On Collapsing Boundaries Between Protagonist and Antagonist: Dante’s Tricks and Others in La Vie En Rose and Apocalypse Now and in the Documentaries Tarnation, Elena and Waltzing With Bashir

Abstract

This chapter shows how Dantean space is often a zone of broken psychological and craft boundaries. Beginning with a close study of the one-shot scene in La Vie En Rose but also offering examples from Dante, the analysis shows how the conventional cinematic boundaries that mark time and space, self and environment, source and score and musical perspective are all often broken in Dantean spaces. After an overview of such techniques in narrative documentaries such as Tarnation, Elena and Waltz with Bashir, the chapter ends with an extensive analysis of the boundary-breaking Dantean Spaces of the film Apocalypse Now. The final section notes how both Apocalypse Now and the film Secretary offer prismatic characters whose inner conflict can be interpreted in two ways, and that this prismatic nature also makes the spaces of these narratives prismatic, making us unsure at times whether they are real or are projections of the person’s own conflicted character.