The Expressiveness of Cinema and the Expressiveness of Myth: On the Affinity of Cinema Language and Mythological Thought

The article is focused on discovering similar principles and mechanisms of communication in such information transmission systems as myth and cinema. The author considers this text as a prolegomena to the model of analysis of the mythological content in a film. A myth is a way to construct a model of reality; it projects the contents of this model onto the facts and phenomena surrounding a person, giving them new meanings and organizing new connections between them. These facts and phenomena can be perceived from two points of view: profane and sacred. The sacred mode of perception is possible in the case of “synchronous reading” of these facts and phenomena — a certain object expressing a part of the mythological model of the world is perceived as such only in the case of presentation of this model in general and other objects representing its other segments.

The elements of a film text, like those of a myth, also can be perceived in two dimensions: linear, that is consecutive in time, and “spectacular-programmable”, that is as self-contained phenomena, not tied to the film’s linear plot. In the second case, these elements can express the connotations preceding the film, determined not by its plot, but by the conditions and concepts of the social group of authors and spectators of the movie. The meanings that images represent on the screen also depend on the organization of these images within each particular system — that is, the principle of “synchronous” perception also works for them.

The author proposes principles of identification of mythological signifiers in cinema, and describes in general terms the mechanism of their analysis. The main question to ask in such an analysis is: how do the signifiers of mythological ideas and representations, revealed in a film at its “synchronous”, “nonlinear” level, interact with the linear plot of this film?.

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