Natalia Rulyova: Poetry in Pictures: a Film about Joseph Brodsky
[Natalia Rulyova is Director of Russian Studies at the University of Birmingham]
Andrei Khrzhanovskii did not intend his latest film A Room and Half to be a biopic about the Russian Nobel Prize winner poet Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996). The film is a sensitive cinematic interpretation of Brodsky’s texts and, in particular, the essay with the same title (in Russian version), which was written in 1985 when the exiled poet lived in USA. The English title of the essay differs slightly: ‘In a Room and Half’. In the essay, Brodsky compares the process of recollecting the past with developing a film. Hence, it is not surprising that Khrzhanovskii finds this essay so eminently suitable for translating into moving pictures.
The film follows the fragmented structure of the essay, representing a chain of memories of Brodsky’s life before exile. The essay consists of 45 sections, or a series of ‘written photographs’. Brodsky observes that memory ‘contains details but not a full picture of the scene’. Khrzhanovskii draws on this idea and applies it to film. He achieves even further fragmentation by using a range of cinematic techniques and juxtaposing animation, still photographs, feature film, the audio recordings of Brodsky’s voice reading his poetry, and his doodles which come to life as cartoon characters. The use of such a variety of techniques allows the portrayal of memory and art at work to illustrate another Brodsky idea which is that memory and art share one commonality, an ‘ability to select, a taste for detail’. ’Khrzhanovskii's selection of scenes, texts and images is insightful, perceptive and informative.
All fragmented images and techniques are organically woven into the whole. Memories are glued together by a loose plot. The film begins with a panning shot of the room in the Leningrad (now St Petersburg) communal apartment on Liteinyi Prospekt, in which Brodsky lived with his parents. The room has been abandoned, wallpaper has come off the walls, and the wind is blowing through open windows. Suddenly, the telephone rings. Brodsky, played by Grigorii Ditiatkovskii, is on the other end of the line calling from New York. The film imagines how Brodsky might have returned to his parents’ home. In real life, the poet never came back to Russia having been forced to leave the USSR in 1972. Neither had he had a chance to see his parents again, despite their multiple attempts to obtain a visa to visit their son in the USA. In the film, Brodsky makes his imaginary journey back to Leningrad by boat. We see him walking to the boat and sitting down on the deck smoking a cigarette. Water is an image of time, and the journey takes us back into the past....
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Andrei Khrzhanovskii did not intend his latest film A Room and Half to be a biopic about the Russian Nobel Prize winner poet Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996). The film is a sensitive cinematic interpretation of Brodsky’s texts and, in particular, the essay with the same title (in Russian version), which was written in 1985 when the exiled poet lived in USA. The English title of the essay differs slightly: ‘In a Room and Half’. In the essay, Brodsky compares the process of recollecting the past with developing a film. Hence, it is not surprising that Khrzhanovskii finds this essay so eminently suitable for translating into moving pictures.
The film follows the fragmented structure of the essay, representing a chain of memories of Brodsky’s life before exile. The essay consists of 45 sections, or a series of ‘written photographs’. Brodsky observes that memory ‘contains details but not a full picture of the scene’. Khrzhanovskii draws on this idea and applies it to film. He achieves even further fragmentation by using a range of cinematic techniques and juxtaposing animation, still photographs, feature film, the audio recordings of Brodsky’s voice reading his poetry, and his doodles which come to life as cartoon characters. The use of such a variety of techniques allows the portrayal of memory and art at work to illustrate another Brodsky idea which is that memory and art share one commonality, an ‘ability to select, a taste for detail’. ’Khrzhanovskii's selection of scenes, texts and images is insightful, perceptive and informative.
All fragmented images and techniques are organically woven into the whole. Memories are glued together by a loose plot. The film begins with a panning shot of the room in the Leningrad (now St Petersburg) communal apartment on Liteinyi Prospekt, in which Brodsky lived with his parents. The room has been abandoned, wallpaper has come off the walls, and the wind is blowing through open windows. Suddenly, the telephone rings. Brodsky, played by Grigorii Ditiatkovskii, is on the other end of the line calling from New York. The film imagines how Brodsky might have returned to his parents’ home. In real life, the poet never came back to Russia having been forced to leave the USSR in 1972. Neither had he had a chance to see his parents again, despite their multiple attempts to obtain a visa to visit their son in the USA. In the film, Brodsky makes his imaginary journey back to Leningrad by boat. We see him walking to the boat and sitting down on the deck smoking a cigarette. Water is an image of time, and the journey takes us back into the past....