Narrative Distance in Screenplay: “The Heir to Genghis Khan” by Vsevolod Pudovkin

Abstract

The article is devoted to the narratological analysis of a screenplay. A distance between a narrator and a story world that constitutes a narrative is studied in regard to a conception of screenplay not as an autonomous literary work but as a series of texts corresponding to various stages of preparation for a film shooting (in our case a libretto, a literary script and a shooting script). The comparison of the literary script and the shooting script of the film “The Heir to Genghis Khan” written respectively by Osip Brik and Vsevolod Pudovkin reveals the shift of the narrative distance, that determined the way the events were shown. During the transition from the literary script to the shooting script the narrative distance is decreased due to the director’s idea on the film and also due the industrial context of filmmaking.