Introduction to Film Studies

Concepts and models

Basic concepts: : semiotics

• The nature of a sign (de Saussure)– signifiant / signifier / merkitsijä – signifié / signified / merkitty

• Categories of signs (Peirce)– index– icon– symbol

Basic concepts: formalism• Categories of motivation

– Realistic– Compositional– Transtextual– Artistic

– Diegetic

• Categories of meaning – Diegetic– Explicit– Implicit– Symptomatic

Levels of meaning in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Bordwell

& Thompson)Diegetic– referential• Relating a fictional world to reality: Dorothy’s fantasy vs. life in the 1930s KansasExplicit• Stated moral ”There’s no place like home!”, i.e. everyday home environment is

more valuable than the enchanting world of fantasy – although a certain moral order prevails in both

Implicit• Young girl on the verge of adulthood may be inclined to fall back on a fairytale

world, but she must grow up and assume the responsibilities of everyday life. Symptomatic• In a society in which human issues are measures in terms of money, genre films

tend to appeal to basic values such as hope.

Basic features about levels of meaning

• The levels interact with one another: explicit meanings are anchored in the diegetic world and the formal structure of the film

• Explicit meanings may be challenged by implicit meanings, possibly even undermined by symptomatic meanings

• The boundaries between the levels are blurred: it may difficult to decide what is supposed to be explicit and what remains implicit; or what is implicit and what is symptomatic

• Films should also be studied in terms of their audiovisual qualities (excess), not just as vehicles of themes or messages

Jakobson’s communication model

contextaddresser text addressee

channel code

Context• Text can be meaningful only in relation to a relevant

context • The addresser and the addressee might have different

contexts • Several contexts may be in operation simultaneously:

aesthetic, ideological, historical, social, practical… • A scholar or a critic must be able to discern which

contexts are relevant from a given point of view • Various contexts of everyday life, the context of viewing

Codes• Combinations of rules or sign patterns which determine how

a sign in a given context should be interpreted • Mainly conventional, culturally specific and timebound• Can nevertheless be to a varying degree be motivated• Relatively unambiguous in their own contexts – but in

contemporary culture they may be layered and conflictual (clothes)

• More or less consciously applied • Guide what is observed and communicated• Encoding and decoding may differ form one another• Should cinematic devices such as shot-countershot-patterns

or the system of standard framings be thought of as codes?

Channel• Media specificity: how does a given media

condition and modify messages?• Comparison of the ’purely’ audiovisual

qualities of film and television with verbal expression

• Comparison of film and television as means of communication and artistic expression

• Film and television in the historical continuum of moving image technologies

Addresser, artist, filmmaker

• Biographism: artist as a mediator of a higher reality or level of awareness

• Work of art as a message from the artist • Comparison with exegetics: tracing the

intentions of the artist• Symptomatic meanings• Freud and the mysteries of creation

Auteur theory – or politics• Film is a form of art and a director is

comparable to an author of a book • The rise of the status of studio directors: Ford,

Hawks, Sirk, Ray, Hitchcock • Cine-structuralism: “[to] uncover behind the

superficial contrasts of subject and treatment a structural hard core of basic and often recondite motifs” (Geoffrey Nowell-Smith)

• Structuring oppositions in the oeuvre of an auteur (Claude Lévi-Strauss’ research on clusters of myths)

Criticism of auteur theory • Filmmaking is a collective industrial effort• In a studio system producers and above all the system as

a whole often have a greater role than the director• Steven Heath: filmmaker as an ideological construction -

we only know the public image• John Ellis: dialectical relationship between the film-

maker and the institutions within which he operates• David Bordwell: filmmakers are conditioned but not

determined by technical, economical and production related constraints

Arguments in favour of taking into account the addresser

• The author as a prism through which the original context may be studied

• Biography as a key to the oeuvre of an artist • The influence of the public image of the

filmmaker on reception• Discrepancies between intentions and results • Discrepancies between the public image of

the filmmaker and his/her actual output

Text centred criticism • Close readings as the presumably most solid

scholarly approach to the study of art• No subjective interpretation tolerated• Intentional fallacy• Extreme form: all that really matters is the

“internal evidence” – all biographical data, even the context should be ignored

• Fictional truth: the way things actually are within the story world

• Concept of implied author →

Implied author• The implied author is an agent internal to narrative

fiction, who guides the reading or viewing. It is a construction which the reader or spectator imagines as the source of the meaning of the work (Chatman)

• Jerrold Levinson: ”The implied author is the agent who appears to have invented, arranged, and integrated the various narrative agents and aspects of narration involved in the film, as well as everything else required to constitute the film as a complete object of appreciation. The implied filmmaker, in short, is the picture we construct of the film’s maker - beliefs, aims, attitudes, values, and personality - on the basis of the film construed in its full context of creation”

Reception aesthetics • Artists cannot completely control how people receive

their works • The dominant culture and ideology do not always

determine reception• Meanings actually emerge in contextualized readings• Time and ever new contexts function as ”ghost writers” • Communication is by nature dialogical and polyphonic

(Bahtin)• Reception is always a process in which several cultural

and social factors intermingle • Intertextual reception studies

Factors which condition spectatorship

• David Morley: To what extent are individual readings conditioned by cultural and socio-economic structures?

• Manfred Naumann: belonging to a society or a social group, living conditions, environment, educational level, age, gender …

• Janet Staiger: political views, ideological factors, generally held opinions, nationality, race, sexual orientation, life style

• Pierre Bourdieu: symbolic power - cultural hegemony as a a form of social control

Conventionalism and realism

• Conventionalism: Our knowledge of the world and ourselves is based on certain conventional, historically and socially conditioned, arbitrary symbolic systems Culture and language determine the limits of understanding (codes)

• Realism: Certain universal perceptual and cognitive abilities broadly determine our ability to make sense of perceptual data, come to terms and understand our environment as well as formulate symbolic systems (schemas)

Schemata• unconscious conceptual structures which process

perceptual data and guide our understanding• basis of our perceptual and cognitive abilities to process

information about our environment • emerge and develop in our interaction with our natural

and social environment • classify perceived phenomena on a mainly unconscious

level • both enable and restrict our perception and

understanding

Cognitivism / formalism Screen theory

realism (natural sciences) conventionalism

emphasis on empirical study highly theory centred

ecological theory of perception, emphasis on schemata

semiotic theory of signification, emphasis on codes

analogies with real world and film perception

historical development of signifying practices

cognitivist theory of spectatorship psychoanalytical theory of pleasure

psychological constructivism social constructivism

historical poetics as a study of film style neomarxist theory of power relationships

neoformalist film analysis study of reception and interpretation

value-free textual study ideology critical textual analysis

Evans: “Reality Programming: Evolutionary Models of Film and

Television Viewership”• Humans consume popular media such as newspapers, television, and film

in large part because these media facilitate environmental surveillance. These media provide cost-effective surveillance across a wide range of people, places, and phenomena. p. 201

• The human preference for television and film over print media is perfectly natural, in that humans are hardwired to attend and respond to visual stimuli, especially when visual stimuli include other people and especially when these people are engaging in salient behaviour. p. 201.

• Television and film producers exploit our innate preferences, offering us content that is highly salient and extremely realistic but that often presents a misleading account of our environment. p. 202. Exposure to these images [thin women, strong men, generally attractive people] has been associated with an increased likelihood of body self-image disorders among both female and male viewers (Botta, 1999; Leit, 2001). p. 207

Jahn: cycle of narrative

• Model of the ‘cycle of narrative’ which connects external and internal stories

• The cycle creates a causal chain linking reception and production and suggesting that both processes are mutually dependent

Manfred Jahn “‘Awake! Open your eyes!’ The Cognitive Logic of External and Internal Stories”.

Jahn: External and Internal Stories

• external story • physical • recordable • public• addressee orientation

• permanent

• internal story • virtual• reportable• private• no addressee orientation • fleeting

The third domain of the cycle: making sense of the real world

• The relevance of both fiction and fantasy is dependent on them being related to notions about the real world even when assuming certain distance from it

• Fiction and fantasy tend to influnce also the way various aspects of real world are conceived

• “It is a poor idea of fantasy which takes it to be a world apart from reality, a world clearly showing its unreality. Fantasy is precisely what reality can be confused with. It is through fantasy that our conviction of the worth of reality is established; to forgo our fantasies would be to forgo our touch with the world.” (Cavell)

Three domains of character construction

We want understand better how the way we • make sense of and relate to real people• make sense of and relate to fictional

characters• fantasize about real people and fictitious

charactersinteract with one another.

Relating to the real world and its external and mental representations

Three interfaces• Fiction emerges from the interaction between notions about

the real world and our fantasies; fiction in turn influences both notions about the real world and our fantasies about it

• Notions about the real world are processed both in private fantasies and public fiction; those two in turn influence notions about the real world

• Fantasies feed on fiction but gain their relevance from being related to our needs and desires in respect of real people; fantasies in turn inspire fiction and to some extent even our relationship with the real world

Merleau-Ponty:• The girl who is loved does not project her emotions like an Isolde or a

Juliet, but feels the feelings of these poetic phantoms and infuses them into her own life. It is at a later date, perhaps, that a personal and authentic feeling breaks the web of her sentimental phantasies. But until this feeling makes its appearance, the girl has no means of discovering the illusory and literary element in her love. It is the truth of her future feelings which is destined to reveal the mis guidedness of her present ones, which are genuinely experienced. The girl “loses her reality” in them as does the actor in the part he plays, so that we are faced, not with representations or ideas which give rise to real emotions, but artificial emotions and imaginary sentiments. Thus we are not perpetually in possession of ourselves in our whole reality, and we are justified in speaking of an inner perception of an inward sense, an ‘analyser’ working from us to ourselves which ceaselessly, goes some, but not all, the way in providing knowledge of our life and our being (Phenomenology of Perception, p. 380)