Roman Jakobson’s cinematographic thinking

Abstract

The article turns on the film theory outlined by the Russian linguist from three contributions: the essay “Is the Film in Decline?” (1933); the interview on cinema realized in 1967; and some comments disseminated in its writings. The hypothesis that raises Roman Jakobson is the transposition of the literary features to the cinematographic mean, until rising what the Russian formalists came in calling “Poetics of Cinema” (Poetika Kino). In this sense, the most revealing contribution is the study of the metonimic and metaphorical functions that the cinema unfolds from the segmentation and the assemblage. A panoramic one by the relations that maintained Jakobson with the poets and painters of the Czech and Russian avant-garde, their culture in film matter (movies, filmmakers), or the theoretical references that handled in film questions are some of the themes undertaken with the aim to contextualize the vision that Jakobson had of cinematographic medium. The thickness of the article will be centered in its article of 1933 on movies, writing as a result of the consequences of the sound in the film language, as well as of a small experience in the making of the movies during its stay in the Czech Republic.