A Room and a Half and the art of poetic cinema

A Room and a Half (2009) is a feature film directed by Andrei Khrzhanovskii, which traces a journey into the artistic world and the early years of Joseph Brodsky. Loosely based on Brodsky’s eponymous essay, the film offers a fictionalized account of the poet’s memoirs, which are creatively explored and enriched by materials taken from his interviews, poetry, and original drawings. By focusing on the polystylistic formal features of Khrzhanovskii’s work the chapter analyzes the film within the framework of poetic cinema, used in Viktor Shklovskii’s sense of the term. Apart from exploring and interpreting the conceptual platform of Brodsky’s oeuvre, the film, arguably, stretches the limits of biographical discourse by conducting a creative dialogue with the viewer on broader metaphysical questions, concerning the reflective and reproductive power of memory, familial love, and existential choices.