Storytelling in Time & Space by L.A. Alexander

Storytelling in Time and Space: Studies in the Chronotope and Narrative Logic on Screen Lily Alexander

Journal of Narrative Theory, Volume 37, Number 1, Winter 2007, pp. 27-64 (Article) Published by Eastern Michigan University DOI: 10.1353/jnt.2007.0014

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jnt/summary/v037/37.1alexander.html

Access provided by Hunter College Libraries (10 Apr 2014 19:42 GMT)

Storytelling in Time and Space: Studies in the Chronotope and Narrative Logic on Screen By Lily Alexander All great storytellers have in common the freedom with which they move up and down the rungs of their experience as on a ladder. A ladder extending downwards the interior of the earth and disappearing in the clouds is the image for collective experience . . . Walter Benjamin I don’t like people who have never fallen . . . Their virtue is lifeless . . . Life hasn’t revealed its beauty to them. Boris Pasternak

This paper is intended to contribute to the theoretical studies of two issues: chronotope, and narrative architectonics. It explores the narrative forms of the ritual journey, and expands the notion of the chronotope of ordeal, associated with a journey. A new type of chronotope, a derivative from the chronotope of ordeal proposed by Bakhtin, and yet a separate form of artistic time-space continuum—the chronotope of rise and fall—is introduced and explored in this paper. In narrative theory after Bakhtin and in film theory after Deleuze an interest in the exploration of fictional timeJNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 37.1 (Winter 2007): 27–64. Copyright © 2007 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory.

space continua, and the logic of narrative movement and change is a foreseeable development. New and newer forms of chronotopes are being proposed by the scholars of narrative systems and cinema studies.1 In emerging chronotope studies the researchers’ goals come down to a) discovering and naming a new chronotope; b) describing it in detail using selected case studies, and c) theorizing it, by placing it in the contexts of narrative and critical theories, and in the case of film, also contemporary visual theory.2 The second and interrelated topic of interest in the present article is narrative/visual architectonics, an area of inquiry first introduced by Sergei Eisenstein in a number of his works. Architectonics was emphasized in his pathos theory, which entails the integration of the forceful horizontal (forward) and vertical (upward) movements in creating the most artistically expressive or, as he put it, “ecstatic,” composition. Following Eisenstein this paper goes beyond the questions of narrative structure, and enters the territory of visual storytelling.3 The essay addresses the poorly studied issue of how the elements of architecture become part of the narrative whole, or how a radically shaped spatial landscape affects the drama of the characters—their ordeals, physical/psychological movement, the meaning of the journey, and spiritual survival. Several foci of this article are mutually connected, and also inseparable from understanding content in its relation to form. Human drama is unfolding in time and space. In the narratives of the journey, the rules of storytelling, and perhaps the author, who mount barriers and obstacles for the heroes, are preventing them from completing their goal—that of passing the test of symbolic ritual journey and achieving spiritual transformation. The heroes’ ordeal intensifies when a landscape becomes a hazard, as well as when the thrills of height, and the mortal risks of fall become part of the journey. Another dynamic aspect of composition is associated with symmetry/asymmetry of the visual and narrative space of the journey, as manifest for example in several renowned European films. These symmetries appear to frame and facilitate the dramatization of narrative space. Symmetry was not a stabilizing factor: it concealed the anguish of displacement and contained hidden asymmetry of power, or the dynamic disequilibrium of movement. Symmetry paradoxically contributed to the heroes’ shaky position between the dangerously towering spatial elements, which appear at the story’s begin-

Storytelling in Time and Space

ning and end, playing a crucial role in narrative development and resolution, as well as in the heroes’ ordeal and survival. My focus of discussion is the dialectics of ascent and descent, rise and fall, hope and despair, as represented by the relationships between heroes and architectural elements in visual storytelling. Case studies, serving the development of the above mentioned theoretical issues, include Federico Fellini’s Night of Cabiria (Italy, 1957), Michelangelo Antonioni’s Outcry (Italy, 1957) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Roublev (Russia, 1967). The three directors are among the most outstanding artists in the history of film, and the texts under discussion belong to the golden fund of world cinema. The stories of Roman prostitute Cabiria, a tragic family break-up in Outcry, and a search by Roublev, a Russian icon-painter, for the spiritual meaning of art are explored in a comparative analysis of the interaction of landscape with a human figure. The films allow us to investigate the dialectics of the heroes’ physical and spiritual movement in the artistic and cultural space. This analysis is based on the notions of chronotope (literally “timespace”—representation and conceptualization of the artistic time and space, derived by Bakhtin from Einstein’s theory of relativity), and film architectonics (spatial organization of the film’s semantic, dramatic, visual and narrative structures). This paper emphasizes the aspects of film architectonics as a symbolic and dramatic organization of space. The interdisciplinary methodology of this study combines the elements of symbolic anthropology (especially an interest in symbolic processes) with the Bakhtinian tradition, and a structuralist approach toward the imagesymbol—its organization and function in text and culture—with a poststructuralist emphasis on movement and change.4 A number of studies initiated by Bakhtin have explored the chronotope of the road or of the journey in folklore, and literature. This type of narrative time-space, and already mentioned the chronotope of ordeal, are associated with the trials, sufferings and tests one cannot avoid on a difficult journey. They are essential for understanding the most effective narrative paradigms at the foundation of many films. The fictional worlds in the three case studies characteristically center on journey and ordeal. However, this paper introduces and explores a distinct type of chronotope: that is the chronotope of rise and fall, dramatically interlinked with the architectural/spatial elements, and their narrative time-space continuum. The

chronotope of rise and fall have always been present in culture, but emerged as a particularly important construct of cultural philosophy in the twentieth century, as more significance was given to the man’s spatial relationships with height. While one of the first cultural chronotopes, that of mythological storytelling, can be defined as the “womb-tomb,” or symbolic dismemberment in the dragon’s belly as part of symbolic journey and death-rebirth, the next significant chronotope was that of the road. The gates of the ancient human settlement opened, and the heroes stepped on the long road, which would last for several millennia of narrative tradition and define narrative models of many genres. As Propp put it, the dragon’s belly (with the devouring spiral of intestines) would unfold into a long road, which the hero would have to survive.5 Lasting from the time immemorial to the rise of mass societies, the chronotope of the road began to lose its cultural significance by the time of WWII, with the last ritual journeys and open spaces to remain on the frontiers of the East (colonial narratives) and West (genre of Western). In the civilized space of the Western city culture, there were no more limitless paths and spatiality free from control: open roads swirled into the labyrinths and dead ends of noir. All space in mass societies was now mapped, measured and under surveillance (Rear Window and North by Northwest). The heroes, pursing freedom and possibility of a journey, had nowhere to go except upward. This is when—in the 1940s–50s—the towers and towering structures emerged as the spatial imagery of symbolic importance and began to multiply in popular fiction and on screen in both Europe and United States, reaching its emblematic high point in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1959). Not surprisingly, the attempts to escape society by moving upward failed, and the stories associated with the towers, lighthouses, mountain slopes, or river banks inevitably began to carry a tragic tone. For a short period, the road opened again in the culture of the 1960s, as the drifters and wanderers became the heroes of their time, and embodied high hopes for the life on the road. But for many A Wilde One (1953) and Easy Rider (1969) the roads soon would be closed again: all paths led—or believed to lead—only to crimes and punishments—the outsiders found themselves trapped, or sentenced to death on the road and executed, as was vividly depicted in The 400 Blows (1958), Breathless (1959), Rapture (1965), and Busch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). As was convincingly shown by means of twelve cameras (the eyes of the

Storytelling in Time and Space

monster) in the final scene of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), the road became again a devouring dragon. Mass society regained complete control of its space, in particular, of strategically important space of the roads: there should be no more lost highways and unmapped side roads left. The tragic compromise between the craving for never-ending horizontal movement without limits and an escape into the skies, however illusory, was not reached until the theme of space travel burst out and established itself in the 1970–80s as a new metanarrative, and more so—a narrative-cultural chronotope. Therefore, the three films under discussion manifest a short and distinctly tragic moment in cultural history, when the chronotope of rise and fall emerged manifesting the search for a way out from the totality of spatial control in mass societies. The tension between the abscissa and ordinate revealed a socio-ideological meaning. In a sense, the journeys of the late 1950s and 1960s in the three films were existential, and thus related to the divine tragicomedy of human existence. Interactive Forms: Emphasis on Architecture The concept of “Dante’s chronotope,” once mentioned but never developed by Bakhtin, may have been intended for the exploration of the vertical dynamics of movement, inseparable from the hero’s ascent and descent on the journey, in both emotional and philosophical sense. This paper shows how film architectonics generates a chronotope, in this case, associated with rise and fall, and how the strategies of visual storytelling integrate the time-space continuum in film content through the interaction of spatial elements with the physical actions, movements, and symbolic gestures of the characters. Fellini, Antonioni, and Tarkovsky are uniquely attuned to the dynamics of cultural space, and are masters of film architectonics. Their cultural heritage plays a significant role in the development of their architectonic skills and film language. The interaction of a human figure with space by means of architecture has been extremely important to both Italian and Russian cultures, carrying a symbolic and spiritual meaning. Both its Ancient Roman and Renaissance heritage left a lot of dynamic architectural elements in the space of Italian culture. These elements have become active ‘characters’ in the cultural space as often shown in Italian cinema. In Russia’s vast landscapes and impassable roads, presence of a church tower

or a friendly shelter has been associated with life itself, and the communication with God—his protective gesture toward a lonely rambler. Thus signification, symbolization, and even sacralization of architecture (typical for all cultures) have been especially important in the two cultural traditions and influenced the very language of film, as vividly shown in the work of Antonioni and Tarkovsky. The three films—Nights of Cabiria, Outcry, and Andrei Roublev—are useful to analyze together because they are united by several similar components and spatial strategies, as well as by the dramatic function of architectural elements. The films display the “dynamization of space” (Panofsky), and a highly dramatic dynamization of space by means of symbolic architectural elements. All three have a peculiar symmetry in their spatialnarrative progression, a transformation of a ‘positive’ space (rise and hope) into a ‘negative’ space (fall and despair), and assign crucial dramatic signification to architectural elements, such as houses, towers, and temples. Architectural elements in the three films not only help to explicate a hero’s drama—they more importantly reveal this drama and aid its development. Architectural elements function as a means of reinforcement of rising and falling motions, and examples for this action include all spatial means of ascent or descent, and all trigger points for upward and downward movements. Architectural elements organize the dramatic space motivating certain physical movements, which result in consequent dramatic actions. The spatial elements are functionally active: they trigger heroes’ physical actions, and reveal their outcomes. In the three films the architectural elements facilitate the characters’ movements through the labyrinths of hope and despair. The physical actions, provoked or even initiated by the dramatic intrusion of spatial elements (ascent and descent, rise and fall, and upward and downward movements) physically, metaphorically and emotionally interconnect with psychological events, connoting the acquisition or loss of hope, faith, love, identity, integrity, dignity, family, and even life. A Notion of Architectonics Spatial/architectural elements have multiple functions and multiple meanings; in these three films, however, they all submit to the same dom-

Storytelling in Time and Space

inant—the dialectics of rise and fall. The three films by Fellini, Antonioni, and Tarkovsky are examples of brilliant film architectonics. Symbolically, architecture and space are used to convey condensed meanings affiliated with particular symbolic forms in the cultural history of humankind. Dramatically, they represent and reinforce the films’ most important dramatic moments, and reflect the films’ dramatic structure. Psychologically, their shapes and meanings express and emphasize the characters’ emotional states. Cinematographically, they provide a means of creating unique angles and perspectives, which enrich visual imagery. The systems of imagery in these particular films function on all four levels: integrating and interconnecting them, carrying out and reinforcing the film’s philosophy and drama. Film architectonics may be defined as a way of connecting all four dimensions in one highly functional artistic whole and a single highly effective artistic language. Thus, the combination and integration of the four components create film architectonics: * symbolic (meanings originated in the macrosemantics of culture), * dramatic (meanings originated in the structure of a given film as a drama), * psychological (meanings originated in the life of human psyche), and * cinematographic (image-meanings originated in the film’s visual semantics).

Fellini’s Night of Cabiria, Antonioni’s Outcry and Tarkovsky’s Andrei Roublev are examples of an effective presence of all four components, brilliantly integrated for the sake of the film’s philosophical idea. The architectural—or dramatically significant architectonic—elements which the audience and the characters encounter frequently in these three films are: * * * * *

the Tower the Road the Temple/Cathedral the House the River

Formulas and Diagrams In the realm of symbolic communication, the images of the Tower, the House (Home), the Temple, the River, and the Road function as both (individual) archetypal spatial forms and as part of an interrelated metaphorical system. These images are each at the center of their own cultural myths, and, moreover, have been frequently mythically related, thereby generating a number of distinct intertextual narratives. Placed together in a certain order, the spatial elements reveal an inherent symbolic meaning, and give a crucial significance to the dynamics of their interactions. The diagrams below are intended to visually frame the polarities of axis and ordinate, and the directions of ascent and descent within the narrative model. They show the place of architectural elements in narrative development, and stress the dynamic forces which induce the protagonists’ rising or falling movements in the story (see arrows). The three diagrams serve as references intended to enhance the discussions of the three films. However, initially introduced next to each other, the diagrams help to outline the principle differences in three narrative models—to be further explored in the conclusion.6

River—Little House (Home)—Road—Big/Public House(House of Fame)—Cathedral(Temple, or the House of Worship/Faith)—Big/Public House(The House of Illusions)—Little House(Home, now Lost)—Road— River

Storytelling in Time and Space

Tower—House(Home)—Road—Gas Station(Crossroads and Missing Temple)—Road—House(Inside-out)—Tower

Tower—Road—Temple—Road—(Bell)Tower

Similarities: Shared Architectonic Elements and Strategies Although the visual richness of the three films cannot be reduced to schemes or formulas, they help to understand the key role and the signification of chosen architectural elements. The films’ graphic organization, presented in diagrams, make visible an architectonic structure, and reveal similarities in visual/dramatic strategies of the three filmmakers. These similarities found in the spatial structure of Nights of Cabiria, Outcry, and Andrei Roublev include the following. 1. Emphasized Frames — two “bearing constructions,” two vertical lines at films’ beginning and the end. The “pillars” of the films’ narrative worlds: the towers in Outcry and Andrei Roublev, and the return to the river banks in Nights of Cabiria. 2. Visible/Graphic Horizontal Symmetrical Structure in all three films (see above). 3. Tendency toward Spatio-Narrative Symmetry. Symmetry in timespace (chronotope). The films’ narrative progression tends to bring heroes exactly to the same point in space from which they started: from a river bank to a river bank, from a tower to a tower. The films’ dramatic plot and resolution contain heroes’ encounters with an architectural and architectonic element. It is a guardian of universal order, and functions almost like a character, requiring that a protagonist confronts the same fears, illusions, or pain that s/he was afflicted with at the beginning, when this architectonic element first appeared. It is more than an obstacle, a conflict manifest in a spatial form—it is an extension of the director’s power gesture, and therefore carries strong emotional and psychological impact. 4. Temple as a Symbolic/Narrative Center—a Temple/Cathedral, or a place where a Temple should be, functions as a structural, dramatic and semantic center. A narrative movement revolves around the architectonic center (A Temple, and a search for the sacred), and returns to the initial spatial point. The center of an expected sacred space is also a center of a dramatic space, its pillar, its turning point, a bearing construction of drama—the epicenter of events. The issue of center is crucial, and when there is no center, or a center is absent or desecrated, it affects the whole universe of the film. A Temple (the Sacred) has a crucial visual and narra-

Storytelling in Time and Space

tive significance and a central meaning in the three films.7 Cathedrals (as designated Temples) are significant in Andrei Roublev and Nights of Cabiria, and there is only an empty space, an abyss, a crossroad—a place where a Temple should be in Outcry. 5. A Visual Perpendicular—Abscissa and Ordinate—an emphasized counterpoint of the horizontal and vertical lines (flight/rise vs. endlessly wandering the road) breakthrough vs. unchangeable routine, find vs. search). In addition to a visible and significant architectural element, there are also contrasting spatial elements based on the perpendicular—the relation of an abscissa and ordinate of the dramatic action. Long empty roads or a river exist in opposition to the lonely tower. These horizontal spaces are dynamic (facilitate the ritual journey), and serve as a counterpoint, and a catalyst for the heroes’ dramatic interactions with the vertical spatial elements. 6. A Formation of Negative Spaces (vertical symmetry) against a horizontal line of the ground (that of earth i.e. of life): underground, shadows, holes, cavities, spaces of downfall—both physical and symbolic, organized by material spatial elements or their dynamic movements. When an architectural element is not functioning as a rising element (trampoline), but betrays character’s expectations, it turns into a negative space (Big Houses/Palaces/Theater in Nights of Cabiria). 7. Importance of a Small House as a Metaphor of Self and the Dynamics around it: Having—Loosing—Searching of a Home. Characteristically, this architectonic strategy is significant for Fellini and Antonioni (following the themes of neorealism), and insignificant in Andrei Roublev, which is a parable, a pure symbolic film—a journey of a human spirit. House and Ground Unlike in Nights of Cabiria and Outcry, there is no home or shelter for the hero in Andrei Roublev. This is because Tarkovsky emphasizes the symbolism of the spiritual journey, rather than the journey of human life. In the parable of the monk-painter, the personal space or acquiring or keeping it is not an issue. As a wandering artist, and a symbolic figure, Roublev does not have nor seek a personal space—the world is his domain, the road is his home.

The House is a shielding frame: it contains vertical lines, but it is also connected to the earth through horizontal lines that emphasize balance and protection. For this reason, the House is the ultimate way of holding one’s ground, of surviving above the ground level of life. As a personal space, the House or Home is crucial in neorealism, and is important for Fellini and Antonioni. Cabiria’s small house is like a little snail’s shell, sheltering a vulnerable, defenseless, helpless little creature. Saved from the river, she feels protected again in her toy-like House. Although tiny, the house still has walls which rise from the ground, creating a comforting sheltering space. We see Cabiria’s house both from inside (as a reliable shelter, her own possession) and outside (as a fragile, minuscule house, near a gas station, in the middle of nowhere, in the deserted outskirts of Rome). Inside and outside perspectives of Cabiria’s House are interrelated and contrasted in the film, creating an image of an illusory existence and a human being struggling alone in the big world. A number of buildings and constructions exist along the horizontal lines of the three films, and they all play important roles in the film architectonics. There are small houses that function as private and personal spaces, and large structures that act as public spaces of social interaction. The latter type appears in Nights of Cabiria in the three forms, which will be referred to as the House of Fame, the House of Worship, and the House of Illusions. They all play crucial role in the film’s plot development. The three public spaces symbolize various forms of reliance and self-delusion: celebrity status for fame, prayer for organized religion and dreams for the entertainment industry. The heroine must discover self-reliance and personal courage in order to begin the independent search for the sacred that will place her on the solid ground. Inside and Outside The spatial forms ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ represent a separate chronotope, which deserves a special study. However, within the chronotope of rise and fall, the inside and outside dimensions are signified as modalities of rising and falling. An ascent is encoded in the form of being inside (being protected, belonging, close to the center) and a descent to being outside (experiencing vulnerability, loneliness, being an outsider, stranger, outcast).8 The dramatic, even tragic, interplay of the inside and outside perspec-

Storytelling in Time and Space

tives in relation to the actions of rising and falling is vividly evident in the examples of Cabiria’s and Aldo’s houses, both of which they lose (left outside with nothing), and in the cathedral scene in Andrei Roublev. Enemies attack the cathedral from the outside, while people are gathered inside relying on the ancient belief in God’s protection within a sacred space. The walls of the Temple do not hold however, and the Tatars rush in killing and raping those praying in the cathedral. The counterpoint of perspectives in Outcry (the glances exchanged by Aldo and his wife from the outside and from the inside) represents the film’s dramatic catastrophe. Aldo returns from a long journey after discovering his personal truth about the world’s sacred center—his own home. He looks through the window (from the outside space into the inside). What he sees is the end of the hero’s hope to restore his life and its sacred center: the woman he loves is now another man’s wife. His former wife looks from the inside into the outside space: she senses, as her face shows, that the outside position to which Aldo is doomed is a sign of a forthcoming tragic end. Aldo never gets inside: he turns around, and walks away. And this is the beginning of his descent. The dynamic interplay between the external and internal spaces functions as a precursor for the rising and falling movements. The Road Outcry and Andrei Roublev are quintessential road movies, and can also be analyzed in the context of the chronotope of the road (two different types of chronotope could be combined in one structure thus creating a complex and multi-dynamic artistic universe). The symbolism of the Road in all three films is instrumental. The road helps Roublev and Aldo to keep their balance, and functions as a dramatic contrast (an architectonic perpendicular) to the rises and falls of the heroes: the journey is essential for the two films, as well as to other works of Antonioni and Tarkovsky. In Nights of Cabiria the symbolism of the road is rich and multilayered: as Aldo and Andrei, Cabiria is on the ritual journey trying to find and define herself. But there are other meanings involved: Cabiria is a ‘road worker’ so to speak, a prostitute waiting for clients on a side walk; she prepares for a journey of a life time: to travel to a better life with the man of her dreams. Finally, the film integrates the intertextuality of Chaplin’s roads

(Giulietta Masina is known as a “female Chaplin”), and Fellini’s own Road with Masina as Jelsomina, a Crying Clown, an ultimate victim who is abused and thrown off her balance, but has no stamina to get up. Falls: Downward Movements and Forms of Descent The three films show and emphasize many kinds of downfalls. They include multiple descents in the form of personal losses by the heroes of Fellini and Antonioni, a threat of execution for the Flying man and the Bell-caster, and Roublev’s moral and spiritual death in the film of Tarkovsky. The visual symbolism of ultimate descent is manifest in the episode-epigraph of Andrei Roublev—a cinematic prologue that metaphorically explains the film as a symbolic spiritual journey. A serf is running upstairs in a church tower (the tallest building in medieval Russia) to reach the roof before his followers catch him. The man has made a balloon, his friends on the ground are trying to inflate it. A man’s rebellious attempt to reach God’s own domain was perceived as a sacrilege by the people of this time. With the screams “burn them alive!” an angry crowd runs upstairs the church tower after the man. He jumps from the roof and flies, but the flight suddenly ends in his fall and death. His descent is shown from the perspective of the ‘sky’—as the terrifyingly swift approach of the earth’s giant body, which devours the flying man. While a House and a Cathedral reinforce a protective gesture over a human being, a grounding gesture in the case of Home, and an inspiring gesture in the case of Temple, a Tower reinforces the power lines of ascent in film architectonics, directing the protagonist upwards. In a similar way, a River as a symbol of bottom, tomb, and downfall, reinforces the power lines of descent, and sends a protagonist downwards, to symbolic death and despair. A River is a polysemantic symbol, and can have different meanings (sometimes a rebirth through the water), but in Night of Cabiria it is the depth of the river that is signified as a metaphor of dying—a reference to the cultural mythology of the river of death. Plot and the Dynamization of Space Nights of Cabiria also begins with the painful physicality of downfall. In the first scene we see the heroine off-balance, losing her ground both

Storytelling in Time and Space

physically and emotionally: her lover robs and attempts to kill her, throwing her into the river. The woman has been used, discarded, and thrown away: she is no longer a human being. She is drowning, and about to lose her life. The dynamic gesture embedded in the first spatial form and dramatic event is the gesture of throwing and descending—falling down and under the horizontal line. The river represents the underworld, death, fall, and loss. The next gesture is that of the saviors: the woman’s unconscious body is roused (upside-down!) by strangers from the underworld of the river, and she is brought back to the living. Cabiria, a poor Roman prostitute, crawls into her Small House and grieves: she morns her loss of faith, her loneliness, and the betrayal by the man she loved. Soon Cabiria is back on the road: a spatial domain where she is vulnerable and defenseless, selling her body to strangers and giving up her inner center—her equilibrium. The horizontal line of the symbolic road emphasizes the suspense created by our expectations: what other falls await Cabiria? Miraculously she is picked up by a rich celebrity. A famous movie star—her big catch—suddenly elevates Cabiria above other working girls, above her poverty, insignificance, her funny appearance and clumsy figure, her status, reality and her own expectations. It is a rising gesture of fate in every sense. Cabiria enters the actor’s luxurious house (a House of Fame). Subconsciously she is hoping that her entering the magic space of fame—the habitat of the star—will change her life and raise her from her misery. But this house is just an illusion: the actor is unhappy and miserable himself. He picked her up because he saw in her a creature lower than himself— something he needed that night to rise his plunged self-esteem. Although invited to his house, Cabiria is not really needed, and becomes a nuisance, ending up locked in a storage room for the entire night. Cabiria ends up falling again—descending into a dark closet-like storage space, unable to move or scream, and not needed by any human being. She is discarded, thrown away, humiliated and forgotten. The irony of fate again sends Cabiria to the underworld. Starting from the up-lifting power gesture in the celebrity’s palacco, she is tossed into the dark storage, a spaceless dimension, with no light, no life, no memory or recognition of her existence—a form of oblivion, a symbolic death. The episode with celebrity begins with unbelievable luck, an elevation of Cabiria’s status—from a lowlife hooker to a movie star’s ‘queen of the

night.’ When her illusions are destroyed, she is thrown down and out again. Humiliated and forgotten, Cabiria finds herself at the symbolic bottom, plummeting into despair. Unable to cope with her miserable life, Cabiria joins a religious procession which is headed to the Cathedral. The Temple promises to be an inspiration, an ascending movement toward a connection with God. She prays to the Virgin Mary, begging her to change her life and lift her from her misery. There is no response, and no help from the beyond. Feeling abandoned and alone again, Cabiria falls to the ground, screaming and crying. She no longer believes in religion. She is disillusioned: she visited the Temple, and there is no place for her in the House of Faith. This loss of faith is another form of descent for Cabiria. Next is the House of Illusions (Mass art? Side show? Theatre, Cinema?): a cheap entertainment. A hypnotist transfers Cabiria to a heavenly place and allows her to reveal her deepest secrets in front of the audience. This scene signifies both a rise and fall that Cabiria goes through unawares. The theater stage elevates her high above the ground (here a cultural symbolism of theatre architectonics comes into play), and she is lifted beyond reality into the world of her dreams. At the same time, she is thrown down by the spiteful laughter of the crowd as she bares her soul in front of the strangers. A scoundrel takes advantage of Cabiria’s deeply personal dreams, promising her a marriage and making her sell her Small House (Home) and everything she owns. He brings her to the high abrupt riverbank, similar to the one we saw at the beginning. The man of her dreams robs Cabiria, taking her life savings, and is prepared to kill her. In a cyclical order, Cabiria descends again to the River—the symbolic domain into which she was once thrown, deprived of all her possessions, dignity and hope. Fellini’s directorial power gesture is circus-like: he juggles with his heroine, throwing her into the air, turning her upside-down, and inside-out numerous times. Cabiria has to struggle through a loss of balance (both physical and emotional) in a tragicomic way throughout the entire film. In Nights of Cabiria, the director and his protagonist play the game of two clowns—the Red clown and the White clown, the Laughing and the Crying, Harlequin and Pierro—the one who slaps in the face and throws the other off his feet, and the one who is slapped, and thrown down.

Storytelling in Time and Space

One more betrayal of faith and love in Cabiria’s life is the downfall from which no person can rise. It must be a final descent—worse than death itself, for it includes the deconstruction of a human heart in such a devious and ruthless way, that even an eternal human soul would seem unable to withstand it. However, Cabiria’s smile—the most famous and inspiring smile of all world cinema—constitutes a paradoxical, unexpected and logic-defying ascent. This eternal, uplifting gesture of Fellini and Masina helped generations of viewers dig themselves out from whatever emotional holes into which they may have fallen. The image of a human being who has the courage, spirituality, and grace of heart to smile again after everything that happened to her remains the principal uplifting power gesture of the film itself. Ascent and the Symbolism of Tower A Tower is a symbol of man standing up from a small stature in the universe. A Tower, as a metaphor, embodies a rising gesture, that of a man extending/enlarging his body, unfolding, standing in all his height, and reaching toward the beyond. By using the symbolism of the Tower, film directors reference this metaphorical rising gesture, and use it as a power gesture to reinforce the character in the film’s universe. The directors’ power gestures are vividly seen in the ways their protagonists are introduced. The heroes of Antonioni’s Outcry and Tarkovsky’s Andrei Roublev are both first shown standing on the top of a tower. This introduction is important as a directorial gesture of signification. It adds to the tower image that has a mythology of its own, and this meaning unfolds within the story: a tower is a body of a giant, an architectural metaphor of a Growing man—a Towering man. The tower is a building and a body, a construction and a being, a mythological giant—a stony man who dares to rise beyond allowable limits trying to reach the sky. The tower embodies mounting, becoming, and a forceful upward movement. A tower is a pedestal that a man uses to become more visible to others and to God. A man on the tower, no matter how seemingly insignificant in his status or fortune, is a metaphorical rising man and is inevitably perceived as—and becomes—a Tragic Hero. His appeal is loud and can be heard by the whole world. By placing a protagonist on the top of the tower, the directorial gesture instantly conveys that he deserves our atten-

tion, and reaches the attention of the beyond (God? Fate? Narrative Logic?). Besides being a powerful signifying device, and a spring of cultural mythology, the image of the Tower plays a crucial role in the dramatic structure of Outcry and Andrei Roublev. It is the place from which Aldo begins and ends his tragic journey. It is a place from which a man flies away (a symbol of artistic freedom and creative aspiration for Tarkovsky) and the place where the Great Bell has to be positioned to ring and to unite the nation. Both the dramatic beginning and the dramatic resolution of Outcry and Andrei Roublev are signified and reinforced by the symbolic images of the Tower. Dynamization of Space in Outcry In Outcry it is the industrial tower that frames the narrative space. Other significant spatial elements include a small house (the Home, as a personal intimate space, a hearth, a place where the heart is), a road (empty, endless, leading to nowhere, and finally becoming torturous), and a gas station (a loop in the vicious circle, an abyss). The latter, positioned at /as a center of the filmâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s narrative space and its universe of meanings, takes the place of a Cathedral in this world in which such a temple no longer exists. The gas station is purchased in exchange for land and a farm (like an irreversible turn from nature and life to civilization and a deathlike existence). The gas station is in the middle of all roads, but none of them leads anywhere. It is very much like a mythological spellbound loop that holds a walker, and, like an abyss, gradually annihilates him into nonexistence. The gas station in Outcry is a symbol of civilization without culture, an industrial change without meaning, a movement without destination. It is a profane or even an anti-sacred center in the place where the sacred center should be. Aldo has no choice but to hit the road because his wife fell out of love with him, and he no longer knows who he is in the big world. His painful wandering in hope to find a new place to call his own and a new self results in nothing. Finding no other center or any sacred meaning in the world besides his own home (family, love, hearth) he left behind, the protagonist has no choice but to take a route back. Having reached his own little house (Home), he glances inside. What Aldo sees through the win-

Storytelling in Time and Space

dow is the only woman he loves taking care of her new infant born from another man. There is no life, no home, no wife, and no love awaiting for the protagonist in the world. The new sacred center of the universe—the place where one’s heart is—discovered by Aldo on his difficult roads, does not exist in his life. The protagonist feels that he has no future; his journey seems to approach his end. Temple as Absent Center In Italian and Russian culture, a cathedral is shaped like an embrace of god—fatherly or motherly—a parental hug, with the round tender form of its roof as a visual metaphor of nursing and protection. As such, it differs from the church towers of the Gothic tradition, which symbolize a hand rising to god, or a rising body that tries to reach heaven. The soft round shapes of a basilica are a promise of a divine embrace and help. The very form of the Cathedral embodies God’s powerful gesture toward his children. Thus, people are expected to worship, but also, more importantly, to receive divine protection in or near a Temple. The Temple, as a metaphor of the Sacred Space—the domain of a sacred meaning—is a desired, searched for, and expected place in all three films under discussion. It is a place where Cabiria and Roublev hope to receive divine guidance to escape their endless suffering. It is the search for the sacred meaning that drives the desperate hero of Outcry on his journey. The temple equates with the semantic, emotional and spiritual center of the films’ worlds. However, the Temple—as a hoped for, desperately needed center and as the meaning of all things, a spiritual focal point, the Sacred—does not exist in any of these films. Against all expectations, Cabiria’s prayers are not answered: Virgin Mary does not hear her cry. The Temple in Andrei Roublev cannot protect people gathered inside, attempting to escape the Tatar raid: many would be killed, tortured and raped in the sacred place. There is no Temple or even a place for it in the world of Outcry: instead there is a Gas Station, which is a metaphor for modern dynamics, and an epicenter of its vicious circle. The Gas Station in Outcry is a sacrilegious place of modern worship: it symbolizes the aimless movement and absent center of the universe. When a sacred center is dysfunctional (Nights of Cabiria), destroyed and desecrated (Andrei Roublev), or non-existent (Outcry), the Temple

turns into a negative space. This is a negative space or a negative center of ruined expectations and undelivered divine protection. The absence of sacred center implies that the hero can only rely on him/herself in this world. The sacred becomes what s/he can only find or ‘construct’ him/herself (Cabiria’s smile, or Roublev’s paintings). The film then becomes a search for the sacred, following the rises and falls of a difficult and unsure spiritual journey. A hero who was unable to find his sacred center, as in Outcry, perishes. A negative center is associated in film architectonics with sacrilege, desecration or despair. A hero, who has nothing to pray to or lean on, has no choice but to continue his/her movement alone, along the road in search for a meaning and hope. An absent center reinforces gravitational instability of the film’s world by creating a lack of equilibrium. It directs a hero to seek above and below his own level, generating upward and downward movements, thus establishing these higher or lower levels as the films’ most active cinematic spaces. This gravitational disequilibrium leads a hero to either lose balance and fall, or to fly to other destinations for support. An absence of a Sacred Center reinforces movement for this search. A lack of center equals a lack of equilibrium, instability of the universe, and therefore originates a desire to leave an unstable ground by flying, and consequently creating higher chances for a fall. An analysis of the three films allows the conclusion that there is a correlation between the absence of the sacred center in the architectonics of the fictional world and the narrative dynamics of rise and fall. Architectural efforts in all three films prove unreliable, and this unreliability is inherent to the dramatic conflict. Human constructions turn out to be an unstable and unprotected environment. A House, a Cathedral, and a Tower—the pillars of the universe, implying support and ascent—betray heroes’ expectations. One’s own house, an ultimate shelter turns fragile and breaks. A dome of the cathedral neither embraces nor protects. And even a tower shakes under a man’s feet, causing him to lose his balance and fall to his death. Although many architectural elements provide a power gesture for a rise and ascent (the church tower for a flying man in Andrei Roublev for example) the duality and ambivalence of these elements easily turn them into a negative space—a space of betrayed expectations and unrealized protection, and a trigger for fall. This dual potency of architectural ele-

Storytelling in Time and Space

ments to provide or deny support/balance reinforces the dynamics of rise and fall, and underscores the unpredictability of the dramatic action. Directorial Gestures and the Polysemantics of Tower A Tower as a symbolic form emerged early in culture for guarding and providing protection—watching over one’s land to anticipate invasion. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, this image conveyed a sense of a spiritual ascent. Medieval gothic towers are also emblematic of religious monotheism, emphasizing the singularity of God. Later the Romanticist and modernist traditions would transfer this image of solitude onto man, so that the image of the lone standing tower would suggest a sense of tragic isolation. A film director has an opportunity to derive any meaning from a polysemantic cultural symbol, and reinforce it by his directorial gesture. Tarkovsky’s towers are of more a Renaissance nature, while the towers of Antonioni are closer to the Romanticist and modernist traditions. It is essential that Tarkovsky’s towers are both church towers, and therefore connected to faith and hope. The tower at the beginning and end of Anonioni’s film is an industrial one, and in essence is placed in a faithless world. In Outcry the tower is paradoxically (contrary to its cultural meaning) a trigger point of despair—the narrative point at which the hero loses his family and later his life. Towers then connote different, and even opposite physical and psychological actions for Tarkovsky and Antonioni in the two films—respectively ascent and descent, rise and fall, hope and despair. The power gestures of the two filmmakers also direct the films’ heroes to commit different and alternative actions. The possibility of flight and creative aspiration is emphasized in a tower image by Tarkovsky, and the inevitability of fall by Antonioni. Towers in Tarkovsky’s film are communication devices, uniting those with similar beliefs. The tower of Antonioni, on the contrary, is a pedestal of a solitary man. Aldo rose closer to God to communicate his pain. Thrown off balance by the picture of his wife caring for her new baby conceived from the man she now loves, Aldo goes back to the industrial tower he used to work on—the last resort in his search for identify and the place of solitude. He climbed up with no goal, and is alone up there facing the

incurability of his loneliness and finality of his journey. However, even when on the top and desperately alone, Antonioni’s protagonist still cannot speak up, or pray or cry to God. Paradoxically, it is an outcry in silence to an unreachable god. Aldo’s cry is never heard, no matter how high a tragic hero raises his voice. The silence of his outcry anticipates a theme of alienation, incommunicability, and a tragic inability to rise, which the director develops later in the films following Outcry. Being on top, standing up, being even as tall as a tower, Aldo strangely looks, and even seems to be feeling, small. His voice is repressed, his outcry is bottled in. Perhaps a cathartic, lungs-wrenching cry for help is what Aldo may need, and what the audience expects. Interestingly, it is Roublev who takes a vow of silence, but it is the outcry of Aldo that we never hear. And yet, Andrei finds a way out of despair, while Aldo plunges deeper into it until he finds his end. The towers of Tarkovsky encode or hide within themselves a divine vision, the eyes of God, so vivid in the film’s unique polyphonic and transcendental cinematography. The hero of Outcry is trying to search for God, but cannot break his silence because he is not sure that it is not a godless universe. The atmosphere around the tower in Outcry is hopeless and gloomy. While the universe has an ability to expand around the towers of Tarkovsky, it contracts around the tower of Antonioni. We almost feel the powers pushing Aldo to the only point—on the tower—he could possibly be: the point of no return. A Cry from the Tower: Sound and/as Movement Since a Tower is a man’s metaphorical call for his god, the sound is almost embodied, materialized in the stone construction. The melody of its vertical line represents and implies a rising voice, an ascending sound. One almost expects to hear a scream rising from the top of a tower. A man’s triumphant “I am flying!” rising above the church’s roof and reaching the sky is what we hear at the beginning of Andrei Roublev. The sound of the great bell (which has a sacred meaning and purpose, of curing the ills of violence, reaching all and uniting the nation) is what everyone expects in the Bell episode. This last episode of Andrei Roublev defines the film’s suspense and its magic. The sound that originates from the tower is the beginning and the end in both Andrei Roublev and Outcry, the

Storytelling in Time and Space

films’ initial dramatic trigger moment and their resolution. The scream of the woman calling for Aldo (first to let him know of her betrayal at the film’s beginning and finally to set off, to provoke his death at the end) embraces the narrative space of Outcry. The Tower and a sound from it constitute the visual and audio ‘frames’ of the two movies. Whose Outcry is It? Voice Rising and Falling When we think of Outcry, we think of Aldo, a male hero, screaming from his lungs from the top of the tower, so God could hear him better. This is the image the film leaves in our memory. We believe that we can hear him screaming about his loneliness, loss of love, loss of home, and despair. However, in the reality of film Aldo actually never cries; he is almost always silent. It is a silent outcry of tragic proportions that we hear. This scream is projected, desired—in his mind and soul, and in ours—to let the pain out. But this never happens. We are left with the impression that we indeed have heard the man scream, and even its echo from the top of the tower, and that this scream is projected upon the entire film. This is the strong image created by the word and image—the film’s symbolic title, Outcry, and the symbol of the Tower. The film’s pure and powerful structure, its minimalist language, dramatic silences and empty spaces reinforce the paradoxical effect of the image-sound interaction. A strong image (Tower) and a powerful sound (Outcry) function in a highly symbolic, even archetypal manner. The frozen gesture of a man turning to his God for support and meaning deeply affects and seems to be the film’s emblematic image. But, strangely, the scream never happens—it is purely metaphoric. Thus, Antonioni creates a paradoxical vision of an image that has no real representation in the film. It is not the man’s but the woman’s voice we hear, her screams at the film’s beginning and its end. It is not coming from the top of the tower, but from its bottom. The cry is not Aldo’s, but is directed toward him. This scream turns Aldo’s head, reveals to him the depth of betrayal and reminds him of his solitude. It is not an ascending cry to God, but a descending scream of a wife, abandoning her husband. It is not a reaching scream but a killing scream. It is an empty voice devoid of affection and meaning: she

has nothing to say to Aldo, has fallen out of love, and has no heartfelt reason to call for him. The outcry is not of the betrayed, but of the betrayer. The outcry we perceive to be from the top, toward God and ascending, is actually that from the tower’s bottom. Although seemingly directed upwards, it is in essence a downward movement. A deadly loop entraps Aldo and brings him down. The cry calls for Aldo to go down—literally at the beginning, and later symbolically, to his death. It triggers and sets off his end. It is a voice-movement downward. The woman he loves brings Aldo down with the power gesture of her call. Her scream is a snake, a rope around his neck, which entraps and drags him to the ground. Antonioni created such an ambivalent image that we will never know if Aldo commits suicide, or loses his balance and falls from the top of the tower when he sees the woman he loves and hears her alluring call. This is a siren voice which leads the hero to his death. The cry is not a movement upward, a ladder toward /communication with God, a god-reaching voice gesture/movement, or, as we think, an indication of Aldo’s rout for survival. This paradox of perception, a distortion /illusion of space, of sound, and of action remains one of Antonioni’s mysteries—a powerful enigma of his masterpiece, and a prelude to the paradoxes of postmodern poetics. The figure of the protagonist in Antonioni’s Outcry on the top of the tower invokes an image of a man screaming from his lungs, calling for God, crying to his God from the highest possible stand he could reach. The height of the tower and the raised voices of outcry refer back to the stilts and trumpets of ancient Greek tragedy. As a tragic hero, the protagonist has to be seen, and his voice has to be heard. At the same time the image of silent outcry—a bursting through but never ascending sound— marks a new cultural era of repressed pain and isolation. Imitating ancient Greek theatre, and experimenting with a genre of film tragedy, Antonioni was in search for a new cinematic form. The film has strikingly minimalist, pure and powerful forms of expression. Antonioni’s self-limitations were intended to reproduce the purity of ancient Greek theatre. The tower plays an essential role in achieving the film’s authentic tragic quality. Antonioni’s new form—a cinema of alienation—is manifest in the process of creation depicted in Outcry. It is amazing how the film’s language embraces and integrates these two distant and incompatible extremes: high tragedy and postmodern journey.

Storytelling in Time and Space

The Rising Movement All three of these films were made at the dawn of realist movements in their respective national cinemas (the late 50s neorealism in Italy and the late 60s post-Stalinist “thaw” realism in the Soviet Union). Crises of the realist representation, connected to historical and ideological changes— declines of liberal movements—led to indirect and structural forms of expression, resulting in a more prevalent use of symbolism in film. The film by Tarkovsky is the story of Andrei Roublev, a historical figure (Russia’s most talented icon-painter), and a metaphor for the Artist. Passions for Andrei—a reference to the fugues of Bach—was Tarkovsky’s original title, but it was prohibited by Soviet censors for its religious symbolism. The film-parable combines historical and mythological perspectives, and includes many revealing encounters on the roads of Medieval Russia. Unlike the single protagonist of Fellini and Antonioni, Tarkovsky uses an echo-protagonist in his “visual fugue”: an embodiment of the hero is represented in various characters in the collage-like episodes of the ritual journey. In each road episode, there is always a kind and innocent soul with an aspiration or a dream, who is being persecuted, tortured, or threatened. These visions of suffering accumulate as an unbearable pain and fury in the heart of a very patient man. The film’s climax and turning point is the attempted rape of the holy fool in the cathedral. This is crucially significant, because the mentally disabled were the most sacred ritual figures in Russian culture—the children of God—and to offend them was considered the most horrific sin imaginable. This attack takes place in the upper level of the cathedral (the sacred center of the Universe, a symbolic heaven/beyond, according to the religious cosmology). The offender—to deepen the sense of moral descent—is not an “evil invader” but an insider of culture—a Russian soldier, a traitor brought along by the Tartars, who participated in the desecration of the capital’s main cathedral, and in the tortures and murders of his own people. Fiery from killing and blood, the soldier violently drags the girl upstairs, paying no attention at her wordless animal-like cries. The sacrilegious and brutal actions Andrei witnesses through the entire film accumulate at this dramatic moment and overwhelm the monk’s patient soul. Not only does Andrei act impulsively, but he commits an act that, as a religious servant, an artist, and simply a moral and spiritual being, would be-

forehand have been unimaginable for him. Protecting the Holy Fool and the holy Temple from the rapist, he kills the man—the Russian ‘brother’ who has violated the most sacred rules of nature and culture. In order to grasp the symbolic density of this scene, one should turn to the symbolic anthropology of space or the sacred topology of the mythological mind. In the latter, the relationships are more than metaphorical: metaphysical and physical realities coincide. The episode takes place in the sacred circle, or more exactly within the sacred spiral of ascending magnitude. The town of Vladimir, which means the master of the world, was at that time the country’s capital, and thus its political and semantic center. The higher level of any church is a spatial signifier of the domain of God. For religious consciousness, the metaphor of space is a mythological reality of space, and therefore God—or his spirit—is “really” presiding and abiding Upstairs—within the higher grounds and elevated spaces of the Temple. The latter, one must add, the main cathedral of the country’s capital city is a sacred place by definition. The space in the epicenter of the Temple and on its highest level has a signification of supreme importance. Vladimir, symbolically, was more than just a capital city: it was the heart of the national body. Vladimir is named as and perceived to be the “master of the world” (a perspective typical for medieval consciousness at the era of national formations). Thus it is the pillar of the universe, its axis mundi—a crucially important and focalizing point in all mythologies, which runs trough the Cathedral of the capital. The country’s main Temple is the sacred place of supreme importance and even more so upstairs, where space manifests the abode of the Holy Spirit. To commit the most sacrilegious act this culture knows, the raping of a holy fool, and even worse—at the utmost sacred place of the universe, means to be destroying the universe and attacking the holy spirit, as well as everything sacred that it is there. The act means overthrowing the hierarchy of divine values, and violating a sacred cosmic order, no less. What the monk witnessed was therefore more than an ordinary crime—the brutal act grows to be the destruction of the universe, or in other words, throwing off balance the universal architectonics of the sacred. And therefore, Andrei had to do something, and to act fast: saving the girl ascended to the action of heroic proportions. Not only should he be forgiven, he should be celebrated as a hero. And yet, as a Renaissance mind, a Hamlet type who is unsure that for any reason—any reason at

Storytelling in Time and Space

all—a man can kill a man, Andrei, who may be forgiven by us, cannot forgive himself. This scene, which is crucial for understanding the entire film, shows three consequent upward or downward movements. First, the soldier, with the girl on his shoulder, is going upstairs in the cathedral. Second, Andrei follows him, rushing up to stop the unthinkable crime. Finally, the soldier is shown falling downstairs lifeless. The three movements, which take only seconds, contain condensed symbolic content of supreme importance. The soldier’s ascent within the sacred space of the cathedral was actually a descent to the lowest point of morality; Andrei’s ascent to stop the crime was, in his eyes, at the same time an unforgivable sin, a moral descent. He would never think he could raise his hand against a human being. Unable to solve this moral problem, Roublev plunges into despair and, to find redemption, takes a vow of silence for many years to come— a form of descent and self-imposed symbolic death in the domain of time. For many years Andrei does not talk, as he cannot accept what he has done, as well as the violence and immorality of the world around him. Time for him becomes a dead loop; he lost faith, hope, inspiration, and, most importantly, an ability to paint. His self imposed punishment—a wow of silence becomes a jail without walls—alienation from life. The years passing by turn into a continuous emotional downward spiral for the artist. The change of fate toward the upward movement is triggered by the casting of the bell. Its rising brings about the ascent of the young bellcaster, Boriska, Andrei himself, the community and the entire nation. This heroic action of the “youngest brother,” a beloved figure of folklore, is an ascent that saves and revives all. Boriska is first seen fallen on the ground, a sole survivor in a village devastated by plague. The last in a bell-casting dynasty, the teenager is himself about to perish—alone in an abandoned settlement, hungry, and with no chance to survive. The prince’s men notice him while searching for a surviving member of bell-casting guild. Out of desperation the boy lies to the guards that he knows his father’s professional secret, and is taken to the Prince as the only man able to cast a Great Bell. An ultimate rise or fall awaits the daring boy: he will either become a Great Master, or his head will fall. This is the condition of the ruler, but the minor feels he has no choice. He does not really know the secret of casting; he vaguely knows he has to find the right clay, but has no idea how to do so. His time

is running out. Wandering up and down the hills around the town doesn’t bring him any luck, until Boriska suddenly loses his balance and falls from the highest hill. He drops down, and down, and down, and his plunge seems to signify an irreversible descent to death. But, having plunged to the bottom, he lands in the clay—the one his father used for casting his famous bells. This find might be the key to success. Boriska hits the bottom, which may be a reversal toward the movement up. Although this paper uses the notion of descent in a modernist sense, this particular plunge into the ground revokes the Bakhtinian context of fall-rise as death-rebirth. A enormous hole in the ground forms the cast for the giant Great Bell. The negative space of the hole has several symbolic meanings: it symbolizes on one hand a terrifying tomb in which Boriska may end up if he fails. It is the furthest depth of his descent. But on the other hand it represents potential revival from death, a place below the ground which could generate the upward movement—the rising sound of the great bell. Working day and night, Boriska and his team almost kill themselves. Weeks of exhausting labor have passed, but no one is sure that the bell would ring. The scene “Rising of the Bell” is full of suspense and horror: if the royal assignment is not accomplished, the heads could roll, and the boy’s would be the first. The rope intended to lift the bell may become the one to hang him dead. The upward movement of the Bell from the deep underground hole to the heights of the Bell-tower is emphasized cinematographically as a profoundly symbolic and spiritual action, and it takes a long time in the film. The slow raising of the bell by hundreds of men is shown from all possible angles, including God’s view: the astonishing perspective from the beyond. The Bell in Middle Ages was believed to have magic and sacred powers. Ringing bells on church towers were thought to communicate with God and the universe through the cosmic language of vibration and sound. The greater the bell, the farther and higher its sound would reach. The boy has been ordered to cast the Czar-Bell, the largest ever created. When this Great Bell rings, its sound rises above the earth and reaches its margins; it becomes a celebration of the entire country, symbolizing its unification and revival after devastating feudal wars. As was designed, the rising Bell awakes the nation and helps it to rise. With the first sounds, Boriska falls onto the ground and cries. Roublev

Storytelling in Time and Space

falls with him and embraces the boy in a parental hug. The Temple, at least in their souls, is restored. The teenager ascends as a great master, while Andrei breaks his vow of silence and escapes his own descent. Roublev, the Leonardo da Vinci of Russian culture, now will rise to the very heights of his talent, creating spiritual art, as the film’s ending shows. The life of Roublev, and his uniquely inspiring and multi-perspective painting signified the beginning of Russia’s cultural Renaissance. Tarkovsky’s film-parable of the post-Stalinist thaw ends on an ascending, inspiring note. The final scene of this black and white film suddenly explodes in color. Roublev’s creations resulting from his sacred journey radiate spirit, and give a sense of divine embrace and the joy of living— the messages radically new to the intimidated and alienated people of the medieval time. Even the film’s prologue, which ends with an image of fall, has its secret, a designed paradox of perception. The flight scene is shot by the director in such a way that its initial rise remains in our memory, while the plunge which follows fades behind and is forgotten. The ascending movement of the balloonist is shot from a high perspective and is depicted as the never-ending spiritual bliss of flying, a reference to Icarus, who in Tarkovsky’s vision would never fall. The image of flight is extended, frozen in time; hence consequential logic is defied by the power gesture of Tarkovsky. Time seems to stop or unfold from within when the man reaches the sky. The realistic chronotope is magically altered, and the moment unfolds into a mysterious eternal dimension, which opens to an Everyman in his ascent and creative aspiration. What happens before, or after, matters less than walking in the air—the very moment of flight that brings the man to the heavens. This is an example of Tarkovsky’s sculpting in time—his unique ability to transform, mold and change the course and perception of time in cinema—and is deeply connected with his philosophical quest to transform film into spiritual process. Conclusions: The Chronotope of Rise and Fall— Patterns and Variations The three films are an echo of their time and its philosophical and social concerns: they all carry the same inner code, and yet, the three direc-

tors in the films under discussion chose different patterns to stress, and consequentlyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;different messages to channel. The spatial designs in the films embed and encode the symbolic images of the stair or the ladder. The interplay and dynamics of high and low surfaces represent the dialectics of physical upward and downward movement, and the simultaneously emotional and spiritual descent and ascent, despair and survival. The architectonics of all three films emphasizes an active participation of universal forms in the solution of human crises. The dynamics of the lines of force or directorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; power gestures may be represented as a sinusoid, or a wave. This wave manifests a pulsation of the spiritual universe with its rhythms of death and rebirth, despair and hope, falling and rising again, perishing and surviving. Responding to the concerns of their time, each of the directors continuously stresses one dynamic sinusoidal pattern prevailing in the world of his film. Tarkovsky emphasizes rising in spite of impossible circumstances; Antonioni shows incessant falling with no shapes or forms to hold to; Fellini displays an eternal up-and-down movement, a tragicomic dance of dying and surviving again.

The diagrams show how the lines of force in the film by Fellini form an endless transformative curve of falling and rising movements, again and again, with an ascending final gesture of survival (Cabiriaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s smile). The chronotope of rise and fall in Fellini has definite roots in the circus tradition.

Storytelling in Time and Space

The lines of force formed by action and movement in the film by Antonioni all are directed downward: the hero descends lower and lower, and in conclusion falls to his death in the film’s tragic end. This emphasis on the downward movement is consistent with a neomodernist style and the spatial design of Antonioni’s “cinema of alienation.”

The very notion of a film as a fugue applied to Tarkovsky (Petrie and Johnson) involves an endless symbolic ascent. It is a characteristic feature of “transcendental cinema” (Schrader) or film as a form of religion, as defined by Tarkovsky himself. It constitutes an ascending movement, which transcends ceilings and boundaries, and places crucial emphasis on the

lines of force directed upwards in the rising power gesture that characterizes Tarkovsky’s philosophy of art. The outlined paradigms show essential features of the film architectonics and film philosophy of the three directors. However, it is important to stress that the types of chronotope under discussion represent three particular films of the featured decade (1959–1969), rather than the entire body of work of Fellini, Antonioni, and Tarkovsky, each of whom experimented with diverse structures involving distinct patterns of rising and falling movements. In all three cases however, the innovative spatial-temporal compositions can be traced to the ritual forms of ecstatic movement conceptualized by Eisenstein in his pathos theory. Like the narrative archetype of the journey and the chronotope of the road, the chronotope of the rise and fall has existed since the time immemorial, as is evident in the myths of Icarus and fallen angels. However, it became prevalent and especially revealing in twentieth century, in both modernist and postmodern contexts related to the rise of mass societies. Visualized as a symbolic ladder, the chronotope of rise and fall can be historically placed in between the 20s constructivist spiral Tatlin Tower and the 40s/60s Esher’s vicious up-and-down stairs circles. Both served as a spatial metaphor for emerging social reality. In the traditional chronotope of the road a person essentially finds ultimate answers and harmony in a horizontal movement: imagine the heroes walking into the sunset at/as narrative closure. Alternatively, in the chronotope of rise and fall a man is always in conflict with the ground. It signifies on the one hand the line of life itself, its equilibrium, and on the other—the surface of political space. In the modern city culture, in which space free from limitations no longer exists, road blocks await a traveler on every corner. One way or another, the protagonist makes efforts to escape his/her ground level—attempts to overcome it, to rise above, or is being run over by it, and falls below. The new emphasis on the chronotope of rise and fall is a result of growing social anxiety regarding fall/failure, and a consequence of living in an increasingly overpopulated but unstable universe. This disequilibrium was stressed by the poststructuralists through the notion of shift, as manifest in Deleuze’s concepts of “events-out-of-field” and “space-out-offield”. The chronotope of rise and fall shows an attempt to get out of the field of displacement, which is about to force an individual out and away

Storytelling in Time and Space

from familiar grounds anyway. It is an angled space, which is not yet locked in an Esherian loop, a Mobius strip of postmodern dimension. And it is a spatial structure filled with stares, sharp corners and abruptly slanted surfaces. In the three films made in the late 1950s and 1960s (themselves tracing the rise and fall of the neomodernist idea) the emphasis on and interplay between ascent and descent is a precursor for understanding the world from a standpoint of postmodern philosophy. The chronotope of rise and fall implies not only the postmodern, but also the post 9/11 condition: it is a form of “anticipatory reflection” of art. It forestalls the modalities of displacement of human beings and meanings (geographical and semantic), and an inevitability of the movement-plunge through an unstable and de-centered universe. An absent sacred center and a void of the pivotal point of ethics within any social spatio-semantic model prove to be an essential factor for the chronotope of rise and fall revealing itself in culture. The more dysfunctional an architectonic center is, the more extreme are the pendulum motions of rise and fall. The significance of this chronotope resides in its ability to address an acute tension between the notions of victory and defeat, as definitive binary oppositions in the existence of an individual in mass societies (and recently of societies as part of global assembly as well). This chronotope facilitates an exploration of an unbridgeable gap between the characters of the Winner and the Loser, an uncompromising conflict typical for Western, and especially North American, cultural semantics. The fall of New York’s Twin Towers opened a new chapter in the cultural, and increasingly political, symbolism of rise and fall. The journey into the philosophical deliberations of the European directors on this assembly of symbolic meanings helps to grasp their historical dynamics. The elaborate architectonics that aids to our understanding of the eternal dialectic of ascent and decent is brilliantly manifested in the work of three great filmmakers. It is what makes each a truly classical work of film art and a contribution to humanity.

Notes The starting point in the development of this study was my observation on the striking similarities in narrative symmetry and the significance of towers in several renowned films. These ideas were developed as part of the course taught in January–April of 2000. The dis-

cussion gravitated toward the issues of height, the symbolism of the tower in culture and the symbolic meaning of fall, notably just months before 9/11. I want to thank my former students in the course “Film Architectonics” at the Toronto School of Image Arts, for whom this work was initially prepared as a series of lectures, and who have enthusiastically embraced the method of architectonic analysis. I am grateful to Linda Lewis for encouraging me to further develop this work and for helping to create an interactive new media version of its earlier draft on a CD-ROM Filmbuilding in 2002, which I used as a visual lecture series in my classes. I would like to express my gratitude to my academic colleagues Bruce Elder, Linda Hutcheon, Dana Polan and James Hewitson for reading this paper at key stages of its development, for encouragement and valuable comments. 1.

Bakhtin introduced several distinctive types of chronotope, and so did Deleuze. Besides “the rhizomes” [cultural rather than textual (self)organization of time-space, which functions within the larger space of culture], the examples of chronotopes theorized by Deleuze most effectively include the “time out of place” (The Time-Image) and “the fold” (The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque). All three are essential to understanding the origin, meaning and consequences of postmodernism. The set of concepts related to displacement, such as “time out of field/place” and “time out of order” is of special interest to the present study. To what extent, a protagonist’s journey is his/her decision, and to what extent s/he is forced on the road and displaced by powerful impersonal forces? Interestingly, although Deleuze is concerned with a different set of issues, he extensively used the cinema of Antonioni as the case study in theorizing the chronotope of displacement he named the “time out of field.” The author of the present paper has been exploring a number of other types of chronotope in film, such as the “the Zone” (concentration camp/gulag) in her doctoral dissertation (January 1998), and later “the chronotope of the ruins” (public lecture presented at Columbia University, May 1998); the chronotope of “the world’s edge” (public lecture presented at The University of Toronto, November 1998). Two essays, currently in progress, investigate the chronotope of rise and fall in American film, as well as the chronotope of crossing paths in world cinema. Some models of fictional worlds with the distinctive organizational principles of time-space have been extensively studied. The chronotope of the train, for example, has been widely discussed by a number of scholars, from the specialists in nineteenth century prose to the scholars of Hitchcock. During the last decade several authors introduced and theorized a number of chronotopes using representational models developed within film culture, such as the chronotope of “the mall” (Mongomery), “film noir” (Sobchack), “black getto” (Massood), “rush hour” (Flanagan), and “maternity ward” (Makaveeva). While many models of chronotopes are presented by the authors

Storytelling in Time and Space

with convincing textual analyses and logical conceptualizations, some attempts are questionable. For example, suggesting that there is a “documentary chronotope” (Chanan) is similar to proposing that there should be the chronotope of fictional cinema and that of animation. It is too generic of a term to hold a viable theoretical concept: documentary films may follow numerous and diverse conceptualizations of timespace, and each may have a different chronotope. Similarly “generic” are the chronotopes proposed by several authors, such as the chronotope “of self,” “of dream,” “family chronotope,” or “metaphysical chronotope.” Within each of these domains many distinctly different models can be found. The debates on various models of fictional time-space will continue as chronotope studies, an emerging area of inquiry, will generate a wide range of hypotheses, from persuasive to less convincing, or requiring a more specific conceptualization. 2.

Discovering new types of chronotope (or rediscovering old, which existed since the beginning of the oral tradition); giving them proper names, or designating suitable terms for newly distinguished chronotopes—is the task for the narratologists and film scholars. Even before one attempts to describe a chronotope and theorize it, some of the key questions emerge: how do we distinguish chronotopes and find proper names for them? For example, Bakhtin called one of his models of fictional time-space “Dante’s chronotope,” while another “chronotope of ordeal.” Clearly the former is not named “after Dante,” but refers to the architectonics of the fictional/philosophical world in The Divine Comedy. However, in the latter, Bakhtin stressed “what happens” to the protagonist rather than where/when or who initiated such time-space continuum.

The notion of architectonics is this paper pertains to the meaningful organization of form, or to the immanent structure of narrative and visual-spatial form. In the films under discussion the elements of space and architecture are integrated as crucial components of form. Architectonics refers to the logic of content embedded within the logic of form, according to the key postulate of Formalism. Dictionaries connect the term “architectonics” to at least three interrelated notions: a) the science of architecture (or in other worlds, the knowledge of spatial design and the knowledge of reality embedded within the spatial forms; b) structural design, such as for example, a fugue in music, in which the multi-level and dynamic interaction of elements defines the whole, and c) as a concept in philosophy, it means the “systematization of knowledge.” It is in the context of these interpretations, the term “architectonics” is used in this paper. Film architectonics carries within a systematic knowledge about the events of the story on screen, or the wisdom of the form. Metaphorically speaking, the towers, roads, rivers, and temples manifest the complete knowledge about the journey and are at the same time the interactive agents of change, its catalysts, as well as the guardians of the knowledge about the inevitability of change. As will be shown in the

paper, film architectonics is construed through the unity of four dimensions: the symbolic, dramatic, psychological and cinematographic. 4.

Methodologically, the present paper follows the route of structuralism and post-structuralism in the studies of the dynamization of space in narrative models. This approach takes its origin in the anthropological studies of culture and performance. However, there are other distinctly different and worth mentioning approaches, such as cognitive linguistics. The notable authors of this tradition include David Herman, Gilles Fauconnier, Mark Turner, John Pire, Rolf Pfeifer, Josh C. Bongard, Rodney Brooks, and Shun Iwasawa. The works of the Tartu school on spatial models in fiction, authored by Yuri Lotman, V.V. Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov, represent the bridge between the two methods: structuralist/anthropological and semantic/linguistic.

Vladimir Propp, The Historical Roots of Fairy Tale. In Russian. St-Petersburg: StPetersburg State University, 1986. For more on the narrative functions on the dragon, see chapter “At the Fire River.”

In the case of Andrei Roublev, in particular, the diagram represents only the film’s key spatial elements and focuses on the film’s beginning, culmination or pivotal point, and ending. It would take a separate study to analyze the architectonics of Tarkovsky’s masterpiece in its entirety.

The notion of Temple is used in the article as both a symbolic sacred space, and architectural form, while the notion of Cathedral is used as a concrete architectural form without a symbolic connotation.

Whether in the narrative systems an entrance into a contained space signifies ascent or descent remains an open question and depends on context. In other words, the architectonics of the chronotope of “inside and outside” may have distinctly different meanings in different films. For example, in the context of the three films under discussion, the “inside space” set against the openness of the road as an ordeal, has a meaning of protective and sheltering realm. It is what the heroes crave and dream about: the safety and sacredness of the space of a family home or a temple. Thus, in the present paper the “inside” and a movement into a contained space correlate with ascent, while being deprived of protected space and thrown out “outside” in the open means descent. In the three films open space becomes a metaphor of ordeal, while closed space that of home or shelter. Exceptions include the scene with Cabiria being locked in inside the storage closet, which becomes a humiliating experience of fall. In other films and other narrative models, such as “the jail tale,” a contained space has an alternative meaning: it signifies a loss of freedom and consequently correlates with descent.

Storytelling in Time and Space

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. Chanan, Michael. “The Documentary Chronotope.” Jumpcut 43, 2000: 56–61. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema II: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. ——— . The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992. Eisenstein, Sergei. Non-Indifferent Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. ——— . Film Form and Film Sense. Cleveland: Merician, 1988. Fauconnier, Gilles. Mappings in Thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2003. Flanagan, Martin. “‘Get Ready for Rush Hour’: The Chronotope in Action,” Action and Adventure Cinema. Ed. Yvonne Tasker. Oxford-New York: Routledge, 2004. Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2004. Hitchcock, Peter. “Running Time: The Chronotope of The Loneliness of The Long-Distance Runner.” A Companion To Literature And Film. Eds. Alessandra Raengo and Robert Stam. Boston: Blackwell, 2004. Johnson, Vida, and Graham Petrie. The Visual Fugue: The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. ——— , and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1999. Lotman, Yuri M. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001.

Makaveeva, Irina, “The Chronotope of the Maternity Home.” Studies In Slavic Cultures Issue IV Sept. 2003: 83–41. http://www.pitt.edu/AFShome/s/l/slavic/public/html/sisc/ SISC4/makoveeva.pdf. Massood, Paula J. Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2003. Montgomery, Michael V. Carnivals and Commonplaces: Bakhtin’s Chronotope, Cultural Studies, and Film. New York-Oxford: Peter Lang Publishing, 1994. Pfeifer, Rolf, Josh C. Bongard, Rodney Brooks, and Shun Iwasawa. How the Body Shapes the Way We Think: A New View of Intelligence. Boston: The MIT P, 2006. Panofsky, Erwin. “Style and Medium in the Motion Picture.” Film Theory and Criticism. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Propp, Vladimir. Istoricheskie korni volshebnoi skazki (The Historical Roots of the Fairy Tale). In Russian. St-Petersburg: St-Petersburg State U: 1986. Pier, John. The Dynamics of Narrative Form: Studies in Anglo-American Narratology. Berlin-New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2005. Richardson, Brian, ed. Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frame. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2002. Sobchack, Vivian. “Lounge Time: Postwar Crises and the Chronotope of Film Noir.” Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History. Ed. Nick Browne. U of California P, 1998. Thompson, Kristen. Ivan The Terrible: A Neoformalist Analysis. Princeton: Princeton UP. 1981. Tompkins, Penny, and James Lawley. Metaphors in Mind: Transformation through Symbolic Modelling. Lisburn: Developing Company, 2000.