The other side of frontality: dorsality in European art cinema

Frontality is one of the most uniformly adopted principles of classical filmmaking. David Bordwell describes cinematic frontality as the positioning of actors’ faces and bodies in full, three-quarter, or profile view in relation to the camera—an approach to staging and composition inherited from the norms of traditional Western drama and painting. Bordwell explains that the convention of frontality is aimed at maximizing the expressivity and intelligibility of a film. Despite its dominance, however, several European filmmakers—including Agnès Varda, Michelangelo Antonioni, Belá Tarr, and the Dardenne brothers—often reject frontality and experiment with non-frontality, or what I refer to as dorsality. I argue that dorsality, as deployed by European art cinema practitioners, has three basic functions: (1) compositional defamiliarization, (2) denial of clear psychological/emotional access to characters, and (3) the exploration of what I will call “displaced point-of-view (POV)” alignment. These functions dovetail with European art cinema’s general tendencies to differentiate itself from classical cinema and to explore self-conscious style. To demonstrate and examine these three functions, I analyze scenes and shots from various European art films that utilize dorsality. The examples I have chosen come from several European countries and every decade from the 1950s to the 2000s.