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Authors
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Despite audience’s incessant exposures to a multitude of screens, windows, and images in
contemporary times, the presence of more than one screen at once in a cinematic context creates a problem
that conflicts with the medium itself: the competition for protagonism among the different narratives
that form the entirety of the frame. Even though this feature is mostly used to the films’ advantage, it is nevertheless
interesting to understand how different images and sounds can be composed in time and space.
Therefore, drawing on John Bruns, I propose to analyze this relationship between screens from a perspective
analogous to that of music. I attempt to transpose the idea of polyphony (i.e., a composition that
encompasses melodic lines that, albeit independent, create a whole greater than the sum of its parts), to
the work on narrative multiplicity in cinema. However, I believe that this analogy might be more interesting
if one considers specifically the split-screen technique, where there are literally several moving pictures
that interact with one other on a single frame simultaneously, yet independently, creating—much like in music—
a whole greater than the sum of its isolated lines. I will delve on how multiple events, and their relative
importance within the frame, may be developed through this cinematic device, allowing them to diverge,
intersect, overshadow, or complement one other. My interest in the relationship between these multiplicities
resides precisely in their fluctuations. I propose to apply this reasoning to the film Vortex (Gaspar Noé, 2021) which I consider to be an object that encapsulates all the aforementioned aspects. I have selected this example not necessarily because it is produced almost entirely in split-screen, but rather because of the exquisite way in which this polyphony contributes to the construction of the film’s dramaturgy.
Description
Keywords
Split-screen Polyphony Musicality Vortex Gaspar Noé
Citation
Publisher
The Faculty of Theater and Television, Babeș-Bolyai University