The conventions in art through the eyes of Viktor Shkolovsky

In 1970, the writer Viktor Shkolovsky, who lived from 1893 to 1984, published a book, in which he follows the laws of literary work and unveils some secrets of artistic craftsmanship. The volume titled "About the disparity of similarity" is the result of a long literary experience and many years of reflection on the essence and meaning of speech in human life. A special place here is the extensive essay "About the conventions," in which Shkolovsky sets out his views on the conventions of depicting space and time in art. A literary work or a painting referring to our epoch or custom to our perception is hardly perceived in their conditionality. We look at the picture painted in perspective and we not only perceive, but we also see the mutual arrangement of the parts, we know which subject behind them. But if we look at the drawings on an ancient Greek vase, we will see that nowhere the figures intersect with each other, they are in an easily perceived space, but not in our perspective, which we are accustomed to. For us this foreign conditionality is less noticeable, Shkolovsky points out, because it is executed not on a plane and is created as a decoration of a decorative object. In order to introduce the prospect of new art, a certain convention was needed, because by seeing the objects in the distance reduced, we at the same time know that these objects do not really diminish. Plato attached great importance to symmetry, and in order to overcome the promising diminution, he chose the picturesque representation of the architectural objects. The philosopher insists on portraying what is not seen but what is known. This old convention seems complete and its replacement takes centuries. The new convention is confirmed in the dispute. In our minds, the objects exist on their own and compared to one another according to their differences. In the picture, however, they are in a different ratio - we see them as close or distant.

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The dispute seems to be resolved. The children, however, retain the cognitive and realistic comparisons of the subjects by their nature and their mutual importance. They can draw the man larger than the house, because his meaning for the painting is bigger. Children draw according to the convention of the meaning of the hierarchy of objects, concludes Viktor Shkolovsky. But the argument is not complete in the literature as well. Objects are enlarged, emphasized according to their weight, according to their meaning in a given situation. Gogol describes the Cossacks' campaign on the endless desert steppe. Taras points to his sons a small, black-out point and says the Tartar is racing there. And the writer adds, that the little mustache head from far away looked right in their narrow eyes, smelled the air as a hunting dog, and disappeared like a roe when he saw that the Cossacks were thirteen. The Tartar is a rival to Taras, and the Cossack, who knew the horseman, drew the invisible mustache and narrow eyes. Thus the detail becomes the bearer of its definition of space. We accept this conditionality by obeying the logic and will of the artist who built the image, says Victor Shkolovsky. In painting there is a so-called iconic perspective, in which the object is depicted unfolded with all its essential details. The medieval painter puts the man in front of him to see clearly his two symmetrical sides - the two hands, the two halves of the face. The top of the table is shown at the top to see all the objects on it. But if possible, all the legs on the table are displayed as well. The artist had to reduce the size and number of individual objects in order to place them entirely. For example, the building on the icon could be lower than the human height. The leaves of the tree are painted not in the form of a common crown, but each leaf individually, with the number of leaves decreasing sometimes to two or three. Shkolovsky emphasizes that every picturesque image, and perhaps every artistic work, requires the habit of perceiving the depiction, to be understood as the convention between the viewer and the author of the work. There are different conventions in the representation of space, and some appear in a particular way in the cinema. The different lenses of the camera have different focal lengths, that is, different spatialities. If the same object is shot with different lenses, it will be different in space and differently close to us. All these various images are presented to us almost simultaneously. Frames go one after another in a meaningful or scenic sequence. There is no time for consideration here, but there is interest in the examination. Space is built on the viewer at the suggestion of the director.

But besides the Convention on Closer to the Most Important and the Removal of the Lesser, another convention is needed in the cinema. Usually we look with two eyes. This allows us, by changing the visual axis, to judge the distance. The cinema camera shoots with one eye. But we have accepted the convention that cinema depicts the depth. This depth, Shkolovsky thinks, is achieved with different lighting or movement in the frame. Long-distance movement, on a mountain road, turns the plane into a conscious depth. Perhaps now we are on the eve of the emergence of a new convention on cinematographic space. By using the effect of the distance of sound, what Tolstoy did in "War and Peace" can be done: In Borodino's description, the smoke of the exploding projectile and the sound that seems to confirm the blast are separated, and the delay of the sound gives the phonetic depth of the stage. Thus, in today's cinema, the sound depth occurs. Besides the conventions of space, Viktor Shkolovsky examines in his essay also the conventions of the time in art. In the "Iliad", the battle, consisting of a number of collisions, is interrupted by the disputes of the gods who have to decide who to be the winner. Parallel time appears. In Stern's "Sentimental Journey", the journey itself, that is, the hero's movement, is delayed and paranoid. Instead of traveling, the hero stays in the same place for a long time. It divides the inner time, the time in the hero's mind, his analysis of the events. In Filling's novel "The History of Tom Jones", the course of time is varied. Years often go through the intervals between the heads of the book. For the artist, the structure of art is something created as if by himself. And he, consciously, sometimes unconsciously, chooses those structures that fit his artistic task in an effort to get to know the reality. The Art Convention, Viktor Shkolovsky concluded, is a condition of a relationship between structures, an agreement that the author unwittingly makes between himself and those to whom he sends his message. Art conventions can be compared, they can be compared, but they are not the same. The inequality of the similar is part of the laws of art.