ARTISTIC TRINITY: LITERATURE – CINEMA – MUSIC (THE FILM “EARTH” BY O. DOVZHENKO)

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to reveal the ideological, thematic, descriptive, intonation-rhythmic consonance of the musical accompaniment of the band “DakhaBrakha” with the film and film story by O. Dovzhenko. The article highlights the role of musical accompaniment in the restored 2012 version of the film “Earth” by the famous Ukrainian director of the twentieth century O. Dovzhenko. This is the first study in which, through the comprehension of the trinity of the samples of music, cinema, and literature, new meanings are revealed in musical compositions and the film, the relevance of the raised existential problems is expressed, the ethnic basis of the concept of characters and the works of art chosen for the analysis as a whole are indicated. The corpus of methods was applied in the research: the cultural-historical method contributed to the understanding of the place, role, and meaning of film, music, and literary texts in contemporary artistic realities; the intermedial approach helped in identifying and characterizing the common, different and peculiar in the pictorial, mood, ideological and thematic, content filling of scenes, micro-episodes, symbolic images and details in samples belonging to various types of arts; the hermeneutic method is applied to reveal and interpret the traditional and innovative in stylistic specificity of the ethno-chaos performance of the “DakhaBrakha” band. Based on the cultural and historical method, the hermeneutic method, and the intermedial approach in the research it was emphasized that the instruments (accordion, drum, cello, ratchet, etc.) involved by the DakhaBrakha musical group, their tonality, rhythm, as well as the Ukrainian folklore samples involved in the content plan contributed to the effective depiction of various states of the main and secondary characters (joy, grief, concentration, sadness, thoughtfulness, etc.), the moods of the peasants, interpersonal relationships, emphasizing the character traits of Ukrainian heroes, hereditary farmers, their natural desire to work on the land and thus self-actualize. The article remarked on the role of pauses in the reflection of emotionally capacious, conceptually important film episodes, micro-episodes, and scenes, enhanced by demonstrative cinematic techniques. The trinity of music, cinematic material, and literary work in the construction of characters and perfect plot layout is emphasized. The musical design of the film “Earth” by O. Dovzhenko, carried out by the ethnic-chaos DakhaBrakha group, accentuates the national selfhood of the Ukrainian character, even though the film tells about collectivization, the purposeful policy of the then Soviet government (the 30s of the twentieth century) to destroy the private property of Ukrainians, to negate the feeling of the owner composed over the centuries. Skillfully combined traditional and innovative stylistic specificity of performing skills of the ethnic-chaos group “DakhaBrakha” contribute to the identification of subtexts, codes for the interpretation of the content of works, actual existential problems, and national originality of the characters. The order, tempo of the musical performance as well as the visual content, that was thought out by the authors of the film, form the musical leading motif of the movie and deepen the understanding of the subtext, symbolic accents of the literary work, emphasize the features of the artistic presentation of the land problem with the help of expressive images of sunflowers, gardens, steppes, fields, oxen, etc. There are a music tempo-rhythmic and tonal-emotional support of frames in the film, that as well performs a peculiar function of sound illustration in the corresponding episodes of the literary text, thus giving the images of main characters and minor characters dynamics and expression. The musical drama of the film “Earth”, audio visualization of the main and secondary characters, repetition, the collision of frames with different plans, landscapes, and the specifics of their location in the frames emphasize the problematic of the literary work, contribute to the multifaceted images of heroes in the literary work and in the film, enhance the understanding of the conflicts (intra-frame, interpersonal, worldview, etc.), testify to the ideological-thematic, compositional, pictorial, emotional-semantic unity of musical, cinematographic and literary texts.

Keywords

• literature
• music
• cinema
• ethnic-chaos style