Cinema Discourse in the Poetics of Manuel Puig's The Buenos Aires Affair

The aim of the work is to determine how the cinematic nature of the narrative is achieved and to trace its role in the dynamics of the plot and images of the main characters of the third novel by the Argentine postmodernist writer Manuel Puig The Buenos Aires Affair. The research was carried out within the framework of a discursive approach. Special attention is paid to the intermedial and intertextual aspects. The first step towards the aim was to distinguish between such concepts as cinema language, cinema text, cinema speech and cinema discourse. It has been concluded that cinema discourse is the most capacious concept, since it includes both the expressive means of the cinema language, on the basis of which the film narration and dialogue of the “collective author” and the viewer are built, and the entire set of cinema texts inscribed in the communicative space of culture. This understanding of the term “cinema discourse” made it possible to consider not only the influence of “cinema poetics” (expressive means of “cinema language”) on the poetics of a literary work, but also the writer's appeal to cinema in the text of the novel as a cultural phenomenon. It has been found that the novel approaches the film due to the totality of artistic techniques and means: nonlinearity of the narrative, the effect of being present in the moment of the narrative, the convention of time and space inherent in the cinematic principle of constructing the chronotope, montage. In addition, the creation of the “watching a film” effect is associated with the dialogic nature of the novel. On the one hand, these are the compositional features of the narrative: in the dialogues, there are often no words of the narrator, which brings the novel closer to a dramatic work and turns the reader into a spectator. On the other hand, dialogism manifests itself in Bakhtin's understanding (as a dialogue between the author/character and the reader) through the text's appeal to the reader (the second interlocutor is often absent in the dialogues so the reader takes their place). Film discourse as a cultural phenomenon is present in the novel in the epigraphs to each chapter. The author quotes excerpts from famous films of the mid-twentieth century. The insert films influence the perception of the subsequent chapter and participate in creating the image of the “starlet” which the main character tries to reach. Thus, citing films connects the novel with cinema, enhancing its intertextuality and intermediacy, and plays a key role in understanding the plot and the characterological component of the novel. The author organically applies film techniques in literary narration and appeals to the reader's spectator experience, creating the effect of “watching” the film while reading the novel, which is important for understanding the images of the main characters and the artistic structure of the novel.

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