structure, sign, and (photo)play

One interesting question posed by our discussion leader was whether (cinematic) communication had to be "bilateral" -- with your permission, I'm going to rephrase that slightly and go with "binary" -- but I think the question remains the same. Or does it? The problem at hand is, to that point, how significant the initial building-blocks of a discourse can be in the meaning of the whole. In "other" words: traditional communication has been theorized as a linear, sender-message.in.channel-receiver relationship [eg the Shannon-Weaver model]. On this account, the sender "encodes" a message, which passes through a channel to the receiver, who then "decodes" said message. The meaning passes through, more or less obfuscated by the degree to which both sender and receiver use the same codes, the amount of noise on the channel, and so on. If a meaning is preserved through bilateral communication, then it presupposes a sort of "text" or a holistic message-meaning conflation, an essential something, that passes through the channel from one side to another. The slight difference made by deploying the term "binary" is simply to complicate that notion of a holistic, essential message contained within the communication, arguing by implication that the meaning of the message is not predetermined, but relies on a mutual construction BY both sides of the communication.

Taking this kind of a view of cinema, when we ask whether "cinematic" communication is bilateral/binary, we presuppose that it is neither. This is because we have already described the means of encoding, or the means of production for the message/film/movie/text as multiple, and the receiving audience as likewise massive and multiple. This sort of "originary multiplicity" confounds the message-in-a-channel model of communication, which is, I think, how Metz arrives at the notion that cinema is not, therefore, communication as such. What it is, as we read, is expression. And so we come down to the linguistic/semiotic hairsplitting -- I mean, analysis. What difference between expression and communication? Why even posit such a difference? It seems as meaningless and tautological (with deference to Jason's post for a more thorough treatment of this point) as the distinction I tried to draw between binary and bilateral. The impact for us is of this potentially deathly boring debate is to first of all see that the meaning of a cinematic message is always already in flux, being constantly constructed by its receivers as well as by its producers. In short, we begin to have a more subtle eye for ambiguity in the meaning of a film.

This ambiguity, which Sonora has given us some examples of below, also conflicts with a basic premise of Eco's arguments for the triple-articulation of the cinematic code -- namely, the assumption that, somewhere in the cinematic apparatus lies the agency by which that code is given its essential structures. On Eco's account, we can learn the given codes and THEN move to their articulations. While this argument does work toward a metaphysics of cinema, it does so on the grounds of an unquestioned ideology -- that the cinematic apparatus has, by virtue of its mechanical properties, endowed us with a cinematic code by which we can interpret the movies. Maybe this will make more sense in the context of next week's readings (and maybe it will be flatly contradicted), but the agency of meaning cannot rest in the technology of production ALONE -- the process of making meaning, including making meaningful films, goes beyond that singularity, just as it goes beyond a single author or a single viewer.