Retelling a Life: Narration and Dialogue in Psychoanalysis Book

Shklovsky has such a crystalline analytical mind. He really wants to order the messy world of art into a science: you kind of get the sense, too, that if anyone could perform this impossible task, it'd be him.

Here, he's writing about the formal constraints of film. He's doing this in 1923, so by "film" he means silent film. He points out that, at a basic level, film is composed of a series of still images strung together in a way that gives the mimetic effect of movement without actually representing movement. In fact, he says pure movement can never be represented in film.

At the same time, he's using a formal analysis of literature, in which the formal constraints of language govern what can and cannot be made into literature: "Literature is made of words and comes into being employing the laws of the word." This happens at every level in the work, and in each case the result is definitive: "the fate of the hero and the division of a work into chapters are phenomena of the same order."

For film and literature, in this analysis, there's a basic unit structure--the image, the phoneme--that governs what you can put together. Because the image in film is always basically static, Shklovsky argues, it falls to the viewer to infer movement: "cinematography can only deal with the motion-sign, the semantic motion."

He doesn't get to montage in this book, but he uses Chaplin as a similar example: film lends itself to grotesques of emotion, "the conventional mimicry" -- a big happy face, an exaggerated sad face -- because the viewer is always having to fill in a gap of some sort. This is a formal problem.

The book ends up being very basic. It's more a prologue than a study. This makes sense: in 1923, Shklovsky is just trying to establish some basic terms and concepts for talking about film as an art. It's pretty cool to watch him do this, even if he doesn't end up getting too far with it. But also he has this really annoying habit, at this point, of falling back on an old man critique of movies: he laments the fact that movies are so popular, and wants them to go away. He imagines that, because of its formal limitations, movies are doomed, and that eventually they will die out. At these times, you're reminded that he's an old, old dude. This is a formal problem.