Radical poetization. Rethinking the final slow motion scene in "Bonnie and Clyde"

The essay analyzes the final slow motion scene of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) to demonstrate how the avantgarde reinvention of slow motion poeticized cinematic language in the 1960s and lent a contemporary political dimension to a film set during the Great Depression. The author’s approach combines American neo-formalist theory with Bakhtinian analysis of the Russian formal method of 20s to establish a theoretical connection between the Russian and American theoretical schools. This essay shows how Bonnie and Clyde’s film language developed in accordance with radical avant-garde modes of thought and how avant-garde thought revolutionized Hollywood in the nineteen-sixties. The essay treats such concepts as attraction and affect which have been relevant throughout the whole of film history. Through analysis of these concepts the author proposes that the reinvention of devices provides a kind of new shock which affects spectators and helps to make a breakthrough in film language. Employing texts by Bakhtin and Comolli and Narboni, the author also demonstrates that the breakthrough always contains a political dimension, its goal being to change the audience’s view of a concrete historical time. Choosing the devices to reinvigorate always depends on the political, social and cultural climate of a given historical period. But the development of these devices forms the basis of stylistic innovations in cinema.