Rhythm in Genre Cinema and Cinematic Avant-Garde

Abstract

The article attempts to outline certain principles and prerequisites for the study of the role of rhythm as the fundamental moment of any film and various approaches (avant-garde and mass cinema) to overcoming, or vice versa, fixation in the film of a given rhythm of the social whole, often associated with and expressed through aspects of industrial production rhythm. General connections between Fordism and classic Hollywood cinema are outlined, as well as between post-Fordism as an economic expression of postmodernism (the cultural logic of late capitalism) and the “cinema of nostalgia” of the 1970s. A comparative study of the approach to the issue of rhythm in the field of the cinematic avant-garde (using the example of the German avant-garde movement of the 1920s (“absolute film”)) and classic genre American cinema is offered. An attempt was made to connect the approach to the rhythm of the cinematic narrative in the film La Palisiada (1923, directed by Philip Sotnychenko) with the above-mentioned moments of the history of cinema, understanding La Palisiada as, at the same time, a study of rhythm and a study of modes of perception of the 1990s years in the current Ukrainian society. It is argued that the research in the realm of rhythm and the nostalgic orientation of films (including La Palisiada) can be closely related manifestations of the same deeply-rooted process — nostalgia for a different rhythm of the social whole, given in this particular case as the 1990s of Ukrainian history