Sunday, October 9, 2011

Hybrid Construction in Pedro Costa's No Quarto da Vanda

In response to Daniel's point, I would like to argue that I think Bakhtin is interested not so much in the extent to which units of language outline the socio-historical ramifications of the words they exclude--though language certainly is useful for this--but in the extent to which all our utterances are cobblings-together of utterances we have heard others speak in other language.

I will cite the film No Quarto da Vanda by the filmmaker Pedro Costa, whose films the IU Cinema screened in a retrospective this weekend, and whose lectures before and after the films inspired me more than perhaps anything since I was a middle-schooler.

One particular composition reminded me of Bakhtin: The left and right thirds of the frame are dark; the middle third is a doorway that leads out into a narrow alley in which Vanda sits with a crate full of the vegetables she is selling to support her heroin addiction. We hear the sound of the bulldozers encroaching, demolishing the Lisbon shanty in which film is set. We hear also a stereo in some room down the street issuing the refrain of that ubiquitous song--"I've got the power!"--but it is muffled. The irony and the bathos that result from the juxtaposition are powerful. And, in a film that blends documentary with fiction--its director's interventions evinced by the unquestionable or inevitable quality of the shots' compositions, even as they appear minimized by the impossibly total realism--the shot seemed to suggest that all our expression is two-thirds excavated by the din of past expression. And that the two thirds are merely what we notice. That is, that when we express we collate the propaganda of others.

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