Title of the research proposal: Slavic Avant-Garde Cinépoetry

Major and secondary disciplinary area: comparative media

Secondary disciplinary area or field of research: literature and cinema

Summary:
My project focuses on the longer narrative poems accompanied by photography or
photomontages and published as separate book editions across several Central and East European
countries during the interwar period. The research provides a comparative analysis of the avant-
garde cinépoetry from Soviet Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, while surveying
similar artworks from Western Europe. By a way of a number of distinct case studies, this
project examines the cinépoetry works from the angle of the “bioscopic book,” a concept
envisaged in a programmatic manner by El Lissitzky in 1923. The essential aspect of my
research demonstrates that the bioscopic book should not be mistaken for a genre, but rather,
should be understood as a theoretical, if not visionary, concept of a visual technology
approximated in the series of experiments. The project will conceptualize the bioscopic book as
an alternative cinematic apparatus (ciné-dispositive) through examining its materiality and
dynamic conceptual design. It will provide a comparative analysis of cinépoetry as a technology
for 1) the formulation and re-production of montage thinking as a new cognitive model by which
we interact with the outside world, 2) augmentation of intercultural, intermedial, and
interpersonal dialogue, and 3) transformation of readers/viewers into prosumers. In addition to
examining specific works of art, my project will look at the cross-cultural networks: the ways
and conditions under which a specific artwork was produced, disseminated, and consumed. The
project will study the larger apparatuses, “networks of discourses, pieces of knowledge, values,
etc., reciprocally linked and governed by strategies of management of power” (Eugeni), a part of
which are ciné-dispositives as their real, concrete, and experiential forms. By examining the
diversity of ciné-dispositives through which the larger apparatuses (dispositifs) are realized in
lived experience, reproduced and transformed, my research will provide an analytic context in
which these differences become meaningful and thus provoke new forms of understanding.

Aleksandar Bošković