The director’s approach to film text in movies following the rule of three unities
Authors: Khimich A. 
Published: March 2024

The purpose of the research. To identify the director’s tools for conveying the authorial understanding of history. To prove that the director’s authorial vision in working on film history does not always depend on the script written by the playwright. The article explores the directorial interaction with the film text in fiction films and identifies two forms of director’s engagement with film dramaturgy and examines the distinction between the “theatrical” approach to working with film text and the authorial interpretation of the story. The object of the research is films with realized unity of time, place, and action, serving as examples of the space for potential directorial authorial approach.

The methodology. In the article the following scientific methods are applied: research (to collect information about the chosen topic), deductive method (to identify certain stylistic features of films with the rule of three unities), comparative method (to identify the features of the director’s work), and generalization method (to write conclusions).

The results. In conclusion, films with embodied unity of place, action and time serve as a vivid basis for illustrating the interaction of the director with the cinematic context: working on such projects requires the ability to create a complex cinematic context and tell a story within limited possibilities without violating the artificially defined canon of the three unities. Through the analysis of selected cinematic contexts and the identification of the director’s toolkit used in them, authorial experiments with local narratives were divided into two groups. The first group included films in which the director works in a theatrical manner and simply transfers the action from the script to the screen, while the second group includes films with an existing authorial interpretation of the story, where the rule of the three unities is complemented by the director’s concept. Studying the director’s approaches of the second group allowed for the identification of four main tools for narrating a complex cinematic context, which complement or even contradict the script content: 1) the director-author’s chamber view (“camera-pen”) — to convey the directorial intonation of attitude towards characters and emphasize his authorial meanings and accents; 2) the chamber view of the character-author to convey his thoughts, attitude towards other characters, motivations, internal events, emotions, experiences, etc.; 3) audiovisual expression of the character’s state and associations through associative editing, to narrate the character’s perception of events; 4) a special, non-mediated cinema-theatrical actor’s existence to narrate complex characters and human relationships. None of these tools is usually inherent in the screenplay of the film, therefore, their application does not affect storytelling but only complements it with new meanings.

The scientific novelty. It is the first comprehensive study of the director’s aspect of interaction with the film text, depending on the author’s intention.

The practical significance. Prospects for further research are related to the following aspects of the evolution of cinema art, which require scientific attention: the methodology of directorial interaction with text and subtexts; directorial innovations in “screenlife” films, where the rule of the three unities is observed; director’s approaches to the cinematic adaptation of theatrical plays, and so on. Overall, the analysis of directorial tools is a dynamic and relevant process in light of the development of cinema industry technologies and the desire to experiment with formats and meanings of authorial expression.