STUDIES AND RESEARCH

Ellipses and their Rhetorical Quality in the film Concert by Branko Belan

Film Concert will be remembered in Croatian film history as one of the most criticized works in its time. It took years for the film to achieve its today’s status of one of the most significant Croatian films of all times. This essay, however, focuses on the particular use of ellipse in regard to the global idea of the movie. Namely, storyline of the Concert follows the destinies of several people during the time of great political and socio-structural changes. Within the context of the events and under the influence of the changes in society, characters acquire different socio-psychological statuses.

With prominent ellipses between the episodes, Belan is trying to show, and he does it with much success, the extents of these psychological and positional changes caused by social upheavals. Leaps in time serve to emphasize the overall transformations of characters and the social situations. The author of the essay first defines a concept of ellipses, establishes its global function, and then proceeds to make a more elaborate analysis of individual ellipses as they appear in each of the episodes.

Vladimir Gojun