Parts and Wholes

When I first thought about what it would mean if film were a language, I thought of equating what I believed to be the smallest units of meaning (what semioticians refer to as monemes), namely, the image and the word. Characteristically, I was wrong. Metz compares the shot with the word on five levels (75-6), showing in the end how a film's shot is more akin to a statement/phrase (Eco's "utterance" – 601) than a word, although not equivalent with the former term either. If I read Eco correctly, he agrees with Metz in a conception of the image like that of Eisenstein: images contain "internal montage" (76), and so are precluded from being the basic building block of the cinema.

In a language, each constitutive part means something in relation to the larger whole of the system. However, when the smallest unit in a film—the shot—ceases to be stable, how can we study an entire film, let alone a director's entire oeuvre as auteur theory demanded last week? Can there be a unified work of art? Can we make it back to the macro-level, able to analyze a film or even FILM? Liz's question regarding the necessary conditions for intercommunication in cinema leads to a possible answer. Perhaps the intercommunication between film-maker and film-viewer occurs not intra-film but inter-film, across discrete films and decades in an evolutionary manner as the categories film-maker/film-viewer merge and the film becomes FILM (Metz's "filmic text…the total discourse of film" – 586). Neither the shot nor the film might have (structural) unity, and the cinema might be more "expression than communication," but perhaps we can find meaning by tracing the patterns across the codes used in various films by different directors? Did I just combine auteur theory with semiotics, or not make any sense whatsoever (as I fear)? I guess my main point is that I agree with Metz's most common-sense argument: "The fact that must be understood is that films are understood" (86). Semantics/semiotic problems aside, meaning must be made or found. Perhaps this is why Eco and Metz (589) posit semiotics as only one way of analyzing film, a relatively humble role for a theory that strikes (especially) at the fundamentals of the cinema.

I found two connections to the culture industry we discussed two weeks ago. First, Metz depicts the director as creator and the spectator as a user (70). Again, this is the film as "expression rather than communication" model. Secondly, Eco argues that reliance on convention for the construction of meaning is pervasive; he even goes so far as to say "we are spoken by the language" (592). Culture is very important for both Metz (cinema is a "technological tool" – 586) and Eco ("we have been taught…optical variants…can be subjected to conventionalization" – 595), as what matters is what we know and experience as much as what we are or how we perceive. In other words, nurture counts as much as nature. In this way, our theorists this week agree with Adorno and Horkheimer, who wrote that the same films are repeatedly made. While Metz is unwilling to go as far as our Frankfurt scholars do by contending rebellion is useless, he does admit change cannot happen instantaneously ("the large syntagmatic category of the narrative film can change, but that no single person can make it change over night" – 70). I think this another way of getting at what I was trying to articulate above, that films and directors making meaning collectively might be easier than individually as a film or a director or auteur. As Sonora points out in her post and Adorno and Horkheimer mention, revolutionary film with a realistic change of being produced by the system it purports to criticize must criticize from within that system. I think Lewis said something akin to this sometime in the past two weeks as well.

One question that is bugging me: is the medium of film driving its content or does the content we want to express/communicate determine the limits of the medium? It seems like Eco believes the former, while Metz (with his argument that the cinema has developed as it has because of the human desire for it to function as a narrative vehicle, a tool for telling stories*) believes the latter. Does film become art when it capitalizes upon the capabilities of the medium (Bazin, I believe) or when it transcends itself?

Utter side note: If, like me, you found Eco pretty baffling, don't be put off from reading his The Name of the Rose. It's a great book.

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*"Had the cinema not become thoroughly narrative, its grammar would undoubtedly be entirely different (and would perhaps not even exist). The reverse of this coin, however, is that a given narrative receives a very different semiological treatment in the cinema than it would in a novel, in classical ballet, in a cartoon, and so on." (85)