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.
Pier Paolo Pasolini,
“The Cinema of Poetry”
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