Doll in Cinematography: Principles of Synthesizing Expressive Means

Malich Dmitrii Miroslavovich Postgraduate student; Department of Art History; St. Petersburg State Institute of Culture 191187, Russia, St. Petersburg, Central district, nab. Kutuzova, 26, sq. 9 mit61@yandex.ru

Introduction

The doll is one of the oldest symbols in culture and performs the function of storing and transmitting cultural information. With the advent of cinema, the doll, which has an immanent playful nature, receives a new artistic space, expanding and modifying the system of expressive means of cinema.

Along with puppet animation, where a new way of "animating" a doll as a character is created through frame–by-frame shooting, there is another way of its presence - in feature films where dolls do not act as independent actors.

Overview of the phenomenon and problem field

There are numerous examples of interaction between people and dolls in feature films: movie characters play with dolls, use them in the interior, perceive them as mascots, and turn to the puppet theater. There are films imbued with puppet mythology, as well as paintings in which the image of a puppeteer plays a significant role.

The unique nature of the doll suggests that its appearance on the screen is not limited to a household reflection of reality. The integration of the doll into the artistic system of cinema gives the frame additional expressiveness, symbolic richness and associative versatility. This fact is consistent with the conclusions of Yu. M. Lotman about the high ability of cinema to synthesize with other modeling systems ^{[5, p. 144]}.

Studies comparing cinema and the doll phenomenon are fragmentary. Most of the works are devoted to puppet animation; there is practically no analysis of dolls in feature films as an element of the artistic system. This pattern determines the need for a comprehensive study of the interaction of the doll and the film language at the level of visual semiotics and the synthesis of artistic systems.

The synthetic nature of cinema

Before considering the synthesis of cinema with the doll phenomenon, it is necessary to outline those well-established views on what exactly cinema borrows from pre-existing arts and how it modifies this heritage in creating a specific cinematic reality. Cinema is a synthesis of almost all the arts that existed before its appearance, but this synthesis has its own characteristics and cannot be described as a harmonious fusion of artistic forms.

A. A. Tarkovsky wrote about the danger of imaginary harmony in the synthetic nature of cinema: "They say that cinema is a synthetic art, that it is based on the participation of many related arts, such as drama, prose, acting, painting, music, etc. But in fact, it turns out that these arts, by their "complicity", can hit cinema so terribly that it can instantly turn into an eclectic mess or (at best) into an imaginary harmony where the real soul of cinema cannot be found, because it is at this moment that it perishes" ^{[10, p. 83-84]}.

As the problem of synthesis was studied in cinematography, the idea of cinema was established not as a harmonious unity of arts, but as a synthetic art form integrating individual expressive means of different artistic systems ^[13]. This position is developed by S. I. Freilich. He notes that the synthesis sought by painting or architecture is methodologically opposed to the synthetics of cinema: by creating an integral space (for example, a temple), these arts do not dissolve into each other and retain their own material, methods of influence and expressive means.

There is a different principle in cinema. The basis of screen art is the integration of individual visual and expressive means of various arts, which do not mix, but combine into a new artistic synthetic reality. As S. I. Freilich notes, "each of the related arts in cinema leaves behind its own material and its own expressiveness. Cinema is close to theater, painting, and literature in its various properties, but it is neither one nor the other, nor the third: cinema embraces the whole integrity of these arts and at the same time expresses all their differences. None of them can replace cinema, because it combines only their opposite qualities. It is precisely about synthetic (but not universal) art, and not about the synthesis of arts" ^{[13, p. 424]}.

If traditional art forms operate mainly with their own means of expression, then in a movie these means act together in various combinations, defining the multilayered structure of the film language. These features of the synthesis of artistic systems are methodologically significant for further consideration of the inclusion of tangible cultural objects in cinematography, including dolls, and the analysis of the specifics of its artistic functioning in the frame structure.

The above-mentioned features of the synthesis of various types of art in cinematography can be methodologically used in revealing the features of the synthesis of cinematography with the material system of culture-the phenomenon of dolls.

Cinema and the physical environment

Cinema, as a technological system, has all the prerequisites for the synthesis of various artistic means. Cinema has inherited its place in the cultural system from its technical foundation – photography, an art with a reputation for maximum authenticity, documentary and visual truth. Thanks to its photographic basis, cinema has gained the opportunity to show phenomena and people in interaction with the surrounding objective world, the world of things. Photo and film images allow the viewer to delve into the phenomenon of the visible world. As M. B. Meilakh notes: "The "young" arts have renewed and sharpened the vision of mankind" ^[7].

It is this feature of cinema that makes it possible to use not only the expressive means of theater, literature, music and painting in creating a cinematic image, but also the artistic expressiveness of things, objects of material culture, the degree of expressiveness of which may vary. Cinema, thanks to its visual capabilities – close–up, changing the angle and lighting - is able to give things an active role in the synthetic artistic structure of the film. The tradition of depicting objects, which had previously developed in literature, painting and theater, was transferred to cinema and received a new development. At the same time, unlike painting or literature, cinema does not deform an object or mediate it with a word, but captures its real visual nature. The experience of cinematography demonstrates that the material environment on the screen can become as expressive and aesthetically significant as an actor's action.

For the artistic "transformation" of a thing, the author of the film has a set of cinematic means. The angle, the nature of the light pattern, the duration of the frame, and the degree of viewer attention directed at the subject are significant.

In The Nature of Cinema, Z. Krakauer notes: "Stage art inevitably focuses on acting, whereas cinema is able to hold our attention to some details of its appearance and show in detail the objects surrounding it. By freely exercising the right to bring an inanimate object to the fore and assigning it the task of further developing the action, cinema only confirms its special need to explore not only man, but also the entire physical being" ^[3].

The desire to see in things not only utilitarian properties, but also its "soul" did not arise with the birth of cinema, it is characteristic of culture from the earliest stages of its development and was actualized in cinema due to the uniqueness of its visual capabilities. Cinema made it possible to rediscover the objective world, to give it "super-utilitarian" properties and to introduce a thing into the space of a person's spiritual experience.

The way the material environment was shown changed depending on the method of creating cinematic reality that prevailed in a certain era. If in the 1920s cinematography developed ways of understanding things in a montage juxtaposition - through the collision of "cleaned" frames–signs, then in the post-war period the emphasis shifted to a multi-part intra-frame image. It was this interpretation of the material environment as evidence of the inner world of the hero, revealed through external details, that entered the culture of cinema and was developed in subsequent decades. This trend became especially significant in the cinema of the 1960s, when the technique of direct on-screen embodiment of a person's inner state was discovered and most vividly realized.

In the vast objective world displayed by cinema, the doll as an artifact stands out for its special aesthetic value. It has a variety of looks, sizes, shapes, silhouettes and color schemes. A doll can be three-dimensional or flat, picturesque or graphic, sculptural or constructive, naturalistic or abstract, depending on the type of visual art it was created in.

The expressiveness of her movements is added to the aesthetic image of the doll, which is also used in films, where much attention is paid to the dynamics of acting and the objective world.

It can be noted that other types of fine art, such as painting, sculpture, decorative and applied arts, and photography, also have the ability to convey the essential properties of things. At the same time, the uniqueness of the doll as a cultural phenomenon lies not only in its external features, but also in a special way of revealing its meanings through various types of human play with the doll.

Visual arts are not able to convey both the doll itself and the person playing with it at the same time. Human-doll interaction is possible in a puppet theater, in which the doll performs alongside the actor. However, the philosophical sound of the doll's image – both an object of the game space and a cultural symbol – can be realized only in cinema, which is able to introduce both a person and a doll interacting with him as an object of the material world into a single screen space. Thus, cinema, relying on the language of the artistic system "doll", develops its own way of expressing the inner world of a person through the material environment, through the state of the material world on the screen, a special case of which is a doll.

The conventionality and symbolic level of cinema

Everything that surrounds a person – the things themselves, their shape, coloring, lighting, mutual disposition, the nature of movement – has a significant impact on the state of the soul and, therefore, can be used to express emotional content. This is indicated by S. S. Phillipov ^[12].

Next, it is necessary to discuss the existing view of synthesis in cinema as a synthesis of the conventions of interacting arts. Combining not only different types of artistic language in one artistic whole, but also different degrees of conventionality of these languages is consonant with the cultural trends of the 20th century.

In the synthesis of cinema and the expressive means of a doll, a paradoxical situation arises: the system of artistic means of the most realistic of the arts, cinema, and the system of the most conventional expressive means possessed by a doll, which is a conditional model of a person, interact.

In the most general sense, convention is an organic property of any art. A. A. Potebnya saw in convention an internal form of interaction between art and reality, a form of their mutual transition into each other ^{[9, p. 32]}.

The understanding of the legitimacy of the conventional language of art was not formed immediately. However, in modern art studies, the idea has become established that any kind of art is inevitably conditional, since it reflects not a literal reality, but an image of reality recreated by the artist.

L. S. Vygotsky wrote: "Along with the images that are built in the process of direct cognition of reality, a person builds images that are recognized as an area built by the imagination" ^[1]. Such an imaginary reality has varying degrees of correlation with the visible world, from deep insight into its spiritual content to complete autonomy, which is determined by the creative abilities of the author.

As a result, an artificially created conditional reality reflects not only the external world, but also the inner world of a person, expressing his spiritual state depending on the creative task and the degree of artistic generalization.

The conventional nature of cinema, like other forms of art, is now also beyond doubt, although at an early stage of its development cinema was often perceived as a direct copy of the real world. "Hyperrealistic "total" cinema was one of the essential and widespread forms of early cinema," notes M. Yampolsky ^[14].

However, despite the higher degree of lifelikeness compared to other arts, primarily due to the fixation of movement, it is impossible to speak about the exceptional realism of cinema. An image taken at a certain point in time, from a certain point and from a specific angle, is inevitably subject to the author's interpretation of what is happening. Moreover, being flat and limited by the frame frame, the movie image cannot be considered as a "registration of reality".

In the synthetic structure of the cinematic image, there is a complex interaction of various forms of convention, which V. V. Zhdan writes about ^[2]. It is this interaction that significantly expands both the semantic potential of the screen image and the power of its artistic impact.

In the cinematic synthesis, different qualities of convention coexist and interact.:

- dramatic convention (plot fiction, time shifts, internal monologue, voiceover),

- visual and compositional conventions (generalized camera angles, special features of the frame plan, light-tonal solutions),

- acting and performing conventions (installation and pictorial drawing of the role, close-up, selection of expressive means),

- musical and sound conventions (musical themes, rhythmic structures, sound generalizations).

Finally, convention is also present in the perception of the moviegoer himself as the final link of the "communication channel" in terms of information theory. The viewer simultaneously clarifies the perceived message in several ways, including taking into account the plot, editing, angle, sound, word, and their use forms a multi-layered space of interpretation.

This difference in the forms and qualities of convention synthesized in a work of cinematography does not deprive it of a specific cinematic convention, its holistic and structural character, and also does not violate the holistic perception of the film by the viewer.

The art of playing dolls and the doll itself as an artifact, unlike cinematography, the conditional nature of which was often questioned in the early stages of development, have an extreme degree of conditionality. However, both puppetry and cinematography at different stages of their existence strove for naturalistic and realistic images. The pursuit of them led to a temporary loss of the specificity of artistic language and expressiveness, after which there was a return to the principles of convention.

Yu.M. Lotman, analyzing this process in relation to cinema, noted: "the illusion of reality becomes one of the leading elements of the language of cinema, based on photography: against the background of this illusion, convention becomes especially significant. But this is the desire of cinema to merge completely with life, and on the other hand, the desire to reveal its cinematic specifics, the conventions of language, these are two extremes, enemies who constantly need each other. They do not exist without each other and constitute the field of structural tension in which the real history of cinema moves" ^[6].

Lotman further illustrates this phenomenon using the example of Italian neorealism, the art of "naked truth", the art of rejecting professional actors, artificially created scenery, literary language, and all existing types of artistic conventions. As a result, this "naked truth" of neorealism has led to an overly complicated language, requiring a huge culture to be perceived. "Being democratic in ideas, it (the art of neorealism) becomes too intellectual in language. The unprepared viewer begins to get bored. The struggle against this leads to the restoration of the rights of a consciously primitive, traditional, but close to the viewer artistic language" ^[6].

Such a close and understandable artistic language is the conventional language of traditional puppet theater and mask comedy, in which death can be perceived as a comic episode, murder as a buffoonery, and suffering as a parody. The inclusion of traditional commedia dell'arte characters in the cinematic narrative with their conventional manner of existence was also used in later Neorealist films, which made it possible to create a more accessible and expressive artistic language.

By analogy, it can be assumed that the appeal to dolls in feature films is explained by the desire for a certain degree of conventionality. The expressiveness of the doll, based on its artistic nature, helps to form images of a high degree of generalization and convey complex philosophical or psychological meanings.

Cinema is also able to absorb a wide range of social, historical and cultural associations in the form of direct or hidden quotations, thereby referring the viewer to a variety of cultural phenomena. This property confirms the polyphonic and synthetic nature of the film language.

A. A. Tarkovsky included quotes from Brueghel's paintings and Andrei Rublev's icons in his films. This series can be supplemented with references not only to painting, but also to dramatic and musical art ^[10].

The phenomenon of film citations is widespread in cinema. This is the subject of the work of A. S. Troshin, who considers citation in films as a manifestation of cinema's self-awareness and understanding of its own cultural role ^[11].

The doll as an artistic object and cultural symbol

Quotations of scenes from puppet theater performances deserve special attention in connection with the topic under consideration. Fragments of performances included in the structure of feature films are quite common, but a detailed analysis of their artistic function is practically absent in the art history literature.

Quoting performance scenes and frames from other films is interesting because in this case it is not individual expressive means that interact, but holistic works with all the complexity of their ideological and artistic structure. This technique makes it possible to significantly expand the ways in which the doll phenomenon is included in the cinematic narrative, involving not only the visual means of the doll as an object, but also the artistic results of the art of playing dolls. Due to this, images of high semiotic density can appear on the screen.

The similarity of the languages of dolls as a cultural phenomenon and cinema is manifested in their figurative and symbolic nature, in their general metaphor. For all types of dolls, at all times and among different peoples, the universal symbolic meaning is the transition between two poles – alive and dead, animate and inanimate. The doll appears in the center of this opposition. Her symbolic range is extremely wide: she can embody both absolute spirituality (a puppet) and absolute lack of spirituality (an automaton).

Dolls come to modern culture from tradition. Their original symbolism is associated with sacred experiences and ideas about human interaction with higher powers. It is this traditional, deep semantics, being encoded in figurative systems, that is transferred to modern artistic practices.

Symbolism, the sphere of the unconscious, and mythologization are key categories for both the language of dolls and the language of cinema. At the same time, the problem of symbolization in cinema is directly related to the problem of convention, since various forms of convention are expressed through a system of symbols and form their own symbolarium.

Cinema speaks the language of symbols, which manifest themselves in the form of visual images. French film language researcher J. In 1964, when the understanding of cinema as a sign-symbolic system had already been established, Mitri, in his work on the analysis of the film language, formulates the main similarity and difference between the cinematic language and other linguistic structures: "Talking about the film language does not mean making a list of means of cinematic expression, stating the connection between its content and form, or characterizing the adequacy of one or another the way it is expressed. The main thing in the study of the film language is to identify the character and essence between the signifying structures and the signified object..." ^[8].

Mitri further notes that in cinema, the signifier and the signified have a special, similar nature. This fact seems obvious, since the image is similar to the object. However, the researcher notes, cinema is not a purely analogical system: "Images are created not for their own sake, but for the sake of what they mean ... Things are equally the signs that I discover in them and the bearers of the meaning that I give them" ^{[8, p. 39]}.

Thus, Mitri captures the symbolic nature of the language of cinema and puts at the center of the problem of understanding the artistic image.: the viewer's ability to see in the shown object not only the object itself, but also an additional symbolic level. Adequate perception of a symbol presupposes the emergence of associative connections that include cultural memory and activate a complex of connotative meanings – sacred, cosmological, ideological, etc.

A. F. Losev pointed out that a symbol "in a hidden form contains all possible manifestations of a thing in general" ^[4], noting that a symbolic meaning is not a sum of individual meanings, but an integral system expressing, first of all, a person's attitude to the reflected world.

But symbolic meaning is not a mechanical set of separate meanings; it is a single organism, an integral system, indicating not so much the presence of the reflected object as the attitude of a person towards this object.

Since its inception, cinema has actively used symbols and individual symbols (detail as a symbol, frame as a symbol), adapting them to its own expressive tasks. Symbolic forms were borrowed from literature, painting, and theater, adapted, and incorporated into the cinematic field, becoming part of the structure of the film language.

To fulfill its communication function, symbolism presupposes that participants in communication belong to a common cultural space, have similar artistic and life experiences, and possess a historically established set of cultural codes. However, there are universal symbols that are understandable in different civilizations and relate to non-national code systems. The use of such symbols allows cinema to achieve a certain degree of objectivity, despite the pronounced dependence of symbolic meaning on the subjectivity of perception.

Zh. Mitri quotes researcher M. Dreyfus: "Cinematic art becomes symbolic art, achieving objectivity only due to the universality of the symbols it creates or already existing symbols that it borrows from mythology or psychoanalysis" ^{[8, p. 39]}.

This is how a special symbolic structure of the film language is formed, in which an image, an object, a detail or a doll can simultaneously act as a sign, a carrier of meaning and a component of a multi-layered cultural association.

The doll belongs to the category of universal symbols, which acts as an expression of the collective unconscious and a carrier of a rich system of meanings that reveal themselves in different ways depending on the game space, cultural tradition and historical context.

The game in cinematography obeys its own laws. On the one hand, any object that appears in the playing field can be reinterpreted; on the other, not every thing is able to accept the subjective content imposed on it. There is a certain hierarchy of objects in the game space: "in any game, not everything can be everything." That is why the artistic structure of the film does not reveal all the possible properties of the subject, but only those aesthetically and semantically significant characteristics that are necessary for the holistic construction of the cinematic image.

Yu. M. Lotman explains this mechanism as follows: "The mechanism of the game effect does not consist in the stationary, simultaneous coexistence of different meanings, but in the constant awareness of the possibility of other meanings than the one that is currently accepted. The “game effect” is that different values of one element do not co-exist motionlessly, but “flicker". Each comprehension forms a separate synchronous slice, but at the same time preserves the memory of previous meanings and the consciousness of the possibility of future ones" ^{[5, p. 144]}.

Even taking a place alongside the main characters or acting as the dominant of the frame, things are not able to obscure a person. Their meaning and significance are manifested only through their connection with human existence, whether it is a hero or an author's position. Man remains the central measure of the artistic world.

Among the many objects used in feature films, there are objects belonging to a special category – symbolic objects. From the point of view of culture, everyday life and collective experience, these objects have acquired a wide range of meanings: from everyday to generalized symbolic, built up by spiritual tradition. The doll belongs precisely to this group: its image carries stable archetypal meanings that allow it to be used as an expressive element of a high degree of generalization and cultural saturation. They have become one of the favorite things that reveal their different meanings in different cinematic contexts. Mythological, fairy-tale, folklore, and superstitious motifs are associated with them.

Everything that has been said about the role and function of things in creating cinematic reality fully applies to dolls, which appear in films as expressive objects, as cultural symbols included in the material environment of the frame and, under certain conditions, capable of becoming significant images without being characters in the film. Their use allows you to create new artistic meanings and express complex ideas through non-verbal means, which is especially important for cinema as a visual art.

Conclusions

The features of cinema highlighted in the work as a synthetic art form allow us to consider it as a system with a specific mechanism for integrating expressive means of different artistic traditions. The study shows that cinema has the ability to:

- synthesize individual expressive means of various types of art;

- to include expressive properties of the objective world in the film image, including things with symbolic richness.;

- to form the visual world of the film as a space of cultural associations and multilevel meanings.

The results obtained allow us to conclude that cinema has a stable potential for interacting with the phenomenon of dolls – represented in culture as a thing, a model, an artistic object and an element of theatrical tradition.

It is established that a doll included in the structure of a feature film functions not only as an object, but also as a sign that expands the semantic field of the frame, enhances the associative nature of the film image and gives the narrative metaphorical and philosophical depth.

Thus, the use of dolls in game cinema is a form of synthesis in which the object turns into an active element of on-screen expressiveness, capable of strengthening the semantic connections of the film and forming its cultural context.

The article is published in the version approved by the reviewers (after receiving a positive review recommending the manuscript for publication) with corrections made by the author (after receiving the editor’s comments, if any).
Read all reviews on this article