Pesaro festival of modern cinema (1965) The debate between Metz, Eco and Pasolini. Linguistics is the foundation of semiology. The image is not decomposable: there are no articulations "below" the level of the shot. Coding is a function of syntagmatic categories. Cinema semiology is on the level of poetics or rhetoric rather than a theory of the sign. A cinema semiology is best described in relation to narrative. Metz:from the point of view of the text; Eco : from the point of view of the interpreter or reader; Pasolini: from the point of view of the creator.

The two traditions: semiology and semiotics Semiology: the study of signs based on linguistics Ferdinand de Saussure ( ). Course on General Linguistics. Roland Barthes Christian Metz Semiotics: the study of signs based on logic Charles Sanders Peirce ( ) Umberto Eco Gilles Deleuze

The semiotic of Umberto Eco Charles Sanders Peirce: "A sign is something which stands for something else in some respect or capacity for someone.”

The semiotic of Umberto Eco Charles Sanders Peirce: "A sign is something which stands for something else to somebody in some respect or capacity for someone.” representamen or representer object or referent interpretant

Defining the sign: representation Peirce: icon, index, and symbol An icon signifies in virtue of its resemblance, or its analogical relation to what it wishes to represent. A symbol does not resemble what it refers to; it signifies through the force of convention. An index may but does not necessarily resemble its referent. It signifies in virtue of a relationship of contiguity with its referent. A causal or existential link is presumed. The representational character of signs can be, and often is, mixed or heterogeneous.

The semiotic of Umberto Eco Charles Sanders Peirce: "A sign is something which stands for something else to somebody in some respect or capacity for someone." We think only in signs. Interpretation is guided by context. This context may be cultural as well as a personal ideolect or ideolects. Signification and interpretation are essentially an open- ended process.

The semiotic of Umberto Eco 1. A sign is a material representation (representamen). 2. A representation is recognized to be a sign through an act of interpretation (interpretant). 3. A sign is recognized as standing for its referent on the basis of a rule or convention. 4. The function of a sign is to correlate an expression and a content. 5. A code is a repertoire of these correlations of expression and content. 6. Expression and content are independent of one another. In other words, the meaning (content) of the expression changes with context. 7. Both expression and content have pertinent, articulated features.

The semiotic of Umberto Eco 8. The content of an expression can be described as independent of any "real" referent. In other words, an expression can refer to an imaginary or false world as well as a real and truthful one. 9. The rules of semiotics are not necessarily the rules of linguistics. There are many kinds of codes or correlations that are not those of verbal speech. 10. The content of an expression is both denotative and connotative. 11. Every act of signification is both complex and heterogeneous. It can encompass or combine: multiple modes of representation: iconic, indexical, symbolic; different kinds of articulation; both arbitrary and motivated correlation of expression and content; different kinds of interpretive labor: recognition, categorization, combination, invention.

Complexity of sign-functions

The semiotic of Umberto Eco Eco’s critique of Barthes and Metz critique of analogy poverty vs. repleteness of photographic image the effect of context on interpretation codes of similitude vs. “impression of reality”

Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The Cinema of Poetry”

"A specific language of images would seem to be a pure and artificial abstraction.” (167) Signals or signs: "...there is a complex world of meaningful--both gestural and environmental--that accompany the lin-signs, and those proper to memory or dreams, both and all sorts of signs coming from the environment, which prefigure and offer themselves as the 'instrumental' premise of cinematic communication.” (168) Im-signs. The instrumental basis of cinema is an "irrational" type.

Pasolini, “The Cinema of Poetry” Im-signs. The instrumental basis of cinema is an "irrational" type. Rational-linguistic/irrational-prelinguistic. Both the physiognomic "language" of reality and the imagistic reality of dreams are pre-grammatical and premorphological (unformed). The components of the im-sign: objective signals linguistic signs + body/gesture [“kinemes”] im-signs, "the world of memory and dreams subjective

The cinema of poetry and free indirect discourse Types of cinematic discourse Naturalism. Indirect. Extracting images without quotation marks from a given historical and sociological milieu. Direct (subjective). Point of view shot.

The cinema of poetry and free indirect discourse Free indirect style Author adopts language and psychology of protagonist; author's language can always be differentiated from that of protagonist. The style of the "first person" who sees the world according to an essentially irrational inspiration. Adopting the point of view of a protagonist with access to the irrational and oneiric. Not only the search for prelinguistic or pregrammatical style, but also "narrational" pretexts, or cultural and revolutionary sources suppressed by bourgeois history and culture. "Obsessive" framing: the felt presence of the camera

Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman “What were the thoughts he pondered then? That he was poor; that he perforce must labor to achieve respect, security; that God just might have granted him more brains and money. That goodness knows, there are those idle lucky dogs with little brains, those loungers, for whom life is just a lark! That he had been in service in all two years; his thoughts remarked as well that the weather wasn’t calming down; that the river kept on rising; that the bridges over the Neva were all most likely up and that he would be two days or three cut off from his Parasa. Thus went his pondering.” V.I. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language 133.