#1
“Dust”, written and directed by Milčo Mančevski, camera by Barry Ackroyd, edited by Nick Gaster, music by Kiril Dzajkovski, cast: David Venham (Luke), Adrian Lester (Edge), Rosemary Murphy (Angela), Joseph Fiennes (Elijah) Anne Brochet (Lilith), Vlado Jovanovski (The Teacher), Nikolina Kujaca (Neda), Salaetin Bilal (the Turkish officer)
A small theoretical framework
Thinking over what a theoretical–analytical frame should I give to this study, I decided for the classical Barthesian (post)structuralist dichotomy – work/text – since I hold that’s the most adequate way to explain my positions and solve my dilemmas related to the movie. According to this, a generally accepted point of view in the theory is that the text, or the intratextual reality, is an order of signs generating a meaning. That’s the one material and non–material side which, in the movies, in particular, starts from the opening shot sequence, the credits and cast and goes all the way to the closing cast (quite often the credits and cast also, i.e. the frames of the text, intextualize, with their displacing, the absence, their way of presentation, the visually–typographic styling and together with the other segments they generate meanings that are essential to the text. The work is a product of this contextual, subtextual, extratextual instance that overlooks, analyzes, contextualizes the text, selects and defines its meanings, gives judgements, gives it a line, impoverishes it or enriches it. The work is created by the tension of the pragmatic axle, the relation – author (the team working on the movie including the producers) – text – recipient (the critic or the scientist as a special, privileged recipient of the art work). The text, although is materially finished and given, on the meanings it generates or can generate, it’s open, unstable, multivalent; and the work feigns stability, judgements, situating, materialization of the established meanings and values of the text, and can be changed, though not so often, with every new reading of the text and its transformation i.e. turning into a work.