“THE PROSCRIBED”: CINEMATOGRAPHIC STUS

Abstract

The paper reviews the image of Vasyl Stus in Roman Brovko’s feature film “The Proscribed” (“Zaboronenyi”, 2019). The researcher aims to find out how the director embodies the psychological structure of the writer’s personality in the film for a wide audience. To do this, the author of the paper uses interviews with the director, the leading actor, and contemporaries of Vasyl Stus, analyzing the feature film from the perspective of its form, content, and meaning. The members of the production team emphasized the reactions of the creative person to untruth and injustice; they focused on such traits of Stus’s character as being extremely honest, caring, and emotionally explosive. Stus’s contemporaries, watching the film first, noted the emotional side as successfully embodied on the screen. The psychological component of Vasyl Stus’s cinematographic personality is based on the character traits, reactions, and behavior inherent to real Stus: the protagonist is prone to impetuous reactions, not suited to compromises, self-sufficient, and strong-willed. To create such a psychological structure of Vasyl Stus’s character in “The Proscribed”, the director works both with the form (he uses the principles of gradation and opposition, the means of image-experience, and a wide shot) and content (imaginary episodes, reading poetry behind the scenes, condensed meaning of the epigraph, some fictional characters, the author’s text in a new context, etc.). These efforts give the opportunity to see the movie character of Vasyl Stus with his inherent emotional reactions (impetuous) and feelings (protest, anger, justice), moral and ethical guidelines (to give much, to be humane and do good), and the high level of self-awareness.