1.
The basic methodology standpoint from which this text grew from, is the semiotic-typology approach of the Tartu semiotic school, which (under the undoubtedly influence of Mikhail Bakhtin – one of the greatest philosophers of literature and culture in 20th century) postulated the term of the isomorphism between the literature / or any other art (in our case, the film) and the culture in whole as a complex Text constituted by a certain number of different semiotic modelative systems.
If we accept the film text (as analogy with the literature) as subgenera of the cultural text – as Yurii Lotman says – then we come to a conclusion that: “the inner organization of the art literature (in our case – the film) is isomorphic to the culture as it is, and it rephrases and repeats the general principals of that organization”.
So, the phenomenon of the culture is taken as a primary one, while in the structural organization of the artistic text (here – the film) we seek for the isomorphic characteristics which show the deep and indisputable cultural disposition of the particular film’s artistic modeling system.
Taking into consideration the methodological basics of the comparative literature science, we come to the second relevant methodology standpoint in our approach to the Macedonian film: the theory of the poly-systematic qualification of the art phenomena in ones national literature, and in proper analogy – the ones national cinematography.
“Every national literature is a mono-literature system for itself, but almost any phenomena can be present in some other system also – no matter if it is epochal, regional or else.” – says the eminent European comparativist from Innsbruck, the academic Zoran Konstantinović.
In our case, it means that the Macedonian film, besides the fact that it belongs to its mother-system of the National cinematography, it can belong to the any other system: the system of the postmodern culture, or the genre system of the action, the horror, the thriller, the historical spectacle or any other film genre. And finally, it belongs to the regional system of the Balkans, which unites in itself many components: geopolitical, but cultural also.
“We’ll never understand any of the Balkan nations, or ethnical group and their literature or culture – if we study them isolated one from another, and without considering the whole Balkan milieu; because, the semi-island of the Balkans is more than a geographical wholeness – it is a historical and a cultural wholeness, too.” – says the Czech comparativist with a Macedonian background, the academic Ivan Dorowski.
Stepping into the field of the cultural and intercultural studies on the Balkans, we can actualize our third relevant methodology standpoint: the area of the imagology, which is often exclusively comparativistic’s area, but today it is a widely cultural field of studies, called mentality research.
In this area’s domain is the reconstructing the structures of the ratio and sub-ratio conscience, the myths, the ideologies and the utopias which shape the collective conscience, including the author’s as well. And if we have in mind that they can be expressed by various media (the artistic genre, the style, or the attitude of the individual to the various institutions of daily living – the marriage, the religion, the society, etc.). So, the imagology is necessary interdisciplinary by its epistemology profile, in cause of its various objects of interests in different areas of the culture in whole.
And finally, we introduce the last of our methodology standpoints included in this text, and that’s the standing of the – so called – the poetics of culture, or the cultural critics, shaped by methodology of the New historicism: “This project (the cultural poetics, the author’s note) is reverting the axis of the inter-textuality, replacing the diachronic text of the literature history with the synchronic text of the cultural system” – says, in his program-orientated text, the leading theorist of this school of literature – Louis Montrose.
If we try to reformulate all this, considering our problem here, we can say that the Macedonian film should be examined and analyzed inter-textualy , into the margins of the complex system of the Balkan culture, which shapes the specific phenomena of the Balkan film, or widely – the Balkan cultural system.