An Auteur Study of Kira Muratova Focusing on the Films Two in One and Melody for a Street Organ

Sammanfattning: This thesis is dedicated to the cinema art of Kira Muratova with the focus on the theme of grotesque. Kira Muratova shot films of different genres; mixing styles, creating a new reality of cinema, mixing audio-visualization of people with animals, classical literature with slang, including photography and pornography, installation, performance, opera and ballet. Due to this fact, her films provide rich objects of research in Visual Culture Studies. This study is concerned with the audio-visual effects, images and scenes connected to the theme of grotesque in the auteur cinema of Kira Muratova. Deliberately departing from the possible socio-historical context, the author of the project presents intertextuality of Muratova's film. This thesis includes a detailed analysis of images and shots of several films with a focus on grotesque and along with general description of the director’s main devices. It searches for meanings, denotations and connotations in the films’ images as the essential elements of the films. In addition to an overview of the whole art of director and auteur features, the project deals in more details with two recent films by Muratova— Two in One (2006) and Melody for a Street Organ (2009). Both films are examples of post-modern cinema, and represent ironically, controversially, abruptly, painfully, but truthfully, many important cultural and philosophical issues and essences: arts, man and his place in the world, his relation to other living beings. Semiotics, auteur theory, other theories of film studies, linguistics and psychoanalysis in their postmodern appearances have been applied to the analysis of Kira Muratova's film.