Introduction to Film

Studies
Concepts and models

Basic concepts: : semiotics

The nature of a sign (de Saussure)
signifiant / signifier / merkitsij
signifi / signified / merkitty

Categories of signs (Peirce)

index
icon
symbol

Basic concepts: formalism

Categories of motivation

Realistic
Compositional
Transtextual
Artistic

Diegetic

Categories of meaning

Diegetic
Explicit
Implicit
Symptomatic

Levels of meaning in The

Wonderful Wizard of Oz
(Bordwell
&
Thompson)
Diegetic referential

Relating a fictional world to reality: Dorothys fantasy vs. life in the

1930s Kansas
Explicit
Stated moral Theres no place like home!, i.e. everyday home
environment is more valuable than the enchanting world of
fantasy although a certain moral order prevails in both
Implicit
Young girl on the verge of adulthood may be inclined to fall back
on a fairytale world, but she must grow up and assume the
responsibilities of everyday life.
Symptomatic
In a society in which human issues are measures in terms of
money, genre films tend to appeal to basic values such as hope.

Basic features about levels

of meaning
The levels interact with one another: explicit meanings
are anchored in the diegetic world and the formal
structure of the film
Explicit meanings may be challenged by implicit
meanings, possibly even undermined by symptomatic
meanings
The boundaries between the levels are blurred: it may
difficult to decide what is supposed to be explicit and
what remains implicit; or what is implicit and what is
symptomatic
Films should also be studied in terms of their
audiovisual qualities (excess), not just as vehicles of
themes or messages

Jakobsons communication
model
addresser
addressee

context
text
channel
code

Context

Text can be meaningful only in relation to a

relevant context
The addresser and the addressee might have
different contexts
Several contexts may be in operation
simultaneously: aesthetic, ideological, historical,
social, practical
A scholar or a critic must be able to discern which
contexts are relevant from a given point of view
Various contexts of everyday life, the context of
viewing

Codes

Combinations of rules or sign patterns which

determine how a sign in a given context should be
interpreted
Mainly conventional, culturally specific and timebound
Can nevertheless be to a varying degree be motivated
Relatively unambiguous in their own contexts but in
contemporary culture they may be layered and
conflictual (clothes)
More or less consciously applied
Guide what is observed and communicated
Encoding and decoding may differ form one another
Should cinematic devices such as shot-countershotpatterns or the system of standard framings be thought
of as codes?

Channel
Media specificity: how does a given
media condition and modify messages?
Comparison of the purely audiovisual
qualities of film and television with verbal
expression
Comparison of film and television as
means of communication and artistic
expression
Film and television in the historical
continuum of moving image technologies

Addresser, artist, filmmaker

Biographism: artist as a mediator of
a higher reality or level of awareness
Work of art as a message from the
artist
Comparison with exegetics: tracing
the intentions of the artist
Symptomatic meanings
Freud and the mysteries of creation

Auteur theory or politics

Film is a form of art and a director is

comparable to an author of a book
The rise of the status of studio directors:
Ford, Hawks, Sirk, Ray, Hitchcock
Cine-structuralism: [to] uncover behind
the superficial contrasts of subject and
treatment a structural hard core of
basic and often recondite motifs
(Geoffrey Nowell-Smith)
Structuring oppositions in the oeuvre of
an auteur (Claude Lvi-Strauss
research on clusters of myths)

Criticism of auteur theory

Filmmaking is a collective industrial effort
In a studio system producers and above all
the system as a whole often have a greater
role than the director
Steven Heath: filmmaker as an ideological
construction - we only know the public image
John Ellis: dialectical relationship between the
film-maker and the institutions within which
he operates
David Bordwell: filmmakers are conditioned
but not determined by technical, economical
and production related constraints

Arguments in favour of taking

into account the addresser
The author as a prism through which the
original context may be studied
Biography as a key to the oeuvre of an artist
The influence of the public image of the
filmmaker on reception
Discrepancies between intentions and results
Discrepancies between the public image of
the filmmaker and his/her actual output

Text centred criticism

Close readings as the presumably most

solid scholarly approach to the study of
art
No subjective interpretation tolerated
Intentional fallacy
Extreme form: all that really matters is
the internal evidence all biographical
data, even the context should be ignored
Fictional truth: the way things actually
are within the story world
Concept of implied author

Implied author
The implied author is an agent internal to
narrative fiction, who guides the reading or
viewing. It is a construction which the reader or
spectator imagines as the source of the meaning
of the work (Chatman)
Jerrold Levinson: The implied author is the agent
who appears to have invented, arranged, and
integrated the various narrative agents and
aspects of narration involved in the film, as well
as everything else required to constitute the film
as a complete object of appreciation. The implied
filmmaker, in short, is the picture we construct of
the films maker - beliefs, aims, attitudes, values,
and personality - on the basis of the film
construed in its full context of creation

Reception
aesthetics
Artists cannot completely control how people
receive their works
The dominant culture and ideology do not
always determine reception
Meanings actually emerge in contextualized
readings
Time and ever new contexts function as ghost
writers
Communication is by nature dialogical and
polyphonic (Bahtin)
Reception is always a process in which several
cultural and social factors intermingle

Intertextual reception studies

Factors which condition

spectatorship
David Morley: To what extent are individual
readings conditioned by cultural and socioeconomic structures?
Manfred Naumann: belonging to a society or a
social group, living conditions, environment,
educational level, age, gender
Janet Staiger: political views, ideological
factors, generally held opinions, nationality,
race, sexual orientation, life style
Pierre Bourdieu: symbolic power - cultural
hegemony as a a form of social control

Conventionalism and
realism
Conventionalism: Our knowledge of the world
and ourselves is based on certain conventional,
historically and socially conditioned, arbitrary
symbolic systems Culture and language
determine the limits of understanding (codes)
Realism: Certain universal perceptual and
cognitive abilities broadly determine our ability
to make sense of perceptual data, come to
terms and understand our environment as well
as formulate symbolic systems (schemas)

Schemata
unconscious conceptual structures which
process perceptual data and guide our
understanding
basis of our perceptual and cognitive abilities
to process information about our environment
emerge and develop in our interaction with
our natural and social environment
classify perceived phenomena on a mainly
unconscious level
both enable and restrict our perception and
understanding

Cognitivism / formalism

Screen theory

realism (natural sciences)

conventionalism

emphasis on empirical study

highly theory centred

ecological theory of perception,

emphasis on schemata

semiotic theory of signification,

emphasis on codes

analogies with real world and film

perception

historical development of signifying

practices

cognitivist theory of spectatorship

psychoanalytical theory of pleasure

psychological constructivism

social constructivism

historical poetics as a study of film style

neomarxist theory of power

relationships

neoformalist film analysis

study of reception and interpretation

value-free textual study

ideology critical textual analysis

Evans: Reality Programming:

Evolutionary Models of Film and
Television Viewership

Humans consume popular media such as newspapers, television,

and film in large part because these media facilitate
environmental surveillance. These media provide cost-effective
surveillance across a wide range of people, places, and
phenomena. p. 201
The human preference for television and film over print media is
perfectly natural, in that humans are hardwired to attend and
respond to visual stimuli, especially when visual stimuli include
other people and especially when these people are engaging in
salient behaviour. p. 201.
Television and film producers exploit our innate preferences,
offering us content that is highly salient and extremely realistic
but that often presents a misleading account of our environment.
p. 202. Exposure to these images [thin women, strong men,
generally attractive people] has been associated with an
increased likelihood of body self-image disorders among both
female and male viewers (Botta, 1999; Leit, 2001). p. 207

Jahn: cycle of narrative

Model of the cycle of narrative which
connects external and internal stories
The cycle creates a causal chain linking
reception and production and suggesting
that both processes are mutually
dependent

Manfred Jahn Awake! Open your eyes! The

Cognitive Logic of External and Internal
Stories.

Jahn: External and Internal

Stories

external story
physical
recordable
public
addressee
orientation

permanent

internal story
virtual
reportable
private
no addressee
orientation
fleeting

The third domain of the cycle:

making sense of the real world
The relevance of both fiction and fantasy is
dependent on them being related to notions
about the real world even when assuming
certain distance from it
Fiction and fantasy tend to influnce also the way
various aspects of real world are conceived
It is a poor idea of fantasy which takes it to be a
world apart from reality, a world clearly showing
its unreality. Fantasy is precisely what reality can
be confused with. It is through fantasy that our
conviction of the worth of reality is established;
to forgo our fantasies would be to forgo our
touch with the world. (Cavell)

Three domains of character

construction
We want understand better how the way
we
make sense of and relate to real people
make sense of and relate to fictional
characters
fantasize about real people and
fictitious characters
interact with one another.

Relating to the real world and its

external and mental
representations

Three interfaces
Fiction emerges from the interaction between
notions about the real world and our fantasies;
fiction in turn influences both notions about the
real world and our fantasies about it
Notions about the real world are processed both
in private fantasies and public fiction; those two
in turn influence notions about the real world
Fantasies feed on fiction but gain their relevance
from being related to our needs and desires in
respect of real people; fantasies in turn inspire
fiction and to some extent even our relationship
with the real world

Merleau-Ponty:
The girl who is loved does not project her emotions like an
Isolde or a Juliet, but feels the feelings of these poetic
phantoms and infuses them into her own life. It is at a later
date, perhaps, that a personal and authentic feeling breaks
the web of her sentimental phantasies. But until this feeling
makes its appearance, the girl has no means of discovering
the illusory and literary element in her love. It is the truth of
her future feelings which is destined to reveal the mis
guidedness of her present ones, which are genuinely
experienced. The girl loses her reality in them as does the
actor in the part he plays, so that we are faced, not with
representations or ideas which give rise to real emotions,
but artificial emotions and imaginary sentiments. Thus we
are not perpetually in possession of ourselves in our whole
reality, and we are justified in speaking of an inner
perception of an inward sense, an analyser working from
us to ourselves which ceaselessly, goes some, but not all,
the way in providing knowledge of our life and our being
(Phenomenology of Perception, p. 380)