City as a Cinematic Text and the Place of Wandering Characters: Visual and Acoustic Poetry

Since the birth of cinema, filmmakers have created personal, political, philosophical, realistic, poetic, emotional and diverse portraits of cities. In the history of art, we’ve seen traveling poets, storytellers, painters, now we can talk about traveling filmmakers and their heroes, who explore and capture their journeys with the film camera. Images from the screen create our perception of places, like modern cities, where we have never been, as their visual or acoustic version is constructed by cinema. From City Symphonies to Essay films and lonely journeys of characters lost in urban landscapes, filmmakers have dialogues, open conversations with cities. Those personal conversations involve - critical thinking, aesthetical study of the place, memories and film language. Kutaisi, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Beijing, Berlin, New York or Paterson, cities from different parts of the world, with different cultural codes and the author’s vision have their visual doubles on the screen and become characters on their own. The article explores different approaches and cinematic dialogues with the cities, their representation and poetry in cinema - visual and acoustic. The semiotic analysis is used in the article as the methodology to observe visual and acoustic possibilities of the film language. The article also focuses on connection of literately forms with film language, how – poetry, essays, letters and diaries are connected with the cinema. In Manhatta (1921) by Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, Walt Whitman’s poem of the same name is “written” in the film and helps to explore the city. Modern example in cinema of writing poetry on the screen and also embodying it in all forms, visual or audio is - Paterson (2016) by Jim Jarmusch. Comparative study of the films from different parts of the world helps to describe a modern city in a film, as a modern audiovisual text, on the edge of reality and imagination, with new possibilities, experiments of form, and carrying the problems of wandering and lost characters in it. On the example of the chosen films, the article reflects on different images of cities, how they are becoming main characters and cinematic texts - from Kutaisi to Hong Kong.