THE RED NARRATIVE CINEMA: AN URBAN MONTAGE IN MOSCOW

Abstract

Statement of the problem. The article explores the concept of transformation as an invisible and constructive key element in narrative films in close relation to its architectural reflections in the Red Narrative Cinema reconstructed as a new shell for the Pushkinsky Cinema Hall, built in 1961 in Moscow's Pushkin Square. This article does not intend to analyze or re-read a certain type of narrative film, but instead attempts to explore how filmic architecture is transformed into narrative cinema in relation to Pushkin Square as a public space in which the Red Narrative Cinema is located. Results. The building offers the constructs of narrative film, defined as a representational, organizational film that tells its audience or spectators a fictional story or narrative. Thus the building, as a stimulating entity, narrates a sensory perception of gathering for an important event that can be visually experienced by spectators, passers-by, and local residents within a juxtaposition of two different materials that wrap the building in a layered structure. Through the use of a continuous change of colour that gradually turns from transparent to red as a sensory pattern and coincides with the cinema event time, the building is able to signify a familiar but diminished pattern in urban space. The building acts as a visual stimulus that reminds people of an event through the use of a dynamically shaped narrative and concretizes montage theories in cinema into space, thus bridging the classical narrative and the narrative of transformation through which the urban space's meaning is symbolized as a grounds for creating debate on the formation of its backbone. Conclusions. Depending on the structure of the fabula (story) and syuzhet (plot of a narrative) as two essentials of narrative film defined by the Russian Formalists, the Red Narrative Cinema embraces the spectator in Pushkin Square and urban life by recalling cultural memory through its transformation of light during the daytime as a visual stimulator for residents and introduces a new language of systems. The findings of the research have important implication for ways of finding correlations between montage and urban narrative, as the building underlines that there is no specific or formulaic approach in montage as in the thoughts of Eisenstein.