IV

		ters but also of technique. What has to be clear here is that polyphony does not have to end up in chaos or cacophony. This is certainly not the case with Breaking the Waves, quite the contrary. To apply dialogism to film thus permits directors to stimulate characters and discover new ways of organizing the relation between them and other storytelling techniques.

		XII

		In comparison to the incredibly complex, ever-fluctuating operations of the narrative process, Jean-Paul Torok once declared the core operations of directing as contributing little that is new to the film. "There are not," he noticed, "thirty-six thousand ways of staging a given scene or situation, but only a few, always the same ones. . . ." 76 If you think of shooting a conversation between two people in a car or in a hallway, it is indeed difficult to imagine a novel way of positioning the two actors or the camera. The car and the shape of the hallway "tell" you where the occupants are going to sit or where they will walk. Unless the project a rock video for example allows for radically different behaviors or camera angles, all directors will stage such scenes within the same general parameters.

		But is this observation really significant? Torok's argument would have been stronger in my view had he attacked our reified view of the world rather than its architectonics. To explain the situation, let us recall the work of Viktor Shklovski and his notion of ostranenie or "making strange." Working in the years 1910 19, the Russian critic had noticed that the very process of daily life slowly but inevitably moves us beyond our first impression of an object, landscape, or person. Soon enough, however thrilled we once were with it, we end up taking it for granted. Think for a moment of an object you really coveted. Once in your possession, that object slowly became part of the furniture. Because it is always at your disposal, you pay less and less attention to it. After a while you no longer experience the powerful longing you originally had toward it. It is still the same object but it has now definitely lost its shine. In opposite fashion, recall your shock when, after an absence of some years, you suddenly rediscover the face of someone you knew very well: a parent, a friend, a former lover. Yes, it is still Dad, Mary Jo, or Clint, but somehow their faces do not match your memory of them. Whereas in earlier years, you saw "Dad," "Mary Jo," or "Clint" as familiar, constant