Problems of Literary Cinematography in the Prose of Alberts Bels

Jūlija Dibovska Most of the prose works by Latvian writer Alberts Bels (1938) can be considered as cinematic in nature. In   the period of 40 years this author has written three collections of short stories and 15 novels. Since this was the Soviet period during the most productive time of Alberts Bels life he experienced censorship and had to contend with last remnants of slowly dying Socialist Realist standards in literature and art. However works of Alberts Bels have always been different and more visual than those of any other writer of Latvian prose fiction of that period. One of the differences between his prose and that of others is the presence of cinematic elements. These elements can be divided in two different but connected forms: functional elements – cinematic imagery, cinematic institutions and professions, elements of cinema industry and movie production; and structural elements – the mimicry of screenplay in prose, for the most part marked graphically but also considered as edited “screens”, “parts”, etc. These elements are also evident in the works of other European and American or even Russian authors’ such as Vladimir Nabokov, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, etc. Usually the cinematic elements in prose are related to the cinematic experience of the author. Those of Alberts Bels is very similar to that of other authors that have used cinematic imagery experimentally and successfully in their work.