Main expressive devices of the literary screenplay in Russian cinema of the 1990s

Prokhorova Elizaveta Vladimirovna ORCID: 0009-0005-6984-648X Associate professor, Department of Dramaturgy and Film Studies, Saint Petersburg State University of Film and Television 192102, Russia, Saint Petersburg, Saint Petersburg, Pravdy str., 13, 1211 jounoetjolie@gmail.com Other publications by this author

In 1991, Alexander Chervinsky in the textbook "How to sell a good script well" ^[19] for the first time published in Russian the rules for the design of the script in accordance with the American format – the standard Hollywood form, which is characterized by laconicity of language and stinginess of expressive means. The stylistic originality of the American format is the direct opposite of the poetics of the literary script, a form that since the 1930s has become a production and pedagogical model for Soviet film drama. Textbooks of the leading teachers of the scenario faculty of VGIK and the scenario department of the VKSR V. Turkin ^[18], I. Weisfeld ^[4], E. Gabrilovich ^[6], I. Manevich ^[16], etc. they describe exactly the specifics of working on a literary script, paying special attention to the importance of literary means of artistic expression for the poetics and problems of the scenario text.

The changes that the socio-cultural change of the 1990s brings to the system of film production significantly affect the film drama. The collapse of the film distribution system and the discord in the structures of film production associated with the lack of state support lead to a gradual reform of the industry according to the Western model, and the American format described by Chervinsky is becoming more in demand on the market than the literary form. Some of the last debutant screenwriters of this period are Peter Lutsyk and Alexey Samoryadov, Renata Litvinova (VGIK), Alexey Balabanov (VKSR). Each of them develops a set of techniques that makes it possible to form updated structural elements in the literary scenario that reflect the problems of Russian reality of the late twentieth century – a chronotope (spatial-temporal unity), a replica and a character. These structural elements are integral to film dramaturgy as a text created for the purpose of screen embodiment. The literary means by which they are formed presuppose translation into the language of cinema, which the director implements in the process of preparing the script for filming. However, even before the start of filming, the literary script exists as an independent finished work, each element of which is subordinated to its problems, which is the uniqueness and universality of the literary script as a form.

The brightest distinctive feature of the literary scripts of P. Lutsyk and A. Samoryadov are the means of artistic expression that organize the spatial-temporal unity of history. The problematic characteristic of the scenarios of Lutsyk and Samoryadov is the initiation of the hero, which takes place through a journey and a collision with an alien space. The relationship between the hero and the environment is organized at the level of script syntax. The hero's place in space is confirmed through the means of literary expressiveness, which form the system of the cinema language of the future picture – the close-up of the plan, the shooting point, the angle, the patterns of camera movement, the logic of editing.

In the debut full–length script "The Feast of Locusts", the environment attacks the main character from time to time, imposing its will on him - this is expressed through the opposition of dynamics and statics (movable and non-movable), created at the level of the text temporitmically. The sequence of frames that opens the script – Moscow waking up – is accelerated with the help of chopped phrases that define each subsequent element of the scene, moving from longer frames with internal camera movement ("One of the windows of the house from afar is just a dark square with a strip of tulle. It is slowly approaching. The tulle strip swings slightly. Getting closer and closer. Here it is next, very close" ^{[15, p. 191]}; "A girl in snow-white underwear flashes in the room. Another woman comes out of the corridor, laughing. Drops of water shine on her smooth, tanned skin" ^{[15, p. 192"]}, etc.)  to short static ones ("Video clip in the bar. On the screen – two half-naked men singing and hugging each other. / Rush hour. The crowd at the factory… / The queue at the store. Screaming, swearing… A motorcade of black limousines. / Hotel. Bar. Negroes, Arabs, Germans, whores ... / The point of reception of dishes ..." ^{[15, p. 195]}). In the next scene, the crowd at the train station pushes the main character out of the car, here the logic of his movement is indicated in accordance with the problems of the script: in each subsequent episode, the initiator of the movement will not be him, but the environment. The environment of a hostile company at a house party locks him in the bathroom: "They tied him up with a belt and a clothesline, took him to the bathroom, locked him up by turning on the light" ^{[15, p. 201]}, the environment of the steppe, meeting on the stretch, pulls strangers forward, into foreign lands: "The guy <...> gently pulled him by the elbow into the steppe" ^{[15, p. 212]}. A dramatic event – the point at which the hero changes – becomes every scene in which the hero takes the initiative to move, directs his own actions and route.

In the last scenario of Lutsyk and Samoryadov, "Wild Field", embodied on the screen, space once again acts as an antagonist hero, whose personification becomes a stranger, watching the main character from the first frames. The look itself turns out to be a sign of strength, a marker of power in the lands of the wild field. The main character, a rural doctor, watches his patients from above – in the mise en scene of each episode, the action of which unfolds around his professional activity, the patients are positioned horizontally, the doctor looks at them from the top point, standing vertically above the table. The only heroes whose gaze turns out to be higher are those who have absolute power over him – his bride, who has returned from the city, before whom he repeatedly bows his head, and an unnamed observer who looks at him from the top of the hill opposite the farm. The view from below is equated with the proximity of death; in this respect, the most expressive episode is in which the main character comes to the pasture to inspect a shepherd who was struck by lightning: "A man was buried in the ground up to his chest next to the fire. One of his hands was lying on the ground, and his head was propped up by stones. It seemed that the man was floating chest-deep in the ground, raking with one hand <...> Mitya looked at his head and froze. The human head looked at him clearly and meaningfully, its lips moved. Mitya rushed to the man buried in the ground, fell on all fours, touched his face" ^{[14, pp. 832-833]}. Shepherds call a person who is at ground level dead, he is able to look only from below. The main character passes into this status after the climax, when he, wounded, is carried by locals on a stretcher across the steppe. An angel comes to him – he was the observer from the hill. The horizontal position of the main character, the shooting point from which he looks into the face of the angel – "It hurts you, it will pass," said the bent man, and his face was as if cut out of stone <...> The bent man shook his head, smiled and kissed Mitya on the forehead" ^{[14, p. 847]} – this is characteristics of being in space, previously characteristic of his patients. Having equaled them, he becomes part of the wild field environment.

The nature of movement in the frame and the way it is transmitted through the editing of scenes, mise en scene and operator techniques set through literary syntax create a spatial-temporal unity in the poetics of the scenarios of Lutsyk and Samoryadov, which is directly related to the problematic – the male initiation of the hero through conflict with the environment. This way of organizing the text of a literary script is traditional for Russian cinema.

In the literary scenarios of R. Litvinova, the means organizing the character is a replica. The filmography of Litvinova, the screenwriter, can be conditionally divided into three groups in accordance with the relations that arise between the director and the script. Literary scenarios of the first group ("Dislike", "Ali K.'s Principled and pitiful look", etc.) in the process of screen embodiment (Dislike", 1991, directed by V. Rubinchik, "Principled and Pitiful look", 1996, directed by A. Sukhochev) retain the plot, but significantly change the problematic – this is due to the fact that the film language chosen by the director for the production does not correspond to the dramatic conflict, to which the literary means of the script are subordinate, organizing the speech characteristics of the heroine. In films based on the scripts of the second group ("Hobbies", 1992, "Ophelia" ("Three stories"), 1997, directed by K. Muratov, "Sky. Airplane. The Girl", 1998, directed by V. Storozheva), the speech characteristics of the heroines are preserved due to the fact that Litvinova takes part in the filming as the performer of the main role, transferring the specifics of the replicas to the screen without changes. In relation to the literary scripts of the third group, Litvinova acts both as a script writer and as a director ("Goddess: how I fell in love", 2004, "Rita's Last Fairy Tale", 2012). Despite the significant plot changes made in the process of working on the director's script, the film retains the problems of the original script, since all the literary means of expression in Litvinova's toolkit work to create her author's world that unites all her scripts and all her heroines.

The specific construction of replicas, which was noticed during Litvinova's studies at VGIK ^{[5, p. 34]}, is a structure-forming technique for her literary scenarios, linking the poetics and the problematic of the text. The function of a replica is to manifest an internal conflict in the heroine with the help of such means of expression as inversion and lexical repetitions. With the help of inversion – changing the order of words in a sentence – an emphase is introduced into the replica, accentuating the keywords, so that its ending is intonationally highlighted by the actress: "And I think a lot about you ... about the surroundings, about the pains that arise" ^{[12, p. 31]}, "This is such a force that it cannot be caught, and it is unworthy to do so with it <...> No one supported me in this life, except for these lights. There is no such power to protect me, there is no such Goddess" ^{[10, p. 255]}.

Another characteristic figure for Litvinova is lexical repetition within the boundaries of one monologue, dialogue or replica, creating a feeling of exaltation of the heroines: "Yes, yes! How did I not understand this right away! I love you! I love you! As soon as I saw it, I fell in love" ^{[10, p. 261]}. "My God, my God, my God… what should I do, I'm terrible, my God" ^{[9, p. 369]}, The speech characteristic by its very form exposes the internal conflict in the heroine. Her expressiveness is reflected in the syntax of replicas, while verbs denoting speech action are neutral and do not imply any emotionality: the heroines "respond", "speak", "respond", etc. Remarks concerning dialogues and monologues indicate the volume of the voice, its modulation and intonation with which the replica is pronounced: "she said plaintively, trying her best to beg" ^{[12, p. 44]}, "he had a thin voice parodying her manner of speaking", "drawling and not very polite" ^{[13, p. 214]}, "speaks with great effort, as quietly as possible, as if forcing herself" ^{[10, p. 291]}.

Exaltation, pathos in the utterance of replicas, the originality of the way of speaking reflect the contradiction characteristic of all Litvinova's heroines – the internal heat and the inability to express it by means of speech, to communicate the internal conflict to other characters of the script in order to resolve it. The method of forming problems at the level of replica construction, which was clearly identified as one of the distinctive features of Litvinova's poetics, in the 2000s again becomes relevant for domestic film drama thanks to a number of debuts by the authors ("Euphoria", 2006, dir. and auth. scenes. I. Vyrypaev; "Free swimming", 2006, directed by B. Khlebnikov, auth. scenes. A. Rodionov, B. Khlebnikov; "Top", 2009, dir. and author of scenes V. Sigarev, etc.), who came to the cinema from modern theatrical dramaturgy and are working on creating a hero with the help of verbatim techniques. So, in the scenario "A Tale about Darkness" ^[17], the image of the main character, Alice, is formed through a kind of speech characteristic, the device of which is similar to the device of replicas in Litvinova's scenarios: " – Now let him come to understand, – Alice said and smiled. – Let, maybe, the groom himself will come. Let the groom come, there will be a class, it will be wild" ^{[17, p. 15]}; "– Did you come alone, Alice? / – I came alone so far" ; "Alice went to the teacher and asked: / – Please tell me, I don't have a pair, but do I have to dance with a chair or something" ^{[17, p. 16]}. Alice's laconicity, her slightly playful and offended tone is created with the help of inversion, which allows intonation to highlight the stressed word and, at the same time, observe the life-like speech; long replicas with a fast tempo rhythm, which is reflected in the text with commas, as if the heroine is trying to say as much as possible at a time, knowing that she has to speak rarely, they become a reflection of an internal conflict.

Alexey Balabanov made his debut in 1991 with the film "Happy Days" – his script of the same name was written based on the works of Samuel Beckett, and the absurdist text largely forms his peculiar poetics. Describing the works of Beckett, Ionesco and other authors who are considered by him to be absurdist, Martin Esslin writes: "... the theater of the absurd, abandoning psychology, the subtlety of verbal images and plot in the traditional sense, creates a poetic image of incomparably greater expressiveness" ^{[20, p. 414]}. The ways of organizing the text, peculiar to the plays of the absurd, become techniques by which the image of a depersonalized hero and an abstract chronotope is created in Balabanov's literary scenarios.

The scenes of a lyrical nature, which precede and end the script "Happy Days", are translated by him into the language of a movie image – the voice of the Nameless One, uttering a monologue about death, is heard in the film from the darkness, but is absent in the script. Instead, the film is opened and closed with shots with deliberately simple, primitive drawings: in the first frame it is a house with a person inscribed in the doorway, pointed at by an arrow with the signature "This is me", in the last arrow with the same signature points to a boat floating on a flooded street. The signature is a refrain from the last lines of the script: "You cry and think that someday you will say. At the end. At the end, you'll say, “Yes, I remember. It was me. It was me then"" ^{[2, p. 43]}. The drawings appear on a double exposure from real frames in which the tram first travels along an empty street, and then turns out to be half under water – this is the literal cinematic equivalent of Beckett's metaphor of the sound that comes from afar when the tram passes along the street ^[21]. Having no direct screen analogue, literary turns are translated by Balabanov into the language of cinema, becoming an image not identical, but synonymous with the original source; the lyrical part of the script, his remarks, are a projection of an absurdist poetic image.

The hero's attempts to find his place in an empty cold city, carefully cleaned of extras, also come to Balabanov's poetics from absurdism and form the way in which he designates an actor's task at the script level. The hero interacts with the world formally – Balabanov designates the external manifestations of his reactions or describes the change that has happened to him through common phrases: "HE smiled contentedly with rotten teeth" ^{[2, p. 27]}; "HE smiled at random with rotten teeth" ^{[2, p. 29]}; "HE lowered his head guiltily" ^{[2, p. 30]}; "HE was confused" ^{[2, p. 31]}; "HE gathered his courage" ^{[2, p. 34]}; "– Gee-gee, gee-gee, – he laughed" ^{[2, p. 40]}. The detachment of the hero, set at the level of the script, sets the task for the actor – the inner content, the motivation of the hero's actions in the absurdist setting, he will have to develop together with the director, while the external score of his role is indicated in the script.

The disintegration of language as a means of communication ^[20], the inability of the characters to understand each other in dialogue, was gleaned by Balabanov from Beckett's texts, sometimes reproduced verbatim: "You know, Borya, we will have a son," Anna said quietly, smiling to herself. / HE paused and asked: / – Why? / – Now the belly is already visible, – she said and unbuttoned her blouse so that HE could see better. / – Apparently, a simple swelling, – HE said with the air of a connoisseur. / – And the nipples have darkened, – she said, taking out her breasts. / – You have an abortion, and they will brighten up again" ^{[2, p. 41]} – "Somehow she suddenly had the audacity to announce to me that she was pregnant, in addition, on the fifth or sixth month and, you see, from me <...> Probably just a bloat, I said, to comfort her. <...> Look, she says, and she bent over her breasts, her nipples have already darkened. I gathered my last strength and said: abortion, abortion and they will brighten up again" ^{[3, p. 173]}; " – Could you give me some parsley? – He shouted. / - Parsley? she shouted. / – Parsley tastes like violets! "Do you like violets?" he shouted. / "Stop it!" she screamed. / – Yes, they smell of parsley!" ^{[2, p. 42]} – "I asked her if I could eat parsley from time to time <...> I love parsley because it tastes like violets, and I love violets because they smell like parsley" ^{[3, p. 173]}. A dialogue in which cause-and-effect relationships disintegrate is untenable as a means of communication between the characters. The hero cannot hear and understand the interlocutor, cannot be heard and understood by the interlocutor, "each replica negates the previous one" ^{[20, p. 88]}.

Similarly, the role of Danila Bagrov is built in the remarks of the literary script for the film "Brother", stylistically and genre-wise, according to critics ^[7] to Balabanov's early works: he "looks with interest" ^{[1, p. 153]} for the filming of the clip, "without malice, withstanding small pauses" ^{[1, p. 154]} he answers the captain at the police station, smiles when he feels safe – in scenes with his brother and Sveta. Rare remarks hinting at the inner state of the hero are composed simply and concisely, in the language of the hero: "He liked the unusual answer for him" ^{[1, p. 157]}; "Internally he was ready for failure" ^{[1, p. 158]}; "He was pleased that she liked them too, and it's delicious to eat pasta like this, lying in bed with a smiling girl. And it doesn't matter that she doesn't hear him"; "<...> Danila noticed two fresh bruises on her back. He got upset and turned off the player" ^{[1, p. 167]}; "He really liked it and didn't want to leave" ^{[1, p. 171]}. Despite the pronounced genre structure, the way of organizing the script text remains the same, the same as in Balabanov's early works. The means by which the hero's detachment is set in "Brother" are identical to the means in "Happy Days". The hero became inscribed in his modern setting, but remained the same stranger, falling into a hostile and threatening other land ^{[7, p. 179]}.

The film language of the script determines the editing and mise-en-scene solutions of the future picture, organizes the space in which the action of the film takes place. The stinginess of the language of the literary script, "inherited" from absurdism – the small use of expressive means, the rare use of tropes, the short or absent exposure of the scene – gives space for the work of the director and actor. One of the main ways for Balabanov's literary scripts to organize a dialogue that leaves space for actor and director interpretation is a continuous scene–forming dialogue containing a small number of remarks or not containing them at all. Such, for example, is the scene in which Danila and the German go to the cemetery: it begins with two lines ("– The city is a terrible force, son. He sucks with his head. Only the one who is stronger can get out. And then... / – What's your name?"), which are interrupted by a brief description of the space and action in the frame ("It was getting dark when they approached the cemetery"), after which the dialogue continues; leaving the scene marks the beginning of a new scene ("Several homeless people were sitting by the campfire. They drank vodka. Hoffman and Danila sat down in silence") ^{[1, pp. 158-159]}. The dialogue becomes the main action of the scene, as in a play, but the replicas in it exist independently from each other, as if forming two parallel lines; Danila's remark "I'm not very Jewish <...> Germans are normal" states his position, but does not allow the dialogue to develop ("What's the difference? / – Listen, are you bothering me?" ^{[1, p. 159]}).

The lack of deep development of heroes allows Balabanov to create dialogues in which replicas become an articulation of the positions of the heroes, as if compensating for insufficient psychologism. A replica becomes a slogan, and communication with the help of slogans is impossible: "Heil Hitler" ^{[1, p. 176]} For example, a replica that was not included in the film, in its screen incarnation becomes a series of proverbs and sayings that work in counterpoint with the content of the scene; a set of morals by Hoffmann, which he informs Danila, unable to understand a similar speech; the speech of Danila himself, who does not understand Cat's vocabulary, but confidently conducts a dialogue in Russian with a French-speaking guest at a party ^{[1, p. 185]}. Recreated by the literary means of an absurdist play, the unified space of St. Petersburg of the 1990s, flooded with characters alien to it, becomes a poetic image that emphasizes the problems of "a disintegrated world that has lost its unifying primary basis, meaning and purpose, turned into an absurd universe" ^{[20, p. 422]}.

The gradual transition of Russian film production to the American script format, which began in the 1990s, jeopardized the existence of a literary script - a traditional form of screenwriting for Soviet film drama. The means of artistic expression peculiar to the poetics of the literary script organize its structure and film language, with the help of which this structure is reflected in the construction of the characters and the organization of spatial-temporal unity. One of the last debutants of the 1990s who studied in accordance with the theories of Soviet film dramatists - Peter Lutsyk and Alexey Samoryadov, Renata Litvinova, Alexey Balabanov – in their literary scripts develop literary techniques that form integral structural elements of film drama. The chronotope in the scenarios of Lutsyk and Samoryadov, which is an antagonist in relation to the main character, is created with the help of indications on the dynamics of the frame, intra-frame and inter-frame editing, foreshortening and the size of the shooting. The images of the heroines of Litvinova's scripts are formed using syntactic means of organizing replicas. The film language of Balabanov's scripts inherits the poetics of the absurdist drama, allowing to recreate in the text a universal depersonalized hero, devoid of psychologism, and the image of the space rejecting him. In the Russian cinema of the 2000s, three sets of techniques used by these authors, regardless of their work, form three main trends in the development of film drama.

You can simply select and copy link from below text field.