Art space and time in the screen chronotope

Abstract

Time and space are the most essential concepts that determine the structure of the screen product and its artistic content. The term “chronotope” (chronos + topos), proposed by Michael Bakhtin as determing the spatial and temporal characteristics of a literary work, is now included in the practice of art criticism, and has become widely used in analyses of films. However, recently the claim that “chronotope” is devoid of specific content and therefore cannot be used to analyze screen works has been increasingly affirmed. The article proves that the use of “chorotope” today, when in the cinema art there is an active search for new forms of interaction of artistic time, allows one to identify productively the stylistic features of the movie, treating screen time-space as a dynamic, volatile phenomenon. Particular attention is paid to the viewer’s perception of the screen chronotope. The author hypothesizes that screen artistic time or screen artistic space can dominate in a particular chronotope, depending on the plot and compositional construction of the episode or film. In screen works, in which “horizontal editing” predominates, the action develops in numerous screen spaces. Temporal characteristics are represented in these films by a small interval of conditionally present time, and heroes’ pasts play a key role in plots. In films with a dynamic story and a constant shift in narrative to events, imagined by the hero, time is dominant for the viewer, and space fulfills a functional role. The concept of the chronotope also facilitates determining the role of flashbacks and “flashforwards,” oneric and imaginary time-space, and analyzeing methods of transmitting the subjective perception of the time or space by the characters in the film.

Keywords:

cinema, film chronotope, cinema time, cinema space, film perception, continuum, sound in movies, montage