Authors

Discussion

The paper analyses how the avant-garde literary world of the Russian poet Daniil Kharms and stories from his short story collection Incidents (1937) are incorporated into the film The Kharms Case (1987) by the Yugoslav film director Slobodan Pešić. The film’s story line follows Kharms’s final days and focuses on the totalitarian cultural context of Stalin’s purges. The paper pays special attention to the unusual status of the figure of Kharms in the film, as he, through another artistic medium, becomes the tragic hero in the absurd world of his own literary universe. The artist’s unique encounter with his own work in the film may symbolically suggest the narrative self-awareness and essentially self-reflexive nature of his literary work. Moreover, the film’s meta-fictional ending and the self-destructive act of determined breaking of the conventional “dramatic” illusion acknowledges Pešić’s film as a highly self-referential work, equalling the undermining of the narrative logic in Kharms. However, we argue that transposition of Kharms's poetics onto the screen is most successful when employing elements typical of film as an art medium: the use of hand-held (shaky) camera, which simulates running, disorientation and fear, the use of close-up (when the emphasis is on the individual experience) or full-shot and low-angle shot (when the emphasis is on the collective experience of the crowd). How Kharms composes his own literary anti-world also resembles the film editing process: the stories come off as almost unedited film material, or cinematographic cuts and sequences of fast-changing frames. The aim of the paper is to highlight the mutual influence of the intermedial dialogue of Pešić’s film and Kharms’s stories.