Repetition in Cinema

Several works on film theory and screenwriting practice take up the question of repetition within narrative. However, few if any, have articulated theories about the relationship between the repetition of the words that comprise the screenplay itself and repetition of the themes that lend coherence to the narrative. In this study we address this gap in the screenwriting and film literature. Specifically, we analyze repetition of words and themes in the screenplay of Sunshine Cleaning, a critically-acclaimed independent film. Based on our survey of the literature, we expect and we find several varieties of repetition among words associated with the major themes in Sunshine Cleaning. This repetition includes but is not limited to polyptoton (words formed by inflections, declensions, and conjugations of a common stem), homonymy,  paregmenon (words sharing a common derivation), and compounding (words formed by combining two or more
words). We further expect and find that the repetition of words linked to themes is extensive and found in the large majority of the scenes of the screenplay. Finally, we expect and find that words associated with
the themes are repeated far more frequently than in a random sample of screenplays contained within the Corpus of Contemporary American English. We conclude the paper with a discussion of our study’s im-
plications for the art and craft of screenwriting.

The repetition phenomenon characterizes each aspect of our daily life, from the cellular mitosis in the microscopic field, to the day’s cycles with its routines (breakfast, lunch and dinner), to the year with the seasons and the life with its continuous untangling between birth and death. We are so dipped in repetition phenomena and driven by iterative rhythms that barely everything vanishes in an indistinctive magma . The repetition is a changeable tool, subjected to different interpretations and uses. In the first part (“What’s the repetition?”) we will remind how that is a extraordinary educative tool, the imitation of gestures and sounds it’s the base behavior to learn something, but also stylistic if we consider the use of the language.
In “Repetition, difference” we will consider the repetition value as difference, analyzing in short the practice of the epic poetry in the ancient Greece. A cyclic repetition, where the version is similar but not the same as its former. And it’s exactly the difference that makes the repetition a creative tool. In fact the difference brings to the “invention”, without it, every part would remain the same, simply generating a repetition.
In the subsequent part (“Repetition, sameness”) will emerge the role that the technology has taken to condition the repetition concept and to transform it from creative tool to an alienation instrument that form and deform us.
In “Originality, creation”, we try to identify the characters of the contemporary creativity, a creativity where the concept of origin doesn’t make sense anymore, but everything is pushed through a different where the copy of something else generates an “another”
From the practice of the Kata to the mantra recitation, in the eastern culture the people live in a more serene way the repetition idea. In the western culture, repetition is often a synonym of boredom, a real sequence of planned actions, a sort of cage, for a society continuously searching for innovations. Our main instrument for the innovation search is the remix, the restoring on cycle with a new formatting (“Re-cycle, the re-mix: the computer talent”): thanks to the strong expansion of the computerized instruments, we are living a redefinition of the repetitiveness on creative way. While in the classic experience where there’s continuity with the tradition, our contemporary is more an idea of copy and paste to create cultural Frankensteins. One of the art that conditions and represents our present the most, where there’s a continuous use of these repetition practices, is the cinema world, we close then with a little window hunting for remakes, quotes and clones.