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A. [ read by week-2 ]
The Persisting Vision:
Reading the Language of Cinema
Reading the Language of Cinema
Martin Scorsese | 2013
In the film The Magic Box, which was made in England in 1950. The great English actor Robert Donat plays the inventor William Friese-Greene – he was one of the people who invented movies. The Magic Box was packed with guest stars. It was made for an event called the Festival of Britain. You had about 50 or 60 of the biggest actors in England at the time, all doing for the most part little cameos, including the man who played the policeman – that was Sir Laurence Olivier.
In the film The Magic Box, which was made in England in 1950. The great English actor Robert Donat plays the inventor William Friese-Greene – he was one of the people who invented movies. The Magic Box was packed with guest stars. It was made for an event called the Festival of Britain. You had about 50 or 60 of the biggest actors in England at the time, all doing for the most part little cameos, including the man who played the policeman – that was Sir Laurence Olivier.
I saw this picture for the first time with my father. I was 8 years old. I’ve never really gotten over the impact that it had. I believe this is what ignited in me the wonder of cinema, and the obsession – of watching movies, making them, inventing them.Friese-Greene gives everything of himself to the movies, and he dies poor. He dies a pauper. That line – “You must be a very happy man, Mr. Friese-Greene” –of course is ironic, knowing the full story of his life, but in some ways it’s also true because he’s followed his obsession all the way. So it’s both disturbing and inspiring. I was very young. I couldn’t put this into words when I saw this, but I sensed them. I sensed these ideas and these things and saw them up there on the screen.
My parents had a good reason for taking me to the movies all the time, because I was always sick with asthma since I was three years old and I apparently couldn’t do any sports, or that’s what they told me. But really, my mother and father did love the movies. They weren’t in the habit of reading, that didn’t really exist where I came from, and so we connected through the movies. And over the years I know now that the warmth of that connection with my family and with the images up on the screen gave me something very precious. We were experiencing something fundamental together. We were living through the emotional truths on the screen together, often in coded form, these films from the 40s and 50s sometimes expressed in small things, gestures, glances, reactions between the characters, light, shadow. We experienced these things that we normally couldn’t discuss or wouldn’t discuss or even acknowledge in our lives. And that’s actually part of the wonder. Whenever I hear people dismiss movies as “fantasy” and make a hard distinction between film and life, I think to myself that it’s just a way of avoiding the power of cinema. Of course it’s not life – it’s the invocation of life, it’s in an ongoing dialogue with life.
Frank Capra said, “Film is a disease.” He went on, but that’s enough for now. I caught the disease early on. I used to feel it. They used to take me to the movies all the time. I used to feel it whenever we walked up to the ticket booth with my mother or my father or my brother. You’d go through the doors, up the thick carpet, past the popcorn stand that had that wonderful smell - then to the ticket taker, and then sometimes these doors would open in the back and there’d be little windows in it in some of the old theaters and I could see something magical happening up there on the screen, something special. And as we entered, for me it was like entering a sacred space, a kind of a sanctuary where the living world around me seemed to be recreated and played out.
What was it about cinema? What was so special about it? I think I’ve discovered some of my own answers to that question a little bit at a time over the years. First of all, there’s light.
Light is at the beginning of cinema, of course. It’s fundamental - because it’s created with light, and it’s still best seen projected in dark rooms, where it’s the only source of light. But light is also at the beginning of everything. Most creation myths start with darkness, and then the real beginning comes with light – which means the creation of forms. Which leads to distinguishing one thing from another, and ourselves from the rest of the world. Recognizing patterns, similarities, differences, naming things - interpreting the world. Metaphors – seeing one thing “in light of” something else. Becoming “enlightened.” Light is at the core of who we are and how we understand ourselves.
And then, there’s movement…
I remember when I was about five or six, somehow I was able to see someone project a 16mm cartoon on a small projector, and I was allowed to look inside the projector. I saw these little still images passing mechanically through the gate at a very steady rate of speed. In the gate they were upside down, but they were moving, and on the screen they came out right side up, moving. At least it was, there was the sensation of movement. But it was more than that. Something clicked, right then and there. “Pieces of time” – that’s how James Stewart defined movies in a conversation with Peter Bogdanovich. That wonder I felt when I saw these little figures move – that’s what Laurence Olivier feels when he watches those first moving images in that scene from The Magic Box. [slide: bison, cave paintings of Chauvet] The desire to make images move, the need to capture movement, seems to be with us 30,000 years ago in the cave paintings at Chauvet – as you can see it here, in this image the bison appears to have multiple sets of legs. Maybe that was the artist’s way of creating the impression of movement. I think this need to recreate movement is a mystical urge. It’s an attempt to capture the mystery of who and what we are, and then to contemplate that mystery.
Which brings us to the boxing cats. [film clip: cats boxing, filmed by T. Edison in 1894] This appears to be two cats boxing. It was shot in 1894, in Thomas Edison’s Black Maria studio that he had in New Jersey – it was actually it was just a little shack. This is one among hundreds of little scenes that he and his team recorded in the studio with his Kinetograph. It’s probably one of the lesser known scenes – there are better-known ones of a blacksmith, the heavyweight champion Jim Corbett boxing, Annie Oakley, the great sharpshooter from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. At some point, somebody had the idea to do two cats boxing – apparently this was what went on in New Jersey at the time. Edison, of course, was one of the people who invented film. There’s been a lot of debate about who really invented film – there was Edison, the Lumière Brothers in France, Friese-Greene and R.W. Paul in England. And actually you can go back to a man named Louis Le Prince who shot a little home movie in 1888. And then you could go back even further to the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge, [slide: E. Muybridge’s photos of horses running] which were made in the 1870s, 1880s – he would set a number of still cameras side by side and then he’d trigger them to take photos in succession, of people and animals in movement. His employer Leland Stanford bet him that all four of a horse’s hooves do not leave the ground when the horse is running. As you can see, Muybridge won the bet. All four hooves do leave the ground at the same time while the horse is galloping. Does cinema really begin with Muybridge? Or should we go all the way back to the cave paintings? In his novel Joseph and his Brothers, Thomas Mann writes, “The deeper we sound, the further down into the lower world of the past we probe and press, the more do we find that the earliest foundations of humanity, its history and culture, reveal themselves unfathomable.” All beginnings are unfathomable – the beginning of human history, the beginning of cinema.
[film clip: 1895 film of train arriving in station by Lumière Brothers] This film, by the Lumière Brothers in France, is commonly recognized as the first publicly projected film. It was shot in 1895. When you watch it, it really is 1895. The way they dress and the way they move. It’s now and it’s then, at the same time. And that’s the third aspect of cinema that makes it so uniquely powerful – it’s the element of time. Again, pieces of time.
[film clip: from Hugo, by M. Scorsese] When we made the movie Hugo, we went back and tried to recreate that first screening, when people were so startled to see this image that they jumped back. The thought the train was going to hit them.
When we studied the Lumière film, we could see right away that it was very different from the Edison films. They weren’t just setting up the camera to record events or scenes. This film is composed. When you study it, you can see how carefully they placed the camera, the thought that went into what was in the frame and what was left out of the frame, the distance between the camera and the train, the height of the camera, the angle of the camera – what’s interesting is that if the camera had been placed even a little bit differently, the audience probably wouldn’t have reacted the way they did.
In Hugo, we converted the Lumière film to 3-D, and we combined it with our 3-D image, but it didn’t have the same effect. We discovered we had to do it in two dimensions within a 3-D image, because the composition by the Lumière Brothers was designed to create the illusion of depth within a flat surface. So in essence, the Lumières weren’t just recording events the way they did in Edison’s studio, they were really interpreting reality and telling a story with just one angle. And of course so was Georges Méliès. [film clip: G. Méliès’ Impossible Voyage]
Méliès began as a magician and his pictures were made to be a part of his live magic act. He created trick photography and incredible handmade special effects, and in so doing he sort of remade reality – the screen in his pictures is like opening a magic cabinet of curiosities and wonders. Now, over the years, the Lumières and Méliès have been consistently portrayed as opposites – one filmed reality, the other created special effects. Of course this happens all the time – it’s a way of simplifying history. But in essence, they were both heading in the same direction, just taking different roads – they were taking reality and interpreting it, re-shaping it, and trying to find meaning in it. And then, everything was taken further with the cut. [film clip: Great Train Robbery] Who made the first cut from one image to another – meaning, a shift from one vantage point to another with the viewer understanding that we’re still within one continuous action? Again, to quote Thomas Mann – “unfathomable.” But as far as we know, this is one of the earliest and most famous examples of a cut, from Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 milestone film The Great Train Robbery. Even though we cut from the interior of the car to the exterior, we know we’re in one unbroken action. And this film [film clip: The Musketeers of Pig Alley by D. W. Griffith] is one of the dozens of one-reel films that D.W. Griffith made in 1912 – it’s a remarkable film called The Musketeers of Pig Alley. It’s commonly referred to as the first gangster film, and actually it’s a great Lower East Side New York street film. Now if you watch, the gangsters are crossing quite a bit of space before they get to Pig Alley, which is actually a recreation of a famous Jacob Riis photo of Bandit’s Roost from Five Points, but you’re not seeing them cross that space on the screen.Yet, you are seeing it. You’re seeing it all in yourmind’s eye, you’re inferring it. And this is the 4th aspect of cinema that’s so special. That inference. The image in the mind’s eye. For me it’s where the obsession began. It’s what keeps me going, it never fails to excite me. Because you take one shot, you put it together with another shot, and you experience a third image in your mind’s eye that doesn’t really exist in those two other images – the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein wrote about this, and it was at the heart of all the films he did. This is what fascinates me – it’s frustrating sometimes, it’s always exciting - if you change the timing of the cut even slightly, by just a few frames, or even one frame, then that third image in your mind’s eye changes too. And that has been called, appropriately, I believe, film language.
[film clip: Intolerance, by D. W. Griffith] In 1916, D. W. Griffith made a picture – an epic – called Intolerance, in part as an act of atonement for the racism in The Birth of a Nation. Intolerance ran about three hours. But he goes further with the idea of the cut, he shifts between four different stories – the first story is the massacre of the Hugenots, the second story is the passion of Christ, the third is a spectacle really, the fall of Babylon, and a fourth story which was a modern American story set in 1916. Now at the end of the picture, what Griffith did is that he cut between the different climaxes of these different stories – he cross-cut through time, something that had never been done before. He tied together images not for story or narrative purposes but to illustrate a thesis: in this case, the thesis was that intolerance has existed throughout the ages and that it is always destructive. Eisenstein later wrote about this kind of editing and gave it a name – he called it “intellectual montage.”
For the writers and commentators who were very suspicious of movies – because after all it did start as a Nickelodeon storefront attraction - this was the element that signified film as an art form. But of course, it already was an art form – that started with the Lumières and Méliès and Porter. This was just another, logical step in the development of the language of cinema. That language has taken us in many directions. For instance, here, [film clip: Love Song, by Stan Brakhage] into the pure abstraction of the extraordinary avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Or here –[film clip: Cisco commercial] This is a commercial, very well done by the visual artist and filmmaker Mike Mills, made for an audience that’s seen thousands of commercials – the images come at you so fast that you have to make the connections after the fact. Film language has also taken us here [film clip: 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Stanley Kubrick] This is the Stargate sequence from Stanley Kubrick’s monumental 2001: A Space Odyssey. Narrative, abstraction, speed, movement, stillness, life, death - they’re all up there. Again, we find ourselves back at that mystical urge – to explore, to create movement, to go faster and faster, and maybe find some kind of peace at the heart of it, a state of pure being.
But the cinema we’re talking about here – Edison, the Lumière Brothers, Méliès, Porter all the way through Griffith, and on through Kubrick – that’s really almost gone. It’s been overwhelmed by moving images coming at us all the time and absolutely everywhere, even faster than the visions coming at the astronaut in the Kubrick picture.
Classical cinema, as it’s come to be called, now feels like the grand opera of Verdi or Puccini. And we’re no longer talking about celluloid – that really is a thing of the past. For many film lovers, this is a great sadness and a sense of loss. I certainly feel it myself – I grew up with celluloid and its particular beauty, and its idiosyncrasies.
But cinema has always been tied to technological development, and if we spend too much time lamenting what’s gone, then we’re going to miss the excitement of what’s happening now. Everything is wide open. To some, this is cause for concern. But I think it’s an exciting time precisely because we don’t know what tomorrow will bring, let alone next week.
And we have no choice but to treat all these moving images coming at us as a language. We need to be able to understand what we’re seeing, and find the tools to sort it all out.
We certainly agree now that verbal literacy is necessary. But a couple of thousand years ago, Socrates actually disagreed – his argument was almost identical to the arguments of people today who object to the internet, who think that it’s a sorry replacement for real research in a library. In the dialogue with Phaedrus, written by Plato, Socrates worries that writing and reading will actually lead to the student not truly knowing it –that once people stop memorizing and start writing and reading, they’re in danger of cultivating the mere appearance of wisdom rather than the real thing. Now we take it for granted – reading and writing are taught in schools - but the same kinds of questions are coming up around moving images: Are they harming us? Are they causing us to abandon written language?
We’re face to face with images all the time in a way that we never have been before. And that’s why I believe we need to stress visual literacy in our schools. Young people need to understand that not all images are there to be consumed like fast food and then forgotten – we need to educate them to understand the difference between moving images that engage their humanity and their intelligence, and moving images that are just selling them something. In fact, as Steve Apkon, the film producer and founder of The Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, NY, points out in his new book The Age of the Image, the distinction between verbal and visual literacy needs to be done away with, along with the tired old arguments about the word and the image and which is more important. They’re both important. They’re both fundamental. Both take us back to the core of who we are.
[slide: image of Sumerian tablet] When you look at ancient writing, words and images are almost indistinguishable. In fact, words are images, they’re symbols. Written Chinese and Japanese still seem like pictographic languages. And at a certain point – exactly when is… “unfathomable” – words and images diverged, like two rivers, or two different paths to understanding. But in the end, there really is only literacy.
At The Film Foundation, which I founded in 1990, we developed a curriculum called “The Story of Movies,” which we make available for free to any teacher who wants it. So far, 100,000 educators have used it in their classrooms. [film clip: The Day the Earth Stood Still, by Robert Wise] We’ve created three study units around certain titles, one of which is a 1951 film called The Day the Earth Stood Still. Which, as you can see, was shot not too far from here. Why this picture? Because it’s beautifully made in black and white. Because it’s Hollywood at its best during the era that, I think, really deserves the name Golden Age. Because it’s one of the really great science fiction pictures of the 50s. And there’s another reason.
The American film critic Manny Farber said that every movie transmits the DNA of its time. The Day the Earth Stood Still was made right in the middle of the Cold War, and it has the tension, the paranoia, the fear of nuclear disaster and the fear of the end of life on planet earth, and a million other elements, more difficult to put into words. These elements have to do with the play of light and shadow, the emotional and psychological interplay between the characters, the atmosphere of the time woven into the action, the choices that were made behind the camera and that resulted in the immediate film experience for viewers like myself and my parents. These are the aspects of a film that reveal themselves in passing, the things that bring the movie to life for the viewer. And the experience becomes even richer when you explore these elements much more closely.
But what happens when a movie is seen out of its time? For me, 1951 was my present when I saw it. I was nine. For someone born 20 years later, it’s a different story.
For someone born today, they’ll see it with completely different eyes and a whole other frame of reference, different values, uninhibited by the biases of the time when the picture was made. You can only see the world through your own time – which means that some values disappear, and some values come into closer focus. Same film, same images, but in the case of a great film the power – a timeless power that really can’t be articulated – that power is there even when the context has completely changed.
[slide: image of Sumerian tablet] But, in order to experience something and find new values in it, it has to be there in the first place - you have to preserve it. All of it. Archeologists have made many discoveries by studying what we throw away, the refuse of earlier civilizations, the things that we consider expendable. For example, this Sumerian tablet. It’s not a poem, it’s not a legend. It’s actually a record of livestock – a balance sheet of business transactions. Miraculously, it’s been preserved, for centuries, first under layers of earth and now in a climate-controlled environment. When we still find objects like this, we immediately take great care with them. We have to do the same thing with film. [slides: series of images of decayed film], But film isn’t made of stone. Until recently, it was all made of celluloid, as I said before – thin strips of nitrocellulose, the first plastic compound. Through the late 1940s, before nitrate film was replaced by safety film, nitrate film caught fire, it blew up - it could turn to powder and explode. In 1950 it was replaced with safety stock.
And with a few exceptions, preservation wasn’t even discussed at that time– it was something that happened by accident. Some of the most celebrated movies were the victims of their own popularity. Every time they were re-released, they were often printed from the original negatives, and in the process they were run into the ground. Film is so fragile – that didn’t really sink in at the time. It wasn’t so long ago that nitrate films were melted down just to get the silver content back. Prints of films made in the 70s and 80s were recycled to make guitar picks and plastic heels for shoes. That’s a disturbing thought – just as disturbing [slide: photo by Mathew Brady from Civil War battlefield] as knowing that those extraordinary glass photographic plates taken of the Civil War not long after the birth of photography were later sold to gardeners for building greenhouses. Whatever plates survived are here in the Library of Congress. So when I hear the question – and interestingly enough some people are still asking it – “why preserve anything?” – I just think of those stories. All that silent film, all those images of the Civil War, and there was no consciousness of their lasting value. That only came later. Why preserve? Because we can’t know where we’re going unless we know where we’ve been – we can’t understand the future or the present until we have some sort of grappling with the past.
I became involved with the cause of preservation in the early 1980s, when I really understood just how fragile film was. Since the early 90s, around the time we formed The Film Foundation, which was an idea by Bob Rosen to put all of us together, myself and a number of other directors, Spielberg, and Lucas and Coppola and Robert Redford, Sydney Pollack… The Film Foundation was formed to bring the studios together with the archives.
Since that time I think there actually has been a shift in consciousness and much more awareness of the need for preservation, which is ongoing – because it isn’t something that’s done once. You have to keep going back, constantly, moving the films from one format to another, to make sure they survive, because it’s an endless process. Today, we have some really wonderful tools. When the time came to restore Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, [film clip: The Red Shoes, by Powell & Pressburger] one of my very, very favorite films and one of the best films ever made, we were fortunate enough to have these tools at our disposal. I thought I would just show you a little bit of the restoration demonstration Thelma Schoonmaker put together for the Blu- Ray of that film, to give you an idea of the work involved. It took years to get this going and was quite expensive. You must bear in mind that The Red Shoes was shot in the old three-strip Technicolor technology with very heavy cameras that had not one but three rolls of film going through them at the same time. [film clip: on the restoration of The Red Shoes] None of this would have been possible before digital technology. But I have to say that we are too late. Over 90% of all silent cinema is gone. Lost forever. Every time a silent picture by some miracle turns up like John Ford’s film he made in 1927 called Upstream, which was recently discovered by the National Film Preservation Foundation in an archive in New Zealand – every time one of those shows up we have to remind ourselves that there are hundreds, maybe thousands more that are gone forever. So we have to take really good care of what’s left. Everything, from the acknowledged masterworks of cinema to industrial films and home movies, anthropological films. Anything that could tell us who we are.
And here’s one example of why we have to look beyond the officially honored, recognized, and enshrined - why we have to preserve everything systematically
[film clip: Vertigo, by Alfred Hitchcock] This is a 1958 picture directed by Alfred Hitchcock that I’m sure many of you have seen, called Vertigo. When this film came out, some people liked it, some didn’t, and then it just went away. Even before it came out, it was classified as another picture from the Master of Suspense and that was it, end of story. Almost every year at that time, there was a new Hitchcock picture – it was almost like a franchise. At a certain point, there was a reevaluation of Hitchcock, thanks to the critics in France who later became the directors of the French New Wave, and to the American critic Andrew Sarris. They all enhanced our vision of cinema and helped us to understand the idea of authorship behind the camera.
When the idea of film language started to be taken seriously, so did Hitchcock. Because his films seemed to have an innate sense of visual storytelling. And the more closely you looked at his pictures, the richer and more emotionally complex they became. Ironically, as people were starting to recognize Hitchcock’s genius, several of his most important pictures were suddenly unavailable. This was in 1973. Vertigo was one of them. There were a number of films: Rear Window, Rope…At the time, no one understood what had happened, we couldn’t see these films anymore, not even on television. In fact, Hitchcock himself pulled the films from distribution so that he could get his estate in order. There were secret screenings, some people had private prints here and there in New York and L.A. In the case of Vertigo that only added to the mystique of the picture. When it came back into circulation, in 1984, along with the other films that had been held back, it needed work but the new prints weren’t made from the original negative and the color was completely wrong. The color scheme of Vertigo is extremely unusual, and this was a major disappointment. In the meantime, the elements – the original negatives - needed serious attention.
Ten years later, Bob Harris and Jim Katz did a full-scale restoration for Universal. It was very expensive. The picture was originally shot in the Vista-Vision process, and so they had to do their restoration in 70mm, which was as close as you could get to VistaVision – because that format is gone now. At that point, they had to work from extremely damaged sound and picture elements. But at least, a major restoration had been done.
As the years went by, more and more people saw Vertigo and came to appreciate its hypnotic beauty and very strange, obsessive focus. Obsessive… focus…[film clip: Vertigo, by Hitchcock] A man is hired to follow a woman. The woman appears to be haunted by the legend of her great-grandmother and that woman’s tragic life. She goes into trances, absences that put her in danger. She sees a vision of her own death in an old mission in northern California that has a bell tower. He brings her there to cure her. She climbs the tower, he tries to go after her but he can’t because he suffers from vertigo, and he just watches, helplessly, as she jumps to her death. That’s just the first half of the film. And that’s only the plot. As in the case of many great films, maybe all of them, we don’t keep going back for the plot. Vertigo is a matter of mood as much as it’s a matter of storytelling – the special mood of San Francisco where the past is eerily alive and around you at all times, the mist in the air from the Pacific that refracts the light, the unease of the hero played by James Stewart in the lead, Bernard Herrmann’s haunting score. And, as the film critic B. Kite wrote, you haven’t really seen Vertigo until you’ve seen it again – so for those of you who haven’t seen it even once, when you do, you’ll know what I mean.
In 1952, the British film magazine Sight and Sound started conducting a poll. They do it every ten years now. They asked film people from around the world – directors, writers, producers, critics – to list what they thought were the ten greatest films of all time, and then they tallied the results and published them. In 1952, number one was Vittorio de Sica’s great Italian Neorealist picture Bicycle Thieves. Ten years later, in 1962, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane was at the top of the list. It stayed there for the next forty years. Citizen Kane is a masterpiece, of course. It was released in 1941 with a lot of fanfare, and while it wasn’t a great financial success, it was generally regarded as a milestone in the art of cinema, re-discovered in the 50s by my generation, on television actually, and considered one of the greatest films ever made. It still is. It was also regarded as an essentially American picture about drive, ambition, failure, and, again, like Vertigo, time.
As I said, Citizen Kane was number one for forty years. Until last year, 2012, when it was displaced by a movie that came and went in 1958, and that came very, very close to being lost to us forever –and that’s Vertigo. And by the way, so did Citizen Kane – because the original negative was burned in a fire in the mid-70s in LA. So, my point is not only do we have to preserve everything, but most importantly, we can’t afford to let ourselves be guided by cultural standards – particularly now. There was a time when the average person wasn’t even aware of box office grosses. But since the 1980s, it’s become a kind of sport – and really, a form of judgment. It culturally trivializes film. And for young people today, that’s what they know. Who made the most money? Who was the most popular? Who is the most popular now, as opposed to last year, or last month, or last week? Now, the cycles of popularity are down to a matter of hours, minutes, seconds, and the work that’s been created out of seriousness and real passion is lumped together with the work that really hasn’t. And then, amidst all this chaos, we have to remember: we may think we know what’s going to last and what isn’t. We may feel absolutely sure of ourselves, but we really don’t know, we can’t know. We have to remember Vertigo, and the Civil War plates, and that Sumerian tablet. And also remember that Moby-Dick sold very few copies when it was printed in 1849, that many of the copies that weren’t sold were destroyed in a warehouse fire, that it was dismissed by many, and that Herman Melville’s greatest novel, one of the greatest works in literature, was only reclaimed in the 1920s.
We also have to think about where we are now.
We need to remember that there are other values beyond the financial, and that our American artistic heritage has to be preserved and shared by all of us.
Just as we’ve learned to take pride in our poets and writers, in jazz and the blues, we need to take pride in our cinema, our great American art form. Granted, we weren’t the only ones who invented the movies. We certainly weren’t the only ones who made great films in the 20th century, but to a large extent the art of cinema and its development has been linked to us, to our country. That’s a big responsibility. And we need to say to ourselves that the moment has come when we have to treat every last moving image as reverently and respectfully as the oldest book in the Library of Congress.
Thank you,
Martin Scorsese
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B. [ read by week-7 ]
Language of Cinema:
Martin Scorsese’s Essay Explains the Importance of Visual Literacy
V Renée | 2013
I think the thing that made the greatest impact on me when I was in college was this strange concept, one I'd never heard of before -- the concept of visual literacy. Understanding the historical, technical, and cultural significance of the film language is incredibly important, and in an essay by Martin Scorsese, he writes at length about how understanding it is not only imperative to create better films, but also for experiencing the intricate design of a cinematic story, and fully appreciating the auteurs who have managed to become masters of a widely foreign, albeit universal tongue.
Like I said before, being able to read a film has a range of significance in our world. Scorsese touches on a few areas in his article that explain how film language is important historically, technically, and socially.
Historically
The history of the "language" of cinema started, arguably, with the very first cut. I imagine it being like the first glottal stop or fricative that set apart the constant flow of sound, or in cinema, images, developing a rich and profound language.
Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery from 1903 is one of the first and most famous examples of cutting. In the first few minutes of the film, there is a shot of the robbers bursting into the train depot office. In the background we can see a train pulling in, and in the next shot, we're outside with the robbers as the train comes to a stop near them. The significance of that is that the audience realized that the train in the first shot was the same one that was in the second, and it all happened in one action (it didn't pull in twice.)
Further along the timeline, filmmakers continued to advance and add to the language of film. D.W. Griffith managed to weave together 4 separate storylines by cross cutting scenes from different times and places in Intolerance. Sergei Eisenstein forwarded the idea of the "montage" most famously in Battleship Potemkin and his first feature Strike. Continuity editing, shot sizes, including the close-up, the use of color, parallel editing, camera movement -- all of these things and more began to speak to audiences and filmmakers in new and exciting ways.
Technically
These techniques began to solidify and become standard. The old way of making a film -- one take or multiple long takes filmed in a wide shot -- began to evolve into much more complex visual narratives. Films could encompass hours, days, years out of a characters story thanks to continuity editing. The shot-reverse-shot editing allowed for the use of close-ups and different camera angles. Certain shot compositions began to speak to audiences in different ways, giving the frame itself a life and language of its own.
Being able to read and speak the language of film as a filmmaker is a skill that must obviously be mastered. Everything on-screen -- the lighting, the shadows, the size of the shot, the angle, the composition, the blocking, the colors, everything -- is a word spoken to your audience.
For example the shot from Vertigo that employs the "Vertigo Effect". Second-unit cameraman Irmin Roberts invented this "zoom out and track in" technique, known as the "contra-zoom" or "trombone shot". Roberts, essentially, invented a new word in the language of motion pictures that means "dizziness", "fear", "terrifying realization", etc.
Socially
There's a great Proust quote that my visual literacy professor shared with us one day in class, "The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." Films of the early 1900s were all about showing something exciting and different: cats boxing, a woman dancing, a train arriving. But, the filmmakers who developed the visual language of cinema were the ones who began to see things in a new light, and as they screened their films, audiences began to learn the language their films were speaking.
Today, filmmakers and viewers are visually literate, but not many viewers realize it. We, myself included, tend to allow the spectacle to overtake us -- we get wrapped up in the story, the visuals, and the music. We feel sad when we watch an on-screen break up or fight between two people who had been close, but we may fail to realize, or at least consciously identify, that a lot of the drama that leads to that climax was created using visual queues.
Many audiences in the past took for granted this form of communication until the film critics that eventually ushered in the French New Wave, like Truffaut, as well as American critic Andrew Sarris took a closer look at the filmmaking of Alfred Hitchcock.
Scorsese mentions that because Hitchcock's films came out almost like clockwork every year (Scorsese likens this to a sort of franchise,) his film Vertigo kind of disappeared into the heap of movies that came out that year. It wasn't a failure by any means, but it wasn't the overwhelming success we today would expect it to have been.
Today, the Master of Suspense is revered as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, but it wasn't until Cahiers du Cinema and critics like Truffaut and Sarris began studying Hitchcock's work, decoding the film language Hitchcock used, that a more solid understanding of film language started to emerge.
They realized that Hitchcock had his own "dialect", which helped develop the auteur theory. Without visual literacy, there wouldn't be auteurs -- the genius and skill of history's greatest filmmakers could potentially be lost on a an audience that doesn't know how to read between the lines of a film.
Understanding the concepts of visual literacy is not only a skill for filmmakers, but all who experience films, because films are such a huge part of our lives. Scorsese says:
Whenever I hear people dismiss movies as “fantasy” and make a hard distinction between film and life, I think to myself that it’s just a way of avoiding the power of cinema. Of course it’s not life—it’s the invocation of life, it’s in an ongoing dialogue with life.
Scorsese laments that today movies are more often judged based on their box office receipts than on the artfulness of their execution.
We can’t afford to let ourselves be guided by contemporary cultural standards -- particularly now. There was a time when the average person wasn’t even aware of box office grosses. But since the 1980s, it’s become a kind of sport -- and really, a form of judgment. It culturally trivializes film. And for young people today, that’s what they know. Who made the most money? Who was the most popular?
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C. [ read by week-10 ]
Film Theory and Approaches to Criticism,
- or, What did that movie mean?
By Christopher P. Jacobs
Movies are entertainment. Movies are documents of their time and place. Movies are artistic forms of self-expression. Movies we see at theatres, on television, or home video are typically narrative films. They tell stories about characters going through experiences.
But what are they really about? What is the content of a film?
DIGGING DEEPER: FOUR LEVELS OF MEANING
Recounting the plot of a movie, telling what happens, is the simplest way to explain it to someone else. But this is neither a film review nor a film analysis. It’s merely a synopsis that anyone else who sees or has seen the movie will likely agree with. This level of content may be called the referential content, since it refers directly to things that happen in the plot and possibly to some aspects of the story that are merely implied by the plot. In John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), four men from the city go on a weekend canoe trip that unexpectedly becomes a life or death struggle for survival of man against man and man against nature. Some characters survive, others don’t. Most films can be analyzed more thoroughly to reveal deeper levels of meaning.
A review (perhaps 400-1200 words) typically includes personal impressions and evaluations of a movie’s content and techniques. A good review may touch superficially on topics that might be explored in more detail in a longer formal analysis. An analysis (perhaps 1200-12,000 words) attempts to determine how the film actually uses various cinematic techniques and elements of film or narrative form to make a viewer react in a certain way and why it makes viewers come away with certain opinions about it. Serious film criticism, whether essays written for magazines, journals, books, or class assignments, attempts to analyze films, rather than merely review them or provide simple descriptions of what happens. An analysis requires some reflective thought about the film, and usually benefits from multiple viewings and outside research.
Most films include lines of dialogue and depict obvious developments of character that explicitly communicate meaning to the viewers. Explicit content is perhaps some sort of “moral of the story” or socio-political attitude that the filmmaker is expressing directly through the mouths and actions of the characters. Some reasons the men in Deliverance give for taking the canoe trip include friendship and camaraderie, proving their manhood, and experiencing nature before it is destroyed by industrial development. As the plot develops, they also express personal attitudes about life and law and survival, which the writer and director obviously want the audience to think about. We also see explicitly how construction of a new dam is affecting the wilderness as well as human settlements.
A slightly deeper level of interpretation is implicit content, which may be less obvious but can still be inferred by seeing how the characters change, grow, and develop throughout the course of the film. Issues and ideas dealing with general human relations (rather than those specific to individual characters) may be fairly easy to recognize but are not explicitly stated by the characters. Sometimes implicit meanings are less obvious, and different viewers might interpret the same thing in different ways, depending upon their own experiences and expectations. In Deliverance we see implicitly the change in one character from being a passive follower after he is accidentally thrust into a leadership position. We see another character’s casual attitude about casual sex change drastically after a traumatic experience in the woods. We see all four men force to contend with unexpected dangers in ways that imply how differently individuals can deal with the same events and suggest that certain compromises in one’s ideals may need to be made in order to survive. It could even be possible to infer that the four central characters are separate personifications of conflicting values that might exist within a single individual. Such a literary technique allows an author (and viewer/reader) in effect to argue with himself over what the best or most practical course of action would be under comparable circumstances, and what different
decisions might lead to. One could also identify instances of dramatic irony and argue whether certain events are meant to be considered “poetic justice” for the characters involved.
Implicit, explicit, and referential interpretations are based entirely on the film as a self-contained work, on “internal evidence.” It is also possible to find richer meaning in a film, meaning deduced by knowing something about its creators and the time and place it was created, meaning from “external evidence” that is not possible to identify exclusively from the film itself. Sometimes this type of meaning is intentional on the part of the filmmakers, and other times it may be unconsciously incorporated into the story. Analyzing a film on this level is treating the film as a symptom of a much greater influence than simple dramatic concerns for the characters and their actions. A symptomatic interpretation looks at the film as part of the broad context of society, reflecting and illustrating themes prevalent in the culture, in the time and place it was made, and possibly in the creator’s personal life experience. This level of interpretation tries to recognize symbolic content, identifying characters and situations as metaphors for something else, or possibly seeing the entire story as an allegory about something else. Deliverance is an outdoor adventure and journey story set in the American south, but many critics looked at it as an allegory for the disastrous American experience in Vietnam, which was still going on when the film was made. Men conditioned by modern urban civilization believe they’re more or less invincible as they travel into a rural environment inhabited by a less technologically advanced culture of backwoods people they look down upon. However, they soon discover the more primitive people can be more dangerous than they expected, they must do things they were not prepared to do to survive, not everyone gets out alive, and those that do are forever haunted by the experience. The movie District 9 (2009) is a science fiction action-thriller, but this Oscar-nominated and internationally popular South African production by Neill Blomkamp is also symptomatic of late 20th and early 21st century attitudes towards immigration, minorities, government and corporate policies, the news media, and documentary filmmaking.
FIGURING IT OUT: APPROACHES TO INTERPRETATION
Identifying the content, whether explicit, implicit, or symptomatic, with a certain attitude you perceive the film takes (whether by its writer and/or its director), is an interpretation of its ideological meaning. Many films are overt attempts by their filmmakers to persuade audiences to their points of view. Others are more interested in raising various issues for audiences to think about. These may be less heavy-handed in supporting one view or another, and sometimes even come across as ambivalent, depicting opposing viewpoints as each having valid concerns and each having their good and bad points. Still other films express obvious socio-political views through their characters, but may appear to contradict them through the actions and ultimate resolutions of the plot, possibly to keep them marketable to a wider public while still raising awareness of the issues. It’s up to viewers and critics to determine whether a film is effective at achieving some or all of its intentions, and sometimes even what those intentions might be. Analysis from a variety of approaches can help a viewer realize just what a film is trying to do, and to appreciate it more, whether or not one agrees with it.
Once people realized that films could do much more than provide simple entertainment, a variety of theories and approaches were developed to help analyze films in order to understand how they created responses in viewers and just what they might mean. Different approaches examine different aspects of a film for different reasons.
A formalist approach looks at the film itself, its structure and form. Thus, while other approaches often use some degree of external evidence to analyze a film, a formalist approach will focus primarily on internal evidence. This approach might analyze how the way the plot presents the story material forces the viewer to see things at certain times and have reactions that might be different if presented some other way. A narrative analysis will examine how a film employs various narrative formal elements (such as character, setting, repetition/variation, etc.) to convey meaning to the viewer. Analysis of specific formal techniques might concentrate on a film’s use of mise en scene or photographic composition, camera movements, editing choices, sound in relation to the image, etc., noting the effect of those techniques on how the viewer perceives the scenes and interprets what they mean.
A realist approach examines how a film represents “reality.” Some films attempt to make techniques “invisible” to viewers so the characters and situations are always the primary focus. Others attempt to use cinematic techniques to replicate a certain type of reality the filmmaker wants the audience to experience -- love, aging, memory, insanity, drug use, etc. Some films are more concerned with creating moods and emotional impressions than with depicting a traditionally plotted story with an obvious beginning, middle, and end. These films may be attempting to convey a type of reality important to their creators, hoping that viewers will pick up on it, but non-mainstream use of techniques and non-standard structure may require a concerted effort on the part of a viewer to understand, multiple viewings, or even an explanation by the filmmaker. Look, for example, at the unusual films written or directed by Charlie Kaufmann, such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Synechdoche New York, Adaptation, and Being John Malkovich.
A contextualist approach to analysis always considers a film as part of some broader context. This can be society at large (as in the symptomatic interpretations mentioned above), the particular culture, time, and place that created it (a culturalist approach), the director’s personal life and previous body of work (an auteurist approach that assumes the director is the “author” of a film), or various psychological and/or ideological contexts. A psychological approach often identifies plot elements with theories of psychologists like Freud or Jung, looking for sexual symbolism, treatment of the subconscious, representations of the id, ego, and superego, etc. The dualist approach looks for pairs of opposites (male-female, good-evil, light-dark, urban-rural, etc.), possibly identifying them as symbolic of contrasting tendencies in society or human nature itself. A feminist analysis concentrates on the portrayals of women in a film -- are they strong, weak, stereotypes, protagonists, antagonists, etc. A Marxist critic will attempt to associate characters and events in a film as representative of class struggle, labor vs. management, poor vs. rich, oppressive governments, and other Marxist sociopolitical concerns. A generic approach looks at a film as a representative of a genre, comparing it with other films from the same genre and finding meaning by identifying shared symbolic motifs or variations from the expected formula. This is especially useful when a film intentionally subverts or inverts various elements of traditional generic formulas. A generic analysis often benefits from a wider-reaching contextual approach, as a substantial number of genre films (especially science-fiction, fantasy, and westerns, but also others such as journey films, war films, and historical dramas) incorporate intentional metaphors and symptomatic content relating to contemporary society at the time they were made. Another way to examine a film in a certain context is to chronicle its reception by audiences and critics over the years. Some films were huge popular and critical successes when originally released, but were all but forgotten within a few years or perhaps a decade or two. Other films were virtually ignored when they first came out, but gradually gained viewer and critical acclaim to the point that they’re now considered major masterpieces or beloved favorites. It’s possible that a film originally rejected by critics but popular with the mass viewing public gradually reversed that position over the decades so that it is now critically respected but largely disliked by the general public. Still other films provoke a certain amount of controversy, falling in and out of favor from one decade to another as public and/or critical tastes change. A variation on this survey of response to a film over the years is the genetic approach, which follows a film through all stages of its creation and release. It will examine and evaluate various drafts of the story and script, memos about changes during production, continuing through various cuts of the film made for preview audiences, theatrical release, re-edited rereleases, television and video editions, and later “definitive” director’s cuts.
A viewer can use any one or combination of these critical approaches to try to figure out just what a filmmaker is trying to say in a work. Different approaches may embrace or totally ignore other approaches to come up with similar or completely opposite ideas about what a film really means. There may be as many different interpretations of a film as there are critics, but examining a film from a variety of approaches may reveal things one never even considered while watching it for the first time. Of course, trying to use every approach to analyze a film would result in a book-length study. Any particular film may lend itself most easily to one or two specific approaches in detail, with some consideration of perhaps one or more other approaches. Writing a brief critical analysis, whether five pages or 25 pages, requires narrowing down the scope of your coverage to only what strikes you as most important about the film and what you consider most rewarding to discuss.
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D. [ read by week-12 ]
Meta-narrative in Film-
Apocalypse Now
Apocalypse Now
by Jean Baudrillard (1981)
The essay below first appeared in the book Simulacra and Simulation (1981), by Jean Baudrillard, one of the leading French post-modern intellectuals.
APOCALYPSE NOW
Coppola makes his film like the Americans made war - in this sense, it is the best possible testimonial - with the same immoderation, the same excess of means, the same monstrous candor . . . and the same success. The war as entrenchment, as technological and psychedelic fantasy, the war as a succession of special effects, the war become film even before being filmed. The war abolishes itself in its technological test, and for Americans it was primarily that: a test site, a gigantic territory in which to test their arms, their methods, their power. Coppola does nothing but that: test cinema's power of intervention, test the impact of a cinema that has become an immeasurable machinery of special effects. In this sense, his film is really the extension of the war through other means, the pinnacle of this failed war, and its apotheosis. The war became film, the film becomes war, the two are joined by their common hemorrhage into technology.
The real war is waged by Coppola as it is by Westmoreland: without counting the inspired irony of having forests and Philippine villages napalmed to retrace the hell of South Vietnam. One revisits everything through cinema and one begins again: the Molochian joy of filming, the sacrificial joy of so many millions spent, of such a holocaust of means, of so many misadventures, and the remarkable paranoia that from the beginning conceived of this film as a historical, global event, in which, in the mind of the creator, the war in Vietnam would have been nothing other than what it is, would not fundamentally have existed - and it is necessary for us to believe in this: the war in Vietnam "in itself" perhaps in fact never happened, it is a dream, a baroque dream of napalm and of the tropics, a psychotropic dream that had the goal neither of a victory nor of a policy at stake, but, rather, the sacrificial, excessive deployment of a power already filming itself as it unfolded, perhaps waiting for nothing but consecration by a super-film, which completes the mass-spectacle effect of this war.
No real distance, no critical sense, no desire for "raising consciousness" in relation to the war: and in a sense this is the brutal quality of this film - not being rotten with the moral psychology of war. Coppola can certainly deck out his helicopter captain in a ridiculous hat of the light cavalry, and make him crush the Vietnamese village to the sound of Wagner's music - those are not critical, distant signs, they are immersed in the machinery, they are part of the special effect, and he himself makes movies in the same way, with the same retro megalomania, and the same non-signifying furor, with the same clownish effect in overdrive. But there it is, he hits us with that, it is there, it is bewildering, and one can say to oneself: how is such a horror possible (not that of the war, but that of the film strictly speaking)? But there is no answer, there is no possible verdict, and one can even rejoice in this monstrous trick (exactly as with Wagner) - but one can always retrieve a tiny little idea that is not nasty, that is not a value judgment, but that tells you the war in Vietnam and this film are cut from the same cloth, that nothing separates them, that this film is part of the war - if the Americans (seemingly) lost the other one, they certainly won this one. Apocalypse Now is a global victory. Cinematographic power equal and superior to that of the industrial and military complexes, equal or superior to that of the Pentagon and of governments.
And all of a sudden, the film is not without interest: it retrospectively illuminates (not even retrospectively, because the film is a phase of this war without end) what was already crazy about this war, irrational in political terms: the Americans and the Vietnamese are already reconciled, right after the end of the hostilities the Americans offered economic aid, exactly as if they had annihilated the jungle and the towns, exactly as they are making their film today. One has understood nothing, neither about the war nor about cinema (at least the latter) if one has not grasped this lack of distinction that is no longer either an ideological or a moral one, one of good and evil, but one of the reversibility of both destruction and production, of the immanence of a thing in its very revolution, of the organic metabolism of all the technologies, of the carpet of bombs in the strip of film.
Simulacra and Simulation is a 1981 philosophical treatise by Jean Baudrillard, in which he seeks to examine the relationships among reality, symbols, and society, in particular the significations and symbolism of culture and media that are involved in constructing an understanding of shared existence.
Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no original to begin with, or that no longer have an original.[1] Simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time.
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E. [ read by week-14 ]
Semiotics and Visual Representation
Brian Curtin, PhD International Program in Design and Architecture
semiotics: general definitions
1. Semiotics is concerned with meaning; how representation, in the broad sense (language, images, objects) generates meanings or the processes by which we comprehend or attribute meaning. For visual images, or visual and material culture more generally, semiotics is an inquiry that is wider than the study of symbolism and the use of semiotic analysis challenges concepts such as naturalism and realism (the notion that images or objects can objectively depict something) and intentionality (the notion that the meaning of images or objects is produced by the person who created it). Furthermore, semiotics can offer a useful perspective on formalist analysis (the notion that meaning is of secondary importance to the relationships of the individual elements of an image or object). Semiotic analysis, in effect, acknowledges the variable relationship[s] we may have to representation and therefore images or objects are understood as dynamic; that is, the significance of images or objects is not understood as a one-way process from image or object to the individual but the result of complex inter-relationships between the individual, the image or object and other factors such as culture and society.
historical notes
5. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) founded semiology early in the 20th century, as well as linguistics, as a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life. The origins of semiotics can be linked to structuralism, which also has its origins in Saussure’s thinking. Structuralism is a method of analysis that seeks to study and reveal the ‘deep’ structure behind the appearance of phenomena; that is, the hidden rules which organize anything from how people interact in particular social contexts to how stories are written or told. Given phenomena has generally been understood on the model of language, or as a language, and academics and theorists since Saussure have variously modified, altered and challenged the insights and uses of linguistics, alongside the relevance of structuralism.
6. Saussure defined the sign, as we have seen, as the relationship between a signifier (that which carries or produces meaning) and the signified (the meaning itself). His primary insight was that the relationship between them is arbitrary; within language the signifier ‘red’, for example, is not in itself red and, further, different languages of course have different words for the same thing. In effect, Saussure emphasized the fact that entities do not precede or determine their naming, otherwise a name would mean the same thing in every language. Eskimos, for example, have many more words for ‘snow’ than English speakers, who only have one.
7. This idea was rendered more complex by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), who challenged the notion that a sign simply generates its idea, however arbitrary. In Peirce’s model, semiosis functions through three, rather than two, positions. There is the sign (that which stands for something else) and the interpretant (also called meaning or meaning-effect, and basically means interpretation or the mental image the individual forms of the sign) and the object (or referent, the thing for which the sign stands).
semiotics and visual culture
8. For studies in visual and material culture, Peirce’s classification of signs in terms of icon, index and symbol are useful, though these are not the only classifications he created. An icon, simply put, is a sign that is linked to a signifier through similarity in appearance. Examples here include portraits or abstract paintings where color is, for example, black; the painting is black, refers to the color black and can then be interpreted differently. The point is that we can gain information (or think we can!) about the signified by looking at the sign.
10. Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was the first to apply ideas of semiotics, as it developed from linguistics, to visual images, for example, food advertise- ments, photography and motion pictures. Barthes’ work offers a useful summary of the important aspects of semiotics discussed above. Essentially, he sought to analyze how the meanings we attribute to images are not a “natural” result of what we see; that is, images are not self-evident and universal in how we understand what we see. For example, it is very difficult to attribute meaning to a photograph without a caption or accompanying text. Further, the meanings that we do give to images are linked to culturally specific associations, though it is very necessary to note that culture can not entirely determine our response (Potts 1996, 31).
(Image missing)
11. Barthes called the immediate visual impact denoted meaning (or first- order or basic meaning) and the cultural meaning we attach to it connoted meaning (or second-order meaning). In other words, denoted meaning refers to the recognition of what is registered by the image or photograph (e.g. a photograph of a monk) and connoted meaning refers to the possible invitation of the image to interpret, give meaning to, the forms even against or beyond the authors’ intention. This provides a useful backdrop to look at the application of semiotics to visual and material culture and, furthermore, in terms of considering cultural meanings, we may also usefully note Barthes’ influence on post- structuralist thinking. Post-structuralism does not view language as a structure but rather a structuring process in terms of the relationship of the reader, or viewer, or consumer (Ribere 2002, 60). In this respect, there is a greater emphasis on the impact of language and the role the individual plays in creating meaning.
semiotics and representation in visual art
12. Given the root of ‘representation’ in notions of resemblance and imitation, among other factors, visual images have often been thought of as more direct and straightforward in their meaning than language itself, which varies from culture to culture. Or, in other words, there has been a strong tendency to think of visual images as not a language, as un-coded and possibly universal in their meaning. Furthermore, as a result of a pervasive link between visual art and the idea of expression, art has been thought of as more intuitive, unconscious and basic than language; therefore transcending the specifics of the culture[s] it emerges from. This, of course, is not true.
21. To briefly recap; we can say that semiotics is concerned with the nature and function of language (be it the relatively ambiguous status of visual language) and the processes by which meaning is generated and understood. Semiotic analysis acknowledges the position, or role, of the individual in terms of a challenge to any notion of fixed or unitary or universal meaning and therefore subjectivity can be engaged dynamically with the image or object. A significant way that subjectivity is acknowledged is in the fact that our perception, or reading, of images and objects can be revealed as socially conditioned. Central to semiotic analysis, in this respect, is the recognition of how visual and material culture is coded; the social conventions which link signs with meanings. Insofar as visual and material culture is coded, meaning is not intrinsic to the image or object and therefore not self-evident.
semiotics: defined through semiotic terms
2. To introduce the language used in discussions of semiotics; we say that semiotics is the study of signs and signifying practices. A sign can be defined, basically, as any entity (words, images, objects etc.) that refers to something else. Semiotics studies how this referring results from previously established social convention (Eco 1976, 16). That is, semiotics shows how the relationship between the sign and the ‘something else’ results from what our society has taught us. Semiotics is concerned with the fact that the reference is neither inevitable nor necessary. The image of the swastika, for example, can have radically different meanings depending on where and how it is viewed.
3. Signifying practices simply refers to how, rather than what, meaning is produced and, finally, the social convention which links signs with meanings is called a code (Potts 1996, 21). The cross is coded in Christian cultures. Meaning does not, as such, inhere in images and objects. The significance we give images and objects is other to what the image or object literally is. In other words, images and objects can operate like signs and, importantly, the meaning we attribute to the sign relates to cultural ideas that we have learned, and may or may not be aware of. Further, Alex Potts wrote that images and objects are not only mediated by conventions, but meaning is largely activated by cultural convention (Potts 1996, 20). How is it possible not to recognize an image or object? When we recognize an image or object, how do we recognize it?
