Worcester Boulevard

As a welcome back to Chris Waugh (ex London Nautical School), I’m sharing one of his school’s (Christ’s College in Christchurch New Zealand) Lumiere Minutes. It’s a bit less than a minute, and clumsily screen-grabbed by me 😦 , but I love it. I’ve just been reading about Bakhtin’s Chronotope – essentially, I’ve always thought, ‘a place in a text where time happens’. But it turns out, not so fast (or simple, or loose).

There are two ways Bakhtin uses the term, I think. First, a chronotope can be a kind of structuring device in a narrative: a railway station, a crossroads (which is what a railway station kind of is), or my favourite (not cited by Bakhtin), the post box on the corner of Brookside Close. That post box was a device that enabled characters to meet in their stories. Railway stations are places of high drama. Crossroads are where stories collide, decisions and deals are made. These are essentially generic chronotopes – identifiable across genres and stories and forms.

But, as I take it, a chronotope can also be a specific location and time in history: this place, at this precise time: an anchor for the text in the world, in life. I’m not sure we’ve looked at Chronotopes in CCAJ (maybe something close, in Places and Stories), but this Lumiere Minute, that I’m calling Worcester Boulevard, anchors it in Christchurch New Zealand last week (or the week before), as well as being an example of the ‘crossroads’ chronotope in film (and novels, and the Robert Johnson song..). And if you didn’t hear Chris say so on the voice-over, or know it’s from Documentary Gesture Exercise 1 (Lumiere Minutes on labour), you might wonder what the focus is.