“Poetic cinema” in Russian film studies: from a Formalist concept to the name of a movement

The purpose of the study is to trace the evolution of the concept of “poetic cinema”, introduced into Russian film studies by the Formalists in 1927, up to the present day. Drawing on theoretical, critical, and historical film studies – from articles by Viktor Shklovsky and Adrian Piotrovsky to contemporary works by Anna Vorobyova, Yevgeny Margolit, and Leonid Naumov – the article traces the main stages in the concept’s reinterpretation: its emergence as a Formalist category of method (1927); the appearance of the laudatory epithet “poet” (the 1930s-1940s); the return of the category to scholarly discourse during the Khrushchev Thaw; the discrediting of the category and its association with the cinema of the national republics (the second half of the 1960s – the 1970s); the rejection of the “poetic – prosaic” dichotomy in the second half of the 1970s; and post-Soviet interpretations. The scientific novelty of the study lies in presenting the history of the concept as a sequence of stages, at each of which its content, the films associated with it, and its connotations in film criticism changed. The study shows that by the late 1970s, “poetic cinema” ceased to function as a means of classifying cinema and became established as a designation for the montage cinema of the 1920s and Sergei Parajanov’s school. Contemporary scholars, for the most part, rely either on these established designations or on individual ideas from earlier interpretations.