Authors

Discussion

A Room and a Half and the Art of Poetic Cinema. 

A Room and a Half (2009) is a feature film directed by Andrei Khrzhanovsky, which traces a journey into the artistic world and early years of Josef Brodsky. Loosely based on Brodsky’s eponymous essay, the film offers a fictionalised account of the poet’s memoirs, which are creatively explored and enriched by the materials taken from his interviews, prose, and poetry, as well as from his original drawings. By focusing on a formalist analysis of Khrzhanovsky’s work the paper argues that it falls into the category of poetic cinema, to use the term introduced and defined by Viktor Shklovsky. A distinctive blend of different styles - fiction, documentary footage and animation – the film capitalises on the synergy of these formal elements that make a markedcontribution to its discourse. Much of its action incorporates animation - the hallmark of Khrzhanovsky's cinema. Rich in symbolism and metaphorical layers, these inserts constitute a cornerstone of the director’s expressive language and form the basis of an intertextual dialogue that he establishes with the works of the author. Apart from exploring and interpreting the conceptual platform of Brodsky’s essay, an attempt is made to find a visual correlative of his poetics, thus translating the artistic world of the poet’s reminiscences into that of the new a