Hiya students,
Some things:
a) Almost everyone has sent me the personal blog links, good job! Those can be found in the Group page of this site.
b) Don't forget to read and comment on your groupmates' posts. Feel free to also peruse and even comment on other classmates' posts.
c) Keep up with the media diary observation posts, a new one each week. More than one per week is also fine.
d) Your pre-task for next Thursday's class (20th September) is to read the exert below from Monaco's How to Read a Film: The Art,
Technology, Language, History and Theory of Film and Media (Oxford
University Press).
e) On the back of your Monaco reading, consider a favourite scene from a favourite film or TV show. Re-watch the scene and consider what is happening and how you interpret or inject meaning into it.
f) Inform your classmates if you think any of them might miss this post/these tasks.
The irony here is that we know very well that we must learn to read before we can attempt to enjoy or understand literature, but we tend to believe, mistakenly, that anyone can read a film. Anyone can see a film, it's true. But some people have learned to comprehend visual images—physiologically, ethnographically, and psychologically—with far more sophistication than have others. This evidence confirms the validity of the triangle of perception outlined in Chapter 1, uniting author, work, and observer. The observer is not simply a consumer, but an active—or potentially active—participant in the process.
Film is not a language, but is like language, and since it is like language, some of the methods that we use to study language might profitably be applied to a study of film. Yet, since film is not a language, narrowly linguistic concepts can be misleading. Ever since the beginning of film history, theorists have been fond of comparing film with verbal language (partly to justify the serious study of film), but it wasn't until a new, larger category of thought developed in the fifties and early sixties—one that saw written and spoken language as just two among many systems of communication—that the real study of film as a language could proceed. This inclusive category is known as semiotics, the study of systems of signs.
Semioticians justified the study of film as language by redefining the concept of written and spoken language. Any system of communication is a "language"; English, French, or Chinese is a "language system." Cinema, therefore, may be a language of a sort, but it is not clearly a language system. As Christian Metz, the well-known film semiotician, pointed out: we understand a film not because we have a knowledge of its system; rather, we achieve an understanding of its system because we understand the film. Put another way, "It is not because the cinema is language that it can tell such fine stories, but rather it has become language because it has told such fine stories" [Metz, Film Language, p. 47].
For semioticians, a sign must consist of two parts: the signifier and the signified. The word "word," for example—the collection of letters or sounds—is a signifier; what it represents is something else again—the "signified." In literature, the relationship between signifier and signified is a main locus of art: the poet is building constructions that, on the one hand, are composed of sounds (signifiers) and, on the other, of meanings (signifieds), and the relationship between the two can be fascinating. In fact, much of the pleasure of poetry lies just here: in the dance between sound and meaning.
But in film, the signifier and the signified are almost identical: the sign of cinema is a short-circuit sign. A picture of a book is much closer to a book, conceptually, than the word "book" is. It's true that we may have to learn in infancy or early childhood to interpret the picture of a book as meaning a book, but this is a great deal easier than learning to interpret the letters or sounds of the word "book" as what it signifies. A picture bears some direct relationship with what it signifies, a word seldom does.
It is the fact of this short-circuit sign that makes the language of film so difficult to discuss. As Metz put it, in a memorable phrase: "A film is difficult to explain because it is easy to understand." It also makes "doing" film quite different from "doing" English (either writing or speaking). We can't modify the signs of cinema the way we can modify the words of language systems. In cinema, an image of a rose is an image of a rose is an image of a rose—nothing more, nothing less. In English, a rose can be a rose, simply, but it can also be modified or confused with similar words: rose, rosy, rosier, rosiest, rise, risen, rows (ruse), arose, roselike, and so forth. The power of language systems is that there is a very great difference between the signifier and the signified; the power of film is that there is not.
Nevertheless, film is like a language. How, then, does it do what is does? Clearly, one person's image of a certain object is not another's. If we both read the word "rose" you may perhaps think of a Heritage rose you picked last summer, while I am thinking of the one Laura Westphal gave to me in December 1968, or the prop for "The Interface," the short film we shot in 1995. In cinema, however, we both see the same rose, while the filmmaker can choose from an infinite variety of roses and then photograph the one chosen in another infinite variety of ways. The artist's choice in cinema is without limit; the artist's choice in literature is circumscribed, while the reverse is true for the observer: the great thing about literature is that you can imagine; the great thing about film is that you can't.
Pictographic languages like Chinese and Japanese might be said to fall somewhere in between film and Western languages as sign systems, but only when they are written, not when they are spoken, and only in limited cases. On the other hand, there are some words—"gulp," for example—that are onomatopoeic and therefore bear a direct relationship to what they signify, but only when they are spoken.
Film does not suggest, in this context: it states. And therein lies its power and the danger it poses to the observer: the reason why it is useful, even vital, to learn to read images well so that the observer can seize some of the power of the medium. The better one reads an image, the more one understands it, the more power one has over it. The reader of a page invents the image, the reader of a film does not, yet both readers must work to interpret the signs they perceive in order to complete the process of intellection. The more work they do, the better the balance between observer and creator in the process; the better the balance, the more vital and resonant the work of art.
