Typology of literary script in Russian cinema of the 2000s

Prokhorova Elizaveta Vladimirovna ORCID: 0009-0005-6984-648X Associate professor, Department of Dramaturgy and Film Studies, Saint Petersburg State University of Film and Television 192102, Russia, Saint Petersburg, Saint Petersburg, Pravdy str., 13, 1211 jounoetjolie@gmail.com Other publications by this author

The most acute problem for the Russian film drama throughout the history of its existence has been and remains the problem of the form of the script. In the 1930s, in the process of disputes between theorists and practitioners, it was resolved in favor of the literary form, which remained the leading production standard until the turning point for the country and cinematography of the 1990s. The literary form became a compromise between two other scenario forms common in those years, which had a number of significant drawbacks that made it difficult to work on the film: the iron, or numbered script involved delegating to the screenwriter some of the staging tasks related to the artistic solution of the scene (indications of size, angle, shooting point), poetic, which was advocated by Sergei Eisenstein ^{[1, pp. 297-299]}, abounded in lyrical means, and therefore was inaccurate and blurred. The literary script, freed from technical remarks and numbering of frames ^{[2, pp. 34-35]}, was characterized by the use of literary means of artistic expression intended for further screen embodiment. In the 1960s, the literary form evolved into film prose, a literary work rich in means of expression. In the face of the sociocultural and industrial upheaval of the 1990s, which led to new searches in the field of cinema, the problem of form was actualized again.

For the first time in the specialized literature, the question of the form and language of the screenplay was vividly and polemically identified on the pages of the first domestic scenario textbook published by the scenario faculty of the State Institute of Cinematography (GIK, since 1934 – VGIK). Its author, Valentin Turkin, entered into a dispute with theorists and practitioners of cinematography on the issue of the status of the screenplay as an independent work of art with its own specific poetics ^{[2, p. 4-5]} – with Bela Balash, Viktor Shklovsky and Sergei Eisenstein, who in their works emphasized the intermediate status of the script as a text intended for further film formation by the director ^{[3; 4; 5; 6; 7; 1]}. The words in the "semi-finished product" are valuable only in the sense that "they explain to us exactly what and how to shoot" ^{[7, p. 22]}, allow us to create a literary statement to which the director will find a "cinematic equivalent" ^{[1, p. 298]}. Discussing the poetics of the screenplay, Turkin wrote about the special purpose of this type of text – the aspiration to visual embodiment, reflected in the literary style. The means of literature are used not only to record the plot and plot of a future film, but also for "even the cinematic form of their presentation, the cinematic pace of their change and movement and, if I may say so, the visual rhythm of a motion picture" ^{[2, p. 23]}, that is, as elements of the film language in the sense in which They are written by Yuri Lotman and Yuri Tsivyan ^{[8, pp. 59-139]}. The role of the screenplay language in the construction of the film language was emphasized in the works of theorists and practitioners and later – Yevgeny Gabrilovich ^[9], Joseph Manevich ^[10] and others paid significant attention to the development of the poetics of the film by literary means in the manuals. Ilya Weisfeld wrote in the abstract of his dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Art History: "The manner of writing a script cannot be indifferent to what the playwright intended. <...> The literary style of the script arises, crystallizes along with the emergence of the idea" ^{[11, p. 21]}. The analysis of literary techniques in the script allows us to identify specific film ethics inherent in the authors and directly related to the author's intention and the problems dictated by the epoch.

The authors who worked in the 1990s, a difficult transition period for Russian cinema from Soviet production, stylistic and ideological standards to an independent Western-style industry, found themselves in a difficult position. The literary tradition of the domestic scenario school of the 1960s, in which they were brought up, gradually began to give way to the American format - a concise and stingy form of scenario recording ^[12]. For the first time, the rules for the design of the script in accordance with the Hollywood standard were published in Russian in Alexander Chervinsky's book "How to sell a good script well" (1992) ^[13]. The American format described by Chervinsky is a direct descendant of the American continuity script, a production plan taken in the 1920s in the USSR as a model for creating a form of "iron" script, which was rejected by production a decade later. Created for the commercial industry, in which the producer is the main figure, the American format was gradually introduced into the new Russian cinematography, which remained without state support and for some time freed from ideological frameworks; and if the gradually emerging spectator cinema, based on the genre conventions of popular Western cinema at that time, its use brought practical benefits, that is, he did not fully meet the demands of the author's cinema. The work of a director who finds "the cinematic equivalent of a literary metaphor" ^{[1, 298]}, the work of a playwright brought up by the author in the last decades of Soviet cinema, required the use of a literary form capable of fully reflecting the idea of the upcoming picture on paper.

The Russian screenplay of the 2000s, reflecting in its specific form the influence of the Russian screenwriting school and the American recording format, was influenced by another trend of these years: the mass "migration" of theatrical authors to the cinema. Brought up in the tradition of theatrical drama, the authors of the "new drama", thinking through the means of the play, brought its formal features into the film drama and, as it were, filled a new author's pool. In 2006, playwright Ivan Vyrypaev shoots Euphoria; with the film "Top" in 2009, another theatrical playwright, Vasily Sigarev, debuts. In 2006, theater director Kirill Serebrennikov adapted the Presnyakov brothers' play "Portraying the Victim". Alexander Rodionov begins to write for cinema ("Free Swimming", 2006, directed by B. Khlebnikov; "Everyone will die, but I will stay", 2008, directed by V. Guy Germanika; "A Tale about Darkness", 2009, directed by N. Homeriki; "Crazy Help", 2009, directed by B. Khlebnikov), Yuri Klavdiev ("Flint", 2007, directed by A. Mizgirev; "Everyone will die, but I will stay", 2008, directed by V. Guy Germanika, co-authored with A. Rodionov), Maxim Kurochkin ("Tumbler", 2007, directed by R. Kachanov, "Shame" ("Short circuit"), 2009, directed by B. Khlebnikov, in collaboration with I. Ugarov). Some of the debutant directors of the 2000s, who worked with playwrights who came from the theater, joined a number of authors called by critics the "new quiet ones" – a generation united by existential and social issues and a desire for documentary poetics, which dictated the originality of the scenario form.

However, the author's cinematography of the 2000s was not limited to the activities of the playwrights of the "new drama". In 2003, Andrey Zvyagintsev, one of the largest Russian directors of the new century, shot his debut film "The Return" based on the script of the same name by V. Moiseenko and A. Novototsky. His further works will be shot according to his scripts, written in collaboration with screenwriter Oleg Negin; their form differs significantly from both the scenario experiments of natives of theatrical drama, and from the literary scripts of VGIK and VKSR students, increasingly tending to the conciseness of the American format, denied by other authors of these years. The problem of form, which in the 1930s led theorists and practitioners to fierce disputes and intensive artistic searches, is being reactualized in the new century of Russian cinematography, once again calling into question the status of the scenario text and its form.

The reform that affected all spheres of society in the 1990s affected both cinema and theater. The abolition of national cinematographies, the lack of financial support from the state, the deplorable state of cinemas, the niche of which was filled by television and video distribution, the instability of the economy and the significant influence of Western films, to which the audience finally gained access, significantly affected the pace and quality of film production. The theater also lost state support, which indirectly influenced its long-term break with modern drama. Pavel Rudnev writes about the stagnation that gripped the theater in the 1990s in all its aspects - from personnel "old age" (there were simply no places for young playwrights and directors in theaters) before the absence of a specialized press, which "was enough to form a stable opinion: "We do not have a modern play." There was simply nowhere to take it – before the advent of the culture of cheats and laboratories" ^{[14, p. 132]}. The connection between theaters, frozen in the already barren Soviet archaic by this time, and young authors from different parts of the country, was restored through the organization of regional theater studios ^{[15, p. 7]} and theater festivals ^{[15, p. 9-11; 14, p. 132-134; 16, p. 6-8]}. Gradually, the Russian theatrical repertoire began to change, replenished with the works of new authors (Olga Mukhina, Vladimir and Oleg Presnyakov, Vasily Sigarev, Yuri Klavdiev, Ivan Vyrypaev, Pavel Pryazhko, Yaroslav Pulinovich, Maxim Kurochkin, etc.). This phenomenon, which originated at the turn of the 1990s-2000s, was named "new drama" in honor of the festival of the same name, held by Mikhail Ugarov in 2002-2008.  

"ND <new drama> stimulated the renewal of the dramatic aesthetics proper: stage language and vision, dramatic conflict, ways of representing modern consciousness in the text – thus becoming an important literary fact. In this sense, it has influenced other genres, primarily screenplays" ^{[15, p. 12]}. The formation of this new dramatic aesthetic, both theatrical and, later, cinematographic, was significantly influenced by one of the directions that developed in the bosom of the new drama – the Russian documentary theater, with the methods and tools of which the young authors got acquainted in 1999 at a six-day seminar organized by the Royal Court Theater, and already in 2002 Ugarov and Elena Gremina is being opened Театр.doc whose repertoire was also represented by documentary plays ^{[14, p. 160]}. One of the main tools of documentary theater is verbatim – the work of authors with live material collected as a result of interviews. Live speech connects the poetics and problematics of verbatim – speech means become tropes, expressing the author's thought at different levels and allowing to reveal the actual boils of modernity, which implicitly or explicitly pop up in the collected texts.

In the mid-2000s, the authors of the new drama began to try their hand at cinema. In the credits of the short film "Shame" from the almanac "Short Circuit" (2009), Maxim Kurochkin and Ivan Ugarov, the authors, are indicated as screenwriters, in addition to the director Театра.doc . In a dramatized story about a journalist Sasha (A. Yatsenko) going on a boring journalistic assignment – he needs to interview residents of one of the courtyards who are not interested in communicating in order to make a note about the "initiative of the city authorities" – the plot retreats before the plot, and the texture of speech itself prevails over the meaning of the words that are spoken. The remarks of the locals are absolutely uninformative, as no one, including himself, is interested in Sasha's future note. The truth cannot be found on the surface: it hides in a bawdy inscription on a transformer booth, behind which a rude yard gopnik hides his chivalrous love for the girl Ole from the entrance opposite (you can even kill for such love – try to break the head of a stray journalist, if only he did not reveal the secret to the chosen one), and in the final monologue Sasha, who still brought Ole the news. "You understand, here... I have a task, right? You have some kind of pipe here, but I'm not interested, well, I don't care at all. And in general, I don't care about anything else. Because I do not know how to speak, and that. And when I saw you in the yard... well, not you, well, this inscription... I immediately realized then, well... that he loves you. He's actually... for you... he's, I don't know… In general, I do not know how to say… But I can't do that." Speech has been devalued, it has lost its communicative function – it cannot say anything, it has to wade through a pile of meaningless words to finally get to the point.

In 2009, Nikolai Khomeriki filmed "A Tale about Darkness". Alexander Rodionov, one of the founders of the Theater, becomes a co–author of the script.doc, who previously worked with Boris Khlebnikov and Valeria Guy Germanica. The essential feature of Rodionov's scripts are the speech constructions of his characters – the ways of organizing the text in monologue and dialogue, the speech characteristics of the characters, striving for a documentary likeness of life. "The links between documentary theater and cinema striving for authenticity appear primarily at the level of the script, or rather at the level of language" ^{[15, p. 191]}. The replicas in the "Tale of Darkness" break off, begin in the middle, gradually turn into an inarticulate set of letters; the vernacular is transmitted lexically on the letter – "well, what", "no", "now", through parcellation and incoherence of speech, bringing it closer to real speech: "Did you study for a mentushka, Natah? Hold me, people... – Alice smiles at everyone and laughs silverily, which means that she is not a scary person. – Actually, the police are not scary at all, – Alice begins to say, not having decided yet who she will tell it to, – we are actually psychologists in general… I'm especially close to psychology..." she's already focused on the two people who are still listening to her. – I don't run with a gun, but here I also signed up for dancing, by the way, no one ...?" ^{[17, p. 25]}. The abundance of obscene language also works to make speech hyperrealistic – in the twenty-first century, obscene vocabulary replaces interjections and fills in pauses.

The remarks in Rodionov's text are poetic and paradoxical, but this paradox allows us to capture in the script those overtones of reality for which common words do not yet exist: Alice's silver laugh, with which she demonstrates her inoffensiveness, is a strange but intuitive acting task set by the script, "The girl saw Alice, began to obey her mother, became kind and good, only so that Alice would not take her away" ^{[17, p. 7]}, "Seryozha looked at the bars and did not cry anymore, because he has never been behind bars before" ^{[17, p. 9]}, "They are surprised to themselves that they are sitting and talking. Everything seemed different to them <....> – You still have two pimples on your chest, – Dimych presses tenderness in his voice so as not to piss himself" ^{[17, p. 30]}. Argot and profanity go beyond the replica and are also used in remarks – because of this, the tonality of the text subtly changes, decreases, allowing you to perceive the script as a document of reality. The voice of the author, who is in the same position with the characters, stylizes the story as a "case from life" – besides, he has his own position and his own sympathies: "Alice was walking down the street and looked around at the women. They hobbled on stilt-heeled shoes, they exposed bronchi in pale cleavages to the icy wind, their bellies and asses showed fat samples in the cracks above their clothes, cars with greedy people sometimes drove by and everyone looked only at these p**d, and Alice walked a modest, elegant, sweet invisible" ^{[17, p. 11]}.

The stylistic irregularity of the text also creates the feeling of direct speech of the witness – the times change in sentences, indefinite pronouns are used: "I stopped, turned on the light, a man crouched in the camera away from the light, then some more. They are scared to death that she paid attention to them" ^{[17, p. 20]}. "Some kind" means not to see from the point of view of the author; the transition from the past tense to the present dictates an intra–frame montage of the scene, a quick transition from a completed action to a long-term reaction. The originality of the form in which Rodionov writes his scripts does not in any way contradict their original purpose – to be a work written for embodiment on the screen. The author acts in his texts as a witness, but not as a narrator – everything that happens in the script is effective.  

Lipovetsky and Boymers write that the new drama was not just a movement or trend, but a theatrical practice that was born "from the interaction between playwrights and directors, despite the fact that playwrights often become directors themselves, as, for example, in the case of E. Grishkovets, M. Ugarov, I. Vyrypaev or the Presnyakov brothers" ^{[15, p. 11]}. Vyrypaev goes beyond the theater and tries himself in cinema in 2006; in 2009, Vasily Sigarev released his debut film "The Top", whose play "Plasticine" in 2002 was staged by Kirill Serebrennikov on the stage of the Moscow Theater of Drama and Direction Roshchin and Kazantsev, becoming one of the key performances for the latter ^{[15, p. 262]}. "Sigarev's plays are built up with self-direction and often represent scenarios of productions, rather than a reason for multiple interpretations. A theater man and a cinema man are fighting in Sigarev; so far the score is equal" ^{[14, p. 186]}, Rudnev writes about him, summarizing the words of critics about the "uniformity" of his plays and their inconvenience for subsequent staging on stage.

Sigarev's peculiar remark language, which distinguishes his plays, obviously affects the style of the voiceover. The melodious, fabulous intonation of the remark preceding the first act of the play "Ladybugs Return to Earth", as it were, frames its plot, embedding it into a kind of general story of a semi-magical, semi-everyday place: "In the beginning there was nothing here. Then a man came and built a City. Houses, streets, squares, shops, schools, factories, collective gardens have become. The streets became paved, and then paved with whitewashed borders on holidays. People began to walk the streets, began to sit on benches, began to sneeze from poplar fluff, began to sell seeds at the factory entrance, began to fall in love. People began to be born and began to die..." ^{[18, p. 3]}. The story of the characters of the play floats out of eternity, large-scale non-existence, at the beginning of the text and returns to it at its end. With the same intonation, the Spinning Top enters the script: "THE VOICE. When I was a kid, I was a boy... not a real boy, of course. But I was still a boy. I had boyish things. I had boyish toys. I had boyish hairstyles. I had boyish nails. I had boyish elbows and knees. I had boyish eyes. I had boyish habits. I had boyish dreams.… I had boyish... thoughts... <> VOICE. Then I got my first dresses, skirts and dreams of marriage. The hair has become longer. Pebbles swelled in his chest. They pierced my ears and put earrings in them. But the nails were still bitten, the knees and elbows were broken, and the thoughts were not very girly..." ^[19]. Volchok talks about her life from above, keeping her distance while episodes from her life follow each other, forcing her to grow in front of the viewer; she will not always be a participant in further scenes opening with a voiceover. The mechanism of recall is not subjective – in the end, the Top will die, her gaze is wider and deeper than a human's gaze. She remembers and sees for herself and for her mother.

The replicas of the characters in Sigarev's texts also strive for extreme realism, but, unlike Kurochkin, Ugarov and Rodionov, he shows the devaluation of speech not so much through meaningless speech constructions as through their repetitions in pre-climactic and climactic scenes: this can be seen as in his plays ("Hey! Hey! Where to?! The tram is there! Where to? HEY! (opens the window) Hey!!! Where to?!!! Where to?!!! Ramble there!!! Taramvai!!! Taramvaaaaay!!!" – "Phantom pains" ^{[20, p. 2]}, "There it is... my grandmother... tell me, okay? <> My grandmother is there... tell me, okay? <> Tell me, okay?" – "Plasticine" ^{[21, p. 266]}), and in the scenarios: "MOTHER. No. Not a wolf cub… You're not a wolf cub. No. What are you even doing? What other wolf cub? You're not a wolf cub. There is no… What are you even doing? A wolf cub of some kind. What are you even doing? What are you even doing? What are you even doing? What are you..." ^[19]. The almost psychotic frenzy of the hero, locked in the moment that broke him, is one of the most frequently used techniques by Sigarev. If Kurochkin and Ugarov's speech exists to destroy the speech project by itself, Rodionov's to demonstrate the meaninglessness of communication, then Sigarev's speech becomes a demonstration of pure affect, almost a bodily act.

Using the example of Rodionov's script, one of the most important trends in the film drama of the 2000s is obvious - the change in the function and form of speech in the script. The meaning of words recedes into the background before these words are spoken, as they are distorted by the characters, where pauses appear in the replica; the form and content of the replica come into conflict, exposing an internal contradiction in the characters, in the situation, in the world. It is not the dramatic construction that determines the place of dialogue in history, but speech subordinates the script and becomes its main acting force, defining all its elements – both problematics and poetics.

Sigarev's texts show the problem of inaccurate embodiment of a high literary form, which is also characteristic of author's screenplays: in order for the text to work as it should when staged, it must be put to the one who wrote it. The system of images and formal techniques that passes from his plays into scripts is distinguished by literary expressiveness, which requires interpretation by both a theater director and a film director. The characteristic features of Sigarev's text reveal themselves, first of all, in the construction of speech, which forms the very structure of the script.

The screenplays of the authors of the new drama, due to their formal originality, go beyond the traditional literary form of the script, which was fostered by the theorists of the VGIK for a hundred years, however, they fully correspond to the definition of a screenplay that Turkin once proposed in his textbook "Dramaturgy of Cinema" - "a complete artistic construction" ^{[2, p. 7]}, a film drama in literary form. 

"A screenplay is not an independent literary work" ^{[22, p. 12]} – this is how the preface by Andrey Zvyagintsev's permanent co-author, screenwriter Oleg Negin, begins to their joint collection of scripts. "I prefer to hold in my hands a text that I would call a technical record. This attitude to the subject can be called strange, but for me the script does not necessarily have to have the advantages that distinguish good literature" ^{[22, p. 5]} – Zvyagintsev writes in his preface. Of the five scripts included in the collection, Zvyagintsev and Negin wrote four – "Exile", "Elena", "Leviathan", "Dislike". The script "You", based on which Zvyagintsev's debut film "The Return" was subsequently shot, was written by Vladimir Moiseenko and Alexander Novotsky and, according to the director, reworked with his participation – the plot and intonation of the statement, which dictated the poetics of the future film, significantly changed.

The form, which can be described as a "technical recording", "an intermediate link between the idea and what the finished film will be as a result" ^{[22, p. 9]}, was already widely used in production in 2003 – this is an American recording format, which is characterized not only by formatting, stylizing the text for the script, typed on a typewriter, but also with a specific expressiveness, almost completely cleared of literary tropes. "Scenarios consist of action, description, and dialogue. And nothing else <...>  No author's thoughts, digressions, inner feelings of the characters (except expressed in words from the screen) or information about the actors, except embedded in the action or dialogue" ^{[13, p. 228]}, Chervinsky writes in the chapter "The form of recording", later dwelling in detail on the remarks explaining the intonation with which the remark is uttered, or a parallel action performed by a character at the moment of the dialogue. This fragment of the manual allows us to highlight one of the key aspects of using the American format, specific specifically for the Hollywood production system: if in the domestic film drama the arrival to the literary form was due to artistic goals, then the arrival of the American film industry to use the American format made it possible to clearly define the sphere of influence and authority of each of the members of the film crew. Working on a role is an actor's job, working with an actor is a director's job.

In this regard, the tasks that the American format performs for production in the Russian author's cinema paradoxically work in its favor. "... it is absolutely impossible in the end to separate these two professions — directing and screenwriting. An authentic script can only be created by a director," Andrei Tarkovsky wrote in "Imprinted Time", arguing about whether it is possible for a director to work on a film based on someone else's original author's script. "If <...> the script is a literary work, then the future director will have to do everything all over again" ^{[23, p. 18]}; if the script is a "technical record" that is cleared of literary means and, thereby, simplified for translation into the film language, the film will follow its letter more Exactly.

The original version of the script "You", published in the collection of scripts for Zvyagintsev's films, begins with a lyrical introduction, a text framed as a prose passage – an internal monologue by one of the brothers dedicated to his father. Such techniques are not typical of Zvyagintsev's creative handwriting and are not found in his subsequent scripts written jointly with Negin; the monologue did not find a place in the film either. The first two dialogues are detailed in describing the emotions of David and Archil, conveyed through remarks – Archil speaks "with a slightly slurred tongue" or "with drunken stubbornness" ^{[22, p. 21]}, David "squeaks" and "sticks out his lower lip" ^{[22, p. 22]}, his face is "already joyless, wrinkles into a tragic grimace, which should be followed by a bitter deafening roar" ^{[22, pp. 21-22]}. Each subsequent scene is preceded by a detailed description of the situation and the mise en scene, designed to convey through the details the atmosphere of the past, which the boys recall; through a detailed lyrical remark, the inner state of the characters is also reported: "And a heavy ruthless hand lies on his fragile childish shoulder. The hand gives peace..." ^{[22, p. 23]}; "And only now this couple of bandits notices that mom, a person who was not and is not closer, has become some other - a little strange, beautiful woman with a mysterious bright smile on her lips"; "The boys enter the house. Shackled, scared, as if the house no longer belongs to them fully as it used to, or perhaps it does not belong at all. It is as if they have entered someone else's domain and at any moment the true owner may jump out from around the corner" ^{[22, p. 26]}. Remarks of this kind are typical for Soviet literary scenarios ^[12]: the image, sometimes difficult to grasp for the camera, requires interpretation, translation of a literary metaphor into the language of cinema. The heaviness of the hand and the peace it gives, the strangeness of the mother, who saw their father for the first time in a long time, and the hostility of the house they enter are organically non–cinematic sensations that need to be revealed in the frame through the visible, to find a cinematic equivalent for them.

"Nouns, verb forms and, of course, dialogues are the substance and flesh of our texts. Our characters "get up" or "sit down", "enter" or "exit", "close" or "open" and less often "look from under their brows", "hide their eyes in embarrassment" or "melancholically shake their leg" ^{[22, p. 6]}, Zvyagintsev writes about his scripts. Zvyagintsev's next film after the "Return", "Exile" (2007), was shot based on the script of the same name by Zvyagintsev and Negin; it was based on the film adaptation of the story by U. Saroyan, written by A. Melkumyan, "Something Funny. A serious story."

The text of "Exile" is extremely stingy and specific, which is especially obvious in comparison with the script based on which Zvyagintsev's previous film was shot: there are no lengthy remarks that preceded each scene in the script by Moiseenko and Novototsky, the circumstances of the scene are set through its title as it is done in the American recording format (EXT/INT, title locations, time of day). Dialogues are also cleared of remarks and represent an exchange of remarks without interruptions. A concise syllable, however, even at the level of the script, which lacks cinematic markings, indicates a visual solution to the future scene. So, the description of the action in the thirteenth scene: "The silhouette of a sleeping woman is visible on the bed. Without turning on the light, without undressing, Alex lies down next to him. He sighs heavily. He closes his eyes" [22 p. 96]. The size, which suggests that a woman sleeping on a bed is shown to the viewer only as a silhouette – a general plan; a heavy sigh, closed eyes require a close-up. In the notes to this scene, the director's notes confirm the logic dictated by the syntax of the scene: "Panorama (?) Static, the general plan. He comes in, sits on the bed. He takes off his shoes and lies down on the bed with his clothes on. Close-up from above. He lies down and hugs her on top of the blanket (sheet), clings to her, sighs" ^{[22, p. 396]}.

A large number of scenes in the script are limited to one or two lines of description of the action – sec. 36: "Alex walks through the grove", sec. 37: "Alex walks along the road. Turning off it, he goes up the hill" ^{[22, p. 104]}, sec. 50: "The car is driving along a hot highway"  ^{[22, p. 108]} (the action in the next section 51 is limited to a dialogue in the car without describing the action), section 55: "Cyrus and George come out of the barn. George locks the door with a bolt. They go to the camera" ^{[22, p. 110]}, giving the director the opportunity to decide on their duration and visual solution already at the level of developing a director's script. The literary script requires a director's interpretation of the literary "cipher"; the American recording format assumes interpretation at the level of specific visual solutions for each subsequent scene, without setting the director the task of reassembling the scene, making it, as Tarkovsky wrote, "anew."

The following three scenarios by Zvyagintsev and Negin, published in the collection, formally differ in no way from the text of "Exile". For Zvyagintsev, who writes with Negin for himself, the entire functionality of literary means that could be used in the script for the sake of transmitting the "cipher" of the visual solution of the future picture does not make sense – he, as a director, develops the film language of history at further levels of work on the film.

The dispute between theorists and practitioners about the form of the script, which marked the first decades of Russian cinema, ended in the 1930s with the adoption of the literary form as a generally accepted standard. The problem of form became relevant again a century later – the socio-cultural turning point of the 1990s, which led to the reformation and reorganization of all cultural institutions of the country, provoked new aesthetic and formal searches.

The tradition of the classical literary script, which was followed by the film dramatists who studied according to the Soviet textbooks of the VGIK, remained alive only in their works; the new confrontation of the "poetic" against the "iron" was the industrial disunity of the form, which appeared due to two bright, and in many ways opposite to each other bright trends of the 2000s. The literary scripts of the authors who came to cinema from theatrical dramaturgy – V. Sigarev, A. Rodionov, etc. – were characterized by a tendency to formal experiments introduced by playwrights from the theatrical stage, and dictated a new poetics of the author's cinema: striving for naturalism and documentality of plots, characters, and, not least, speech. Verbatim's technique, which the Russian theater became familiar with in the late 1990s, influenced not only their work, but also the entire Russian auteur cinema of the last three decades.

The American format, which was introduced to Russian film dramatists by A. Chervinsky (1992), replaced the literary script as a production standard in the early 2000s. Considered the prerogative of the Hollywood production system, where the entire filming process is subordinated to the figure of the producer, it quickly became the leading format for writing scripts aimed at the mass audience. However, all the formal signs of a script written in the American format are possessed by the scripts of one of the most important film directors - the author of modern Russia – A. Zvyagintsev, who works in collaboration with screenwriter O. Negin. The language of his scripts is practically devoid of literary means of artistic expression, and tends to dryness and conciseness of the staging plan, which does not affect the visual expressiveness and depth of his films in any way.

Thus, the Russian film drama in the 2000s is divided into three formal trends. Young authors who came to cinema from the modern phenomenon of theater form a new emotional scenario characterized by a high degree of literary expressiveness and poetic language. Major authors who debuted in the 1970s and 1980s (for example, Y. Arabov, A. Mindadze, etc.) continue to write scripts in literary form ^{[24; 25]}, continuing to maintain the domestic tradition - this is also due to the fact that, starting with the debut, they work in established creative tandems or go into directing. The American format, which has become widespread in the field of producer cinema, is practiced much less often in author's cinema – in particular, in the joint works of A. Zvyagintsev and O. Negin, who emphasize that the conciseness of the form contributes to more productive work on the visual solution of the picture at later stages of film development. However, these examples show that, despite the narrow prevalence of the use of the American script recording format in author's cinema, the problem of form, which was solved 90 years ago for Soviet cinema in favor of a literary script, begins to take shape again in the 2000s - modern Russian cinema is again in search of a form that meets the demands of the new century.