The polyphonic film

Abstract

In music, polyphony is the arrangement of multiple and heterogeneous voices which, though simultaneous, remain independent of one another. The most compelling analysis of polyphony as it relates to narrative form comes from Mikhail Bakhtin, for whom the polyphonic novel was perfected by Dostoevsky. This musical analogy is not only extraordinarily rich but, given the increasing number of films receiving critical acclaim for their multi‐plot structure, useful and relevant. The polyphonic film, however, does more than depict simultaneous events and assemble multiple plots. Unlike the critically acclaimed multi‐plot films Babel (dir. Iñárritu, 2006), Syriana (dir. Gaghan, 2004), and Traffic (dir. Soderbergh, 2000), Magnolia (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999) achieves true cinematographic polyphony by depicting simultaneity without unity, multiplicity without completeness.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.