| Abstract [eng] |
The paper deals with the analysis of contemporary Lithuanian documentary film in the field of communication and culture theories, where “contemporary” film is considered to be made more or less in the last ten years. It analyses the object in the terms of innovation of definition, iconography of the protagonist and structures of narratives. The definition of documentary film is examined on the one hand from the journalistic point of view, characterizing it as a fact-based film that depicts actual events and persons; on the other hand, in the film theory sight it is considered to be a manipulative narration of the story, taken out of reality. A central question is if characteristics of factuality is remaining the main one talking about the documentary film, as the examples of Lithuanian poetic documentaries are far-off exposing of reality. That is why this study suggests a new definition of the object, putting a director’s role in the narrative above actual reflection of factuality: a documentary is called here a director’s viewpoint (in the case of Lithuanian poetic genre – a meditation) on the phenomena of the objective reality. Qualitative film text analysis and the communicational approaches of John Fiske, Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard’s ideas provide the theoretical framework for the study. Documentary films are analyzed as the object of science of communication. It is focused on reading the communicational codes and conventions in different genres of documentary films, resulting in classifying code systems to several visual roles of heroes and two types of narrative structures. It is concluded that particular types of narratives use particular codes of iconography: closed structures use to depict concrete personalities in digital codes, meanwhile open-structured narratives prefer more abstract visualization of an icon-hero using analogical codes and conventions. Low rate of narration, long lasting frames and minimal action, symbolical protagonists and unlinear editing presuppose difficulties for the receiver to encode open-structured stories, called “poetic” in Lithuanian context. That is why it is discussed that poetic codes should be established as a new genre in the field of documentary, which would help the receiver to distinguish it as “poetic”, unconventional, and perceive it in the frame of the genre. In Fiske’s words, it would make the audience to gain the communicational competence to read and accept this new kind of text as a reflection of national mentality and specific features of Lithuanian directors’ character. It is also concluded that documentary film correlates with documentary photography in terms of thematic and generic discourses, namely Jonas Mekas’ “Frozen Film Frames”, that can be considered both as an object of film and of photography. As Lithuanian documentary film is not deeply researched in the fields of communication science and culture studies, further research on establishment of the poetic genre and the audience perception of unconventional narratives would contextualize studying film as an object of communication. |
