De-dramatization in flow cinema: reinventions of dramatic form in contemporary cinema
Keywords: De-dramatization; dramatic form; flow cinema; contemporary cinema.
This study aims to identify a series of constant tension that runs through cinema from its birth to the present day: a struggle between the rationality of intrigue and the sensitive effect of the image, between the representation of action and pure movement. This tension seems to take shape in a radical way in the first French avant-gardes, as they seek to insert cinema within the system of the arts, with the narrative being seen, sometimes, as an obstacle to it becoming a “true art”. This clash between mythos and opsis seems to find a relative harmony in classical cinema, in which the mise en scène is the way to achieve greater expressiveness of the drama in the image, although there, too, it faces upheavals in the narrative: the musical scenes, the gags and the suspense had the effect of suspending intrigue in favor of purely sensory scenes. When reaching modern cinema and its experimentation with the plot itself, this constitutive tension meets the crisis of the notion of mise en scène, until, in flow cinema and slow cinema, the intrigue becomes a minimal thread, sometimes reduced to a small situation, so that the films are made through the shots as blocks of sensations.