POETIZATION AND DEPOETIZATION OF THE CITY IMAGE IN THE CINEMATIC DISCOURSE: WHAT ARE THE CREATIVE POSSIBILITIES OF THE CINEMA LANGUAGE?

Abstract

The city has been one of the main sources of creative inspiration in various arts since ancient times. The focus of our research is on city images, which are created in the cinematic art. In particular, the present paper explores the verbal and nonverbal means used in the cinematic discourse to poetize and depoetize images of the city. As investigation material, we have selected films about Moscow. The selected films belong to two distant historical periods - the 1960s and the 2000s. To do our research, a special algorithm of analysis has been elaborated. It consists in a step-by-step study of the following levels of the film: the title of the film, the title complex, the verbal system and multimodal (cinematic) tropes. Special attention is paid to the description of the main figurative models underlying the entire figurative-expressive (artistic) structure of the studied films. The paper shows that the poetization process is provided by the mechanism of coordination of verbal and nonverbal means of the cinema language in the formation of urban images, while the depoetization process is triggered by the mechanism of their mismatch. The method elaborated and the results obtained help to step further towards the goal of understanding the phenomena of linguistic and multimodal creativity.