INTERTEXTUAL ELEMENTS IN THE POETICS OF THE FILM “CARGO 200” BY A. BALABANOV

This article is devoted to the theme of interaction of literary texts with the language of cinema. The article describes some intertextual sources of the film “Cargo 200” by A. Balabanov. The plot frame of this film may be considered the novel “Sanctuary” by W. Faulkner, but conceptually the film is different from it. The myth about the dead bridegroom is used in the film only conditionally and is transferred to another character. Popular Soviet songs are used in the film in different functions: they create a cultural background (in fact, very relative), accompany and illustrate the plot, serve as characteristics of the characters. Although Balabanov preferred rock music, in this film mainly popular songs are used in an ironic manner. Sentimental romance of these songs contrasts with the terrible context and in a sense creates the effect of “black humor”.

A SCRIPT FOR HERSELF: CHARACTERIZATION AND FREE INDIRECT STYLE IN CONRAD'S VICTORY

Some of the most influential studies written about Joseph Conrad in the 1950s (by Douglas Hewit, Thomas Moser and Albert Guerard) established a critical paradigm that continued to dominate Conrad studies for decades to come – especially with regard to his later novels, which according to these critics represented a decline after the achievements of his major period. The principal reason for this decline, as Moser argues, was Conrad's altered choice of subject matter from the novel Chance onwards – i.e., his newly-discovered interest in romance and female protagonists. Conrad's failure in representing intimate erotic relationship in his later novels, as Moser maintains, is inseparable from his inclination to create melodramatic and inauthentic heroines, incomparably less complex than the striking male protagonists of his earlier works.More recently, critics such as Robert Hampson and Susan Jones have proposed a different approach to the romances of Conrad's later period. A case in point is Hampson's analysis of Lena's character in Victory. Unlike the earlier critics, who accused Conrad of sentimentality in female characterizations, Hampson argues that it is Lena herself who views her own being and her role in Heyst's life through a prism of sentimental romance. Lena's subjective perception of reality amounts to writing a script for herself (Hampson 2004), which casts her in the role of a sacrificial heroine. By using free indirect style, Conrad allows us to see Lena presented through her own idiom, in a manner comparable to Joyce's treatment of Gerty McDowell in Ulysses. The paper draws on Hampson's contention, exploring Conrad's narrative strategies in Victory, while also referring to the theoretical frameworks such as Genette's Narrative Discourse and Bakhtin's Dialogic Imagination.

Three-Women Fiction, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies

At work in Peking Opera Blues is a deeply intertextual relation to the film adaptations (three-women films) of a popular form of sentimental romance fiction - mandarin duck and butterfly fiction (yuanyang hudie) - which emerged when China, after thousands of years of dynastic rule, first experimented with democracy as an alternative mode of governance and lifestyle. This “fiction of comfort” came under attack by the May Fourth Movement after 1919, and was eventually consigned to the margins of modern Chinese literature. Reading through the lens of “three-women” films like Fate in Tears and Laughters (1932), Three Modern Girls (1933), Sun Moon Star (1960), and The Story of Three Loves (1963), and their women-centered narratives, enables a reading of Peking Opera Blues which reveals some of the ways in which Tsui Hark is able to emphasize the idea of women as narrative images; to highlight female agencies and subjectivities and to explore the rising status of women in the more globally connected, post-Confucian, and post patriarchal consumerist society of Hong Kong.

Moulin Rouge

Moulin Rouge is a brilliant musical pastiche that highlights the defining characteristics of the genre (the structural tension between sentimental romance pushing toward melodrama and an edgy reflexive irony built into the backstage business) while accentuating its international dimensions. Despite the dazzling visual spectacle and conscious cultivation of artifice and clichéés, it's the soundtrack that drives the film and enables it to be emotionally moving. Structured by a dizzying spiral of doubling and exerting its power through dramatic shifts in pace, Moulin Rouge uses poached lyrics and fracturing close-ups to negotiate the relationship between this singular story and its generic predecessors.