Brodsky's Formulas of Poetry at Screening and More Strokes for  Landscapes
A Publicity Article by Anna Polibina-Polansky (a Revised and Replentished Version)

Brodsky's formulas of poetry are precise though sometimes they do sound vapory, vague, lacking contours and keeping repetitions and plain similes. He means definite terms under which the poetic genres may freely go. Mr Joseph Brodsky at his Nobeli speech over genres of literature admitted that poetry is a huge amplifier and speed-enhancer for consciousness. A collection of metaphors within one stylistics, in case if a certain fabula (subject, plot) is kept, can be considered as an act of poetizing. Aesthetics is prior to ethics and morals, as Brodsky formulates it.
Outer actions are not obligatory to Tarkovsky (his protagonists are often sufficed with an outer paisage, with generalized landscape). Fellini also often does with a single landscape (or a mise en scene), and spreads its impact over the entire plot (Ginger and Fred, Eight and a Half, A Rehearsal of an Orchestra), but those paisages have more to do with well-comprehended, up molded post-modernism. Tarkovsky often omits the context of the epoch (Ivan's Childhood, Andrey Rublev), and that is how he freely handles with an old-Slavonic (highly experimental) pieces of the visual, dynamic experience. These are broad allegories, metaphors embracing entire layers of the undermeant reality. However, Tarkovsky is considered as a personality of rippened postmodernism, at his genres.
Brodsky's theories are a Psaltyr for poetic cryticists, as he does little with his poetic practice, but, rather, with his personal circle of literary erudition. Cafavis acquires capacities at which he could get compared to Frost, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, etc. He qualifies poetic figures at a seemingly well-balanced, justified way, omitting sheerly literary parameters. He is rather an opera evaluator than a grateful viewer, and his visual rows have more to do with black-and-white static photography. He is very much traditional at artistic genres and their estimating; he does not notice the dimensions of synthetic and inter-structural genres on which modern European museums are assuredly operating; it can't be said so, however, of his poetic scales and formulated prospectives. He remains sagacious and syncrete, at the realm of poetry, duly and diligently characterizing the lyric phenomenas; so they prove to be prior to other artistic genres, as if poetry goes forth at the cavalcades of featuring genres' dimensions.  We can admit that the crytical terms and genre systems are more or less universal for the major part of artistic clues and variations. So, hyperboles and allegories work at all scales of images, at versatile genres, and the reality when cryticists alter stylistics and artistic principles can be encountered more and more frequently, as if some ancient theoretical pieces of practice are being gradually restored by some mighty observer or even ruler.
D.Lynch and Q.Tarantino create films based upon a video variety of stylistic clues of the reality; they find a seemingly unexisting compromise between unsimilar styles and close angles of the same reality. The groomed reality bears the traits of the experimental perception, rather than of the experimental methods and comparative devices. Those allegories are rude and crude, only at first glance. But at the context of the entire narration, they acquire features of a wholesome, up thought methodics.
R.Bresson contemplates actors as mere models (Murat Nemet-Nejat, Chax Press Publishing House, NY) ; so he negates their basic capacity due to the principle of vision of plots.  He regards subjects, as accomplished, elaborated, perfectized substances, self-sufficing  and deserving immersing into their dense layers.  J.-L.Gaudare negated the very principle of the shades of stylistics in cinema, bringing to life and vividness, the principle of parallelism of the screen with the highly complicated existance, sophisticated by the very notion (definition).  Tarkovsky came even further at this, as his actors are only the samples of the epoch's up molded profiles, some static sculptures developing his own verbal ideas, not due to their mutating characters or their complicated nature, but, rather, to transfigurating and yet, constant epochal reality. The principles of estimating the cinema genres are being overviewed, overwhelmed, re-vised at the spot, by the very scale of the masterpiece and the filmmaker's screen handwriting. We face a new reality that keeps the principles of judgement and inner musing, already within itself.
Screen semiotics is all of poetic symbolism, tonalities, metaphors and metonymies; so the theory of lyrics and fiction proves to be peremptory (excluding, however, the theory of compounding stanzas and the syntagmatic patterns of prose).
Brodsky preferred opera cryticism and static photography to the visibly innate ideas of screening of the reality, and the past of Venice was more meaningful to him than the reality of multi-genre Italian (and pan-European) cinema, to speak nothing of American movies. His access was just, at his scale, and quite challenging and baffling for outer witnessing persons, from the point of his epoch.
The semiotics of prose was ever speculative, from the point of the language and its inevitable obscurity (not only in Medieval-and-Gothic times, however). We are in habit of wondering of how the victorian capitalism was reflected at the novel "Dombey and Son" by Charles Dickens or how the early education of D.H.Lawrence got reflected in his fiction. These are steady archetypes and "common places (topos)" of cryticism, and that all is due to the language and its semantic resources. Barthes affirmed, opposind Raymond Picard, that Racine can be interpreted in a multitude of ways, from freudism and structuralism to marxism and modernity. Such were also the recollections of Frank Webster. I am recalling the "Pushkin Magazine' (issued by the "Europe" Publishing House in Moscow back in the 2000s) where Prouste was regarded from two points of accessing, classical and postmodern (that greatly vary between themselves). Nabokov was considered, however, from a "wholesome" point, as the author of a unique style fed with various geographical contexts.
I am recalling those vivid examples as back in 2003 I happened to translate into Russian, due to the Soros's Open Society Foundation's initiatives, a bright book of magnificent literary-and-media reserching publicity by Frank Webster who narrated of Barthes as a "multiplicationist" at the trade of fresh, renewed interpreting of classical literary texts. He also admitted that we often do not with the up rendered reality, but, rather, with the tongue of the author and his "sense of speech". So the lyric protagonist of Brodsky affirmed  at his cycle "A Part of Speech", that "from the entire person, we are left a particle, a portion,  a part of speech" (in several meanings), and he was unimplorably correct. The Creator quotes a poetically gifted personality, all partially, by His preferences and choices. I remember our professor Victor Golyshev (an eminent Brodsky's poetic addressee) admitting that "we think not only with the help of wording, but, rather, with unconscious images and liberated allegorical structures" (somewhat). It is not seldom when I try up this formula onto my basic dictums and utterances that occurred to myself over decades.
As we think of the health of our close ones or, say, of our own definite passion for someone, other daily themes get tarnished and faded away, they get removed to peripheries of memory. We are egotistic and egocentric at our "closest psychology", and it is rather our basic mode of being and of our own nature than anything starkly selfish and speculative.
Brodsky ever found very much persuading ways of expressing his true poetic self. He was sеraightforward and openly firm, honest and trying to avoid wrong, simplified and deceptive formulas (seemingly and by his linguistic resources). His rare colloquial expressions are summoned only to emphasize his subconsciousness. As an author, he is based at accidental  contexts and occasionalisms no less than his favorite lyricist Mandelstam once did. He is a prophecizer and an epochal  diarist, by his main vocation. So his tonality truly bribes our humanistic self. We start up breathing with the same stylistic air, with his aloof lyric character (a lyric heroe, by a precise, literal Russian expression, as the Russian terms here inherits straightly to the Greek original phrase-notion). His structure of signs and allegories has a lot to do with our hidden, intimate psychology highly opposite to totalitarian viewing of things (and so he noticed, by himself).
Jean Baudrillard spoke of the system od signs, in texts. The scope of meanings is now huge and subtle, versatile and keeping varieties of contexts (often due to interpenetrating of literary tongues, mainly ones by various influential or well-read authors). The simulated, out feigned, artificial reality trades situations, contexts, interpretations and intentional messages that are kept at our memory as some ads, teasers, announcements, up crowning phrases. So the very image of the tongue is being shaped, up molded, up thought, conjured...
The upper genres of art are summoned to surpass this primitive and low mode of being. Poetry is a mighty, widely resounding amplifier for the visible reality, Brodsky affirmed at his Nobeli speech. Colorful metaphors and well-sounding, acute phrases (not phraseologisms, however) are meant to struggle for our comprehension, fantasies, memorizing of things. So they win (gain, retain, etc.) our own attention and imagination, and we surrender our will to those imposed, intensive, insisting contours of plausible, desirable worlds and realms. We are victimized to the air of created linguistic universes, no less than that.
Cinematographer  is a certain system of reflecting strives and fanciful realities. The filmmaker offers as much to us as he is able to comprise with his own ultimate imagination (he is fully indulged to the world of his speech, and his input is undoubtedly absolute). We own and spend his deposites by the verbal means. His efforts are highly concentrated  at the text and are summoned to keep the reality (and, simultaneously, our emotions either) "up tossed" into the needed stylistic and intonational direction. The situational context we are freely offered is in fact, elaborated in details and up thought "up to the very rim". The author's fervor is the uppermost impulse possible at verbalized tone-modulating itself. The motives for fiction are foundated upon the inner strives for transfigurating the images of reality; there exists an obvious author's need for the ultimate textual redemption for what has been out lived, survived, perceived and comprehended at some imperative, obligatory  and inevitable way.
The system of signs by Brodsky has a lot to do with morality, no matter how the moral side is visibly neglected, re-thought, got hidden or diminished. He inherits rather, to the most painful and responsible author's access to genres. His cordial scale is ever sharpened, suffered, ultimate and utmost, throughout his poetic and prosaic texts equally. He overlived five heavy heart attacks, not only in reality, but, rather, at his verbal reality of frequently altering summits and ditches. His lyric character truly deserves our "linguistic attention" (a notion, by Frank Webster). We willingly surrender our subtle, elated "verbal imagination" (by the expression of Akhmatova, Brodsky's close acquaintance and teacher in poetry who survived all hardships of the Russian first sixty-six years of the 20th century) to the "narrative will of the author" (by my own formula). Brodsky openly teaches us how to thrive at discerning the essence of the general happenings of the society; through the lurking catering of his tonalities, we feel the gist of "what is meant to be uttered at writing" (I spread my own terms onto the stylistic phenomena of speech and can't do without generous wordings).  Prosodic gammas are not too easy to be altered, as they convey unallowed, prohibited, well-erased angles of vision, Brodsky's lyric character insists. The reality ought to keep its contours, throughout the poetic narration; so he is widely known as an author for epic stories, despite the length of his stanzas and poems. "Long poems and enumerated cycles" are thought to be a clue mode of his self-expression, though their number hardly exceeds one of his "brief excerpts about the reality" (pure and unexaggerated lyric sketchery).
Brodsky points at that we are responsible  for flaws and drawbacks and 'neglected, victimized items' of what is around (in order not to talk of the existantial cryteria of allegorical writing). The reality of the entire last century (primarily, in Europe, Russia and the Middle East) insists at that verbal strives of morality, are righteous, correct and inevitable.
It is thought that the reality in America greatly corresponded to the Russian psychological novel of the 19th century (to the cycle starting from Dostoevska and Turgenev to early Nabokov and bellelettrist Aldanov). But Faulknaire, Salinger, T.Williams, Wilder, Hemingway (partially), Capote and, Stone and Updike go much ffurther at their thematic elaborating of simlistically modernized plots. Their genre is seemingly traditional, but their cognitive access is one of the postmodernity's era. We face a new epoch at screenwriting, staging and shaping of new plays, as the after-war penetration of European thematic streams spreads upon continents, of considerable impact to the American and Latin prose.
Totalitarism at all categories (nationalism, bolshevism, putchism, etc.), is destructive and putting all history and culture of the society, under a huge threat. Though Brodsky thought culture and history to be somewhat opposite and never allowed those two notions, to be equalized, at any dimension (look up his Nobeli speech "By the Facial Non-general Expression"). Honesty is the largest cortsey and the best policy at poetry, proved Brodsky, with all his lyric experience and metaphoric means. The moral outlooks of the epoch prove to dictate further principles of the genres' development, though they may be sometimes overlooked by contemporaries or taken for other cryteria. Brodsky's creed was at aesthetic principles, but he could afford this to himself, after all in verses and featuring publicity. We even have to agree to his prosodic scale.
The poetics of contexts are very much accentualized, for the early works of Brodsky. His archive had to be digitalized and duly spreaded, and that need coincided with the era of Internet development. Moreover, Brodsky was a compelled epigone of Akhmatova's intonations. So the era greatly owned to his handwriting, back in the mid-nineties. The systems of digital typing and of machine translations have overlived several of revolutionary stages, since Brodsky's death; some of them are worthy and well-elaborated. His creative masterpieces have been issued as a small collection of his works at his home city, in four academic volumes, as a separate volume of his prose and essays, as a poetic volume of 1981 in various English translations, and so on. Several films and performances have been issued and staged and up screened, over the entire period of his life (by Kokovkin, Liberov, Shishov and Yakovitch, Khrzhanovsky, by YHS, etc.).
Brodsky's long poem "Gorbunov and Gerchakov" reflects his hard experience of doing with a system of mental health under the totalitarian Soviet regiment. Mental hospitals served no less than ghettoes for genre artists and poets. Brodsky learned the hardway of being an object at this complicated tool of moral and physical punishments. That was how I began my doing with the theme of talented mental patients, at cinema and publicity.
I am making experimental films, where all feature scripts and poetic screenplays are written by myself; they are self-drawn or foundated at my own snapshots and dynamical visual rows. My two-part film of Brodsky "The Vague Harbor of the Redemption" (director-playwright Anna Polibina-Polansky, 2013) is meant to introduce a panorama of his original stylistics; it is based at my equity-rhythmic English poetic translations of his "programmal poems".  My Russian post-modern film "Carmine Frescoes of Joseph Brodsky: the Venetian Sheen" (director-scriptwriter Anna Polibina-Polansky, 2011) has gained popularity among pan-European audiences, due to my self-drawn sketchery, as if out of his life. His best friends (throughout the entire lifetime), Rein and Golyshev, taught me the craft of poetic writing and of featuring translation, accordingly. My self-drawn English reel of Akhmatova (over my own English poetic translations from her), "The Clay of Magic Sounds, or Those Contours Will Not Quench Within" (director-essayist Anna Polibina-Polansky, 2012) took an award of a film festivity at Broadway, NY (RDFF). I have also produced short films of Brodsky's literary-and-life acquaintances, Dovlatov, Pekurovskaya, Rein, Bobyshev, Basmanova, and demonstrated them over the center of Moscow and in European countries. This circle of genre personalities was extremely meaningful for his perception of the complicated reality of former  Leningrad and Moscow. Those personalities determined Brodsky's life itinerary, at positive and negative ways.
The poet of two capitals, Brodsky enriched his genre capacity abroad, in his compelled exile that was first to fully recognize him, as a lyricist and a mighty voice of the cruel, totalitarian epoch (that we yet remember). The "verbal imagination" is summoned to exceed the epoch and to prophecize of the humanitarian and cultural values and threats; all other human capacities are inferior and secondary, to these ones. By Anna Polibina-Polansky; January, 2021; Moscow.