Hostages of the form

An approach to the treatment of dystopia in cinema

Abstract

Antonio Santos’ book Tiempos de ninguna edad. Distopía y cine (Times of any age. Dystopia and cinema) is the opportunity to dialogue with the work, about the dystopian discursive genre and from a genealogical perspective that takes us back to its literary origins. If for Juan Ignacio Ferreras the science fiction novel is a romantic fiction that projects in a hypothetical future the social relationships in force at the time of its writing, two other concepts of bakhtinian roots well define the ideological and formal specificities of the genre. Thus, dystopia resorts to a relationship between time and space (chronotope) that facilitates the critique on the present through an imagined future. At the same time, it constructs the narrative space through a stylization that questions the forms and ideas of those which are carriers. However, despite its different genealogy, dystopia maintains some homologies with the utopian genre, tending to configure a dogmatic thought. This dogmatism is verified in a more intense way in its literary aspect, as didactic genres that they are, than in its cinematographic derivations. However, somehow it interferes with our common sense, both in the public and private spheres, although this question goes beyond the limits of this work.