The Irony of Music Eventfullness in The Butterfly Hunt by O. Iosseliani

Researchers often talk about the carefully composed “universe” of O. Iosseliani’s films in which they perceive “harlequinade”, “carnival”, and “burlesque” as means of opposing the director’s creative consciousness to ideological discourses and related dramatic clichés. The director’s special thinking with musical and sound forms also appears to be oriented towards the effect of travesty “reversal” of meanings. The interaction of the layers of sound culture, which forms the archetypal subject of the master’s films, makes it possible to read his films as a sound parable. The article for the first time explores the musical form of the film The Butterfly Hunt (1992), where the idea of antagonism between the elite and mass culture is embodied in the principle of sonata and realized both at the level of the plot and in the process of interaction of diegetically significant inclusions from the pre-existing music. In Iosseliani’s film, the romantic archetype of sonata form is interpreted in accordance with the author’s worldview, combining nostalgic and ironic frames of mind. Thus, the first subject group is formed by episodes which concentrate the attempts of the characters — the inhabitants of two French family estates — to cultivate the “high” values of the European musical tradition, and the second subject group — by the key elements of the soundscape of a small town, saturated with musical events of everyday life. The dramaturgy of sonata antagonism captures the extinction of the individualistic-personal basis (lyrics), which at the plot level of the film corresponds to the steady advance of new machine technologies on the space of rural idyll. At the same time, the discovery in the film of the cyclic basis of the secondary form (concentric), as well as the connection of artistic expression with the genre archetype of scherzo, makes it possible to interpret the captured “degradation” processes in the context of an ironic oscillation of meanings as a special form of semantic rebirth.