Language and meaning
5.7 Language and meaning
The dominant threads in the attempts to describe how films and television work find their locations in the numerous and complex propositions broadly labelled as structuralist. The emphasis here is, crudely speaking, formalist, with the interest residing in the text rather than authors and audiences, and the endeavour is to discern structures common to a large number of individual texts. Structuralist theory was a very useful way of countering the journalistic tendency to consider the prime quality of film in its relationship with the real world – that is, how true to life it was. Structuralism developed from the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who insisted that meaning was created by differences existing inside the structure of language. By analogy, a structuralist reading of a film would deal with the film as a particular aspect of a structure that is found across the whole spectrum of
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films. One such structure may define how a film follows the classical Hollywood narrative pattern of stability–disruption–return to stability; another may concentrate on the role of the hero; and yet another might reveal how the text is constructed around the set of oppositions, some thematic (community/anarchy) and others formal (repose/violent action). A particular strength of structuralism is that it can be used to express absences as well as presences – i.e. not only what the text says about a particular theme, but also a latent text. The semiological approach also took its inspiration from the insights of de Saussure, and described the cinema (like language and other social phenomena) as a complex system of signs. Its strength lies in its systematic nature, in its capacity to reveal a whole set of codes in films, and how individual films are made understandable mainly by reference to others. Most importantly, semiology distinguishes between codes specific to the cinema (for example, the structured use of camera movement) and codes incorporated into a film but not necessarily specific to it (usually in the form of literary devices in the narratives). The three models that have been most involved in these developments are those of Vladimir Propp, Claude Levi-Strauss and Christian Metz.
Ferdinand de Saussure initiated the modern approach to the study of language; he perceived it as a natural system that could scientifically investigate developing structures, frameworks and analytical concepts. He defined language (langue) as a self-contained whole, and a principle of classification that could not be confused with human speech (langage), of which it is only a definite part. Language is both a social product and a collection of necessary conventions that have been adopted by the social body to permit individuals to exercise that faculty. These conventions are headed by the use of the langue as an abstract synchronic pattern, which defines the rules of language, and the parole, which describes the diachronic performance that takes place within the langue. Putting it crudely, the langue is the set logical sequence of communication, and the parole the various choices that can be used within the sequence. Another of Saussure’s major contributions was the concept of the sign, the signifier and the signified, in which he analysed the process of linking the name of an object with the object itself. Expressed simply, the sign is an arbitrary unit, the word, which we use to communicate the concept of the signifier (a symbol of physical form), which signifies the object being described. The object is signified in the mind. The sign is the process of signification, which in language is always a sound. The system of linguistics developed by de Saussure became a master plan for other studies of systems where there was felt to be a need for rules and conventions. In the morphology of the folk tale, Vladimir Propp
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proposes an underlying structure to the plots of some hundred-plus folk tales whose apparent content and subject matter changes from one story to another. He argues that the tales he studied had been classed together by investigators because they possessed a particular construction, which was immediately felt and determined the category. He maintains that the structure of the tale should be made explicit or transferred into formal structural meanings. Previous studies had proposed that plots in the folk tales were composed of motives, such as the dragon kidnaps the king’s daughter, but, says Propp, this motive can be varied without changing the plot; the dragon can be replaced by any villainous force, the daughter by anything beloved, the king by any father figure, and the kidnapping by any form of disappearance. He proposes that the functional unit of the plot for the reader is the paradigm with various characters from which any number can be chosen for a particular narrative. There are two units or components for Propp in folk tales; the first are roles filled by various characters, and the second (which constitute the plot) he calls functions. A function is an act of dramatic persona that is defined from the point of view of its significance for
a course of action in a tale as a whole. It is this definition that forms the crux of Propp’s analysis. He enquires what other actions could take the place of
a certain action without changing its role in the story, and the overall class that includes all these actions then serves as the name of the function in question. Propp isolated some 31 such functions that he suggests can be used to form an ordered set, and the presence or absence of which in particular stories can be used as the basis for the classification of plots.
Claude Levi-Strauss’s work on the structural study of myth seems to have been more often invoked than applied in accounts of film criticism. The model has been primarily applied to authorship studies, although it is more suited to accounts of the general underpinning of text. A Levi-Straussian analysis posits the revealing of hidden content through a model of binary oppositions and bundles of relations. Levi-Strauss has investigated the structure of myth to illustrate how these binary oppositions and bundles of relations can be listed in columns of what he called mythemes. These mythemes in each list expressed a particular aspect of the narrative; for example, in the Oedipus myth these are an over-rating of blood relation, an under-rating of blood relation, the killing of a monster and the connotation of the surnames of Oedipus’ father-line. By comparing and opposing these themes, a complex structure of meaning can be deduced. Of the three models, it is the semiological work of Christian Metz that is most specific and elegant. It is specific because it investigates the visual narrative and concentrates particularly on the nature of film. Metz believes that although
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film is like a language, the image is not a word and the sequence is not a sentence. Cinema fails as a language because it is a one-way system of communication and it uses no arbitrary signs. His work departs from the structures of linguistics and focuses on the phenomenon of film – what follows what (syntagma) and what goes with what (paradigm) – and the importance in film of the difference between denotation and connotation. The syntagma of a film or sequence shows its linear narrative structure, and the paradigm represents the choices possible at stages in the syntagma (shades of de Saussure’s langue and parole). In his work The Grande
Syntagmatic 12 , Metz redefined montage and mise en scene as syntagmatic and paradigmatic categories. Thus he placed film theory where it belongs, investigating film narrative taking place in time and space.
The application of the various systems of structuralist analysis has been seen to offer solutions to some problems and at the same time present new ones. Peter Wollen has used both Propp’s and Metz’s work in a desire to set plot paradigms and thus describe a story-generating system. In the case of Propp he used the Hitchcock film North by Northwest and, insofar as the text has been convoluted so as to accommodate the 31 functions, the application can be considered to be successful. However, it is apparent that the application the system derived from such a narrow base does highlight the limited value of the system for use with other films. In the case of Metz’s syntagmatic, Wollen used Citizen Kane, and since the system has been designed to assess a visual pattern in film the process seems to work reasonably well – although whether the process brings the expected fruition is debatable. Wollen was keen to revitalise the concept of the auteur by defining a structure of repeated motifs within a body of directors’ films, and, with Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Jim Kitses and other English film theorists, developed the auteur structuralist ideology. The attempts to formalise the work of an auteur within a structure brought considerable criticism from other theorists, particularly Robin Wood, Charles Eckert and Brian
Henderson, whose main objection was that the process 13 :
. . . reduced the play of text to its underlying structure giving the critic no way of accounting for anything other than the structure and tempting him or her to believe that it is only the structure which gives the text value.
Some auteur structuralists (a loosely applied term), including Jim Kitses, indicated that the forceful and complex body of themes against which the auteur defined his or her work provided the underpinning for the concept of genre and criticism. The auteur theory tends to treat popular art as if it
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were high culture. For this reason, some critics turned to genre criticism to find an alternative method of writing about popular cinema. Laurence
Alloway makes the point 13 : . . . our reflex homage to personal originality too often makes us dismiss
as aesthetically negligible a formulaic film that may be an interesting, valid, even original development within the convention.
There are two genres that have been especially important to the development of Hollywood; the western and the gangster thriller. Each genre has developed its own recurrent iconography and its own themes against which the individual artists have reflected their personal vision, often following closely the formulaic nature of the genres, as in the case of John Ford or Howard Hawks. It is one of the non-naturalistic (mythical) qualities of genres that they find ways of making their unique sensibilities seem normal to a wide audience. Both the western and the gangster film have a particular relationship with American society, both dealing with significant stages in the development of American history. It could be seen a case of America talking to itself about its agrarian past in the case of the western, and its urban, technological present in the case of the gangster. In describing
the western, Jim Kitses says 14 : First it is American history, needless to say this does not mean that the
films are historically accurate or that they cannot be made by Italians: more simply the statement means that American frontier life provides the milieu and mores of the westerns.
As in the case of the debate over whether the study of the author could be substantiated by the claim of the theoretical status, the concept of genre has also been discussed in similar terms. However, it soon becomes obvious that its use is as a set of organising principles rather than an applicable theory. To describe a film as a western, a whole range of films that appear to fulfil the role have to be examined to enable a set of themes or motifs to be ascribed to the nature of the genre. In his study Virgin Land, Henry Nash Smith has traced how the west as a symbol has functioned in America’s history and
consciousness. He asks 15 : Is the west a garden of natural dignity and innocence offering refuge
from the decadence of civilisation, or a treacherous desert, stubbornly resisting the gradual sweep of agrarian progress and community values?
With this ideological perspective pervading the genre, it is possible to include a wide range of antinomies within the basic elements of form. Kitses
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lists a series of antinomies: the wilderness from which the flow of concepts of freedom, honour, self-knowledge, integrity, self-interest and solecism come; the community embracing restriction, institution, illusion, com- promise, social responsibility, democracy; nature/culture and the west/east. These, he suggests, are not only exclusive to early western genre, but have
a national world view for the special problem that affects America. In films such as John Ford’s My Darling Clementine, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, and The Searchers, it is relatively simple for the post-modern audience to identify and deride the mythic presentation of the west and America. However, it is worth considering the assertion made by Will Wright in his
work Six Guns and Society that 16 : . . . a myth is a communication from a society to its members. The social
concepts and attitudes determined by the history and institutions of a society are communicated to its members through its myths.
Wright builds his case for a structural study of the western upon an eclectic use of the works of Levi-Strauss, Propp and de Saussure, and makes a convincing case for such a analysis. The main objection to the structuralist approach to film criticism is that since those who propose it extol its scientific nature, then like any scientific process it should be applicable in all the situations for which claims are being made. The argument appears to be that unless the system works completely, it does not work at all. This is a difficult position to accept, because it is only the most elementary theories in science that are not open to debate or variation. It is therefore more than appropriate that the systems proposed by the structuralists should be taken seriously and used to develop an understanding of how films work. The difficulties begin to become apparent when a theorist attempts to apply a single system exclusively to a film. There appears to be a large area of overlap between the approaches. If we consider the elements of authorship, structure, myth and genre as being set at the four points of a square that represents film theory and criticism, then by using a whole superstructure of study we can attempt to analyse film.