Bakhtin’s Polyphony in Documentary Film

This essay will discuss how "polyphony," a term borrowed from musical theory by the literary critic and scholar Mikhail Bakhtin, can be successfully applied to documentary film.An alternative to character-centric storytelling (the pervasive mode favored by the documentary distribution and funding community), polyphony allows filmmakers to tell complex stories about systemic issues that defy easy categorization or solutions.The three films discussed here are the Black Audio Film Collective's Handsworth Songs (1986), Sabine Gruffat and Bill Brown's Speculation Nation (2014), and Brett Story's The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016).Each film demonstrates, in its own way, how polyphony is not only relevant, but also compelling when applied to documentary film.Deriving from the Greek, the word polyphonic means "many sounds."Polyphony, in music, is "the simultaneous combination of two or more tones or melodic lines." 1 In literary terms, Bakhtin has provided a comprehensive definition of polyphonic when discussing the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky.In his seminal work, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1963), Bakhtin argues that Dostoevsky is the first Western novelist whose characters are truly polyphonic, in that his characters are not guided by an omniscient voice of the author or in the service of an overarching argument to be made, but instead are equal in relation to one another and each equally important.Bakhtin wrote, "A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky's novels." 2 Whereas character-centric storytelling focuses on evolution and development of one or more characters and their psychological development, Bakhtin argues, Dostoevsky's polyphonic storytelling focuses on a snapshot of a moment in time, highlighting how characters respond to a given situation without focusing on growth or psychological insight.While character-driven storytelling often adheres to a three-act structure, providing a sense of closure and resolution at the end, the polyphonic storytelling in Dostoevsky's novels has an open structure, more likely to raise questions rather than provide answers.In Dostoevsky's novels, the world and its characters are depicted in a constant state of becoming.