a film about the eighteenth-century Armenian poet, 50 singer and musician Arutin Sayatyan (1712-1795), who took the pseudonym of Sayat Nova, and pre-production began. The process of obtaining a “green light” for a film produced by a republic studio was complicated by the fact that at every stage of production approval was needed from both the local authorities (Goskino of Armenia in Sayat Nova’s case) and the Moscow-based State Committee (Ministry) for Cinematography, Goskino SSSR. While both Paradjanov’s screenplay and, subsequently, the screen tests were received enthusiastically by Armenian Goskino, 51 Paradjanov’s project was criticized by the Moscow authorities who pointed at the lack of dramatic structure and historical background, and warned against its “excessive hieroglyphic and encoded quality” (qtd. in Steffen, A Cardiogram of the Time 226). Despite the criticism, permission to begin production was granted by Moscow Goskino in August of 1967. As 50 James Steffen mentions that this was his second proposal after suggesting the making of an adaptation of Old Gods, a play written by Armenian writer Levon Shant, which was rejected by Goskino (Steffen, A Cardiogram 208). 51 Regarding this, the Armenian Artistic Council commented on “the painterly-compositional perfection of the shots, in which the highest artistic culture was reflected” (Steffen, A Cardiogram 225). 144 soon as shooting was finished in the summer of 1968 and the director’s cut was submitted by Paradjanov, the film fell victim to a series of accusations about the inaccessibility of its symbolism, the absence of narrative logic and a failure to render the greatness of the life and oeuvre of Sayat Nova, the national poet of Armenia. In a memo to Gevork Hayryan, the chairman of the film committee of Armenia, the Minister of Cinematography Romanov stated that “the material doesn’t yield the possibility of gaining any new understanding whatsoever of Sayat-Nova, about the real life journey of the great poet of the Transcaucasus and about his place in the development of Armenian national culture… [it] is lacking any clear and consistent thought; it falls apart into separate scenes and episodes not logically connected to one another” (qtd. in Steffen, A Cardiogram of the Time 239). After a strenuous process of revisions, such as changing the title from Sayat Nova to The Color of Pomegranates, clarifying the visuals with title- cards from Sayat Nova’s poetry, and cutting explicitly religious scenes, the film was finally granted theatrical release in Armenia. 52 In the USSR the 52 In the article “Paradjanov’s Playful Poetics: on the ‘Director’s Cut’ of The Color of Pomegranates,” James Steffen goes over all the changes that were made to Paradjanov’s original, arguing that Yutkevich’s re-editing destroyed the crucial aesthetic strategy of the film, in particular, its formal resemblance to an illuminated manuscript. 145 film was released only after it was re-edited by the renowned Soviet director Sergei Yutkevich; one of the changes included the division of the narrative into separate parts that would follow the chronology of Sayat Nova’s life. The film was awarded an unenviable “third category” ranking usually assigned to low quality productions, keeping it in a state of restricted distribution. The continuing controversy around The Color of Pomegranates is not surprising, since in a time of ferocious censorship under Brezhnev, Paradjanov produced a highly unorthodox film. What was hoped to be an ideologically safe, traditional Socialist Realist biopic narrating the biography and greatness of the poet of the Transcaucasus turned out to be an avant- garde collection of tableaux loosely based on motifs from Sayat Nova’s poetry that creatively addressed some events of his life, turning to mythology rather than historical facts about the Armenian ashugh. 53 For instance, while the historical Sayat Nova was married and had children, Paradjanov chose to narrate the poet’s love of Princess Anna, the sister of King Irakli, as his only worldly love, after whose tragic end he retreated to a 53 A popular Armenian bard or troubadour during the 16 th -18 th centuries. 146 monastery. For the first time the Soviet screen was confronted with a feature film shot entirely in tableau style, in which static, “frozen” and flattened images unfolded in a non-linear fashion. Its unorthodoxy even provoked the Minister of Cinematography Romanov to shout at Goskino Armenia Chairman Hayryan after the screening: “You’re a Communist! How could you permit such a film to be made?” 54 The Color of Pomegranates introduced a radically new aesthetic form for Soviet filmmaking, one that was born of the “visual regime,” bringing a painterly code into cinematic order. It presented a dramatic visual breakthrough in the utterly logocentric tradition of Russian cinema that emerged during the era of Soviet Montage School, whose practitioners based their montage theories on linguistic models, and was reinforced by the Socialist Realist aesthetics. In “Cinema without Cinema,” Mikhail Yampol’sky argues that “[Soviet] films traditionally focus on the problems of the hero’s psychology, the nature of social conflicts or narrative collisions – aspects that belong entirely to the literary bases of film” (12). He suggests that one of the main reasons for the weakness of Soviet/Russian commercial cinema was its investment in words as opposed to images. He also notes that 54 from James Steffen’ interview with Yuri Sayadyan, Jan 2001 (Steffen 239) 147 the Soviet industry always neglected film’s truly cinematic qualities, such as the effect of the viewer’s primary identification with the medium, which can only be achieved through sensory, visual elements based, among other things, on the nuances of color. Yampolsky provides a very telling example of disregarding sensual phenomena and foregrounding the audio dimension over the visual in a film by Roman Balayan, A Kiss (1983). In order to render the sensation of heat on the screen, Balayan recorded the sound of mosquitoes, and increased the volume to the extent that instead of producing a subliminal effect, the sound stood out like the roar of a jet. The scholar also argues that the logocentrism of Soviet film culture impeded even the work of such great visual masters as Tarkovsky (13). In The Color of Pomegranates, Paradjanov abandons the logocentic ideology of the Soviet film, and advocates an oneiric, irrational type of cinema based on the combination of painterly and cinematic semiotic codes, which puts him in line with the ocularcentric tradition of western art filmmaking of the sixties, and in particular with such great visual masters as Pasolini, Fellini and Antonioni. 148 Representation in terms of Pictorial Art: Self-valued Art Works in The Color of Pomegranates The new aesthetic principle developed by Paradjanov in The Color of Pomegranates effectuates the ocularcentric understanding of poetic cinema as conceptualized by Western theorists of visual poetic film including Pasolini and Deleuze. In what follows I shall point at the specific ways Paradjanov actualizes the image-oriented “cinema of poetry” model. In Paradjanov’s biopic about the eighteenth-century troubadour Sayat Nova, a biographical account of the poet’s life yields to a powerful oneiric aesthetic devoid of narrative continuity and characterization that offers a purely visual interpretation of the poet’s life and oeuvre. The Color of Pomegranates is presented in a form of static tableaux inspired by the motifs from Sayat Nova’s poetry and by Trans-Caucasian medieval culture. The film represents the journey of Sayat Nova from birth to death and narrates some major events in his life. It progresses as a series of novellas evoking the poet's childhood, his days at the court of King Irakli of Georgia, his love for the king’s sister, Princess Anna, his retreat to a monastery, and his death. Paradjanov does not utilize conventional cinematic resources for advancing the story, such as spoken dialogues, shot-reverse shot sequences or cause- 149 effect narrative development, but rather extends the cinematic representational mechanism to painterly and theatrical modes. Turning toward the forms of pictoriality and plasticity, he aims to mute his characters and retain the aesthetics of silent cinema. The use of speech, in fact, was never a prominent feature of Paradjanov’s cinema. When he worked on the script for Lermontov’s Demon in co-authorship with Shklovsky, the latter wrote, “Dorogoi Sergei! K sozhaleniiu, my ne smozhem sniat’ nemuiu lentu. Liudi dolzhny govorit’…”[Dear Sergei! We can’t approve a silent film. People should speak!] Paradjanov responded, “nenavizhu slovesnyi kinematograf, gde govoriat… govoriat… govoriat…”! [I hate the “talkies” where people speak… speak… speak!] (Ispoved’ 253) In “The Cinema of Poetry,” Pasolini argues that cinema possessed a kind of natural poeticism at the time of its emergence, when the “cinematic apparatus” was still a “hypnotic monstrum,” an irrational, barbaric medium capable of shocking the spectator (547). In The Color of Pomegranates, Paradjanov redeems the film’s poetic quality through the aesthetics of “archaic practice,” which is created by the static quality of silent moving pictures that emerge in front of the spectator and alternate with excerpts 150 from Sayat Nova’s poetry presented on title cards. Paradjanov favors a static mode, always recording from a fixed camera position with no panning, tracking or zooming, nor does he use depth. Such a shooting technique differs considerably from the virtuoso camera choreography of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors photographed by a different cinematographer – Yuri Ilyenko. Ilyenko’s camera whirls, falls from above and makes swift turns, powerfully participating in what David Cook calls “perceptual dislocation” (19). In The Color of Pomegranates, Paradjanov consciously renounces this style, connecting it with the ideology of colonial, ethnographic film which, by means of a liberated camera, communicates the energy of ritualistic dance. On the other hand, he says about The Color of Pomegranates, Ia ushel absoliutno v storonu ot etogo etnograficheskogo, takogo kolonial’nogo fil’ma, i schitaiu, chto eto kolossal’noe zabolevanie iunosti, chto esli etomu podrazhaiet takoi master, kak Yuri Ilyenko, ili napominaiet kartinu xotia by dazhe aksessuarom, obriadom, tantsami, dinamikoi. Kartina “Sayat-Nova” sniata s odnoi tochki: prosto nazlo Yuriu Ilyenko, ne meniaia svet, tsvet, ne meniaia optiku, s odnoi tochki. Esli mne udalos’ sdelat’ dinamiku plasticheskuiu, ia schitaiu, chto dazhe, esli mne eto ne polnost-iu udalos’, to kartina statichna, bezumno statichna, i etim ona mne ochen’ doroga (Zapis’ vystupleniia 208-209). [I have fully abandoned that ethnographic, colonial film. If such a great master as Yuri Ilyenko imitates that style now, I consider it to be a malady of the young age. I can sense that style in accessories, dance, the overall dynamism of a picture. The film Sayat Nova is shot from one point of view, to spite Ilyenko; we haven’t even changed lighting or lenses. If I succeeded in achieving the plastic 151 dynamics… or even if I achieved it at least partially… the film is static, insanely static, and this is why it is so precious for me.] An impression of utmost stasis is emphasized through the arrangement of shots into a chain of tableaux that frame the film’s diegetic space in terms of pictorial art. The film incorporates the representational mode of art through various techniques. Paradjanov’s elaborately constructed tableaux feature portraits, groupings of figures, landscapes and objects framed separately as self-valued works of art. Thus, the film shows a huge array of artifacts that represent the Trans-Caucasian medieval heritage, including illuminated manuscripts, relief sculptures, metalwork, textiles, carved wood, and ceramics, as well as man-made and natural objects from medieval mythology. Very often, the objects featured in the tableaux appear arranged in artificial still life compositions, as is demonstrated in the opening sequence of the film. The Color of Pomegranates begins with shots of fifteen still lifes introducing the central symbols of the narrative that are used in a complex associative network throughout the film: pomegranates bleeding against a white cloth, a live fish placed next to lavash, a rose and a kamancha, 55 a blackthorn twig, etc. 55 A Persian bowed string instrument that was widely played in classical music of Central Asia. 152 Figure 5: Still Lifes From the Opening Sequence of The Color of Pomegranates 153 Another example of pictorial mode is the “image-within-the-image” insertions of entire sequences of miniatures that are taken from Armenian medieval illuminated gospels that may function as parallel narratives. For instance, in the novella about Sayat Nova’s childhood, a shot of little Aroutin browsing through a folio is followed by eight miniatures taken from eleventh and fourteenth-century gospel manuscripts illuminated and bound by Ewargris and Melk’isedek respectively (Nersessian 158). 56 The miniatures are superimposed over cinematic shots that feature episodes from the life of Christ including Baptism, Resurrection, Nativity and Entry into Jerusalem. 56 These are held in Yerevan Museum of Ancient Manuscripts, the Matenadaran. 154 Figure 6: Miniatures from the Illuminated Manuscripts Featured in The Color of Pomegranates 155 The stylistics of display in The Color of Pomegranates presupposes the appropriation of a certain graphic tradition. As reflected in Paradjanov scholarship (Lotman, Steffen), the film’s foregrounding of the pictorial mode could be attributed to Armenian medieval iconography, from which Paradjanov draws the elements of the film’s graphics. Thus, James Steffen observes that the film’s visual content intends to recreate the structure and techniques of Armenian manuscript illuminations, the analogy with which may be traced through the alteration of text and illustration, through the poses of photographed figures such as heavenward gazes and arms stretched upward as if in prayer, as well as through the use of flattening frontal cinematography (Playful Poetics 28-29). 57 The incorporation of a painterly code is also emphasized through the technique of excessive framing, which Carla Oeler mentions in her article “Nran Guyne,” noting that Paradjanov very often photographs objects and the body against doorways, arches and wall niches thus almost always doubling the frame (Nran Guyne 144). In “Perpetual Motion,” Paradjanov explains how his work in cinema is closely linked to painting techniques: 57 In “Novizna legendy,” Yuri Lotman also suggests that both The Color of Pomegranates and The Legend of Suram Fortress demonstrate the elements of the language of Armenian medieval manuscript graphics (Lotman 65). 156 Ia vsegda byl pristrasten k zhivopisi i davno uzhe svyksia s tem, chto vosprinimaiu kadr kak samostoiatel’noie zhivopisnoie polotno. Ia znaiu, chto moia rezhissura okhotno rastvoriaietsia v zhivopisi, i v etom, navernoe, ee pervaia slabost’ i pervaia sila. V svoiei praktike ia chashche vsego obraschaius’ k zhivopisnomu resheniiu, no ne literaturnomu ( Paradjanov, Ispoved’ 33). [I have always been interested in painting and got used to the idea that I perceive every shot as an independent painting. I know that my directing can easily commingle with painting, and this comprises both my films’ weakness and power. In my cine-practice I more often appeal to the painterly rather than the literary]. If the painterly mode of The Color of Pomegranates is indicated through the aesthetics of tableaux, “image-within-the image” insertions and overall orientation towards an illuminated manuscript, the theatrical space is created primarily through the use of tableau vivants, as well as through the deliberate choreography of the characters’ movements expressed in the artificiality of their mannequin-like, slow on-screen manoeuvring. As far as the incorporation of tableau vivants is concerned, Paradjanov’s film could be considered within Lyotard’s concept of “acinema.” Positing cinema as an ultimate inscription of movement, Lyotard argues that in the current (conventional) cinema “the diegesis locks together the synthesis of movements in the temporal order” (172), while the other, underground “acinema” (“negative of movement,” “negative of cinema”) is not 157 necessarily founded on the productive impetus of movements and chooses the path of immobility instead, which represents a waste of energy and the possibility for jouissance, a pure enjoyment. One of the most apposite examples of acinema is provided by tableaux vivants that fix the subject’s movements in a certain pose, destabilizing the relationship between the viewer and what is seen and providing a certain libidinal potential for the spectator (one may only look, not touch). Being a heterogeneous medium that brings theater together with painting and photography, the tableau vivant carries a double function in The Color of Pomegranates. It actualizes the film’s central motif, the tension between desire and interdiction, and represents one of numerous examples of the layering of different representational modes within the cinematic medium. Alongside incorporation of tableaux vivants, Paradjanov uses elaborate choreography, pantomime and gestural performances throughout the film, which recalls silent cinema with its exaggerated gesturality. The novella “In Search of Ourselves,” in which Sofiko Chaureli plays the roles of both Sayat Nova and Anna is thoroughly choreographed. Paradjanov alternates shots of her statuesque movements to mirror the poses of the poet and his beloved. The frontal camera approximating a human gaze 158 underscores the voyeuristic theatrical effect of putting the characters on display in front of the audience. The theatrical mode is also reinforced by heavy make-up producing the actors’ mask-like appearance, and by wigs and elaborate costumes. Borrowing across other media is a frequently used technique in The Color of Pomegranates. Very often a sequence represents layering of multiple modes. In a scene that symbolically renders the funeral of Anna’s and Sayat Nova’s love, both characters perform hand choreography standing in front of a mummy-like doll. The doll features authentic Armenian textiles and lies on a bed of a stone with relief sculptures. During the scene, the Princess and the poet hold a silk linen with an embroidered inscription from Sayat Nova’s poetry that reads “You abandoned us and went away,/ But we the living wrapped you/ In a cocoon so in your new world/ You would burst out like a butterfly.” As the sequence ends, two medieval stelae sculptures are shown against the church wall. The next scene opens with Anna making lace and Sayat Nova playing a kamancha, while they also perform pantomimes and hand choreography against a moving frame around a golden statue of an angel (the frame makes recurrent appearances throughout the film). Such a dense conjunction of representational forms (painting, 159 sculpture, textile arts, poetry, music, pantomime, tableau vivant) compensates for the undermining of conventional cinematic mechanisms in the film. Figure 7: Frames from the Novella “You are Fire” in The Color of Pomegranates 160 Figure 7, Continued In another sequence that combines multiple semiotic modes, a scene with carnivalesque dances of Muslims, referring to the invasion of Georgia and Armenia by the Persian troops of Nadir-Shan, is followed by a title card with Sayat Nova’s poetry, a close-up of Sofiko Chiaureli’s face and a fragment of the Georgian metal craft masterpiece, the Khakuli Triptych. 58 58 “Khakuli triptych” is a 10-11 th century cloisonné enamel which is kept in Tbilisi National Museum. 161 Figure 8: “Khakuli Triptych” The artifact closing this sequence itself represents a thing of heterogeneity: the center-piece, featuring an enamel of the Virgin, is put into a frame ornamented with cloisonné enamel, cabochon jewels, pearls and gold repousse work, while the surface of its open wings is covered with silver mountings. The triptych was executed by two masters with distinct techniques, which explains the difference in ornamentation of the outside wings of the triptych (Gink 78-79). After the triptych insertion, we see a shot of Sayat Nova in close-up intercut with a cross pendant and a bas-relief 162 which are followed by a relatively long hunting sequence set in a natural landscape. The hunting scene involves choreographic sketches with much more liberated movements: dancers throwing a golden ball, an animal tamer with hunting leopards, a cavalier with a peacock, and knights on black stallions. The transition from showing the cultural artifacts followed by exaggerated, arrested movements within the space of theatrical tableaux vivants to the natural setting, signals an emancipation of the body from the theatrical confined space and closed indoor aesthetics of arches and bas- reliefs. It also invokes a significant thematic issue of the film – Sayat Nova’s turmoil of choosing between the austerity of monastic life and bodily senses. As mentioned previously, the cinematic form that embraces this multi- mode layering seems to be very archaic at first glance. Flattened, two- dimensional mise-en-scenes, the fixed viewpoint of the camera, limited editing, and the alteration of pictorial images and writing suggest that Paradjanov favors a form characteristic of “primitive” cinematic techniques. However, this effect tends to become easily subverted. Preceding the novella about Sayat Nova’s life in the monastery, the scene of symbolic parting with Anna shows Sayat Nova leaving his kamancha and stepping back from Anna to the point where he finally disappears in what seems to be a black painted 163 setting and not a real door. In the next shot he miraculously re-emerges from a real cathedral doorway leading to an outside yard where Muslims perform carnivalesque choreography against the background of Persian textiles. In this montage of scenes in which an artificial setting in the theatrical space of a room opens up to reveal an outside courtyard, Paradjanov playfully demonstrates the magic of cinema: not only is it capable of mixing and embracing other artistic media (this scene features music, dance and the art of textiles), it can effortlessly manipulate the temporal and spatial dimensions. Representation oriented towards art in The Color of Pomegranates is marked by a dual character, expressed in the conflict of accumulative montage-within-the shot and the paradigmatic rhyming. A combinatory principle of mise-en-scene foregrounding on the one hand, and creating a complex associative network of sensory and visual data on the other, assumes a rather complex interplay between the perceptive and the cognitive within the film. The aesthetics of tableaux generates a very peculiar cinematic form that does not depend on the continuous flow of shots within the narrative but on the value that individual shots carry in themselves. According to the tenets of the Soviet Montage School, the most important 164 value of the cinematic shot emerges when it is put in juxtaposition with other shots in the sequence. Both montage of linkage and dialectical montage assume that the generation of meaning in cinema derives from the sequential arrangement of filmic signs, while the value of the shot in itself is always secondary. In Paradjanov’s tableau aesthetics this is reversed. Various observations have been made by film scholars on the nature of Paradjanov’s montage style. Barthelemy Amengual in “Sur Deux Neveux D’Eisenstein,” suggests that Eisenstein’s dialectical montage is comparable to Paradjanov’s montage within the shot. He claims that while Eisenstein constructs montage syntagms on the basis of nominative and predicative shots, similar to the Japanese ideographic principle (water + eye = cry), Parajanov’s tableau has its own polysemy and, by itself, already represents a predicate. He speaks of this type of montage as ritualistic, epic and non- narrative, where action is nullified in favor of a poetic tune. By the same token, Yuri Lotman argues that inside of the frozen planes, Paradjanov develops an extremely intricate narration full of dynamism and based on the rich symbolism of color, of folkloric rituals, Georgian and Armenian poetry, and on symbolic meanings drawn from world culture (Novizna legendy 65). 165 Besides the dismissal of external montage forms in favor of the internal dynamism of the shot, there is another important aspect to Paradjanov’s poetics of tableaux that concerns its absorption into the narrative. The director uses an extremely intricate system of imagery rhyming throughout the film. “The spectator is hired to work for Paradjanov,” Yuri Lotman comments on this quality of the director’s tableau aesthetics, referring to the fact that the viewer’s memory should always be activated. Without doubt, it is impossible to claim that sensory elements can fully bypass the cognitive domain. David Bordwell comments on the combination of perceptive and cognitive operations in the process of visual perception, that “Seeing is… not a passive absorption of stimuli. It is a constructive activity, involving very fast computations, stored concepts, and various purposes, expectations, and hypotheses” (32). Despite the fact that in the films of “visual order” such as The Color of Pomegranates the elements of visual rhyming and rhythmic parallelism can be, by all means, present, 59 59 Paradjanov’s screenplay for Sayat Nova, which features a highly aestheticized style and a complex symbolic system, demonstrates how it paradoxically relies on the Formalist actualization of the poetic function of speech. Appendices A, B include fragments of both literary and shooting scenarios from the typescripts preserved in Paradjanov’s personal archive at RGALI. The style in which the screenplay is executed allies him with the tradition of ornamental prose that emerged in 166 they exhibit a distinctive shift away from the dictates of form of the Soviet Montage School toward ocularcentric aesthetics in cinema. One of the major differences between the combinatory forces of tableau aesthetics and the significatory impetus of montage-between-the-shots is that in the former type, the spectator is left to decipher complex links between the shots on her own and has to process an unprecedented amount of visual information, unlike the situation in the latter “totalitarian” version of montage where all the deciphering is done for the spectator by the filmmakers. Thus, visual Russia in the 1920s and is usually associated with the work of Vasilii Rozanov, Andrei Bely, Boris Pil’niak, Vsevolod Ivanov, Aleksei Remizov and Evgenii Zamiatin (see Gary L. Browning, “Russian Ornamental Prose”). Defining ornamental prose as one that privileges imagery over plot, Shklovsky observed that “ornamentalism has emerged on the literary scene less as a result of literary influences than in response to the general feeling that the old form has lost its resilience” (Theory of Prose 180). Shklovsky’s account of ornamentalism corresponds to his principle of siuzhetnost’ based on the concept of perceptibility of form that he foregrounds in order to differentiate poetic film from prosaic. Paradjanov’s screenplay uses an extensive network of tropes, as well as phonetic, syntactic and morphological devices that instead of informing, significantly slow down the flow of the narration and obscure the story of Sayat Nova. Similar to the texture of poetic speech, the script features numerous formal elements that make the style perceptible. A fascinating fact is that the postanovochnyi (shooting) scenario of Sayat Nova is almost identical to Paradjanov’s poetic libretto (his literaturnyi (literary) scenario.) It retains the overall ornamentalism and colorful digressions of the literary script, and it appears to be equally arbitrary and fragmentary. Thus, what was supposed to be a purely functional script has the uncanny effect of a technical commentary to lyrics or a poem separated into serially numbered shots, containing descriptions of camera operations and an inventory of requested gear, extras, and sets. Paradjanov himself jokingly commented on the difficulties of the script’s approval, “Stsenarii byl napisan v stikhakh, on byl absoliutno neponiaten nikomu i poetomu ne byl utverzhden. Nikto ne ponimal, na chto nado navodit’ focus (Paradjanov, Ispoved' 209). [The script was written in verses, it was not understood by anyone, and that’s why it was not approved. Nobody understood on what to set a focus]. Paradjanov's screenplay for Sayat Nova, written in the style of ornamental prose allies his work with the tradition of poetic cinema that stems from the Formalists’ foregrounding of the principle of siuzhetnost’ as one of the main conditions of poeticism in film. 167 rhyming in The Color of Pomegranates may occur between neighboring shots or across relatively long portions of the narrative. It might involve a single object, figure, a choreographic pose, or it may concern a whole cluster of images and even connect entire novellas. It is noteworthy that in Paradjanov’s rhyming schema, connections across disjointed tableaux are often established through sensory elements, such as color. The novellas “In Search of Ourselves” and “You are Fire” represent a visual game of this kind. They tell the stories of Anna and Sayat Nova falling in love (“In Search of Ourselves”) and their love’s tragic ending (“You are Fire”) and are executed almost identically through the layering of multiple representational forms. Conjoining the modes of theatrical tableaux vivants, painting, music, and lace-making, and giving central place to choreographed pantomimes performed by Sofiko Chiaureli for both characters, Paradjanov throws in only one major change between the two rhyming novellas by coloring them differently. A densely coded color symbolism is one of the crucial components of Paradjanov’s ocularcentric style. The colors red, green and black, on which Paradjanov builds the contrast of these two scenes, are the principle colors for Canon Tables in Armenian medieval manuscripts and signify the “four elements of the first 168 temple” (Nersessian 80). 60 If green in the first novella’s narration of two blissful lovers could allude to the floral theme of the Garden of Paradise, red on black in the second scene about “buried” love refers to the contrast of sensual pleasures and the strict asceticism between which Sayat Nova is about to choose (the voiceover recites the lines from the poetry of Sayat Nova “You are fire/ Your dress is fire…Which of these two fires can I endure.”) As an allusion foretelling Sayat Nova’s choice of the spiritual over the worldly, Paradjanov uses the symbolism of unleavened bread for the Eucharist in the first of the rhymed compositions and ends the novella of Anna’s and Sayat Nova’s unconsummated love with him stepping into a black arch (in Canon Tables black is interpreted as a color of “true existence,” a divine symbol (Nersessian 80)) suggesting the irrevocable vow he is making. Besides his abandoned love, the poet’s kamancha and an open folio are left in the empty room as symbols of Sayat Nova’s forsaken passion for music and poetry. The folio of a medieval Armenian manuscript provides one of the most persistent “visual rhymes” of images in the film. It is featured in the opening sequence when the manuscript is rhythmically 60 Vrej Nersessian refers to the eighth century commentary by Stepanos Siwnetsi (80). 169 intercut with a series of still lifes to pose the film’s central clash between the perceptual and intellectual. The same conflict of memory and perception also transpires in the collision of the cinematic and theatrical modes within the film. If the painterly quality of the former is oriented towards the expulsion of the syntagmatic component, the aesthetics of theatrical performance on the contrary activates it, assuming that the viewer should keep the performance in her memory as a one-time-only experience (Dalle Vacche 26). 61 It appears that Paradjanov’s techniques of visuality, which involve the aesthetics of tableaux, foregrounding of mise-en-scene, preference for the internal montage, as well as references to the medieval iconographic tradition, reflect what Andre Bazin calls the centripetal quality of painting. In his programmatic essay “Painting and Cinema,” Bazin differentiates between the centripetal forces of framing in painting and the centrifugal quality of the cinematic screen. According to the scholar, the picture frame concentrates the space of painting inward “opening solely onto the interior of the painting,” while the cinematic screen, not confined by absolute 61 Angela Dalle Vacche discusses Rohmer’s comparison of moving pictures and theatrical performances. 170 boundaries, is dominated by centrifugal characteristics that draw the cinematic space off-screen. Since Paradjanov never activates the off-screen space, neither by dialogue or any insertions from outside of the frame provided by the screen, and since he does not mobilize the centrifugal capacities of montage characteristics of the Soviet school, he attains a visual control over the entire cinematic space of The Color of Pomegranates, which is reinforced by the film’s assimilation of the perspective of a medieval illuminated manuscript. Furthermore, Paradjanov contaminates the modes by inverting the centripetal and the centrifugal characteristics of painterly and cinematic by superimposing over the cinematic shots numerous paintings, the illuminations and icons, thus applying the limited spatial properties of canvas onto cinematic frame. Thus, in The Color of Pomegranates, Paradjanov develops an extremely complicated cinematic form that goes far beyond the primitive effect of the “archaic practice” that it tries to simulate by its static nature and iconic value. He borrows extensively from other semiotic systems, contaminates various representational modes, fashions a conflict between the painterly, theatrical and cinematic, subverts the tradition of the syntagmatic 171 montage, as well as opens a dialogue between the forces of cognition and perception. The Free Indirect Subjective in The Color of Pomegranates Paradjanov’s rather scarce diaries reveal that Pier Paolo Pasolini was his most revered director, who also influenced his film-making in the most direct way. During Paradjanov’s imprisonment at a strict-security camp in Vinnitskaya Oblast, Ukraine, 62 he created a collage series entitled “The Gospel According to Pasolini. A Requiem” to commemorate Pasolini’s death. 63 Of all the elements that Paradjanov owes to Pasolini, including the stylistics of tableaux, homoerotic content, the incorporation of paintings, iconic frontal style cinematography, etc., the most significant one is the use in his films of the free indirect subjective technique. Despite the fact that there is no evidence that Paradjanov was familiar with the theory of poetic 62 Paradjanov was convicted twice, first in 1974 and sentenced to five years on charges of homosexuality (he was released a year before the end of his term after an appeal by an international campaign headed by Louis Aragon), then again in 1982 for nine months on charges of bribery. 63 From a letter to Lilia Brik: “Smert’ Pasolini potriasla menia. Kak smog, ia vyrazil v kollazhe “Rekviem” (Ispoved' 472). 172 cinema developed by Pasolini, 64 The Color of Pomegranates exhibits a number of important characteristics outlined by his 1965 essay, “The Cinema of Poetry.” As discussed above, the technique of the free indirect subjective assumes that the author of the film can speak indirectly, in the first person, contaminating her own discourse with that of the protagonist and making them indistinguishable, in a similar way as the reporting and reported discourses may interfere with each other in literary texts. The Color of Pomegranates is inspired by poetic oeuvre of Sayat Nova, and assumes the co-existence of the reported discourse of the poet and the reporting discourse or, rather, reporting vision of the director. The Color of Pomegranates does not represent a conventional cinematic adaptation of the literary text, for Paradjanov does not directly adapt the poetry of Sayat Nova to the screen, but rather creates a visual parable about his life incorporating motifs from the poet’s oeuvre, and also uses excerpts from his poetry to clarify some of the imagery of the film. The film’s opening titles (which Paradjanov was asked to add by both Armenian 64 However, Paradjanov could have been very familiar with the practice of the “cinema of poetry” via Pasolini’s films. 173 and Moscow censorship authorities) 65 read: “the filmmaker has tried to recreate the poet’s inner world through the trepidations of his soul, his passions, and torments widely utilizing the symbolism and allegories specific to the tradition of Medieval Armenian poet-troubadours.” Despite the fact that the film doesn’t identify itself as an adaptation transmitting the voice of Sayat Nova to the screen, the poet’s presence is made clear by multiple quotations from Sayat Nova’s lyrics (through both title cards and by voiceover), and most importantly through constructing a strong viewpoint of the main protagonist. The director shares his own viewpoint with the consciousness of the poet whose discourse he is reporting, thus providing a favorable context for the intrusion of the free indirect subjective that according to Pasolini is fundamental to the “cinema of poetry.” Explaining the specifics of how intermingling two points of view within film narrative leads to visual poetic cinema, Pasolini says that “the 65 Before sending a finished version of the film to Moscow to obtain approval for wide release, Goskino Armenia authorities suggested that Paradjanov insert an introductory title-card that read “This is not the concrete biography of a single poet. The authors of the film are recreating the world of a poet, his passions, spiritual vicissitudes and sufferings, broadly using the symbolism and allegories of medieval Armenian poets,” and asked Paradjanov to remove all references to Sayat Nova from the film. Furthermore, a Secretary of the Board of Directors for the union of Filmmakers in Moscow also sent a letter to the Minister Romanov, suggesting that the film be prefaced with a title card to “inform the viewer who Sayat Nova is and that the film is not a tale of the life of the poet, but that it represents an attempt to portray in screen images the movement of poetic thought, associations, reminiscences, fantasies, the poetic “creation” of myths” (Steffen, A Cardiogram of the Time 244, 247). 174 author uses the ‘dominant state of mind in the film’… to make a continual mimesis of it, which allows him a great stylistic liberty” (The Cinema of Poetry 555). Thus, the director can speak indirectly through the vision of his protagonist, allowing him to transcend cinematic convention and create an idiosyncratic poetic vision. Exploring the stylistic operations of the free indirect subjective in Godard, Antonioni, and Bertolucci, Pasolini mentions the technique of “the close follow-up of two viewpoints,” which brings together two shots framing the same object with little or no difference. Such a succession of identical or similar shots is a pronounced technique in The Color of Pomegranates. In the sequence in which Paradjanov imitates the vision of a child and “speaks” through the eyes of little Aroutin, he shows the boy on the roof of the cathedral peering to King Irakli’s baths, where a male masseur is giving the king a massage. In two almost identical consequent shots, Irakli turns his head towards the audience and gazes into the camera. The only difference between these two shots is a barely noticeable change in the background color against which Irakli is photographed. 175 Figure 9: Two Consequent Shots of King Irakli from The Color of Pomegranates Furthermore, in the same sequence, after the king’s baths, the camera tracks towards another chamber, in which there lies a young princess whose naked breasts are covered with a pearl shell. There follows a subjective long shot of Aroutin gazing at the Princess’s naked breasts. After that we see the same take again, however, a little detail is added by Paradjanov: milk is poured over the Princess’ breasts and over the pearl shell. 176 Figure 10: Two Consequent Shots of Princess Anna (The Color of Pomegranates) It is clear that through this technique Paradjanov constructs a duality, consciously showing the existence of two visions within the film. Ironically, the acclaimed Soviet director Sergei Yutkevich who re-edited the film for the wide release in the Soviet Union and abroad, discarded Paradjanov’s doubling technique as pure sloppiness and even reproached the director saying, “Chto vy tak toropilis’, chto dva dublia stoiat podriad?” [How come you were in such a hurry that you spliced two identical takes together?] (Zapis’ vystupleniia 206) Another important strategy to subvert a single discourse within the film involves the formation of polyvoicedness through a striking contrast between two shooting techniques that reflect different perspectives and carry 177 disparate subtexts. On the one hand, Paradjanov’s film features static, frontal cinematography that frames still images and tableaux vivants and conveys the aesthetics of manuscript illumination. On the other, it includes disrupting voyeuristic gazes that can be directed at either the characters or spectators. While both techniques promote the aesthetics of seeing, their underlying semantics differs significantly. If according to Lacanian psychoanalysis, the gaze emerges to substitute for something that is missing in visual representation and institutes the subject’s desire (182), conversely, the frontal style of shooting refers to the sacredness of iconography and appeals to the divine nature of the Gospel texts of illuminated manuscripts that the film is trying to recreate. Such a duality is symptomatic of the structure of the entire narrative, which is based on the binarism of worldly desire and interdiction. Both frontal cinematography and the aesthetics of the gaze contribute to the disruption of the film’s singularity or the system of suture, which assumes identification of the spectator with the character. If the suture effect of the shot-reverse shot mechanism is typical for classical narrative cinema, its absence usually defines poetic cinema against mainstream film. As discussed in the previous chapter, classical cinema very rarely features 178 images that do not represent somebody’s point of view. Usually, such “free” images are followed by a close-up of the “owner of the gaze.” Paradjanov’s frontal cinematic iconography with its tableaux and still lifes does not promote a singular point of view and constantly questions who authorized the imagery, for it never provides the therapeutic exposure of the author of the gaze in the subsequent shot. Notably, Pasolini particularly mentions this style of cinematography – “the succession of a series of pictures… into which the characters enter” – as a strategy that actualizes the free indirect subjective, since such “obsessive framing” does not express anybody’s perspective and is “finally liberated and hence poetic” (The Cinema of Poetry 552). Similarly, frequent employment of the technique of gazing directly into the camera prevents the suture system of the viewer’s identification with the character and problematizes the reception on the whole, for now it is the viewer who is subjected to the gaze. The technique could be also related to the phenomenon of “making the camera felt,” which Pasolini considers to be one of the most important aspects of the “cinema of poetry” (556). The disruption of the discourse’s unity backed up by the strategy of the free indirect subjective goes together with the suspension of naturalism 179 in Paradjanov’s cinema. The deliberate artificiality of The Color of Pomegranates achieved through the incorporation of the theatrical mode, elaborate choreography of the actors’ movements and gestures, subverts the mimesis with reality that conventional cinema is striving to achieve, and represents one of the crucial characteristics of poetic cinema. In fact, Paradjanov’s extensive use of gesture performances demonstrates a close affinity of his cinematic tactics with Pasolini’s anti-logocentric film semiotics. In “The Cinema of Poetry,” he argues that of all the sign-systems of human communication, a system of signs by gestures would be better suited for cinema than the system of linguistic signs, for it relies on facial expressions (images), and thus “prefigures” cinematic communication (544). The contamination of the two mutually bound discourses within the film – that of the director and the protagonist – parallels other important dichotomies within the narrative. A chain of dualities that Sayat Nova represents, including the split between masculinity and femininity, between languages (Paradjanov’s sound-track features poem recitals in all three languages in which Sayat Nova wrote: Georgian, Armenian and Azerbaijani), as well as that of the bodily desire and passion for poetry and the rigorous abstinence of the monastic life only intensify the viewer’s 180 inability to identify with a coherent subject. Furthermore, the film’s polyvoicedness escalates as diverse artifacts from Armenian medieval culture, visually rhyming with each other throughout the film, form new layers of meaning or even generate narratives- within- the narratives, as in the sequence exposing eight illuminations taken from the 11 th and 14 th century Gospel manuscripts that recount the episodes from the life of Christ that are chronologically arranged. One of the important preconditions for the free indirect subjective stated by Pasolini in “The Cinema of Poetry” is that the director and his character should come from the same social milieu and have an analogous psychological, cultural, and linguistic background. In this case the character’s ideological position is not marked against the authorial discourse, and by their merger there arises an opportunity for the director to “speak through some narrative alibi in the first person” (557). It appears that the strategy of the free indirect subjective presupposes a double operation: the construction of a secondary vision within the narrative, and its subsequent neutralizing by merging the discourses/visions and thus eliminating the otherness. The Color of Pomegranates seems to exhibit this particular technique. The merger between the discourses of the director and 181 the hero is actualized first and foremost through Paradjanov’s self-projection on the main protagonist. Tellingly, Paradjanov was heard identifying himself with the poet, by saying “Aroutin – ia, Sayat Nova – ia” (“Aroutin is me, Sayat Nova –is me”) (Ispoved’ 86). As I have mentioned previously, Sofiko Chiaureli, who plays six roles in The Color of Pomegranates, takes on the roles of both Sayat Nova and Princess Anna. This androgynous quality of the main character achieved through a woman acting in the role of a male (or read in the sense that the poet’s beloved possesses a masculine side), in fact works as a form of self- portraiture that refers to Paradjanov’s own bi-sexuality. A decidedly subjectivizing element could also be traced in the obvious homoerotic content expressed in the film through the excessive display of male bodies and voyeuristic male gazes. James Steffen suggests that the film’s explicit homoerotic charge was one of the reasons for its reediting by S. Yutkevich. He argues that the film’s homoeroticism is fostered through the contrast of the physical visibility of the male body and aestheticizing of a nude female body. Steffen refers to the king’s bath scene featuring half-naked King Irakli who is having a massage performed by a male masseur, a group of nude men covering their genitals, and the purely abstract treatment of Anna’s nudity, 182 as her naked breasts are shown covered with a pearl shell (Director’s cut 26). Interestingly enough, Charles Dowsett in his biographical and literary study of Sayat Nova, discusses the fact that many of his love songs were actually devoted to King Irakli and addressed him with the same awe and admiration with which he glorified women. Analyzing his 1759 Armenian ode “May ye know that one year produced me and my beloved friend” addressed to Irakli, he notes that it is written in the style of Sappho’s Lesbian ode and describes the physical and mental aspects of love. Dowsett doesn’t exclude the possibility of Sayat Nova’s downfall at court being connected with his bisexuality (161). Regardless of Paradjanov’s knowledge of the homoerotic subtext in Sayat Nova’s poetry, a homosexual aesthetic is definitely present in The Color of Pomegranates that denounces heterosexual love and incorporates a tale about a sex-starved nun that criticizes religious asceticism. In contrast, the male bond of the monks in the second part of the film seems to epitomize a “pure relationship” bound by genuine companionship. As soon as the singularity of the filmic discourse is disrupted, the two perspectives of vision are established and subsequently contaminated 183 through the director’s affinity with the main protagonist (to the point that it is not clear who is speaking or, rather, who is authorizing the gaze), this is the time for the free indirect subjective to unleash its true poeticism. Thus, a multi-stage operation of the free indirect subjective turns out to be “only a pretext” for generating the “other” film, which could be created when the world is seen “according to an essentially irrational inspiration.” The result is a defamiliarized look, liberated from cinematic conventions and returned to the condition of selecting images from chaos, thus bringing about the cinema’s pre-grammatical mechanism. No single concept of Pasolini’s “cinema of poetry” is closer to Paradjanov’s aesthetics than the positing of cinematic objects as portions of reality rather than signs. Besides advancing the free indirect subjective, Pasolini’s theory of poetic film is founded on the extremely controversial assertion of cinema’s equivalence with the sign system of reality. Pasolini suggested that “the cinema is a system of signs whose semiology corresponds to a possible semiology of the system of signs of reality itself” (Pasolini, Stack Pasolini on Pasolini 29). This notion also found its reflection in Paradjanov’s The Color of Pomegranates. Pasolini’s postulate 184 that “cinema expresses reality with reality” is primarily based on the belief that the link between the object and the cinematic sign is not arbitrary as it is in written language, but that the cinematic object represents an analogue of reality. This premise doesn’t imply though that Pasolini didn’t understand the basics of semiotics and simply equated the sign with the referent, of which he was accused after he introduced the concept of the “cinema of poetry.” For example, Umberto Eco refuted Pasolini’s equivalence of cinema with reality based on the assumption that “every image is born of a series of successive transcriptions” that convey nature into cultural phenomena. Moreover, Eco argued that despite the fact that the iconic sign retains some qualities of the “normal perceptive code,” it can also be arbitrary in the same way as the verbal sign is, if we take as an example of an iconic image a drawing that features a distorted object (595). Privileging the elementary, materialistic matter of free-standing objects with their pre-grammatical, archaic history, Pasolini’s main incentive nevertheless was to offer an alternative to the narrative syntagmatics of prose cinema. Opposing the idea of semioticizing the world through codes imposed by certain conventions, the material base of images would liberate them from the symbolic system while restoring their concrete nature. The 185 technique of frontal iconographic cinematography that Paradjanov uses in The Color of Pomegranates appears to create the most faithful replicas of objects and is comparable to Pasolini’s device of “obsessive framing” discussed in “The Cinema of Poetry” as one that “liberates” and thus makes images “poetic.” Hundreds of medieval artifacts fill the screen of The Color of Pomegranates photographed in a style that closely approximates natural human perception. When featuring these artifacts, Paradjanov never uses any technical machinery to alter or enhance their natural dimensions, which gives a compelling reality to the Armenian medieval world and sharply contrasts with the artificiality of other means employed in the film. A crucial question that concerns situating objects of the physical world within the framework of the “cinema of poetry” is how the natural/ the objective is compatible with the poetic film’s tendency towards deep interiority. Pasolini addresses this question in “The Cinema of Poetry”: In sum cinema… has a double nature. It is at the same time extremely subjective and extremely objective (an objectivity which ultimately is an insurmountable vocation of naturalism). These two essential aspects are closely bound together, to the point of being inseparable (548). Dwelling on this paradoxical dichotomy, Pasolini, to some extent, invokes the Surrealists’ view of Freud’s psychoanalysis that treats dreams in terms of 186 reworking the fragments of reality. Most importantly, however, from the perspective of Pasolini’s prejudice against the structural and codifying forces of narrative, a shared feature of the subjective and objective domains infers that both the a-grammatical nature of objects of reality and the subjective world of dreams are unaffected by rational syntagmatic categories or any semiotic codes. Free of any linguistic connections or narrative links, both can thus be seen as the generators of the “irrational” or “poetic.” Deleuze’s “Time-Capsules” on Paradjanov’s Tableaux The Color of Pomegranates reflects a number of issues implicit in Gilles Deleuze’s re-reading of Pasolini’s free indirect subjective in his Cinema books. For instance, an almost complete arresting of motion in the film comes close to Deleuze’s idea of the collapse of the sensory-motor schema under which the action is halted in favor of the “optical situation” of seeing and being seen. Carla Oeler provides the most relevant examples of the characters’ inactivity within The Color referring to the episodes in which a drummer never actually moves his hands to play the instrument when we hear a drumming sound, or one in which the choir boys never open their mouths to sing when we hear them singing (Nran Guyne 144). Similar to 187 Deleuze’s opsigns (optical images that come to replace action), Paradjanov’s ocularcentric cinema also prevents the seamless spatial and temporal continuity characteristic of a classical film narrative through a number of complex optical operations described previously in this chapter. For example, the aesthetics of the gaze and the construal of two viewpoints hinder the actualization of the suture code, i.e., identification with the character, while the frontal iconography featuring tableaux-vivants, objects of the physical world or paintings superimposed over the frame, prevent the film’s narrative closure. All these techniques of visuality are almost always generated within the context of the two conflicting poles, involving that of the camera (director’s) consciousness/ the character’s perspective (subjective/objective); the interiority of inner world/ exteriority of the physical reality; the imaginary, dreamed/ the real. According to Deleuze, these poles are always striving toward a “point of indiscernibility” and enter into a very complex relationship with each other, eventually giving birth to the time-image. Deleuze makes use of Bergson in order to show a connection between looking at a physical object and the work of subjective mechanisms of perception. The theorist compares the two types of recognition delineated by 188 Bergson, and argues that if the first kind of “automatic” recognition, works by involving motor mechanisms (e.g. we find our way home automatically), the second, “attentive” recognition, presupposes the imposition of remembered images from the past on the current object of perception. Despite the fact that both types of perception obviously assume the projection of a memory-image onto the object, under automatic recognition, the operation of perception and projection happens simultaneously, while attentive recognition summons up remembered images from a more distant past. Bergson explains that “the progress of attention results in creating anew, not only the object perceived, but also the ever-widening systems with which it may be bound up” (qtd. in Deleuze, Cinema II 46). This is exactly how perception works in The Color of Pomegranates, for every single object mobilizes multiple memory-images and an intricate network of associations that the character/director links with it throughout the large blocks of narrative or takes it even beyond, layering blocks of the Armenian cultural heritage. The situation of attentive recognition is compared by Deleuze to the cinematic flashback, which happens in optical cinema without any transitions and is not indicated in the film’s structure. The object in optical cinema forms “circuits” with recollection-images, generating an image with 189 two sides – actual and virtual (memories, dreams, thoughts) that reflect in one another forming a “circuit of indiscernibility.” Of particular relevance to Paradjanov’s work is the Deleuzian concept of time-image which is actualized in optical cinema when recollection- images emerge. The Deleuzian time-image always presents time in a non- linear way, conjoining the past, the present and the future on the same plane. The Color of Pomegranates abounds in such direct images of time that combine various moments from the character’s life in a single shot (plateau), thus providing a condensation of tenses instead of a conventional narrative system with its chronological flow of events. In the sequence narrating Aroutin’s sexual awakening, after the boy is shown gazing into the chambers of the king and the princess, the transition of the boy into a young poet is rendered in a manner reminiscent of Deleuze’s time-image. Framed together in a single mise-en-scene, little Aroutin passes a kamancha to Aroutin, an adolescent, and disappears behind the young poet. The concluding shot of the sequence of Aroutin’s transition into adulthood is particularly relevant to Deleuze’s discussion of attentive recognition. It features Aroutin, an adolescent, standing in a musical studio, stroking his kamancha and pouring pearls onto it. Through the use of simile, in tune with Deleuze’s model of the 190 virtual image that ushers an opsign towards the time-image, the image of the poet’s kamancha conjures up another image-recollection, that of Princess Anna’s naked breasts featured in the previous shot. There is another occasion in the film when little Aroutin is shown in the same frame with a much older Sayat Nova in the dream sequence of the poet exhausted by the life in the monastery. The dream sequence into which this time-image is incorporated also contains the most radical manifestation of Deleuzian time-capsules in The Color of Pomegranates. Sayat Nova’s dream is locked into a space that represents a canvas layered with objects and people from various moments of his past. There are two time-capsules in the dream sequence that run one after another, evoking the possibility of the two perspectives – that of the director and that of the poet – that offer slightly different versions of Sayat Nova’s past. 191 Figure 11: Dream Sequences of Sayat Nova (The Color of Pomegranates) The structure of both time-capsules is similar though. In each, frame is divided into multiple segments – each one rendering a different moment in Sayat Nova’s life and featuring people who played significant roles in his past. Combined in these time-elegies are the images of little Aroutin holding a golden ball and standing by King Iraklii, Anna shooting a pistol, Sayat Nova as a monk exchanging his black robe for a white one, the Catholicos Father Lazarus from Akhpat, Aroutin’s father, and a spinning golden angel sculpture in the background of the second plateau, which represents a much busier frame on the whole. Both time-capsules are heavily layered with registers of theatricality and artifacts that summon up complex chains of association, uniting the sheets of the past and present. 192 The direct time-image is posited by Deleuze as part of the “crystalline” regime which is pertinent to the optical cinema and characterizes it as the proliferation of “reflections.” In The Color of Pomegranates, the whole filmic space exists in multiple reflections, with points of view, symbols, artifacts reflected in each other, the past reflecting in the present, the dream-work reflecting reality and body parts reflected in objects (e.g. Anna’s breasts invoked in Sayat Nova’s kamancha). An especially powerful type of reflective relationship concerns the protagonists’ gaze directed at the viewer. Little Aroutin, his parents, King Iraklii, Anna, Sayat Nova, the Catholicos all gaze back at the audience incorporating the viewer within the film. This marks the reversal of relations between the “seer” and the seen –- “the character has become a kind of viewer,” as Deleuze comments (Deleuze, Cinema II 3). The principle of indiscernibility is still sustained in the crystalline regime of The Color of Pomegranates which summons poeticism by the contamination of the real and imaginary, the subjective and the objective, matter and spirit. Discussing how the film’s reflective consciousness is rendered through the two central metaphors of the window and the frame, Carla Oeler calls Paradjanov’s film a “reflection on reflection” for its conscious reflecting on its double framing, such as 193 photographing against doorways and displaying multiple empty frames in its tableaux. The scholar also points out that these artificial frames inhibit visual immediacy distancing the targeted photographed object from the spectator thus promoting the aesthetics of reflection (Nran Guyne 143). Deleuze’s theory of crystalline regime is productive for describing Paradjanov’s construal of ocularcentric poetic cinema in several ways. Firstly, similar to Pasolini’s aesthetics of free indirect subjective, the poles of the crystalline regime, multiple, constantly oscillating towards indiscernibility, also foreground the value of poeticism in cinema. Commenting on the contamination of the subjective and objective, Deleuze notes that in such a situation, “the story no longer refers to an ideal of the true which constitutes its veracity, but becomes a ‘pseudo-story,’ a poem, a story which simulates or rather a simulation of the story” (Deleuze, Cinema II 149). He is all for the poetics of “I is another” (as he quotes Rimbaud) when it concerns the film-maker in the poetic quest “to [take] real characters as intercessors and [replace] his fictions by their own story-tellings…” (152). Secondly, the type of time presentation outlined by Deleuze in Cinema II corresponds to Paradjanov’s use of time-capsules and could contribute to defining Paradjanov’s style of filmmaking on the whole. The 194 Deleuzian perspective highlights the imagocentric cinema of Paradjanov against the background of the logo-oriented poetic cinema that prevailed among Soviet filmmakers. The time-image reveals one of the most crucial components of this style, which involves the resistance to sequential ordering of the cinematic material. The radical effect of the condensation of multiple planes of the past on the same plateau parallels Paradjanov’s other accumulative strategies such as privileging montage-within-the shot to syntagmatic dialectical montage or montage of linkage, or his powerful centripetal tendencies of the painterly and the aesthetics of collage. The fact that the time is not presented chronologically, but exists in the form of layers residing on a single plateau, is symptomatic of an overall “geological” approach used by Paradjanov. He excavates medieval history through the registers of objects, artifacts and the ethnic spaces of Georgian and Armenian secular buildings whose presence in the film authenticates the past. At the 2007 USC Poetry and Experimental Film Symposium “In The Vernacular,” the film scholar, Melinda Barlow, speaking on the poetic cinema of the American artist and filmmaker Janie Geiser, described the poetics of the “suffusion of the worn” (Susan Stewart’s notion (Stewart 195 139)) reflected in objects and artifacts displayed in her films. She suggested that the “poetic potential” that these objects carry in themselves “radiates from the center and affects the narrative vertically.” It was precisely the vertical organization of filmic material that poetic cinema theorists identify as one of the principle markers of “poetic” in film. Roland Barthes in the essay that inspired Pasolini’s “cinema of poetry” writes that only the “existential geology” of modern poetics, which he sees exclusively as a “vertical project,” is capable of liberating the poetic dictum from the communicative function and grammatical clichés of classical poetry. For him, the word within the vertical paradigm, free of any possible linear connections, is encyclopedic, it contains all the acceptations from which a relational discourse might have required it to choose. It therefore achieves a state which is possible only in the dictionary or in poetry – places where the noun can live without its article – and is reduced to a sort of zero degree, pregnant with all past and future specifications (48). Very much in tune with Paradjanov’s absolute object not confined by the codes of semiotics, the Barthesian poetic word acquires the status of a concrete entity capable of rendering “reality with reality.” Similarly, some of the Formalists who also pursued the material base of the “word as such” 196 following the Russian trans-rational poets argued for the paradigmatic type of filmic signification. At the 1953 symposium “Poetry and the Film” held by New York film society Cinema 16, the experimental filmmaker Maya Deren defined the poetic in similar terms by suggesting that it is a “vertical investigation of a situation” which happens at the moment of intensification of emotion and could be opposed to the “horizontal attack of drama” (204). By the same token, vertical organization of the material seems to inform all aspects of Paradjanov’s poetics in The Color of Pomegranates, ranging from the slide show of tableaux vivants; the layering multiple representational modes including painting and theatricality; the substitution of montage-between-the-shots with the aesthetics of collage; the imposing different viewpoints; and, finally, the geological approach to time itself. The paradigmatic nature of The Color of Pomegranates is something that also links it with Lev Manovich’s concept of database cinema. Paradjanov’s “Poetic Database” In Language and New Media (2001), Manovich suggests that the database, which represents the fundamental basis of the new media, has come to impinge on the cultural logic of the traditional artistic forms that use 197 narrative as its key form of expression (the novel or classical cinema). Elaborating on the database relationship with narrative, Manovich argues that as a cultural form, the database represents the world as a list of items, and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause- and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies (225). Positing them as two competing cultural modes that divide modern media into those that privilege database (storage media, multimedia references, library catalogues, internet) and those favoring narrative (with few exceptions, cinema), Manovich maintains that database still found a way to affect the cinematic language of some film-directors, especially those who are “concerned with expanding cinema’s language”(237). Besides proclaiming Dziga Vertov the most important database filmmaker of the twentieth century, Manovich also studies the phenomenon of database cinema in the works of Peter Greenaway. In the films of Greenaway, who often uses numerical systems to classify the listed items, the elements of database are sometimes not subjected to any taxonomy, e.g. as in The Draughtsman’s Contract, in which the draftsman’s twelve works are not 198 ordered, underscoring the fact that he is working on these pieces simultaneously. It appears that many of the techniques that identify The Color of Pomegranates as “poetic” within the Western ocularcentric approach to “cinema of poetry” also comprise the film’s database structure. Specifically, Paradjanov’s “poetic cinema” reenacts the two major procedures pertinent to the database mode: selection and compositing. Paradjanov himself openly expressed his antipathy towards linearity and narrative cinema. In a very dismissive and even coarse way he commented on the issue during his “Address to the Young Filmmakers of Belorussia”: nevozmozhno… odnovremenno udovletvorit’ zaprosy v obschem liudei, podgotovlennykh k izobrazitel’nomu kinematografu, psikhologicheskomu, s podtekstom, s assotsiatsiami, s metaforoi, s allegoriami, ponimaete, ili zhe nado davat’ tu skhemu, kogda domokhoziaiki na kommunal’nykh kukhniakh budut pereskazyvat’ siuzhet, kto kogo i zachem, i skol’ko raz (Zapis’ vystuplenia 218). [It is impossible simultaneously to answer the demands of those who are prepared for visual, psychological cinema, the one with subtexts with associative links, metaphors, allegories… or to provide a schema for the housewives in communal kitchens who would retell the plot to each other describing who’s been with whom, and why, and how many times…] The aesthetics of inventory underpins the entire narrative of The Color of Pomegranates. 199 Figure 12: Inventory Sequences from The Color of Pomegranates 200 Figure 12, Continued Paradjanov’s cinema was called “ideal’nyi komissionnyj magazin” (“ideal second hand shop”) by a friend. He creates an archive for the storage of not only objects, artifacts and tableaux, but representational modes, time and even viewpoints as well. He stores the moments from Sayat Nova’s childhood within the film’s memory board, and then uses them freely at any point of the story generating a new meaning each time. He uses a color- coded system to order his items: he makes the same takes of objects only changing their color or that of the background, or uses this device on a larger scale, re-coloring an entire novella (e.g., from the dominant white and green to red and black as he did in “In Search of Ourselves” and “You are Fire”). The database character of The Color of Pomegranates is deeply reflected its polyvoicedness, for changing perspectives is one of the strategies of ordering 201 the film’s elements. This is especially prominent in Pasolini-inspired follow- ups of two different viewpoints upon the same object that was discussed previously in the chapter. Paradjanov’s “crystalline” intermingling of discourses and mediations between the author and the character and between the character and the viewer do in fact come close to the interactive design of hypernarrative (interactive narrative) discussed by Manovich. Through the reflecting correspondence of gazes between the viewer and the character, the effect of mediation between the archive and the user is produced. Most importantly, the accumulative, centripetal quality of Paradjanov’s tableaux style, including the creation of time-capsules, anticipates the principles of digital compositing which hinge on combining multiple image layers within one shot. It appears that all strategies that I have described as characteristic for the “cinema of poetry,” such as the slide show of tableaux, reshuffling representational modes, including that of painting and theatricality, the use of free indirect subjective, the substitution of layering elements within a single frame for temporal montage represent a prototype of database sensibility. Paradoxically, Paradjanov’s cinema seems to unite the incompatible: database logic and “poetic” originality, based on the creation 202 of a radically new for the Soviet cinema aesthetic form, born of the “visual regime.” Such a convergence of database structure and poetic vision makes it possible to suggest that it would be productive to use the concept of poetic database as a tool to revise complex polarizations within the poetry/film debate. 203 CONCLUSION The search for poetic value in cinema, beginning with the Formalist inquiries into poetry and film and continuing in contemporary media studies (e.g. “poetic simulations”) could be characterized by one common feature, namely, that those looking for “dark matter,” envision poeticism as an instrument needed to displace current cinematic conventions and thus expand cinematic vocabulary. Absorbing poetry into film, directors have devised such mechanisms as interchangeability, virtuality, and “database narrative” that represent an essential part of the “poetic database.” In its turn, “poetic database” has become one of the keystones of digitally-expanded cinema, and, even more, has taken part in the formation of the digital culture as a whole. 204 Figure 13: A Laser Scanned Image from “House of Cards” In July, 2008, the musical group Radiohead released a new video called “House of Cards.” Despite the fact that it contains the images of real people and landscapes, no cameras were used to shoot it. Each image that appears in this video is in fact a collection of laser scans of moving objects transformed into 3D models. Using an open code provided by Google, its viewers can change images, colors, backgrounds, textures and upload their 205 own version of the video onto Youtube. There are already 82 versions of this video. Here are some user-generated images written in an open code. Figure 14: User-generated Versions of “House of Cards” 206 Figure 14, Continued Amazingly, like the very first feature films of the early 1900s based on lyrics, this work is also the visualization of a song. However, this time the reliance on poetry is on a new level. As it is on the cutting edge of visual technology and free from any narrative forms, the music video as a genre strives to appropriate techniques of visual, dreamesque, oneiric cinema in their most concentrated form. In fact, it easily incorporates any achievements of visual culture, whether they are montage phrases from the Soviet school, classic Hollywood narratives, 3D animation or the tableau style of Paradjanov. The way the Radiohead video was made and exists, to some extent, is the realization of Dziga Vertov’s “poetic database” and his envisioning of the future of the cine-eye. Now we have a functioning 207 prototype of a film that might be created by its viewers. It is free from the limitations of a camera and exists on multiple levels (as a film, a code, a database). It is an effective communication tool: it motivates its audience to collaborate and thus creates a growing online community. According to Google statistics, “House of Cards” has already had more than two million viewers. This novel strategy allows us to envision the creation of films in the near future: directors will introduce to the audience not a finished version of a film, but rather their visions of the film’s basic “DNA,” along with a number of tools and applications based on an open code. The future “cine- eye” will be able to easily travel in any direction, may be placed within any object, may see from any angle, at any level and in any time (as it is already realized in computer graphics). It will also develop the “cinema of poetry’s” non-linear (rhizomatic) narrative strategies based on virtuality and the dreamesque mode, as cinema continues to merge with computer games. It is quite possible that in the near future any film will have as many versions as it does viewers. The question arises, if Vertov, Pasolini, Paradjanov and other film-poets saw such a film, would they enjoy it? 208 Deleuze and Guattari showed us how this kind of de-territorialized perception may enter a new circuit of re-territorialization, especially when dealing with rhythms and refrains. Intended as the most powerful tool to gather, order and distribute data, a database’s primary purpose is effective communication. Thus, according to database logic only the most effective ways and pieces of communication are being selected and compete with each other. The number of tools, images and the ways they can interact grow exponentially, while the possibilities for individuals to perceive the new works are rather limited. Being bombarded by such an enormous amount of visual information, the viewer tends to choose the most effective images and easily becomes “untrained” to perceive more complex and “fragile” art forms. Peter Greenaway once expressed this concern saying that “cinema's death date was in 1983, when the remote control was introduced to the living room." Such a perspective is not new in the history of poetic cinema: it is enough to return to the database imagery of Shklovsky’s mashinka dlia siuzhetov (plot machine). In order to resist the “erosion of form” produced by current convention, film-poets have always found ways to expand cinematic language, paradoxically, by establishing the new boundaries 209 themselves. Poetry has proven to be a perfect source for both potent creative expression and rigid formal restriction. Poetic value in film represents an ever-changing category reflecting the development of cinematic language itself. When the Formalists attempted to theorize poeticism in cinema and the Soviet Montage School filmmakers were trying to make the first poetic films, the endeavor was the least challenging, simply due to the fact that cinema as a medium was very young. Although by that time it had already adopted conventions that, as the Formalists argued, it inherited upon borrowing across the neighboring art forms – the theatre and novel. At that time the Formalists, alongside the Montage School directors, turned to verse theory in order to imbue cinema with new form and ideology. Positing poetic discourse as aesthetically perceptible, the Formalists argued for devices laid-bare and drew attention to the material of the medium as the dominant framework for the poetic in cinema. Thus, Formalist poetic film theory and practice appealed to poetic function in verbal arts and was striving to make the representational form in cinema difficult and hence poetic. The Formalists drew attention to the medium through the principle of siuzhetnost’ or plot-actualization, which for practitioners of the Soviet School took manifold forms of “perceptible” 210 montage ranging from thesis-antithesis conflict in Eisenstein’s dialectical montage to making interstices felt in the theory of intervals. The film-poetry practitioner Dziga Vertov, in his quest to re-invent the current cinematic code, used the basic tenets of Formalism, e.g., rhythm as the constructive principle of verse, to realize his ideological objective for the conversion of “life facts into truth.” Appropriating poetry into cinema, he strove to transcend cinematic perception. At the same time, he was determined to achieve the efficiency of communication, the involvement of the audience, and he wanted to create films that produce new films or “films that beget films,” as he put it. By creating his “poetic database” Vertov epitomized the cinematic epoch of the Golden years of Soviet Cinema and used every single technical and ideological innovation of the Montage era (Michelson) catalyzing them through the power of rigid poetic structures. Also preoccupied with re-inventing conventional cinema, post-war Western art film directors and theorists turned to the poetic as the way to liberate the cinema from “totalitarian” montage. Making the “cinema of poetry” meant for them the subversion of the dictates of form. They achieved this through techniques of split subjectivity that resist the suture code of the cinematic apparatus and withstand syntagmatics by privileging 211 the oneiric, materialistic matter of free-standing objects. When Deleuze’s crystalline regime came to replace the sensori-motor schema of classic cinema, it also aimed to eradicate the seamless and spatial contiguity popularized by Hollywood cinema, in the same way as the falsifying narratives of O’Connor’s “poetic simulations” strive to undermine the representational realism of mainstream productions. Paradjanov worked at a time when “poetic database” in cinema became very sophisticated and included poetic techniques developed by, among others, Surrealists, Italian Neorealism, and French Nouvelle Vague. Introducing a new understanding of poeticism in film, Paradjanov resorted to the implementation of certain stylistic restrictions and turned to the archaic aesthetics of silent cinema. In the digital era, film poets’ reinvention of cinema through limitations may be illustrated by Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002). To obtain the utmost oneiric effect, Sokurov denied the whole idea of montage: all scenes of the film were captured in one continuous 90- minute tracking shot, with the camera sliding in and out of the halls of the Hermitage. The evolution that poetic film made from making form difficult to constraining form could be best exemplified in the recent film by Julian 212 Schnabel The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007). The film depicts the life of the French journalist and editor of fashion magazine Elle Jean-Dominique Bauby after he experienced a massive stroke that left him with a condition known as “locked-in syndrome,” in which his entire body was paralyzed with the exception of his left eyelid, allowing him to communicate by blinking. The film’s truly oneiric, dreamesque, lyric intensity transpires through Bauby’s ecstatic fantasies and other poetic qualities. The film abounds with subjective shots looking at the world through Baudy’s extremely restricted point of view that makes the viewer claustrophobic, caged within the consciousness of a paralyzed protagonist. This utmost imprisonment of the eye is symbolic of the poetic film’s evolution that has undergone from the times of the experimental film of the Soviet Montage School to the present. Having begun its flight of perception liberation, the deterritorialized cine-eye of Dziga Vertov drove poetic film from “gaseous” imagery, the interaction of ceaselessly proliferating signs, to an extreme form of confinement a century later. 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Abstract (if available)

Abstract "The Cine-Eye Goes Digital" provides a revisionist study of poetic film through the concept of "poetic database" and examines how the theory and practice of poetry/film convergence laid the groundwork for the development of new media "database aesthetics" (Manovich). The project focuses on the experimental cinema of Dziga Vertov and Sergei Paradjanov and explores how the search for poetic sensibility in their works has led to the strategies of interchangeability, interactivity and virtuality that represent an essential part of their "poetic databases" and further define the logic of digital environments as a whole.

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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Two decades of Soviet biographical film: from revolutionary romanticism to epic monumentalism

Asset Metadata

Creator Shembel, Daria (author)

Core Title The cine-eye goes digital: Vertov, Paradjanov and the poetic database

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Slavic Languages

Publication Date 03/09/2009

Defense Date 01/27/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Cinema,database,OAI-PMH Harvest,Paradjanov,poetic film,Vertov

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Levitt, Marcus (committee chair), Imre, Aniko (committee member), Pratt, Sarah (committee member), Zholkovsky, Alexander (committee member)

Creator Email dshembel@mail.sdsu.edu,dshembel@yahoo.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2010

Unique identifier UC152441

Identifier etd-Shembel-2644 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-218000 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2010 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Shembel-2644.pdf

Dmrecord 218000

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Shembel, Daria

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu