When cinema borrows from stage: theatrical artifice through indexical explicitness in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and Dogville

ABSTRACT

Framed within the debate on the different nature of theatrical and filmic communication, the study considers two avant-garde films by Greenaway, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, and von Trier, Dogville, as examples of texts that travel from one medium to another and show closeness to the theatre. This is revealed not solely through the artificiality and the enclosure of the setting and the mise-en-scène, but also at the level of the discourse understood as the ensemble of images, music, gestures, and dialogue. The two films exhibit an unnaturalness unusual in cinema, a medium in which the editing realises a seemingly realistic representation of characters and events. The discussion focuses on how such a sensation of artificial non-realism is achieved in the films. It is argued that it derives from the marked explicit relation between the various levels of communication in the two films, the verbal and the visual, as well as between the dialogue contributions by the different participants in the narrative, characters, and narrator. The construct adopted for the analysis is indexicality, which is interpreted in a broad sense and that, as is discussed, contributes to the “monstrative” dimension of the films in terms of the explicitness of the communication.

KEYWORDS:

• Indexicality
• monstration
• explicitness
• verbal–visual
• deixis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Roberta Piazza is senior lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Sussex. Her interests range from anthropological linguistic studies of identity, as she explores in her co-edited volume Marked Identities (2014 with A. Fasulo, Palgrave), to pragmatics and media discourse, as she discusses in her monograph The Discourse of Italian Cinema and Beyond (2011 Continuum) and in the co-edited volumes Telecinematic Discourse (with M. Bednarek and F. Rossi, Benjamins 2011) and Values and Choices in Television Discourse (with L. Haarman and A. Caborn, Palgrave 2015). Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Pragmatics, Discourse & Society, Language & Literature.

Notes

1. This paper is the result of conversations held over a long stretch of time with a number of very generous colleagues. I thank them all for their input and support. First of all Anne Furlong without whose delightful exchanges during her 2013–2014 sabbatical in London I could not have written this paper. I owe much also to my friends and colleagues Billy Clark, Trudy Haarman, Dan McIntyre, Christiana Gregoriou, Susan Mandala, and Glyn Hyde; special thanks to Matthew Platts for his technical support. The study was presented at the 2015 PALA (Poetics and Linguistics Association) conference 15–18 July, University of Canterbury and I am grateful for the comments I received in that forum. My sincere thanks also go to the three editors of this special issue.

2. Johnston (2002) on how the spatial and temporal structures of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover offer a spectacle of disgust and a critique of consumer society.

3. The cinematic avant-garde movement Dogme 95 was started in 1995 (hence the name) by Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. It was an attempt to reject complex and sophisticated ways of filming and any form of commercial art. Similar to the 1960s French Nouvelle Vague and 1940s Italian Neorealism, Dogme 95’s manifesto advocated shooting on location rather than in studio, using hand-held camera and banning any forms of temporal and geographical displacement. As a result, the film occupies only the present in front of the audience. Similar to Brecht’s attempt to fight artistic alienation, with these devices, von Trier and Vinterberg wanted to involve the viewers and stimulate their critical consciousness by creating a new way of filming and telling stories.

4. The concept of indexicality that goes back to Charles Peirce has been interpreted in a variety of ways by many scholars. For example, Silverstein ([1976]1995, 199 in Johnstone, Andrus, and Danielson 2006, 81) talks about “orders of indexicality” and uses the notion of “index” for “signs where the occurrence of the sign vehicle token bears a connection of understood spatio-temporal contiguity to the occurrence of the entity signaled” (Silverstein [1976]1995, 199 in Johnstone, Andrus, and Danielson 2006, 81).

5. Dogville’s dialogue transcript is available at http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/d/dogville-script-transcript-nicole-kidman.html (accessed 03/04/2015); the dialogue transcript of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is available at http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/c/cook-thief-wife-lover-script.html (accessed 03/04/2015).

6. Pellanda (2012, 75–76) discusses this very feature in Michel Piccoli portraying Gilbert Valance in De Oliveira’s (2000) Je rentre à la maison and comments on how this actor’s back to the audience suggests the disregard for viewers and how acting can be realised by specific actions.

7. Designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier, the characters “ambiguously complement the film’s critique of late capitalism” (Rollins 1995).

8. For the relation between the name Grace and its etymology and gift, see Chiesa (2007).

9. Brighenti (2006, 108) defines the final massacre of the town of Dogville as ‘not simply a retributive punishment (or vengeance) (…) [but also as] a sacrificial purification, which is based upon an impersonal transfer of violence and on a peculiar economy of the concentration of diffused violence’. On similar lines, Lattek (2006) stresses the element of “arrogance” in Grace that coincides with her initial intention to forgive the inhabitants of Dogville by which she takes away their entitlement to, in the father’s words, “the penalty (…) they deserve for their transgressions”.