What is Cinema? Semiotics

‘Classical’ film theory

Lecture structure Cinema as language Semiology III. Language or language system? Metz IV. Index, icon, symbol: Wollen

I. Cinema as language Eisenstein: compares cinema to verbal language; focuses on relations between elements of a film.

Bazin: focuses on meaning within shot Bazin: focuses on meaning within shot. But ‘On the other hand, of course, cinema is also a language’ (‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’).

II. Semiology Saussure: semiology is the ‘science that studies the life of signs within society’.

Saussure brackets the referent and divides the sign into two parts: the signifier (the sign’s form) and the signified (the sign’s meaning). Unmotivated (arbitrary) vs motivated (natural) signs.

Onomatopoeia: motivated signs

III. Language or language system? Christian Metz In the 1940s and 1950s, anthropologist Lévi-Strauss drew on Saussure’s linguistics to analyse systems such as kinship and myth.

In the 1960s, Metz asked whether cinema is a language (langage)?: language in general, human linguistic capacity or a language system (langue)?: a specific instance of language, with a code

language system (ciné-langue)

But the ‘code’ can change or disappear But the ‘code’ can change or disappear. Cinema is a language in the general sense, beyond any specific system of montage. ‘The cinema began to speak only after it had begun to conceive of itself as a language that was flexible, never predetermined […]’ (Metz, Film Semiotics, p. 55)

It’s hard to distinguish the signifier and signified in cinema (in contrast to the unmotivated signs of verbal language systems).

Metz: semiological analysis of cinema should focus on narrative, a ‘non-system language’. ‘Cinema has become language because it has told such fine stories’ (ibid., p. 47)

Semiotics of the Kitchen (Martha Rosler, 1975)

IV. Index, icon, symbol: Peter Wollen Peirce and his wife, Juliette, in 1908 Wollen: Saussure’s emphasis on unmotivated signs makes his approach too restrictive for studying cinema. More useful is Peirce’s account of ‘natural’ or motivated signs.

Peirce’s second trichotomy of signs: Index: signifier is not arbitrary but has an ‘existential bond’ with the signified Icon: signifier resembles the signified Symbol: signifier does not resemble the signified but is arbitrary or conventional

Peirce: the three categories of index, icon and symbol often overlap in a single sign.

‘The aesthetic richness of cinema springs from the fact that it comprises all three dimensions of the sign: indexical, iconic and symbolic. […]’ (Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, p. 97)

film as indexical: Bicycle Thieves (Vittoria de Sica, 1948) film as iconic or pictorial: Blonde Venus (Josef von Sternberg, 1932)

‘In [Godard’s] hands, as in Peirce’s perfect sign, the cinema has become an almost equal amalgam of the symbolic, the iconic and the indexical. His films have conceptual meaning, pictorial beauty and documentary truth’ (Wollen, ibid., p. 106)