Abstract
Roberta Piazza’s penetrating study of represented discourse in Italian film convincingly makes the case that a comprehensive study of cinematic texts requires not only an analysis of narrative and visual elements, but also an analysis of the spoken element, the dialogue. After an introductory chapter contextualizing her main aims, ‘to revalue the verbal discourse of cinema and propose an initial characterisation of it’ (p. 27), she establishes that dialogue is ‘an overlooked element’ (p. 22) in the study of film (Chapter 2), and outlines a methodological framework for the study of cinematic dialogue that allows her to integrate the verbal (represented spoken interchanges between characters) and the visual (camera movements, gaze direction, lines of sight, shot composition, handled objects, etc.) (Chapter 3). Four analytical chapters then follow, two focused on specific genres (comedy and melodrama in Chapter 4, westerns in Chapter 5) and two that offer in-depth case studies of individual films, Michelangelo Antonioni’s When Love Fails (Chapter 6) and Mohsen Melliti’s Me, the Other (Chapter 7).
Running through and uniting the various analyses is a focus on conflict talk. While this might at first appear to be an unnecessary limitation, it turns out to be neither unnecessary nor limiting, but is in fact a highly revealing ‘lens through which all the films selected are examined’ (p. 22). As Piazza points out, conflict is the key element that transforms a sequence of events into a story, and episodes of conflict talk in the films mark ‘crucial moments’ (p. 6) that underline larger issues of character and theme. This focus on conflict talk allows for some insightful findings. Differing modes of conflict, as Piazza’s analysis shows, map onto the different genres. Comedy often features more open conflict, with speakers directly contradicting each other in consecutive turns, while melodramas are characterized by a more ‘dissociative’ (p. 87) performance of conflict, with speakers seeking to disengage from quarrels in various kinds of avoidance and redirection turns. In the westerns, verbal conflicts, in a surprising contrast to the violent physical altercations, are more indirect still, relying heavily on the expression of irony and the distancing repetition of previous talk (p. 51). The focus on conflict also serves to illuminate issues of identity, another significant thematic aspect to emerge in Piazza’s study. In the westerns, the expression of conflict through irony projects masculine identity (p. 110). In addition, the ‘good cowboys’ turn out to be, in the main, ‘dialogically expansive’ (p. 112) in that they accept other voices and discourses, while the ‘bad cowboys’ tend towards the ‘dialogically contractive’ (p. 112), shutting down contributions that contradict their own. In When Love Fails, strategies for coping with oppositional discourse portray some female speakers as being in control of their own narratives, and others as being led; in Me, the Other, conflict talk reflects the identity of one of the central characters as he is gradually transformed from an accepted outsider to a rejected outcast.
While Piazza’s work on conflict talk in Italian cinema here is a valuable contribution in its own right, this book is perhaps even more significant for its contribution to the development of stylistics as a discipline. While she takes the study of cinema to task for neglecting dialogue, she also acknowledges that others (presumably other linguists) have gone too far in the opposite direction, overly stressing ‘the superiority of the verbal’ (p. 11), and accordingly positions her own work between these two poles at the ‘interface between words and images’ (p. 22). Her integrated verbal–visual approach, inspired by Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (1996/2007) application of Hallidayan transitivity to the interpretation of images, contributes a number of fresh insights to the growing body of work in pragma-stylistics. Take, for instance, the notion of the reader or viewer as an ‘overhearer’. In primarily page-based approaches, the ‘overhearer’ of the written dialogue is a relatively static, monolithic construct (see Short, 1989). When both the verbal and visual dimensions are considered in a medium such as film, as Piazza demonstrates in a re-working of Levinson’s (1988) participant role framework, it becomes clear that the overhearing audience is cast in a variety of roles with respect to the words and actions on the screen, from ‘passive outsiders to more participative bystanders or overhearers’ (p. 22). Piazza’s verbal–visual analysis further shows, for example, how epistemic modality can be communicated visually through differing levels of picture clarity; how characters’ internal emotional states can be signalled not only through their dialogue, but also reinforced through varying camera shots; how mismatches between the verbal and the visual in a scene can convey dramatic irony; and how visual representations, such as eye gaze or the handling of an object in a certain way, can cast participants as syntactic subjects or objects for viewers.
Piazza’s study also impresses by keeping its methodological promises. She quite rightly acknowledges that her work, while systematic and transparently retrievable, remains an interpretation, and her analytical categories are well-grounded in previous studies, encompassing both the semiotics of film and many of the pioneering studies in both micro- and macro-pragmatics such as politeness theory, discourse analysis, conversation analysis and relevance theory. One model not employed that might have been is Tsui’s (1994) framework for conversation, particularly where conflict talk unfolds in three-part exchanges rather than pairs (p. 79), where hearers apparently employ a relatively closed set of response strategies in reaction to a particular type of initiation (pp. 89–98), and where participants seem to reclassify initiations in their replies (p. 91, p. 100). This, however, I offer not as a criticism but as an observation. Piazza has grounded her discourse analytic work here in the model proposed by Eggins and Slade (1997), and while some discussion of why other models available were not chosen could have been useful, the analysis offered stands up to scrutiny.
The Discourse of Italian Cinema and Beyond joins a growing body of work that is taking forward work in stylistics by expanding not only the subject of analysis, from poetry and prose fiction to film and television, but also the set of methods in acknowledging the visual alongside the verbal. While Piazza herself is modest in speculating how her investigation might contribute to the study of film within media and cultural studies, this truly interdisciplinary work is a clear contribution to both stylistics and film studies. Piazza’s analyses are grounded equally well in linguistics and film theory, and this book stands as a relevant contribution to our knowledge of both discourse and the cinema.