Christie Reading

All in all, I felt that this was a relatively confusing article and it was hard to discern exactly what the focus was, because I am not very familiar with Russian cinema. However, I thought it had a good point in its stylistic approach, especially dealing with the subtleties of metaphor in film. Though I have never seen the film, “ The Devil’s Wheel,” that is referred to in the film, I could envision the ball falling into the hole and how this symbolized this stage of his life. I find these techniques very interesting, and I can understand how formalists would relate it to poetry. Film is very literary when setting up the story and plot; it simply has more technical aspects involved in order for it to be brought to life. I have noticed these kinds of metaphors in numerous films, even most recently in this class. The train entering the tunnel in “North by Northwest,” was a metaphor for the action of two of the main characters who were in the previous cut. These techniques definitely add flavor to a film and create something more that just a narrative. It gives it a certain poetic life that can be appreciated at the deeper level, which seems to be what formalism was all about.