Conclusion

making it real

Amy E. Varela

pp. 181-188

in: Martin Flanagan, Bakhtin and the movies, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

Abstract

The main objective of this work has been to show that Hollywood film texts involve us in practices of watching and understanding that mobilize a field of discursive relations that I have identified as "dialogic". Bakhtin suggests that the project of dialogism encompasses all expressions of socio-ideological life and is without limit in space and time; it takes heed of our contributions to meaning, but will ultimately carry on without us (MHS, p.170). The size and span of this conception prompts a vertiginous feeling, requiring us to find ways to corral dialogic energies into a less abstract form that can meaningfully interject in our work with film. It can be forgotten, particularly when attending to the later essays,¹ that Bakhtin is a great thinker of the specific as well as of the global. This book has tried to look at structural, generic and technological specificities in a series of representative texts without treating diegetic events as ontologically separate from context and from reception; preserving a sense of the flow that Bakhtin says is channelled through the "gates' of the chronotope. Markers of film style can be thought of as accents of the depth, range and history of the ideological voices that collaborate in the textual enunciation. Hamid Naficy argues that modes of production inflect the freedoms and inhibitions of filmmakers, which in turn produces style as accent (2001, pp.43–6).