Abstract: The author of the article analyzes the film “The Kreutzer Sonata” (director M. Schweitzer, composer S. Gubaidulina) and defines the role of audio background consisting of music and sound effects in the development of the concept of the film version of the same-name novella by L.N. Tolstoy. Based on the comparison of the piece of writing and its screen adaptation, the author describes the functions of the audio background and the role of music as a drama factor. The author emphasizes the importance of timbre and sound principles since the sound characteristics help to define the edges of the event line of the story (the past and the present), and the railway and urban noises become a marker outlining the key phrases of the dialogue of Pozdnyshev with his companion. For the film, the role of citations is important, which are used for describing the characters and interpreting them. Citations accompany the images of Liza (classic piano pieces, romance and French song), Pozdyshev (Strauss waltz, Offenbach’s cancan, and a prison song), and Trukhachevsky (P. Satasate’s gypsy songs). Three main characters are united by L. Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata which creates the psychological subtext in representing the relations between Liza, Trukhachevsky and Pozdyshev.  S. Gubaidulina’s music, using the minimum primary musical expressive means, and mostly by timbers characterises the range of Pozdnyshev’s emotions from love to hate and comments the inner dialogue of the character. The audio background in the film fulfils the illustrative, characterizing, subtextual and drama functions. The specific peculiarity of introducing music into the synthetic text is a frequent usage of the intraframe principle determined by both Tolstoy’s prose and the very title of the novel. The author proves that Schweitzer’s “Kreutzer Sonata” is more authentic as compared with other screen versions since it preserves the dialogues and remarks of characters, the unanimity of real events and flashbacks corresponds with the primary source, and the drama of the film is equal to that of the literary text; at the same time, the expression of culmination points is supported by music and sound effects thus helping to understand the idea of the novella.   

Keywords: The Kreutzer Sonata, superlative, audio sequence, dramaturgy, noise effects, quote, film interpretation, Schweitzer, Gubaidulina, Lev Tolstoy

Abstract: The article analyzes the peculiarities of a director’s interpretation of the image of the main character of the 2006 “Tristan and Isolde”. The author analyzes the expressive means, including the musical ones, and the screenplay in comparison with the original novel by Gottfried von Strassburg. The scientific novelty of the research is determined by the fact that the author is the first Russian scholar who studies this film using the methods of interdisciplinary analysis, which helps to compare the image of the protagonist with its historic and cultural prototype, and detect the artististic and esthetic position of the director. The research methodology includes the comparative, art, historic and cinematological, and musical analysis, the principles of semiotic analysis in relation to the elements of the artistic language of the film as “independent” texts. The authors come to the following conclusions: the director follows the tradition of history films using the mythologic materials, but not using their “magicness”, embedding the implied mythology. The key points are highlighted by the music which is more than merely supplementary and denotes the genetic linkage of the heroes’s senses with nature and becomes an integral element of the media text. Besides, the music in the film plays an important form-making role connecting its segments. The worldview depicted in the film is vertically multifaceted: it contains the referrals to the Migration Period, the Middle Ages and modernity.

Keywords: Anne Dudley, film music, Kevin Reynolds, medieval novel, Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan and Isolde, epos, cinema, media text, culture hero