christian-metz-language-and-cinema.pdf

APPROACHES TO SEMIOTICS edited by

THOMAS A. SEBEOK Research Center for the Language Sciences Indiana University

26

LANGUAGE AND CINEMA by CHRISTIAN METZ

Translated by Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok Indiana University

1974 MOUTON THE HAGUE - PARIS

© Copyright 1974 in The Netherlands. Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague. No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 73-81079

Printed in Belgium by NICI, Ghent.

CONTENTS

1. Within the Cinema : The Filmic Fact 2. Within the Filmic Fact: The Cinema 2.1. 'Cinema' in another sense 2.2.From material to codical homogeneity: a premature conclusion 2.3. The same code in several 'language systems'; several codes in the same 'language system' 2.4. Cinematic specificity, cinematic language system (I) . 2.5. Cinematic-filmic, cinematic-non-filmic, filmic-noncinematic

9 22 22 24 28 39 46

3. Film in an Absolute Sense 3.1. 'The Film'/'The Cinema' 3.2. The zone common to the film and cinema. Its limits .

50 50 55

4. Plurality of Cinematic Codes 4.1. General and particular codes 4.2. Plurality along two axes 4.3. 'Cinematic language system' (Π)

61 61 64 67

5. From Code to System; Message to Text 5.1. 'The study of films': two different approaches . . . . 5.2. Code/singular system 5.3. General and particular codes (II) 5.4. Terminological points 5.5. 'Structure of the message' or structure of the text ? . .

70 70 74 79 83 87

6. Textual Systems 6.1. The film as a unique totality 6.2. The system of the film as displacement

91 91 99

6

CONTENTS

6.3. Cinematic and extra-cinematic: from duality to mixture 6.4. Readings: several textual systems for a single text . .

105 118

7. Textuality and 'Singularity' 7.1. Filmic texts smaller or larger than a film 7.2. Group of films and class of films 7.3. From 'particular code' to sub-code (III) 7.4. The pansemic tendency of certain figures 7.5. Code/sub-code (IV) 7.6. The systemic and the textual 7.7. Textuality and generality 7.8. 'Film' in the absolute sense (II)

121 121 126 129 131 137 143 150 156

8. Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic 8.1. The syntagmatic and the textual 8.2. The syntagmatic and the paradigmatic; syntagmatics and paradigmatics 8.3. Degrees of preexistence of the 'object studied' 8.4. Circularity of paradigmatics and syntagmatics 8.5. Syntagmatic and consecutive 8.6. Paradigmatic and syntagmatic in textual systems . . .

161 161

9. The 9.1. 9.2. 9.3.

184 184 187

9.4. 9.5. 9.6. 9.7.

Problem of Distinctive Units Several types of minimal units in the same t e x t . . . . Several types of cinematic units in the film The determination of minimal units and the overall study of grammar Several types of extra-cinematic units in the film . . . Distinctive units : diversity of size Distinctive units : diversity of form Critique of the notion 'cinematic sign'

10. 'Specific/Non-Specific': Relativity of the Classification Used 10.1. 'Form/material/substance' according to Hjelmslev . 10.2. Semiotic interference between language systems . . . 10.3. Distinctive features of the material of the signifier . 10.4. The intermixing of specificities : Multiple specificity, degrees of specificity, modes of specificity 10.5 Cinema and television 10.6. Language system as a combination of codes

163 168 170 173 175

193 196 199 200 204 208 208 212 219 224 235 240

CONTENTS

10.7. Non-specific codes. Codes of content and codes of expression 10.8. Hjelmslev reconsidered : 'substance'

7

245 251

11. Cinema and writing 11.1. Cinema and writing as recordings 11.2. Cinema and writing as transmissions 11.3. Cinema and writing as'printings' 11.4. Cinema and writing as 'compositions' 11.5. The cinema in relation to the 'writings' of Writing Degree Zero 11.6. Cinema and ideography

254 254 257 262 266 267 271

Conclusion: Cinematic Language System and Filmic Writing .

285

References

289

Subject index

295

Index of Names

302

Index of Films

304

1 WITHIN THE CINEMA: THE FILMIC FACT

What is referred to globally as 'cinema' (and to a lesser degree as 'film') is, in reality, a vast and complex socio-cultural phenomenon, a sort of total social fact (in the sense of Marcel Mauss) which includes, as is well known, important economic and financial elements. It is, rather, a 'multi-dimensional' phenomenon which, if taken as a whole, does not lend itself to any rigorous and unified study, but only to a heteroclite collection of observations involving multiple and diverse points of view (plurality of criteria of relevancy). 'Cinema' (or 'film') as such is not a knowable object, an object of scientific understanding; what Saussure has said about 'language system' (langage) in its broadest sense, and which led him to distinguish it from a language (langue) as a system of signification (as a particular system of signification), could, mutatis mutandis, also be applied to it. Linguistics has progressed only by making such a distinction. It is due to this progress that we see it, today, rediscovering language in its broadest sense, contributing to the study of diverse linguistic phenomena other than natural languages themselves (literary analyses, the 'secondary modeling systems' of the Soviet school, the 'performance models' of Chomskyans, socio-, psycho-, ethno-, and neurolinguistics, etc.). But insofar as the study of the cinema is concerned, things have not progressed this far. Cinema is a very recent phenomenon: the year 1895 (date of the first public showing, organized by the Lumiere brothers) represents, in the anthropological perspective we are adopting here, a very late date in human development. To forget this fact is to run the risk of falling into a fairly widespread sort of 'audio-visual' fanaticism or propheticism which, in order to establish for itself a new social fact worthy of interest, must, at the very least, make it extremely difficult to reflect calmly on the problems of film. Inversely, it is because the cinema is a recent development that it is possible to judge as normal, up to a certain point, the present, rather

10

WITHIN THE CINEMA : THE FILMIC FACT

deceptive state of research on the subject. What one most often calls a 'theoretician of the cinema' is a sort of Renaissance man, ideally possessing an encyclopedic knowledge and a quasi-universal methodological formation. He is expected to be familiar with the principal films produced in the entire world since 1895, as well as their main filiations (he is thus a historian); he must also, evidently, set himself the task of revealing a certain number of insights into the economic circumstances of their production (so that he is also, in this case, an economist); he must force himself as well to specify in what way and why a film is a work of art (here he is an aesthetician), without neglecting to consider it as a sort of discourse (in this case he is a semiotician); quite frequently, he also feels obliged to make copious observations about the psychological, psychoanalytical, social, political, and ideological phenomena to which particular films allude and around which their content revolves; in sum, virtually nothing less than a universal anthropological understanding is required. Under these conditions, what is surprising is not the still embryonic attraction of cinematic studies, but rather the existence of a certain number of precise contributions to the understanding of film. Methodological procedures have been such, until now, that it would have seemed more reasonable to expect practically no progress at all. This is not, however, the case; in the theoretical texts of Baläzs, Arnheim, Bazin, Laffay, and others, as well as in the writings of Eisenstein and the Russian formalists, or even of Morin and CohenSeat (where the selection of relevant analytic criteria is already more deliberate), we find a number of observations and very keen analyses to which we have referred more than once in the past and which we cannot afford to ignore in constructing a rigorous theory of the cinema. These materials constitute an entire period of reflection on the film, a period whose culmination and synthesis is found in the impressive Esthetique et Psychologie du cinima (1963-1965) of Jean Mitry. It would be impossible to prolong this period without doing it damage. Its justification and raison d'etre (as well as its relative and absolute fruitfulness) stem from the fact that the cinema was a completely new and still astonishing phenomenon: entire books were devoted to commenting upon its very existence, without any further refinement of an analytic point of view. But today the cinema, although a recent development as noted above, has become an established cultural fact. We can no longer content ourselves with remarking upon it as a newly created marvel, but rather must begin to under-

WITHIN THE cinema: t h e filmic f a c t

11

stand it in its diverse aspects, and for this we must have some idea of the different perspectives from which it may be studied. There is another sort of 'theory of the cinema' which, because it is foreign to the principles followed in the present book, will not be discussed here. In the present jargon of professionals (film producers, critics, historians of film), the term 'theoretician' frequently designates an author whose writings are primarily normative and the principal aim of which is to exercise an influence on future films, even to prescribe for these films the choice of certain subjects (subjects of social significance, for example). In this sense of the term, there exist some great theoreticians of the cinema, many of whom are Italians and avowedly Marxists and whose conviction and inspiration are estimable. In some cases their influence on the production of films has been greater than would have been imagined possible (one has only to think of the rise of certain schools and of certain trends in the cinema, for example, Italian neorealism, the English documentary school, expressionism and 'KammerspieF in Germany, and various present day groups of the 'new cinema'); during the great era of the Soviet cinema, the Marxist inspiration was deepened and an attempt was made to refrain from opposing 'content' and 'form', and from relegating the latter to an ahistoric futility. Although there are numerous marginal cases here, as elsewhere, it is not the directly prescriptive theoreticians we are thinking of when we speak of a 'first epoch' in the theory of film, but rather those authors who, like those specifically mentioned above, have devoted all or a significant part of their cinematic efforts to the analysis of films such as they are, and who appear, as such, as the precursors of a description of the film, in the sense that this word has in the sciences of man, particularly in linguistics. This choice does not entail a judgement of the principle of a normative theory - since the semiotician, like any member of an audience, finds himself confronted with films that he likes and others that he does not like - but simply the necessary distinction between two types of 'theories'. On the one hand, there is that type of theory which is concerned with films to come, which sees things in terms of influence, which does not hesitate to counsel and prescribe, which seeks to respond directly to the technical problems of the 'creative artist' and is significant only from this perspective. On the other hand, there is that type of theory which is concerned with discourses which already exist and which seeks to analyze them as givens. Aestheticians encounter a similar problem:

12

WITHIN THE CINEMA : THE FILMIC FACT

there are the aesthetics of authors (aesthetic theories whose authors are occasionally not the authors of 'works of art', but this is irrelevant to the classification) and the aesthetic theories of analysts. It is not in the same sense of the word that the Preface to Cromwell and the writings of Francastel deal with 'aesthetics'. It is the descriptive theory of the cinema which is at present coming to the end of the first stage of its development, a stage marked by the absence of any principle of analytic criteria, and which must from now on begin to make explicit the point of view from which a given description is made. In this regard, the first distinction to present itself is the one which was made by Gilbert Cohen-Seat in 1946 and which remains pertinent today: the distinction between cinematic fact and filmic fact.1 This distinction may be summarized in the following manner: film is only a small part of the cinema, for the latter represents a vast ensemble of phenomena some of which intervene before the film (the economic infrastructure of production, studios, bank or other financing, national laws, sociology of the contexts of decision making, technological equipment and emulsions, biography of film producers, etc.), others after the film (the social, political, and ideological impact of the film on different publics, 'patterns' of behavior or of sentiments induced by the viewing of films, audience responses, audience surveys, mythology of stars, etc.), and, finally, others during the film but aside from and outside of it (the social ritual of the projection of the film - less formal than in the classic theater, but retaining its sobriety even in everyday sociocultural situations - the furnishing and decoration of the theater, the technical methods of operation of the projectionist, the role of the theater attendants - that is to say their function in various economic or symbolic systems, which does not detract from their practical inutility - etc.). The importance of making this distinction between the cinematic and the filmic fact lies in the fact that it allows us to restrict the meaning of the term 'film' to a more manageable, specifiable signifying discourse, in contrast with 'cinema' which, as defined here, constitutes a larger complex (at whose center, however, three predominant dimensions may be distinguished : the technological, the economic, and the sociological). 1

Essai sur les principes d'une philosophic edition, 1958), 53 ff.

du cinema (Paris : P.U.F., 1946; new

WITHIN THE CINEMA : THE FILMIC FACT

13

It is clear that the so-called semiotics of the cinema is primarily concerned with the 'filmic fact'. In spite of inevitable areas of overlap, the semiotics of the cinema cannot usefully contribute to the understanding of the 'cinematic fact', at least not in any direct manner, and not at the present stage of research. Semiotics, whether of the film or anything else, is the study of discourses and 'texts'. (Note, however, that the sociological dimension of the cinematic fact is, by definition, closer to the study of film as language than are the economic or technological dimensions.) There is yet another terminological problem here, although in this case more apparent than real. In certain, easily testifiable uses of the word 'film', it designates something other than a signifying discourse. It may refer, for example, to a physical object (the roll of film in its metallic case); in this sense, it is a technological item. In other contexts, it might designate an economic fact, the total income from the successive and/or simultaneous distribution of several copies of a particular film (as illustrated by such sentences as "This film has grossed four million in the New York area alone"). Semiotic analysis is obviously not directly concerned with film in these two senses of the term, nor in various other (rather numerous) ones of the same sort which we shall not discuss here. If this difficulty seems negligible to us, it is because it is a confusion of words, and not of things themselves - to be precise, the ambiguity resides in the ordinary metalanguage and not in the language-object. Our intention here is not to study the lexicon of the cinematographer, which itself constitutes a signifying-set, but rather to show (see the works of Jean Giraud and Ginette Jacquinot) that the aspects of social experience focused upon by the various meanings of the word 'film' stem from what Cohen-Seat calls the 'cinematic fact' and not what he calls the 'filmic fact'; it is that everyday language is capricious, not that the conceptualization is obscure. Suffice it to say that what we shall call 'film', except where otherwise indicated, is film as a signifying discourse (text), or as a linguistic object: Cohen-Seat's filmic fact. 'Filmology', under the influence of Etienne Souriau, had already undertaken the task of isolating and circumscribing that aspect of film which is pertinent for us here, and had coined the term filmophanie2 (or 'filmophanie level') to designate the film functioning as an object perceived by the audience for the duration of its projection. It is the 'filmophanie' film, and it alone, that we shall call 'film'. %

L'Univers

filmique,

ed. Etienne Souriau (Paris: Flammarion, 1953), 8.

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WITHIN THE CINEMA : THE FILMIC FACT

The notion of filmic fact, in the sense just specified, is, however, still too vast to attribute to it the principle of analytic distinctiveness suitable to a semiotics of the film, for the film itself is a 'multi-dimensional' phenomenon. Some of its elements are of interest to psychology : the psychology of perception (the film as a perceptual and spatiotemporal 'Gestalt', monocular or binocular relief - three-dimensionality - the projection of color by the mind in black and white films, retinal after-image, the 'phi effect', 'intermittent light stimulation', the role of maskings and movements, filmological studies with electroencephalograms, 'screen effect', etc.); cognitive psychology (experiments on the comprehension of film by children, peoples unacculturated to the cinema, variously pathological subjects; the film as a test of level of intelligence; the role of short-term memory and rapid restructuring of the field of perception in the comprehension of a chained sequence, etc.); psychology of emotion (the film as projective test, projection and identification, affective participation in the unfolding of the film, etc.); psychology of memory (how are films remembered, and for how long); and of course psychology of the imagination (the film between the real and the imaginary, between the dream and the spectacle, between the nocturnal dream and the daydream, the problem of the 'impression of reality' in the cinema and more generally of the 'imagination', in a Sartrian sense), etc. It should be borne in mind that there have been studies (and sometimes in great quantity) devoted to all of these topics and more, and that the discipline known as filmology has, for the most part, concerned itself with the study of the film with methods proper to psychology, experimental and social psychology in particular. It is precisely in this area that it has achieved the most precise results.3 On the other hand, some of the most outstanding characteristics of the film are of direct concern to sociological investigation. If studies of audience influence or reception (and, at the other end of the chain of events, the sociological description of decision-making contexts) belong to the cinematic rather than the filmic fact, sociology has nonetheless to concern itself with the latter in other respects. In the present state of research it is interested, for example, in the content of films, the social elements of which (collective representations, diverse types of stereotypes, ideologies, propaganda, 'images' and 'roles' put forth, etc.) are more immediately apparent than what is called its form. Content analysis is one of the tasks of communication research, especially * See in particular the first volumes of Revue (Paris), founded in 1947.

Internationale

de

Filmologie

WITHIN THE CINEMA : THE FILMIC FACT

15

within the current organization of scientific disciplines, of 'mass' communication research (at least when the content to be analyzed is that of a film). It is equally clear that the study of film is of interest to aesthetics; the film is always a 'work of art', whether by its quality and its success ('box-office hits'), or simply by its nature : a film can only be declared 'bad' if one assumes on the part of its author an aesthetic and creative intention, whether it is an unconscious one obscured by the artifactual process of fabrication or the commercial 'formula'. Moreover, it can only appear to be bad in relation to the aesthetic criteria more or less clearly present in the mind of the person who judges it to be such. In this sense, everything that can be said of the officially recognized arts may also be said of cinema. The discipline known as the 'history of the cinema' (which is usually only the history of the succession oi major films) is a branch of art history, or at least should be, and is sometimes prevented from being considered as such only by the irrational prejudices of cultural legitimacy, which are concerned with the unequal 'nobility' of different means of expression and which have been analyzed by educational sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu and JeanClaude Passeron. To speak of an aesthetic dimension in relation to the cinema is not to assert that the concepts of a particular aesthetic theory like 'work of art', 'creation', or 'author' (at least if these terms are taken in their sacrosanct sense) must be relevant to the study of film; they have also not been found to be such in the analysis of other arts. What can be said is that, in relation to aesthetics - and in no matter what manner this is conceived - the position of a film is identical to that of a book, a piece of music, or a painting. (It is true that social pressures, intrinsic constraints, are felt to be greater and more direct in the film than in any other art,4 but this is a difference of degree, and only of degree, and of degree of immediacy; and then, one always forgets to mention dime novels, military marches, popular paintings....) The film also offers rich material for studies inspired directly or indirectly by psychoanalytic methods. In this regard, as in others, partial studies based on clearly enunciated analytic criteria are already available or are in the process of being made.6 * We have examined this point in particular in an article in 1968 ("Le dire et le dit au cinema: vers le declin d'un Vraisemblable ?", Communications 11), reprinted in our Essais sur la signification au cinema (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968). 5 For example: Nathan Leites and Martha Wolfenstein, Movies, A Psychologi· cal Study (Glencoe, Illinois : The Free Press, 1950).

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It would be tempting to say, by way of a sort of analogy with what was said earlier about the distinction between cinema and film, that, within the filmic fact itself, two or three types of phenomena may be isolated - for example, the psychological, sociological, and aesthetic which are not of direct concern to semiotics, and which should therefore be restricted to the study of film considered as a language system. Such an assertion would be meaningless, despite its apparent obviousness, for the film 'as language' is, in fact, the film in its entirety. It would be impossible to envisage a semiotics of film indifferent to the nature of the material means of expression involved (in the Hjelmslevian sense).6 Cinematic discourse depends on five different sensory orders : the visual image, the musical sound, the verbal sounds of speech, sound effects, and the graphic form of credits. Structural analysis, it is true, is concerned with form and not its material support; but the former owes some of its properties to the latter and both remain distinct only up to a certain point. (Linguistics encounters similar difficulties; this is the problem of the relationship between phonetics and phonology.) It would in any case be impossible to define the film as a linguistic phenomenon without taking into account the fact that it makes use of five signifying codes, namely the five mentioned above. To this extent the semiotics of film is inextricably tied to 'psychological' considerations (perceptual mechanisms, inherent properties of the visual image, etc.), utilized in a different perspective. It is also difficult to see how a semiotic approach could afford to ignore the form of the content (this term is also used in the sense of Louis Hjelmslev) of different films, i.e., the organization of what is called the 'themes' of the film (and which, even with another type of analysis, remains 'thematic'7 in nature), the internal organization of meaning underlying a given film, etc. In this way, a semiotic analysis inevitably encounters sociology, cultural history, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, etc. Finally, how could a study of signification ignore the fact that film, unlike a natural language, is a mode of expression in which language and art maintain a quasi-consubstantial relation to one another and • Louis Hjelmslev, Prolegomenes ά une theorie du langage. Danish original 1943, French translation 1968 (Paris: £d. de Minuit). For more precise references to this problem, see Chapter 10.1. 7 On this particular point, see our article "Propositions methodologiques pour l'analyse du film", Information sur les Sciences Sociales V I I : 4, 1968, 107-19, especially 108-9 with note 1.

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where language itself is a product or an aspect of artistic invention ? 8 Cinematic codes do exist, but they do not have the constancy and stability of natural languages. The student of film, like the speaker of a natural language, is faced with pre-existent forms which are anterior to his own activity, hut not to the same degree, nor in the same way. A semiotic analysis is thus closely associated with the aesthetics of film. These are only three examples - the principal ones, perhaps, but certainly not the only ones. They all suggest the same conclusion: film, because it constitutes (contrary to the cinema) a delimitable space - an object devoted from beginning to end to signification, a closed discourse - can only be envisaged 'as a language system' in its entirety. It would certainly not be wise to accord too absolute a value to the distinction which is often proposed between divisions of a discipline according to the objects studied and the methods employed to study them. The relationship between subject and method is always a twoway affair. What is referred to as a domain of research is an area whose principle of delimitation, in the last analysis, would always appear to be an indissoluble combination of 'object' and 'method'. But it remains to be said that the relative importance of these two classificatory criteria is liable to vary considerably from one case to another, and that, within a single 'stage' in the history of research (as well as in its geography, which springs from the history), certain divisions make themselves felt with more force than others. The distinction between 'cinema' and 'film' was a relatively easy one to make, since it referred, in large part, to objects or, more precisely, to what, today, would seem to be from the point of view of the object. The cinematic object is, in fact, immense and heteroclite, and sufficiently large so that some of its dimensions - for example the economic and technological - are excluded from the domain of a semiotic analysis. It is not unlikely, however, that this apparently intrinsic nature of the object is in turn, if looked at a little more closely, in the long run a characteristic rather of the methodological domain. It would be ridiculous to attempt to isolate, within the cinema, a sort of absolute object such as the cinema-as-economic-fact, since economists are themselves uncertain about the intrinsically separate existence of economic facts. But the economist is much less uncertain when it comes to the methods to be employed in an economic study; thus a situation " On this point, see Essais sur la signification au cinema, text 3, especially 64-65.

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is created in which the economic study of the cinema may be usefully made the 'object' of an autonomous discipline (see, for example, the work of Henri Mercillon). Even if we assume, as we are doing here, that the name 'object' is given to what is always only a more profound avatar of method, the consequences for a rational division of labor remain unchanged, since it is the nature of the most coherent and most positive methods to create by their very existence the most clearly delimitable 'objects'. Viewed in this way, the phenomenon which is the cinema, with its vast scope, covers afieldof which certain areas coincide with the objects of diverse, fairly well-established, and fairly unrelated disciplines (technology, sociology of audiences, economics, etc.). It is in this sense - completely relative in the eyes of an historian of epistemologies, but provisionally absolute for the 'fieldworker' - that the cinema is not a unitary object. It is also in this sense that semiotics could not, at present, and without some degree of immoderation, adopt as its goal the complete study of the cinematic fact. But these very criteria, at once relative and absolute, yield completely different results when applied to the notion of film. This is so not only because psychology, sociology, aesthetics, semiotics, etc., considered in themselves and outside of any study of film, represent enterprises which are imperfectly distinct and perpetually confused at their borders (witness social psychology, experimental aesthetics, the sociology of art, etc.), but even more because the study of closed texts (of which the film is one) represents the place par excellence where the mutual implication of these disciplines is greatest. A closed text - a tale, a myth, a play, a novel, etc. - is always, and always at the same time, a total cultural object and an object in some way exiguous in relation to the general production of a society. For both of these reasons, it delineates the type of space in which, more than in any other, the different social sciences and humanities come into close contact, and very close contact since it is on such a tiny surface. There is reason to predict that this situation will not last, and that the present geography of the social sciences - so manifestly uncertain and provisional - will be modified. But while waiting for some great, new clarity of vision to come to our aid, it is difficult to see how it would be possible today to distinguish, within thefilm,several 'objects' possessing a minimum of reality, no matter how this reality is defined. The parallel with literary phenomena (justified in other respects, as we have said) could be deceptive here; it is no longer a question of what

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should be, but of what is, and literary studies have a considerable headstart, in spite of their own aporias. Under these conditions, the sole division of labor within the study of film that can be envisaged, for the time being, is one of those divisions said to be 'based on methods', but which is based, in fact, on the insufficiencies of these methods. This sort of classification, as we have just seen, is always founded on method, and it is simply when method is further extended that an object is created. This, again, does not at all modify the problems of analysis. It is necessary, then, to consider it as normal that the 'semiotics' of film depends on data (but not on methods) borrowed from the psychology, sociology, aesthetics, history, etc. of film. The amount of interference will necessarily be great, but it is not necessary to try to be clearer than the facts themselves, that is to say than our knowledge of the facts. The fact clearly remains that none of the disciplines just mentioned have been able up to now to master the film as a total signifyingobject, and this objective is precisely the one that a 'semiotic' analysis of the film could and should adopt. Moreover, semiotics, as has sometimes been pointed out,9 is meaningful only as a general study of cultural configurations and logic, rather than as a mechanical extension of linguistic methods applied to more and more diverse 'objects' (such as the film) taken individually. By its very nature, the semiotic enterprise must expand or disappear, while other disciplines (such as certain behavioristic or experimental studies) lend themselves to a procedure more certain to survive, since they at least achieve partial results which are never completely useless. To this extent one can - and ought to - assign to the semiotics of the film the goal of the complete study of the filmic discourse considered as an integrated signifying event (form and substance of content, form and substance of expression). On the level of long-term objectives (which one must have), this is the only definition that appears to us to be possible for this growing discipline. It will someday no longer be a question, then, of 'semiotics' in the somewhat restricted and provisional sense that the term sometimes has today (on the margins of linguistics), but rather of the structural analysis of the film and films (with linguistic models, in this broader perspective, still playing an important role). Nevertheless, we should not confuse distant objectives with more or ' For example, Tzvetan Todorov in "Perspectives semiologiques", Communications 7, 1966, 139-45.

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less quickly realizable tasks. At the present, semiotics has not mastered the film as a total structure any more than has sociology, psychology, or aesthetics. We may be convinced that it is better suited to do this (with the aid of these other disciplines) than they are themselves, but such convictions cannot be spread simply by multiplying the number of programmatic statements; what is important is to provide analyses, which are always incomplete. This book would never have been undertaken without the idea that a semiotic type of analysis is alone capable of providing in advance the framework for a coherent and unified understanding of the filmic object. The day when the realization of this goal is in view the semiotics of the film will have only to conserve this name; it will be in reality (or more in reality) what it is today programmatically, i.e., a theory of the filmic fact, and not an application of linguistic methods, even if it must pass through such a stage in order to reach its goal. In parallel fashion, and for the same reasons, disciplines like the psychology of film, the sociology of film (not to be confused with the psychology and sociology of the cinema, i.e., of publics), etc. will preserve a sort of de facto autonomy - an autonomy also founded on method, in the sense defined above - as long as the unitary theory of film has not been achieved. We might even add that it is precisely at the moment when one hopes to surpass this too highly fragmented situation (which teems with psychodramas, regardless of whether they are disguised as interdisciplinary discussions or not) that one should pay greatest attention to its provisional yet real existence. Methods are things which cannot be interchanged (and which cannot be 'combined' without great danger of giving rise to monstrosities), but data and insights, bits of experience attained, can and ought to circulate freely. Anyone unfamiliar with the cinema will never develop a semiotic theory of it. The first era of general reflection on the film is, as we have said, coming to a close, and every filmic study must clearly and consciously select its principle of relevancy. During this first phase, what was called the theory of the film (or the theory of the cinema, for they were scarcely ever distinguished) consisted of a global, on occasion sustained and precise, focusing of attention on the filmic or cinematic fact: an eclectic and syncretic, and in some cases very enlightening study which made use of several methods without applying any of them in a consistent manner, and sometimes without being aware of doing so. In a third phase, which we can look forward to entering some day, these

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diverse methods should be profoundly reconciled (which may imply the mutual disappearance of their present forms), and the theory of film will then be a true, not syncretic, synthesis capable of precisely determining the domain of validity of the different approaches and the articulation of different levels. It would appear that we are today entering the second phase, in which a tentative but necessary methodological pluralism may be defined. The psychology of film, the semiotics of film, etc., did not exist yesterday, and may no longer exist tomorrow, but must be allowed to live today, true unifications never being brought about by dictate but only at the end of a long series of studies. For all of these reasons, the only principle of relevancy capable of defining, at present, the semiotics of the film is - in addition to its application to the filmic rather than to the cinematic fact - the desire to treat films as texts, as units of discourse, consequently forcing itself to study the different systems (whether they are or are not codes) which give form to these texts and are implicit in them. If one asserts that semiotics studies the form of films, this should be without forgetting that form is not that which is opposed to content, and that there exists a form of the signified which is just as important as the form of the signifier.

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2.1. 'CINEMA' IN ANOTHER SENSE

It remains to be explained why we have spoken more than once o£ a 'semiotics of cinema' - as often, perhaps, as of the 'semiotics of film' while at the same time restricting this study to the filmic rather than the cinematic fact. This is because the terminological pair cinema/film remains a useful one even within our 'filmic' perspective, on condition, of course, that these terms are given a new definition. 'Cinema', in fact, is not always (as it is for Cohen-Seat) the sum of that which is related to the film but external to it; even at the heart of a filmic analysis cinema continues to be a notion which intrudes itself at every turn, and which is hard to imagine doing without. What is called 'cinema', in all its uses (including the most popular), is not solely this notion of the sum of phenomena surrounding the ßm, which is the core of Cohen-Seat's definition, but also the sum of films themselves, or rather the sum of traits which, in the films themselves, are taken to be characteristic of what is sensed to be a certain 'language system'. There is also the same relationship between cinema and films as between literature and books, painting and paintings, sculpture and sculptures, etc. Thus one can say of a certain configuration of montage that it is properly cinematic, or that it belongs to the language of the cinema. And it is clear, although paradoxical, that the cinema thus conceived is situated within what Cohen-Seat calls the filmic fact. From a semiotic point of view, it is in one's own interest to deal with these two (both simple and manageable) terms in such a way as to differentiate those concrete units of discourse, each of which is a 'film' and a particular totality capable of being directly attested, from that ideal set which is known as 'cinema' and which is the virtual sum of all films and, as such, the place where different structures of signification ('processes', 'expressive resources', 'figures', etc.) are felt to

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flow together and to be organized in a coherent manner. Even if each film introduces and reorders these structures in its own way, even if each film makes use of only a small proportion of them, these structures continue to be by their very nature potentially common to all films to the extent that they constitute a general pool upon which each film will draw and the selection of which is closely related to the very selection of the cinematic vehicle itself. Even in everyday language, that is without any attempt at terminological standardization, cinema and film are not synonymous; and this is not solely because the opposition of the two words is located on the semantic axis discussed in Chapter 1. We have seen, of course, that film is often opposed to cinema as a referent language (a signifying discourse) to a set of phenomena of a technological, economic, sociological, and industrial order. Thus, one could say that Film exercises a powerful emotional control and that The cinema is a powerful industry; in all cases of this sort (and they are numerous) we find the opposition between cinematic and filmic as defined by Gilbert Cohen-Seat. But it is also not uncommon to find the two words in opposition in other sorts of contexts as well, where both refer to sets of phenomena which, according to Cohen-Seat, should be classified as 'filmic'. In a sentence like Television and cinema share certain expressive resources, cinema cannot be replaced by film. Inversely, in Televised broadcasts and ßms share certain expressive resources, films may not be replaced by cinema. Both of these sentences, however, refer to eminently filmic phenomena, such as the existence of supposedly specific 'expressive resources'. In this example, which could be reinforced by many others of the same sort, film is what corresponds to television itself. More generally, it is clear that common intuition situates the film in the same series as 'book', 'statue', etc. - and cinema in the same series as 'literature', 'sculpture', etc. In music, one speaks of different musical 'pieces'; in the same way, each film is in some sort a cinematic 'piece'. We see, then, that the lexical pair film/cinema, such at it is often found in common speech and in writings on the screen, corresponds rather precisely (even within the 'filmic' domain) to the distinction which is made, in classical aesthetics, between a work of art and the art itself - in sociology between the product (or programming) of a certain 'media' and the media itself - and, finally, in semiotics, between the message typical of a certain medium of expression and this medium itself, no matter what the exact definition the latter receives, in turn, in the process.

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If the film - the message - is a 'concrete' object, it is because its borders coincide with those of a discourse which has been effectively sustained, a unit which preceded the intervention of the analyst. The cinema, on the contrary, is more problematic for semiotics. It is a more difficult notion : an abstract unit, a purely ideal whole on which the analysis concentrates - upon which it would like to establish - a certain unity which has yet to be determined. The film is an object in the real world, the cinema is not. To say that that which is the basis of the unity of a film is of the order of a 'given' is not (ought not) to succumb to the sort of simplistic 'realism' which ignores the fact that things exist only through discourses which are woven into, between, and around them. The fundamental unity of a film, like any social phenomenon, is, in the last analysis, a sort of systemic web, and the semiotics of filmic facts, as we shall see below, ought to study individual films as well as the cinema. The film is a 'given' in only one sense, but one which is important: its external contours, its material extension, are not a problem for the analyst, for they have been determined by the film-producer and were his problem. Concerning the cinema, on the other hand, merely to want to draw up a first rough list of what will be considered to be cinema and what will not is already to pose the theoretical problem in its fullest extent, and to raise the question of distinctiveness,1 In this sense, film and cinema are opposed as a real object to an ideal one, as an utterance to a language system.

2.2.

FROM MATERIAL TO CODICAL HOMOGENEITY: A PREMATURE CONCLUSION

There exists in popular opinion and in certain writings ingenuinely devoted to the 'seventh art' a sort of implicit theory which attributes to the thing called 'cinema' a unity which remains sensible and concrete, a unity which is of the same order as that of the film. Not infrequently the cinema is pictured as something which, on the one hand, is of a systemic nature - as a group of codified facts - but which, on the other, could be classified according to the physical nature of the means of expression which it employs, i.e., by its (or by their) material(s) oj expression, in the terminology of Louis Hjelmslev.2 In this bizarre view 1

The principle of distinctiveness dominates all linguistic research; it was formulated very clearly by Andre Martinet, Elements de linguistique generale (Paris: Armand Colin, 19638) Chapters 2-5, 37-8.

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of things - which, in spite of its internal contradictions, is considered self-evident by many - the 'cinema' is the language made up of a combination of moving photographic images, sounds, words, and music; and 'silent pictures' is the language which utilizes only the first of these four elements. We shall leave aside a particularly dubious variant of this conception according to which the talking cinema itself would have the greatest aesthetic interest in being - and nearly the obligation to be - organized, to the exclusion of all else, into a system founded solely on the play of moving images, and in which recourse to the other three elements would be legitimate only by means of their peremptory structural subordination to forms of the first. Here it is no longer a question of an implicit attempt to define the cinema, but rather a sort of normative choice explicitly aimed at influencing future developments. But even if we ignore this moralizing excrescence, the fact remains that the definition of the cinema in terms of the materials of expression is rather widespread. The success of this conception lies in the fact that it proposes, as the cinematic object, a type of unit which is, so-to-speak, discretely spectacular, a type of homogeneity founded directly on the sensorial and on the technical, a material sort of coherence. Thus it is not surprising that definitions of this type coincide to a rather large extent with the spontaneous classifications brought about by a layman's naive perception as well as with everyday social classifications. A certain number of combinations are distinguished and usually referred to as so many 'languages' which are imagined to be arranged one after the other along the length of a single axis and maintaining between themselves the type of relation that logicians would call exclusion (absence of any common zone). Thus, there would be the verbal language, the musical language, the pictorial language, the language of flowers, the language of gestures, etc., and each of them, as the cinematic language, would correspond to a certain material of expression or to a certain combination of several of them. In the end, there would be as many languages as there are physical types of signifiers. In this conception, the unity of the cinema tends to approximate that of the film. Certainly the film remains a singular object while the cinema is a combination of different objects, which is to say it is an ideal object. Nevertheless, the cinema - like the film, and simply on a larger scale - is still defined by the parallel and simultaneous realization of its 1

For additional bibliographic information, see Chapter 10.1.

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four sensorial series (which are really five, since the written credits are often forgotten), as well as by the technological processes to which this quintuple physical chain owes its definitive nature (in the sense that it may be said that televised images do not all share the same definition, i.e., the same number of 'lines'). What is characteristic of the cinema is that the speech events are recorded on a sound tape (and are not, for example, transmitted by telephone, or overheard directly), that the images are photographic (and not video-taped, or on the other hand obtained by hand), etc. Defined in this way, the cinema is nothing more than the combination of messages which society calls 'cinematic' - or which it calls 'films' - and it so calls any message that corresponds to a certain technico-sensory determination: technical in terms of the transmission, sensory in terms of the reception. The cinema is that which is materially cinema. Thus it can be explained why the word 'cinema', in ordinary usage, sometimes serves, among other things, to designate a certain sum of ßms. This is a secondary meaning which is not uncommon and which appears in sentences or expressions like : English cinema can offer no film comparable to the latter; the Soviet cinema of the great epoch; the best film in the entire history of the cinema, etc. In an equal number of cases the word designates an object which - in addition to what would belong, according to Cohen-Seat, to the 'filmic' - consists more precisely of the sum of a certain number of films; this 'cinema' is in some sense the result of a process of accretion. In the works of the first theoreticians, it is in regard to the technicosensory definition that the art of moving (and at that time silent) pictures was considered a 'language', or a 'script' - or yet again (depending on the author) as a means of expression capable, through progressive refinements, of becoming a language or a script. When Louis Delluc, Victor Perrot, Jean Damas, and Ricciotto Canudo developed such themes, they not only intended to assert, with a somewhat militant fanfare, the abundance of an intuited 'expressive richness', but also the visual specifiicity (the sensorial particularity) of this tool so full of potential resources. If, for these authors, the cinema - actually or potentially - merited consideration as a language or a script, it was because it had a material of expression which belonged exclusively to it, i.e., animated photography and linear order. Even today some authors take this same view - for the single sensory series of silent pictures, they have simply substituted the multiple series appropriate to talking pictures.

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We have to admit that in itself there is nothing wrong with this definition of the cinema. It rests, in fact, on a commonsensical proposition which, on that level, cannot be disputed, and which is not incorrect. We shall reconsider it from another point of view below (see the whole of Chapter Ten), in order to try to clarify it. Within a preliminary delineation - still wholly external, but clearly necessary it is clear that the 'cinema' could be nothing more than a certain (putative) signifying system which is distinguished from others by its material of expression. The cinema, to begin with, is evidently that which is neither painting, nor sculpture, nor theater, etc. It is in some of its extended forms too tempting and too often considered to be self-evident that the technico-sensory definition may be criticized. From the idea of a material homogeneity, one slips in many cases into the impression, even into the assertion, that there ought obviously to exist (at least in principle) a single system - a single code - capable of accounting for all of the significations found in the messages whose physical nature corresponds to the definition given. Thus, from material singularity one slips into systemic singularity, unless the possibility of distinguishing between the two was never even considered. Because a combination of physically homogeneous messages exists, there must exist a single 'language'. What is meant by 'cinema', in this case, is not only the sum of films, but also the unique and sovereign code which is assumed to be coextensive with all the semiotic material provided by these films. It is the sum of the characteristics of these films, in addition to the sum of the films themselves. It is all the films, but it is also everything about the films. It is a postulated logical uniqueness as well as the established physical singularity. Emilio Garroni has presented a penetrating analysis of this gradual transition, and has pointed out its dangers.3 The 'cinema' so understood becomes a unique and total code. Of course it is not claimed that this code is already known, that the analysis has been carried to its logical conclusion, or that its paradigms and its syntagms (or its modes of generating) have already been established. But the goal of this analysis will be that of elucidating the code of the cinema, without necessarily calling this code a 'language', terminology which betrays the confused desire, proper to this conception, of renouncing neither physical nor systemic singularity, whether they are judged inseparable 2

Semiotica ed estetica (L'eterogeneitä del linguaggio e il linguaggio cinematografico) (Bari : Laterza, 1968). To appear in French in the series "Champ Libre", and in English in the Approaches to Semiotics series.

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or whether the possibility of separating them had never been considered. These conceptual tendencies appear in many current uses of the word 'cinema'. Thus one can hear or read that The cinema excels in referring to things without naming them (although this is a characteristic of the visual image which is only one part of the cinema, and which also exists outside of it) or that The cinema contains nothing which corresponds to the 'chapter' of the novel (a proposition which is true of the cinematic narrative, but not of cinema in general), etc. In all contexts of this sort, the word 'cinema' is evidently charged by those who use it with the task of designating something which is not only of the order of a code (i.e., which is not of the order of a message), but which also constitutes the code which regulates a technico-sensory sphere as a whole, and this sphere cdone. Note that such a suggestion is already present in the frequent use of the word 'cinema' in the singular and with no determinative such as an epithet, a relative clause, or adnominal complement. There is a sort of absolute usage here, which appears in the two sentences above, as well as in all those sentences whose predicate posits such a quality or property in attributing it to the 'cinema' (and just that), the subject of the statement.

2.3.

THE SAME CODE IN SEVERAL 'LANGUAGE SYSTEMS', SEVERAL CODES IN THE SAME 'LANGUAGE SYSTEM'

It is appropriate to distinguish, then, much more strictly than does the average work on the cinema, between two sorts of conceptual classifications: those which regroup all messages of a certain sensory modality without necessarily positing a single code, and those whose unity is of a systemic order (i.e., which are codes, or groups of codes). The latter are also abstract entities since the only 'concrete' categories belong to the message. Their unity, moreover, is based even less on the physical nature of the signifier, which is a 'given'; it is a constructed rather than an inherent unity, and it does not exist prior to the analysis. Although codes, in the present stage of semiotic research, are not (as is necessary) all formal models, in the broad and strong sense this notion has in modern logic, they are, at least, all units which aim at formalization. Their homogeneity is not a sensory one, but rather one of the order of logical coherence, of explanatory power, of classification, of generative capacity. If a code is a code, it is because it provides

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a unified field of commutations, i.e., a (reconstructed) 'domain' within which the transformations of the signifier correspond to variations in the signified, and within which a certain number of elements have meaning only in relation to each other. A code is homogeneous because it was meant to be such, never because it was discovered to be such. This is why the bi-univocal relationship between codes and groups of physically similar messages does not by any means represent a necessary or permanent, or even common, state of affairs. Eric Buyssens has already noted4 that certain codes - which he called heterogeneous semes - utilize several different materials of expression. He presented a simple example of this, that of the code ('seme') used by the audience of a theatrical performance, in our culture, to express its opinion : a componential commutation puts the signifier /Cat calls/ opposite the signified 'Disapproval', which is physically of a type which can be described as auditory, non-phonetic, and 'labial' - and, opposite the signified 'Approval', the signifier /Applause/, which is auditory and non-phonetic but 'manual' (or again the /Bravo !/, which is phonetic and even phonemic). It also happens that a system of differentiations (a code) is transposed in its entirety from one modality to another while its internal relational structure (jorm according to Hjelmslev) remains to a greater or lesser extent unchanged. We know, for example, that various aesthetic systems which, until the nineteenth century, were manifested, i.e., realized in physical form, only in the material of expression proper to 'pictorial language system' (the unique and fixed image rendered by hand) have undergone since then a second manifestation, more or less isomorphic to the first, in the sensory order of the cinema's moving photographic image arranged in sequential order. The forms of classic Flemish painting are revived in Jacques Feyder's Kermesse Heroique, those of more recent Flemish painting (Magritte, Paul Delvaux) in L'Homme au crane rase or in Un soir, un train by Andre Delvaux, those of August Renoir in some of the films of his son Jean (Une partie de Campagne), etc. But some of the systems of spatial organization which have most influenced the history of painting have, in turn, been 'borrowed', as has been shown in a number of scholarly works, from the use of space in the theater (and what is such a 'borrowing', semiotically speaking, if not the migration of a form 4

Les langages et le discours (Brussels : Office of Publicity, 1945), Chapter IV.A, 34-37.

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through several modalities of expression ?). We also know the considerable role, advantageous or disadvantageous according to different schools of aesthetics or judgements of taste, that 'literary' or 'dramatic' schemes play in the construction of films. In all these cases, one is dealing, after all, with systems which, as systems, are more or less similar across different groups of physically homogeneous messages, i.e., with codes more or less common to different 'language systems'. This phenomenon, which one encounters quite frequently, allows, moreover, a certain number of rather complex variations, according to whether the preservation of the form is more or less complete, and whether the technico-sensory differences between the donor-language and the object-language are more or less considerable. We will not dwell any further, at this point, on these problems, which will be examined elsewhere in this work (see Chapter Ten, especially Part 2). If it is true that a single code can be manifested in several language systems, it is equally common - it is even the rule - that within one and the same language system the influence of several perfectly distinct organizational systems can be seen. This is only a simpler (but less exact) way of saying that, without an arbitrary and impoverishing 'reduction(ism)', an analysis cannot adequately treat all of the semiotic material to be found in the various messages of a given 'language system' if it insists on recasting them into the framework of a single constructed model. Thus, what Saussure called 'langue' is in no way the code which could explain all the features of a natural language, with all its configurations and variations. Saussure himself emphasized this point, that a language code (la langue) is only a part of the language system (langage), and that the latter also includes actual 'speech' (la parole). Only langage is a concrete reality, langue being a purely relational system of differences obtained by analysis through the process of abstraction and which is thus only a part of langage. But if it did not construct such partial models (of which the homogeneity is intellectual rather than physical), langage - despite the concrete homogeneity which is due to its uniformally phonetic manifestation - would remain, as Saussure has insisted, an immense collection of heteroclite facts, an amorphous and unmanageable phenomenon about which diverse disciplines would confusedly dispute, outside of any clearly assumed criteria of distinctiveness. This is to say that a physically homogeneous event may be extremely heterogeneous in the eyes of the analyst, and that its explication may demand the establishment of several systems, each of which is logically homogeneous. Emilio Garroni has recently noted this,

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and with good reason.5 It may be remarked, however, that Saussure seemed to attribute a greater or lesser lack of organization to that part of language that he excluded from la langue (viz., 'speech', parole), while more recent studies have reinterpreted speech variations themselves as resulting from the action of diverse sub-codes: geographic, stylistic, socioprofessional, idiolectal systems, the 'secondary modeling systems' of Soviet semioticians, the 'models of performance' of Chomskyans, diverse intonational codes (Ivan Fonagy),6 scientific or technical terminologies, etc., in brief, a whole series of codes which, while distinct from that of langue and grafting themselves onto it, are not less, as it is, coherent organizations and bearers of meaning, in some sense, other langues. We also know that Hjelmslev's celebrated distinction between the 'denoted' and the 'connoted'7 was the consequence, above all, of his desire to treat the pervasive codical heterogeneity of discourse, such as it is revealed through analysis. Denotation and connotation are not physically distinct; they are not objects. Denotation is a homogeneous event by the way it is constructed, which is obtained by abstracting from diverse discourses (like the langue of Saussure); and these discourses, according to Hjelmslev, can best be analyzed if it is assumed that the code of denotation underlying them functions entirely on the side of the signifier, and if one studies the signified which corresponds to this global signifier. In this way one arrives at the properly connotated event which is thus also a homogeneous thing because it is constructed. This hypothesis of a multiplicity of codes in the same language (the duality of denotation and connotation and the plurality of codes of connotation themselves) constituted for Hjelmslev the best way of handling what empirically attested discourse (the different fragments of the 'texts') contribute to the picture of a constant codical heterogeneity. These texts vary endlessly, to mention only two examples from Hjelmslev,8 in their 'types of styles' (normal style/ creative style/archaistic style) and in their 'levels of style' (elevated style/vulgar style/neutral style). But it is not only in regard to phonetic language that it is important to distinguish between the physical and systemic elements. Recent studies, such as those made by Umberto Eco, Jacques Bertin, Emilio *

Semiotica ed estetica. "L'information de style verbal", Linguistics 4. 7 Chapter 22 (155-67 in the French edition) of Prolegomenes langage. 8 Ibid., 156. 0

ä une thiorie

du

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Garroni, Julien Greimas, and the present author, have shown that, in each of the diverse 'language systems' of photography, drawing, graphic schematization, 'diagramatization', cartography, cinema, etc., different, perfectly distinct systems intervene in the same message, and that many of them are not specific to the language system considered, but have a larger socio-cultural significance and appear as well in other language systems used by the same civilization at the same time. Thus the photographic message brings into play - in addition to those systems proper to it and sometimes even before they intervene (the 'before' being logical rather than chronological here) - diverse perceptual systems which are also pertinent in the deciphering of the real (non-photographic) world, codes of identification which also function in the stylized design or in the recognition of everyday objects, codes of iconographic systems comparable to those studied by Erwin Panofsky9 in pictorial works, systems of connotation and of 'taste' which extend well beyond (but without excluding it) a properly photographic aesthetics, etc. You will recall that, in a chapter of La struttura assente,10 Umberto Eco undertook to draw up a preliminary list of the different codes which can be found to be operative within the still picture (which constitutes a physical class of messages). He arrived at the number ten - ten main categories of codes - and his enumeration does not pretend to be exhaustive. Jacques Bertin has noted, in the course of his study of Simiologie graphique,11 that certain conventional symbols frequently found in geographical maps are nevertheless foreign to a properly cartographic code, for example when the diagrammatic silhouette of a house represents the hotel trade, or the abstract design of a fish the fishing industry. (It is thus a question of modern ideograms, as George Mounin has remarked in another context.12 It is also a question - the two are not mutually exclusive - of specific signifying units which give rise to one or another of the systems of diagrammization studied by * Essais d'iconologie, French translation by Claude Herbette and Bernard Tesseydre (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). See especially the Introduction, written in 1939. In this regard, we note a little known article by Panofsky directly concerning the cinema: "Style and medium in the motion pictures", in D. Talbot, ed., Film : An Anthology (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959), 15-32. 10 Milan : Bompiani, 1968. This concerns Chapter B.3.III.5. In French: in Communications 15, 1970, 38-40. 11 The Hague : Mouton, and Paris : Gauthier-Villars, 1967, 51. 13 In "Les systemes de communication non-linguistiques et leur place dans la vie du vingtieme siecle," Bulletin de la Societe Linguistique de Paris LIV, 1959, 176-200.

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Abraham Moles. This example shows, in any case, that the cartographic code does not account for all of the cartographic message.) Julien Greimas has, for his part, heavily stressed the importance of the linguistic code in the decipherment of visual objects.13 Sight, it has often been said, recognizes those things for which language has provided a name. There is, for Greimas, a large correspondence between 'visual figures' (optically recognizable objects, each of which is a class of object-occurrences) and certain sememes of natural languages (a sememe is a meaning of a lexeme). The optical figure of a train - a stable, visual unit capable of being recognized among the numerous sensible variations differentiating between the diverse railroad vehicles which can be perceived - corresponds to the sememe train, i.e., the lexeme 'train' where it designates a group of cars drawn by a locomotive. In a similar vein, Emilio Garroni14 has shown that the different, properly visual and representational systems of organization are not the only ones to intervene in the pictorial and even the 'figurative' work. The latter also includes, among other things, units which can be enumerated and identified only in relation to certain diagrams of the language system, for example 'motifs' such as the cross or the crucifixion in paintings of the Christian tradition. (We could, evidently, consider, with Panofsky and doubtlessly Garroni himself, that these are cases of an iconographic rather than a linguistic code; but - besides the fact that the units of the latter may well correspond to units of the former and may come to name them - the fact remains that we are in the presence of an intrinsically non-pictorial system.) We have previously remarked, in Essais sur la signification au cinema (67-68), that the comprehension and integration of the total message of a film presupposes on the part of the viewer a command of at least five main types of systems. (Once again, this number is only a rough approximation, and is certainly incomplete.) The first four of these contain nothing which is specifically cinematic : (1) visual and auditory perception itself (systems for structuring space, 'figures' and 'backgrounds', etc.) to the extent that it already constitutes a certain degree of intelligibility which is acquired and variable according to different cultures; (2) the recognition, identification, and enumeration of visual 18

See the beginning of "Conditions d'une semiotique du monde naturel", in A. J. Greimas, ed., Pratiques et langages gestuels, (== Langages 10) (Paris: Didier-Larousse, 1968), 3-35. 14 Semiotica ed estetica, 140-41.

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or auditory objects which appear on the screen, i.e., the capacity (which is cultural and acquired) to appropriately manipulate the material that the film presents; (3) the ensemble of 'symbolisms' and connotations of diverse orders which are associated with objects or with relations between objects even outside the film (in the culture), but within films as well; (4) the ensemble of principal narrative structures (in the sense of Claude Bremond)15 which are present within a given civilization and which occur in all sorts of filmic or non-filmic narratives; and finally - and only finally - (5) the ensemble of properly cinematic systems (i.e., proper to films alone and common to all films) which serve to organize into a special type of discourse the diverse elements presented to the viewer by means of the preceding four elements. (The reader will note that it is necessary to add to the list, at the very least, the command of the language used in the 'dialogues' of the film, and the comprehension of the musical discourse which often accompanies the diegesis.) We shall see, in Chapter Ten (particularly Parts 4 and 5), that certain codes may be appropriately considered to be specific to the cinema even if they are not manifested solely in the cinema, but also appear in one or another adjacent language systems. But in this first approximation, provisionally acceping the definition of the specific in terms of an exclusively cinematic manifestation makes it easier to distinguish, in a still general manner, the different groups of codes which participate in the total message of the film. It does not hurt to insist on this pluralism of codes at a time when a cult of the 'visual' (or of the 'audiovisual') is developing, sometimes bordering upon the irrational. Just because a message is visual does not mean that all its codes are, and because a code is manifested in visual messages does not mean that it is not manifested in other ways. Visual 'language systems' maintain with other language systems systematic connections which are many and complex, and nothing is gained by opposing the 'verbal' and the 'visual 'as two large blocks each of which is homogeneous, massive, and without irregularities, and which would maintain with each other purely external logical relations (the absence of any common zone). The visual - if what is understood by this is the group of properly visual codes - does not reign as uncontested master over the parts of its alleged kingdom, i.e., over the whole of physically visual messages. On the contrary, it plays an appreciable role "

See especially "Le message narratif", Communications 4, 1964, 4-32.

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in non-visual messages. And the semantic organization of natural languages, in certain of their lexical domains, succeeds in masking, with a variable margin of overlap, the configurations and the divisions of sight. The visible world and language are not strangers to one another. Although the interaction of their codes has not been studied in all its detail, and although one could hardly reduce the relationship between them to an integral and servile 'copy' of one by the other, it remains no less certain that one function (among others) of spoken language is to name the units articulated by sight (but also to help it to articulate them), and that one function (among others) of sight is to influence the semantic configurations of language (but also to be influenced by it). It is not only from without that the visual message is partially invaded by language (the role of the caption which accompanies the newspaper photograph, dialogues in the cinema, television commentaries, etc.), but also from within and even in its very visuality, which is intelligible only because its structures are partially non-visual. In truth, the notion of 'visual', in the totalitarian and monolithic sense that it has taken on in certain recent discussions, is a fantasy or an ideology, and the image (at least in this sense) is something which does not exist. Thus, just as a single code may be manifested in several language systems, a single language system may manifest several codes, some of which may not be specific to it. This discrepancy between codes (systematically homogeneous units) and 'language systems (physically homogeneous units) is widespread, and cannot help but be accentuated when one is dealing with a 'rich' language system, i.e., one which is open to all social, cultural, aesthetic, ideological, etc. influences and initiatives; a language system, in sum, which is open to numerous and diverse codes. The cinema is, among others, just such a 'rich' language system, and there is no need to wait for numerous analyses of the corpus of films to predict that it would be fruitless to want to organize into a single code the ensemble of traits of signification found in films. The 'domain' which is constituted by the cinema - insofar as there is a domain - distinguishes itself first by its vast scope. There are a great number of messages (films), many of which are long messages, each of which contains many images, many sounds, and many words (and thus many mixed configurations). The very surface of the field can only increase a priori the likelihood of a multiplicity of codes. There is another circumstance which reinforces those just mentioned. The cinema is already a 'composite' language system on the level of the

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material of expression. Not only does it have the opportunity of including several codes, but even several language systems which, in a certain manner, it contains within itself, language systems which may be distinguished from one another by their physical nature alone, e.g., its continuous moving photographs, its speech, its music, its sound effects. In this the cinema differs from other means of expression which, even with different codes, are not physically composite. Thus, for example, we have classical music, where the material substance of the signifier consists uniformally of 'musical sound', the spoken language where it is limited to phonetic sound, writing where it is restricted to graphic lines, etc. Even if the cinema is defined in technico-sensory terms, one has to speak of a specific combination of several materials of expression, and not of one particular one. (We should guard against confusing the heterogeneity of codes, which is common to all 'language systems' of any importance, with the composite sensory order, which characterizes only some of them.) Finally (and most importantly), the cinema is one of the language systems endowed with some socio-cultural depth. It is not the only one in this case, and it is not necessarily the 'richest' of its kind. It is not a question here of drawing up a list of merits - always a pointless activity - but simply of remarking that the cinema, with other languages, does not belong to that group of systems of signification which might be called specialized, such as road signs, card games, the game of chess, telephone or Social Security numbers, trumpet or bugle calls, technological diagrams, markings of bus routes, Marine signal flags and semaphore, railroad signals, etc. Linguists and semioticians often draw their examples from such specialized systems (see Bühler, Cantineau, Martinet, Prieto, Hjelmslev, Mounin, Buyssens, Peirce, Morris, Eco, the present author, etc.). If they do this it is because of the illustrative capacity these restricted systems afford the elaboration of concepts of general semiotics, rather than because of some conviction as to a real anthropological importance these things might have in social life. Some of the important advances which have been made in semiotic theory, notably in the work of Luis J. Prieto, have been historically connected to the analysis of these 'specialized' modes of communication. The fact remains, however, that the study of these systems cannot serve, in itself, as a satisfactory objective of semiotics (it constitutes, rather, a means; it permits scholastic exercises and trial runs) - and that the semiotic enterprise would have little value if its real goal were not to shed some light upon the

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nature and function of the socially and humanly most important 'language systems'. In the case of specialized systems, the distinction between language and code frequently tends to disappear. The messages which constitute such a restricted signifying ensemble are entirely regulated by the action of a single code (or - but the final result is about the same - the diverse secondary codes which are linked to the principal code have an anthropological significance which is even more restricted than that of the principal code, and thus are rather weak in absolute terms). To be precise, it cannot be denied that the code of road signs is found together with a certain number of appended systems of a connotative or stylistic order. The different occurrences of the same sign - if the distinctive unit, Hjelmslev's 'invariant', is called 'sign' - differ among themselves in a number of ways, and these traits, which are not relevant to the study of the principal system, become distinctive again in relation to diverse expressive codes. The situation, at least in principle, is thus the same as for the richest language systems, like natural language. Thus, the base of the traffic sign will be more or less high, the triangle of metal more or less large, the arrow which is represented more or less wide, etc. But these variations are of sufficiently minor interest that the principal code, in practice, becomes coextensive with the whole of the 'language system'. We find, then, as is normal, that the number of codes which are involved in a language system increase with the 'richness' of the system as a whole. Specialized systems, which are in use only in certain very restricted contexts of social life, are thus protected against the large amount of complex and constant fluctuations of meaning in cultures. The cinema, on the other hand, like all rich languages, is largely open to all symbolisms, collective representations, and ideologies, to the influence of diverse aesthetic theories, to the infinite play of influences and filiations between different arts and different schools, to all the individual initiatives of film-makers ('revivals'), etc. In this way it is possible to treat the total ensemble of films as if they were the diverse messages of a single code. This complexity of films is also the result of the fact that the cinema is what we call an art. To say this is not to render a value judgement, nor to wish to rediscover some classical 'hierarchy of fine arts' (itself normative and arbitrary). Certainly one can, against some academic, reactionary, and basically ignorant 'taste', choose to assert that certain

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films are very beautiful, and, against some other taste (fanatical, visionary, and equally ignorant, although these are not the same things) that the cinema has, until now, offered us only a rather limited number of films of a depth and richness comparable to those of the great literary, musical, or pictorial texts. But these would be considerations of another sort. Within the perspective which we have adopted here, the inclusion of the cinema in the arts does not oblige us to say that the film is always (or frequently) a work of art by its success, nor that many films are 'beautiful', nor that a beautiful film is more beautiful than a beautiful book, etc. We will maintain only that the film - and even the ugliest, dullest, and most absurd one - is always a work of art by virtue of its social status. We should guard against confusing 'work of art' with 'aesthetic object'. Mikel Dufrenne has aptly said16 that many aesthetic objects (like the sea, the forest, or the greyhound) are not works of art, and that many works of art (weak or unsuccessful ones) are not aesthetic objects. The film is a work of art by its intention. It is an object which is composed, willed, concerted in its total organization, destined to please (or to touch, to disturb, to revolt, etc.), lacking any immediate practical utility. It is also a work of art by its consumption. The viewer rates it as 'success' or 'failure', 'original' or 'banal', 'interesting' or 'boring', etc. The cinema is an art because it functions socially as such, even if our culture does not accord it the same dignity or the same legitimacy as the traditional 'fine arts'. It is necessary to note, in addition, that in certain cultures - as those of contemporary Egypt or India, great producers and consumers of films - where the social image of the cinema is very different from the image it has in our country, it is the entire group of arts, and not the cinema in particular, whose mode of cultural function is rather far from what we know. Through its affinity with the arts the cinema is comparable, rather than to specialized systems of communication, to those vast, complex, and, so-to-speak, fundamentally socio-cultural 'language systems' which cannot be reduced to a single code, namely, the oldest arts such as myths, social rituals, beliefs, collective representations, tales, symbolic behavior, ideologies, etc. To this it may be added that the cinema, contrary to restricted modes of communication, has no sector of meaning (no portion of the material of the content, in Hjelmslevian terminology) which is proper " At the very beginning of volume 1 ("L'objet esthetique") of de l'experience esthetique (Paris: P.U.F., 1953).

Phinominologie

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to it. Certain 'language systems' are at the same time semantic fields - for example, traffic lights, the whole 'meaning' of which can be reduced to the social problem of the movement or non-movement of automobiles and pedestrians - but others are restricted to organizing and expressing no particular field. Thus the cinema, like literature or the theater, is in principle capable of saying anything, and conveys nonspecialized signifieds which are above all ideological and cultural, and which could be found just as well - presented and organized in a different manner, but taken from the same semantic pool - in other language systems utilized by the same civilization during the same period.

2.4. CINEMATIC SPECIFICITY: THE CINEMATIC LANGUAGE SYSTEM 0)

Ordinary language (as well as the majority of works devoted to problems of the screen) employs the word 'cinema' not only to designate those phenomena which Cohen-Seat would call 'cinematic', but also to name two other notions both of which belong to the 'filmic': first, the ensemble of films, and second, a single system which is supposed to account for this ensemble. The first of these meanings is quite neutral, purely summarizing, and may be retained, for it presents no problem. We shall disregard it in the discussions which follow. The second, as we have seen, should be discarded, for it results in too much confusion. Current usage, however - frequently inconsistent and with definitions which are implicit and unstable, remaining less than a terminology quite frequently treats the word 'cinema', in other cases, in an appreciably different manner and one in which a new conception of the thing takes shape. 'Cinema' ceases to be, then, more or less exactly, an impossible global system whose unity would be vainly inferred from a technico-sensory homogeneity, and tends to resemble more a veritable code, of a systemic unity which is not expected to explain the totality of elements of signification which appear on the screen. In certain usages, in fact, 'cinema' refers rather precisely to only one of the codes - or a single group of codes - at work in films : those assumed to be at work only in films, and which are judged 'specifically filmic', i.e., intimately connected with the adoption of the cinematic vehicle itself - to the exclusion of other codes - which the film shares with more or less broader areas of cultural symbolism. Such a use

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of the word contains within itself a pluralistic conception of systems. The cinema is thereby no longer the code underlying everything contained in films, but only that which is contained only in films. These two meanings of cinema, contradictory but common, are like two concentric circles : the second regroups a class of facts which, in relation to the class of facts designated by the first, is only a part of the filmic. All that which is specifically filmic is filmic, but all that which is filmic is not specifically filmic. This beginning of a new conception (which is much more interesting for semiotics) may be seen taking shape, for example, in the following sentences, which are frequently read or heard: This film is quite beautiful, but owes little to the resources of the cinema; This film ends with a brilliant piece of cinema; The film is entirely a reflection on the cinema; This film is of a great purity and the cinema in it is eclipsed and forgotten, etc. The extreme example is that celebrated sentence, so often repeated and so often criticized : It's a box office hit but it's not cinema, an assertion whose implications of normative aesthetics (admittedly crude and irritating) we shall set aside here, but which reveals at least a certain capacity to make a distinction between what is materially cinematic and what is systemically so, and to discern that all that which is in films is not necessarily of the cinema. It happens, unfortunately, that this first step toward progress is immediately canceled out by a certain abusive assimilation, which has the opposite effect. The specific is isolated from the whole of the filmic, only to be defined in turn according to criteria which are first and foremost technico-sensory and of a non-systemic order. That which 'belongs to the cinema' is the visual, or what moves, or what presents us with vast spaces, etc. These conceptions - in particular the definition of the cinema according to visuality or movement - are still rather widespread, despite their commonplaceness. We are touching here upon that notion of 'cinematic distinctiveness' which has been so frequently invoked, and which Emilio Garroni, in a recent work,17 has submitted to a profound and largely convincing examination. Garroni recalls that throughout the history of cinematic theories this 'distinctiveness' has often consisted, in the last analysis, of an essentially normative notion (or even a weapon), which a descriptive semiotic could not, as such, retain. It is in the name of the distinctiveness of the cinema that some films have been condemned, "

Semiotica

ed

estetica.

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being judged as insufficiently 'cinematic' or too 'literary' or too 'theatrical', whence comes the expression noted above (It's a box office hit but its not cinema) which Andre Bazin has already had the merit of criticizing. It is once again in the name of distinctiveness that such and such a preferential evolution has been prescribed for the cinema of the future. Thus it is said that the cinema ought to be the art of montage (attempt to reduce the filmic message to the single code of montage), or further that it ought to be the art of the image (attempt to reduce it to the visual image, itself conceived of as resting upon a single code). Garroni also attempts to show, with great precision, that this idea of distinctiveness was tied, in more than one interpretation, to the belief in a sort of massive homogeneity of the 'modeling system' proper to each of the arts (we have only to think of certain attempts to establish a 'system of Fine Arts'). In asserting the specificity of the cinema - as musical specificity, pictorial specificity, etc. - it was often hoped, more or less clearly, that it would be possible to construct a cinematic code valid for all filmic material, and that the entire film would belong to the cinema. 'Specificity', for many authors, had as a vague corollary 'uniqueness of code', and this one code, as we have seen above, was confused with directly physical traits such as visuality, movement, or montage in a material sense (juxtaposition of several independently filmed shots). Thus this code, or this system, did not merit its name, since it consisted most often in an enumeration of traits, and not in a structure. We would not want to adopt the ideology (and even less the fanaticism) of cinematic specificity. But merely because a notion has, in certain phases of the history of ideas, involved too much confusion, does not mean that it should be abandoned altogether. It is often the case, and not just in the field of the cinema, that certain concepts serve as the focal point of misdirected theories although the concepts are quite accurate in themselves. Among those who have been misled, the mere mention of 'specifically cinematic' elements (even if ill-defined) brought to mind the idea that certain traits can be cinematic without being specifically cinematic. The very presense of 'specifically' has the effect of introducing a distinction which, if well understood, could become an important one for the semiotics of the cinema. Above all, we must, in this regard, make it clear that the only entities capable of being or not being unique to the cinema are codes (systems), so that these codes are only (or at least primarily) manifested in the film, or that the film, to the contrary, is content to 'adopt' them from other

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cultural units. On the other hand, cinematic messages (films) are by definition cinematic throughout. Thus they could not be specific or non-specific, or at least they are, in the weakest sense of the word, always specific, since they always appeal, as messages, to a certain material definition outside of which they would not even be called films. To the extent that it is a film and not a painting or a book, a film, of course, is always a particular sort of object. It is precisely the error of many theories of specificity to want to present at the same time the film as a semiotic fact (sometimes even, still more clearly, as a systemic fact), and to nevertheless connect it, in a direct and naive fashion, to some physical characteristic of the signifier, such as visuality or movement. These features, because they are defined in sensory terms, inevitably characterize all films, and thus could not distinguish between them. Thus this theory renders a normative criterion unacceptable, although the establishment of this criterion was its true goal. The fact remains, obviously, that some films more than others give the viewer a strong impression of being cinematic. In this regard, the films of Eisenstein or Murnau and a tape on which a theatrical performance has been recorded with a single, fixed shot lasting three hours are not comparable. Semiotics should not deny differences of this sort, but should, to the contrary, account for them. But semiotics should not forget, for that matter, that materially speaking these two sorts of messages are both films, so that the unquestionable difference of specificity is a result of the fact that, in the first, the structure of signifying configurations (which is not a material thing) is, to a notable degree, properly cinematic, while in the second case it is to some extent almost totally un-cinematic. The idea of specificity is of interest to semiotics only if, within a given ensemble of physically homogeneous messages, one succeeds in distinguishing with some degree of precision between the traits which belong to this 'language system' and those which this language system shares with others. The notion of specificity, in sum, is only useful to the extent that it isolates certain characteristics and makes possible a sort of selection. If, in a language system, everything is specific, it loses the greater part of its value, for it fails to furnish the fundamental definition that it claimed to have provided, and merely offers an extensional definition close to common sense truths. However, if the characteristic of specificity is attached to the material traits of the signifier, this specificity can only become co-extensive with the 'language system' as a whole and with everything in that language system,

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since the latter is distinguished from others precisely by its material of expression. To claim that 'the cinema is the art of movement' is not, no matter what one says, to express one of the elements of the basic distinctiveness of the cinema, since it is to express the most superficial and most obvious of the elements of its distinctiveness, since all films move. Such a statement is far from resolving all the problems, of course. For even when the characteristic of specificity is associated with codes, one is forced, in a certain manner, to return to peculiarities of a physical order. If a code, in fact, is peculiar to a language system, it is because it can only be manifested in a medium of expression which has certain characteristics, and because the language system being considered has precisely such a means of expression. Thus, any rhythmic code - disregarding the figurative senses of the word 'rhythm' - requires for its expression a medium which has the physical characteristic of temporality, and this is why rhythmic codes are specific to those language systems whose means of expression satisfy this requirement (music, cinema, poetry...). We shall return to the delicate problem of the relationship between the specificity of codes and the specificity of language systems (means of expression) below, in Chapter Ten. We shall note here that there is a great difference between a specificity defined directly according to material criteria and one that is defined in terms of codes, even if the specification of codes cannot be accomplished without a consideration of certain traits of the material of the signifier (and not of this material itself, taken as a whole and without further analysis). In fact it is this second type of definition, and it alone, which makes it possible to discern in each language system certain nonspecific configurations, and which thus allows us as well, when it is declared that the others are specific, to propose something which is not a truism. This definition will also permit us to determine degrees and modes of specificity (as below, in Chapter 10.4). To conclude the discussion of these points we shall agree that cinematic specificity (or the absence of it) shall be used only in relation to different systems which are manifested in films. In addition, the word 'cinema' shall be used only to designate the ensemble of specific systems. The notions of cinematic specificity and of cinema will thus have two points in common: they group together systems, not isolated physical traits; and they only group together some and not all filmic systems. What has just been said of the cinema and of cinematic specificity

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could just as well be applied to the notion of 'cinematic language system'. In writings about the big screen, the latter, like the others, suggests two quite different and unequally interesting definitions. When one speaks of cinematic language system, one sometimes has in mind that conception (which has already been discussed) of a total and unique code which would regulate all the elements of all films, which would appear only in films, and which would, consequently, be directly linked to their physical nature. This is the case when it is claimed that Cinematic language is essentially visual (while it is composed of diverse, unequally visual systems, and while a system, even a visual one, is never visible as a system) - or again that To know how to manipulate cinematic language is to know how to express oneself with images and sounds (while there exist a goodly number of audiovisual configurations which do not belong to the cinema, even if they do appear in certain films) - or even that In our day, it is necessary to teach children how to understand cinematic language, which will play an important role in their lives (while what may, perhaps, play an important role is the totality of filmic messages, and not the properly cinematic codes, which constitute only a small part of this totality), etc. But there exists another class of propositions, also well represented in the literature on the cinema, in which the expression refers rather clearly to certain of the codes which intervene in films. One can say, for example, that Cinematic language is almost lacking in this film, or that In the first few years that followed the Lumiere brothers' invention, there was still no cinematic language and films merely recorded familiar scenes or music-hall spectacles, etc. Such uses evidently imply that all that is found to occur in films need not belong to the cinematic language system. This suggestion, as we have seen, is associated with certain uses of 'cinema' and 'cinematic specificity'. Note, however, that the idea of a specificity of a systemic nature (and of a specificity with a partial explanatory power, i.e., not extending to the whole of the characteristics of films) appears in 'cinematic language' and in 'cinematic specificity' in general with more emphasis (although still implicitly) than in 'cinema'. The difference is without a doubt due to the fact that 'cinema' has a large number of other meanings, the confused memory of which inevitably comes to connote the particular one that, in a given utterance, the speaker alone had in mind - while 'cinematic language system' and 'cinematic specificity' have a noticeably more restricted domain of use. Moreover, in 'cinematic language', there is language,

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a word which effectively evokes in many minds the double idea of a specificity (one language system; it is one language system among others), and of an ensemble of facts of a semiotic nature. In 'cinematic specificity', the semiotic connotation is weaker but - as compensation the idea of specificity is made more explicit. Once again, in one case as in the other, this semiotic specificity should not be confused with a physical distinctiveness, and this is why 'cinematic language' and 'cinematic specificity' - like 'cinema' even if more infrequently - also permit uses where the confusions which we have here tried to dispel begin to appear. These uses are based on the word 'language' (which thus presents, in relation to the problem considered here, both advantages and disadvantages). You will recall that this word readily designates a unity in terms of physical manifestation ('pictorial language', 'musical language', etc.), i.e., a materially homogeneous but codically heterogeneous unit. This applies as well to 'cinematic specificity', at least where what is understood as the distinctiveness is the language system itself, and not some of its codes. What appears, finally, is an entire interplay of fluctuating, sometimes contradictory nuances, implicit definitions, shiftings due to the context, and connotative pressures, the sum of which cancels itself out if one considers a large number of sentences. This explains why the three expressions, 'cinema', 'cinematic language', and 'cinematic specificity', are each capable of being used in two main ways, and why the difference between the two is nearly the same in all three cases. We shall thus retain all three, but only in one of the two forms into which common usage divides them, and according to a principle which itself had to be made explicit. Thus they become parasynonyms, since they both allude to filmic codes, and only those which can be shown to be proper to the film. They refer to something that we shall, nevertheless, call globally the cinematic (nominalized adjective). This 'cinematic' is no longer that of Cohen-Seat, since it is composed of the ensemble of signifying configurations which appear only in films (and which consequently appear in films and are 'filmic'). Cinematic language, cinematic specificity, and cinema all designate

the cinematic, but from different angles. 'Cinematic language' refers to it as a semiotic fact, as a fact of discourse, 'cinematic specificity', to the extent that it is in opposition to any structure which is intrinsically non-cinematic, and, finally, 'cinema' as such and without further specification. It is also common, as we have said earlier (p. 26

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and p. 39), that the last term preserves in other contexts its neutral and recapitulatory meaning (the sum of individual films), which does not contradict the meaning we are considering here. 2.5.

CINEMATIC-FILMIC/CINEMATIC-NON-FILMIC/ FILMIC-NON-CINEMATIC

When the expressions 'cinematic language', 'cinematic specificity', and 'cinema' are taken in the vague and at the same time totalitarian sense which we have rejected, the number of phenomena that one is led to declare to be cinematic becomes very large. It thus creates a heteroclite mass which is difficult to master (this is precisely why it is preferable to distinguish within it several sub-sets, corresponding to as many systems which remain, moreover, to be established). There is, however, one trait - and one alone - that is shared by all those things called 'cinematic', in the loose sense of the word: they are all phenomena which are immediately discoverable infilms,phenomena which are 'found' in films, which the investigator can 'attest' in films, which have films as their place of manifestation. In addition to being dangerous, as we have said, it is somewhat paradoxical to call these phenomena cinematic, since another adjective exists which is so-to-speak ready made to refer to them and which would appear to be naturally (or rather linguistically) predestined to the task: the adjective ßmic. In fact, what is filmic, if not the sum of what appears in films ? Remember, moreover, that writings on the film sometimes use this adjective in this way, but since they also employ 'cinematic', they do not take advantage of a distinction that could be associated with the differential treatment of the two terms. We shall pursue what is most interesting in these suggestions of usage, but making it more exact and explicit - above all pinning it down - and eliminating the inopportune meanings of the words we retain. This is, as is well known and as has well been pointed out by Hjelmslev, one of the ways of making a terminological system out of that other system, ordinary language. It is, of course, not the only one; instead of transforming a word into a term, one could directly fabricate the latter, which is then a neologism (neologism at the level of the word or the syntagm, i.e., of the 'locution'). Either of these solutions could be preferred, depending on the pragmatic demands of optimal communication in a given field of research as well as the overall set of

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available lexemes, and without forgetting that a minimum of grace and maneuverability should not be disdained. We shall call filmic, then, all the traits which appear in films (i.e., in the messages of the cinema), whether they are or are not peculiar to this means of expression, and no matter what idea one has of this specificity or of its absence. We shall call cinematic certain filmic facts which are supposed to play a part (or which one intends to make play a part) in one or the other of the codes specific to the cinema. The cinematic is but a part of the filmic. Certain phenomena are filmic and cinematic, others filmic but not cinematic. The point of departure for this discussion (Chapter One) was the terminology proposed by Gilbert Cohen-Seat. In what concerns the cinema, as we have shown, a semiotic interest remains essentially within the domain which this author calls filmic, and scarcely touches what he calls the 'cinema' (an industrial, technological, economic phenomenon; the sociology of publics, etc.). We see now that, concerning the filmic, the definition proposed here rejoins exactly - even if only after a certain detour - the one Cohen-Seat himself formulated. The filmic, for him as for us, is not the uniform of the theater attendants or the architecture of the movie house, the price of seats or the budget of production companies, the influence of the cinema on juvenile delinquency in the Southwest of France, the chemical properties of the different emulsions used, or the technical modalities of the studio equipment. The filmic is that which belongs to the signifying discourse (to the message) that the film is as a perceived unfolding and as a linguistic object (but which the film is not, as a supple tape rolled up in a round can). It is only that, as Cohen-Seat has rightly indicated, but it is all that, as we pointed out a moment ago. As for Cohen-Seat's 'cinematic', it is more vast than the filmic and encompasses it. The cinema is not only the film, but also what precedes it (production and technology), follows it (audience and influence), accompanies it (the functioning of the projection room). But, on the contrary, the filmic is more vast than the cinematic as we understand it, and encompasses it: the film itself is cinematic only in some respects. Thus, our definition of the filmic corresponds to Cohen-Seat's, but our definition of the cinematic deviates from his. His cinematic is the object of study for the technologist, the sociologist, the economist; ours is the object of study for the semiotician, for it consists of a set of codes which are combined in discourses. If we have accorded an importance to the fact that 'cinema', in

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current usage, often designates phenomena which intervene in the filmic, it is became the status of the word is inseparable from the status of the thing. Cohen-Seat does not emphasize sufficiently the fact that film is twice, and in two different ways, in opposition to the cinema. Film differs externally, in rejecting cinema as that which does not belong to it, as that which surrounds it (and thus it is the 'cinema' of Cohen-Seat), but it also differs internally, in circumscribing cinema as that which, while within it, is only a part of it (and thus it is cinematic in the sense we are proposing here). What Cohen-Seat fails to point out is that cinema - and this time in all possible senses of the word is present at the very heart of the film, and that certain characteristics of films are due to the fact that these films are the products of the cinema. Κ films manifest semiotic systems which do not appear elsewhere (and which we thus call cinematic), it is because these systems are connected, in one way or another, even if the connection is indirect and complex, to that technico-sensory, economic, and sociological ensemble which constitutes the 'cinema' of Cohen-Seat, and whose extension within the film they represent. It would also appear to be possible, given the following conditions, to reserve for the word cinematic both of these meanings, Cohen-S6at's and ours. They are two quite distinct notions, but that they correspond to two meanings of the same word (instead of being associated with two distinct terms) is neither an accident nor a troublesome collision which should be eliminated. On the contrary, it is the everyday language which is correct in giving the same name to the vast sociotechnico-economic 'machine' which produces or consumes films, and to the systematic marks that this machine leaves on these films. The semiotic approach, we have said, 'leaves aside' the phenomena that Cohen-Seat calls cinematic. It would be more appropriate to say, as we see now, that it does not touch directly upon their study, but approaches them from another direction, and comes into contact with them at their position at the heart of the film. It is when the cinema, immersed and dissolved in the film, becomes itself a fact of language and discourse that a semiotic analysis may usefully attack it. Thus, the cinematic which is of interest to semiotics is the cinematicfilmic. The cinematic of Cohen-Seat is nothing other than the cinematicnon-filmic, and the other traits of the film, those which are not necessarily related to the cinema, constitute the domain of the filmic-noncinematic. Confusing the cinematic-filmic with the cinematic-non-filmic can

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always be avoided (if it threatens) by the use of these two terms. However, in the perspective we have adopted here, we shall - except in a context which could promote confusion - simply call the cinematicfilmic 'cinematic'. The adjectives 'cinematic' and 'filmic', as defined above, do not maintain parallel relations with their corresponding nouns. A filmic fact isfilmicby its source; it is a fact which has been discovered initially in a film. A cinematic fact is cinematic by its destination; it is a fact that the analyst consciously attributes to one or the other of the codes proper to the cinema. Thus, a filmic fact has the film behind it, and a cinematic fact has the cinema before it. The difference is due to the fact that the film is a message, while what is proper to the cinema is a group of codes. An analysis which does not have to establish the literal purpose of the filmic, must on the contrary construct the cinematic piece by piece. For the semiotician, the message is a point of departure, the code a point of arrival. The semiotic analysis does not create the film, which it finds already made by the cineast. On the other hand, we can say that, in a certain manner, the analysis 'creates' the codes of the cinema; it should elucidate them, make them explicit, establish them as objects, while in nature they remain buried in films, which alone are objects which exist prior to the analysis. It should, if not invent them, at least discover them (in the full sense of the term). It should 'construct' them, which is in one sense to create them. A filmic fact cannot be filmic by its destination. The film is not something which one can decide whether to attribute or not attribute to such and such a fact, for it is already 'complete' when an analysis is made of it, and it thus already contains within itself the different traits which the analysis can but discover. Similarly, a cinematic fact cannot be cinematic by its source. The codes of the cinema are not things which one can immediately discern somewhere, for the cinematic does not exist independently; only an analysis can separate it out. It thus consists only of what the analyst puts into it. The analyst's task, in sum, is to uncover certain filmic facts and to construct the cinematic codes by means of these facts; some filmic traits are cinematically specific, others are not.

3 'FILM' IN AN ABSOLUTE SENSE

3.1.

T H E FILM'/THE CINEMA*

The reader may perhaps object that it is unnecessary to thus reintroduce the terms 'cinema' and 'cinematic', even with certain qualifications, into a study which is scarcely concerned with the cinematic fact, at least in Cohen-Seat's sense (which itself corresponds to very common usage). Wouldn't it be possible to imagine designating, by the word film - this time taken in the absolute singular (singular of generality) - what is expressed by the substantive 'cinema' when it refers to the totality of films, and what is expressed by the substantivized 'cinematic' when it refers to the codes proper to films ? It is something like this that critics of the cinema are thinking of when they speak 'of film' (and not 'of films'). This use of the word is, in French, only provisional, but it has been strengthened in books written in other languages such as English and German. Here the word 'film', employed in an absolute sense, is found in places where the word cinema would be used in a French text. Thus, semiologie du cinema becomes in English 'film-semiotics' or 'semiotics of film' (and not 'movie-semiotics' or 'semiotics of the movies'!), in German Film-Semiotik (and not Kino-Semiotik/). To langage cinematographique corresponds the German Filmsprache (not Kinosprache), to structure de la signification au cinema, the English 'structure of meaning in film' (and not 'in the movies'), etc. If it were decided to more rigorously extend this usage to French and to monitor it rather closely, it would seem that one would both be able to render impossible at the terminological level all confusion between CohenSeat's cinematic facts and our specific codes, since the terms 'cinema' and 'cinematographique' would be excluded from being a signifier of the latter - and to clearly show that the semiotic approach remains essentially within the domain of the filmic fact, since the only term used would be 'film', in the singular or plural. At the same time this play on

'film' in an absolute sense

51

number would permit us to preserve the necessary distinction between diverse individual messages (films) and systemic traits of a general order (film). Thanks to the absolute singular, it would still be possible to directly speak of the codes without involving any of their particular manifestations. This solution, perfect at first glance, is attractive by virtue of its appearance of clarity, rigor, and simplicity. Examining it a bit more closely, however, one sees that it could only create new confusions. It would mean, in fact, substituting one of the meanings of the word 'film' (its absolute sense) for one of the meanings of the words 'cinemacinematic' (the one which we are proposing, and which refers to facts within the filmic). However, French usage has merely suggested the introduction of this usage, and without much perseverance; in order to affirm or establish it, it would be necessary to do violence to it and this means that no one would follow us; thus the manipulation would lose its expected advantage. It is noteworthy, in fact, that cinema and film, in French, tend to be in opposition in almost all contexts. This opposition is quite flexible, since each of the two words has several meanings,1 but if the site of opposition is capable of changing, the fact of their opposition tends to be maintained or to be reconstituted in each of these contexts. Thus film, in singular or plural, is in opposition to the cinema of Cohen-Seat. It is the signifying discourse (or signifying discourses) as opposed to the economic and technological elements. We have discussed this paradigm at length; it exists in ordinary language, and formed the basis of Cohen-S6at's terminology. But what must be noted here is that neither can film be substituted for cinema as we understand it (groups of specific codes). This is obvious when the word designates one or several particular films. 'Films' are thus messages, and the same word cannot designate codes. The case is the same (despite some suggestions to the contrary, noted a moment ago) when film is used in an absolute sense. Let us consider this last point. In ordinary English, one can say that The film most often begins with the credits but not that The cinema most often begins with the credits - that The film has a beginning and an end, but not that The cinema has a beginning and an end, etc. These 1

Movies is more common than 'cinema' in French, without, however, corresponding to 'cine'; students of English see in this an 'Americanism'. On the other hand, English also has the word 'cinema', but which is rarer than its French cognate and does not have the same area of usage.

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'film' in an absolute sense

examples are simple and common, and could be easily multiplied. What do they show ? They show that the word 'film' - even in the absolute sense where it refers to a group of traits which are of the same order of generality as the 'cinema' and which, like it, may be applied to virtually all films - does not, however, designate the same thing as 'cinema'. Certainly it becomes generalized in this way, and in this approaches our 'cinematic', a convergence which formed the basis of the terminological undertaking envisaged a moment ago. But ßm, even in the general singular, is still the message, and it is the message which begins most often with the credits, has a beginning and an end, etc. All propositions which obviously imply a closed text, a discourse, but which would no longer have any meaning - and moreover would not occur to anyone, which accounts for the unacceptable sentences - if they had to apply to a code (system), i.e., to a purely abstract entity which does not involve a textual representation, and thus no 'beginning* or 'end'. This ideal substance is cinematic. And concerning 'film' in an absolute sense, one does well to exclude reference to any specific message, but continue no less to include the fact itself of the message, which is distinct from any code, codical elements, or group of codes, a sufficient reason for abandoning the idea of using it as a substitute for our 'cinema'. There is a second reason, a corollary to the first namely, that the message, precisely because it is a message, manifests conjointly all sorts of specific or non-specific codes; however, our notion of the cinematic excludes the second, retaining only the first. Thus, cinema is in opposition not only to films (distributive plural), but also to ßm (absolute singular). Similarly, 'literature' may be contrasted with 'book' as well as 'books', and 'painting' with 'picture', as well as 'pictures', etc. For particular messages are not the only ones to differ from general codes; the very existence of the message is different, or the ensemble of traits common to diverse messages to the extent that they are messages and not codes. A book always has a beginning and an end, while literature does not. A piece of music is a discourse, while 'music' is not. This notion of 'absolute-film', or at least the principle behind it, does not present any difficulties. It designates - it is even, in its most common usage, the only term to designate - what one has in mind when one wants to speak of the message (a delimited object, a closed sequence, a manifest and actualized unit, a web of co-presences) without referring to any specific message(s) and in imagining what one says as being applicable to any message - but also without this element of generality

'film' in an absolute sense

53

being able to lead to confusion with the system at the corresponding level (a purely abstract signifying-ensemble, and as such never manifested), which is equally a 'general' thing, but in a different manner. The word 'film', in its diverse spontaneous uses, is thus always on the side of the message, and it is to the context that tradition assigns the task of indicating if it involves a given message or the fact of the message. Everyday language maintains this last distinction in a relatively clear way, although by means of quite different signifiers. Thus, on the one hand we have This film is very beautiful, I don't like this type of fiIm, Murnau's films have not become dated, etc. - and, on the other, The film is thoroughly meaningful, Films are social objects, A film is a work of art, All films are basically documentary, etc. These examples also show that use of the word 'film* in the grammatical singular is not necessarily always based on the singular of generality (a semantic notion). If, for example, someone tells us that This film is one of the most beautiful around, or that The film just shown was made in Australia, the grammatical singular obviously excludes all generality, and on the contrary, recalls the various remarks made earlier about the plural of particularity. 'Film', in those cases, is similar to 'films'; it is a question of particular messages, even if for the moment only one is mentioned. Inversely, it may happen that the idea of generality is easily established in propositions where the word 'film' is used in the grammatical plural. Instead of saying that the film begins most often with the credits, one can just as well say that Films begin most often with the credits, and it is clear that in both cases one has said the same thing. We shall nevertheless speak of the absolute use of the word (rather than of its 'singular of generality') and of its distributive use (rather than of its 'plural of particularity'). It would have seemed simpler to distinguish between the 'general' and the 'particular' uses, but this terminology would have been dangerous, invoking much too much the notion of language usage (ordinary usage or, on the contrary, special usages). However, the distributive use of the word 'film' is in no way, in the present usage of French, an unusual one, but on the contrary the most ordinary one, and the absolute use is, according to present usage, the more restricted of the two. 'Film' serves much more often to designate one or more specific messages proper to all films. Thus the fact of the message, even considered in its greatest generality, is not to be confused with the fact of the code. And yet there is nothing more in the message than in the ensemble of codes of this message - if not their combination, which is itself a system, but a

54

'FELM' IN AN ABSOLUTE SENSE

particular system - since all the signifying structures, all the organized configurations, all the 'laws' which the analyst discovers within the message are the very things which will be attributed to one or another of its codes, and which will thus contribute to the detailed establishment of these codes. The particular combination of several codes within a single message is nothing less than the structure of that message. But the structure of an object and the object itself are nevertheless two different things; the latter is what initially serves as the object of analysis, while the former is the expression of the completed analysis. Codes exist only because the analyst has created them with materials furnished by the message, but they (or their combination in a particular system) are not real objects in the world and thus remain inalterably distinct from the message. Thus we can understand that it is not the cinema which has a beginning and an end, or which begins with the credits - but only the film, which is always a message. In English and German, the words movies and Kino (the closest equivalents to the French cinema) are primarily restricted, in current usage, to the designation of diverse things which Cohen-Seat would call cinematic. 'Movies' and 'Kino' have only a slight connotation of the filmic; they evoke the industry, technology, economy (like cinima), but only slightly the discourse, language, or the work itself (contrary to cinema). Also, in order to designate the filmic fact in its most general sense, English and German use, in many cases, only 'film' in its absolute sense. We leave aside the English motion pictures, which is very inconsistent. In French, on the contrary - and in other languages, like Italian, which behaves in this regard very much like French - the word cinema currently designates filmic facts (example: le cinema est un langage), except that the absolute sense of the word film is also used. Thus French makes use of two terms within this semantic domain, while English and German for the most part have only one, i.e., in those cases where one would like to mention the filmic fact outside of any particular film. It is without a doubt this duality, proper to certain languages, which explains why the two terms are specialized and tend to share the semantic field, 'cinema' on the side of codes, and 'film' (in its absolute sense) on the side of the message itself, designated as a general fact. We shall conform, then, after having investigated them, to the dominant tendencies of the ordinary usage of the word 'film', and will duly use it in its distributive as well as absolute sense only to designate facts of (particular or general) messages with the plurality and hetero-

'film' in a n a b s o l u t e sense

55

geneity of codes that they involve. Thus we support the definition of the filmic proposed earlier: 'filmic' will be the adjective which corresponds to the substantive 'film' in its two uses. For the codical facts which properly characterize the screen we shall preserve the term 'cinematic', which has already been discussed. These conventions have the advantage - and also the goal - of preserving a clear distinction between codically heterogeneous messages and specific codes, in the analysis of particular films as well as in the general study of the film.

3.2. THE ZONE COMMON TO FILM AND CINEMA. ITS LIMITS.

There is something which nevertheless should be called to the reader's attention: the distinction between the cinematic and the filmic, which everyday language maintains for better or for worse (obstinately and confusedly at the same time) and which we would like to make explicit here, does not prevent, in certain propositions, cinema and film (or cinematic and filmic) from becoming interchangeable and from being spontaneously felt as such in writing. Thus, outside of an especially qualified context, one could equally say that the crosscutting montage and the lap dissolve are 'filmic' or 'cinematic' figures, that they 'belong to the cinema' or that they 'belong to film'. But doesn't this stem from the fact that the proposition itself, in its content and its exact level of generality, provokes a provisional neutralization of the two oppositions which normally separate 'film' from 'cinema' (and which we shall maintain elsewhere) - namely the opposition between message and code, and between heterogeneity and homogeneity ? On the one hand, the two figures in question here - crosscutting montage and lap dissolve - are in fact among those filmic facts which also belong to the cinema. On the other hand, the statement was presented in a sufficiently general form that we still did not know if these figures are envisaged as occupying a segment of the discourse (i.e., as aspects to the message, thus filmic) or as occupying a place in a purely logical and ideal spatio-temporal combinatorics (i.e., ais aspects of a code, thus cinematic). It suffices to modify the content of the proposition so that the two words cease to be interchangeable. Take, for example, a film whose tenth and eleventh minutes are filled with a sequence of cross-cutting montage. No one would dream of saying that this minute-by-minute account informs us of the cinematic

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'film' in an absolute sense

status of the figure, for it is evidently its filmic status which is thus revealed. On the contrary, if some theoretician of the screen established in his 'montage schedule' a privileged relationship between the crosscutting montage and the parallel montage, emphasizing their common characteristics and pinpointing precisely their differences in order to establish their paradigmatic relationship, everyone would judge that it was the cinematic situation of the figure (and not itsfilmicsituation) that the author was attempting to show. In the Soviet films from the classical period, the symbolic opposition between the 'Reds' and the 'Whites' often helped to organize and punctuate the narrative. One could not, and does not, speak, however, of it as a cinematic construction, for the paradigm of the Reds and the Whites belongs to a political code and not a cinematic one. When it appears in a film, one speaks of it as a filmic construction. But it could happen that the manner in which this opposition is used, in the detail of images, calls for resources proper to the cinema. One could say, for example, that The cinematic treatment of the antithesis between the Reds and the Whites was especially successful in this film. A sentence like Cinema is a language (or Cinema is an art) is much more common than Film is a language (or Film is an art). One speaks of a cinematic language more often than of a filmic language. In these three pairs of expressions, the version containing the word 'film' (or 'filmic') borders on the unacceptable. It is felt to be such in everyday language itself. To think that the cinema is an art does not allow us to say that film is one, since it can only be a realization of this art, and not the art itself. In cinema, sound is as important as images/ In flm, sound is as important as images: these sentences are both possible, and express just about the same thing. This is because, at this degree of generality, the idea which is put forward (the great importance of sound) is true both of codically heterogeneous messages and of the homogeneous, specific codes. On the other hand, it is at the end of the film - and certainly not at the end of the cinema - that sound sometimes continues to be heard while all images have disappeared from the screen : the proposition, this time, makes sense only in reference to a message. The contexts in which 'cinema' and 'film' (or 'cinematic' and 'filmic') become interchangeable are quite numerous. Examples are easily found in the literature on the cinema, and often consist of quite simple sentences without any sort of affectation. We have already cited some examples; there are many more, for example, The Cinema (or film)

'film' in an absolute sense

57

brings into play four types of materials, visual images, sound effects, speech, and music. The quite considerable extent of this zone of overlap should not be surprising, and the overlap itself is no anomaly to be 'done away with'. This phenomenon of contextual neutralization is not restricted to the domain of the cinema (or of thefilm!); its equivalent may be found in other semiotic studies, even in linguistics. To propose that Morse code is based entirely on the opposition between short and long, or that Every message transmitted in Morse is based entirely on the opposition between long and short, is one and the same thing (except that the words 'based entirely' do not have exactly the same meaning in both cases). Similarly, if one asserts that clichis are practically nonexistent in the French language, one could just as well say that Clichis are practically nonexistent in French utterances (it is simply that the nonexistence in question is not exactly the same in both cases). It could never be said that the notions of language and utterance are, in linguistic research, freely interchangeable, or that their opposition rests on uncertain and obscure considerations. It is clear to everyone that these are two quite distinct notions. And yet there exists a class of propositions which are true of both the utterances and the language; the example given of clich6s is one. Others are perhaps more common; thus, one can say that The combination of a verb and a noun is in many idioms an essential characteristic of the language, but just as well that The combination of a verb and a subject is in many idioms an essential characteristic of the utterance - that The French language permits both coordination and subordination, but just as well that French utterances permit both coordination and subordination, etc. We can understand, then, that if the distinction between cinema and film is sometimes a source of difficulties, it is not because the two notions are inherently ill-defined, or that their opposition is complex and ephemeral, but rather that habits of rigor are less well established in research on the cinema than in other disciplines. That two concepts should overlap in one place while remaining distinct elsewhere should cause confusion only in studies which are themselves confused. What remains true, however - but which is of greater interest to stylistics than to our terminological project - is that current usage turns out to be on the whole more strict and more consistent when it is a question of the word 'cinema' than of 'film'. The word 'cinema' almost never occurs in statements concerning the message and the message alone: anyone might say that Films rarely last more than three

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'film' in an a b s o l u t e sense

hours, but no one says that The cinema rarely lasts more than three hours (or at least one is speaking of something different: of the 'filmshow', which is a social institution and not a message or a discourse : a good example of a cinematic-non-filmic fact). Anyone might say that Films ordinarily end with a visual image which is longer than the others, but no one would say that The cinema ordinarily ends with a visual image which is longer than the others. One can commonly talk about serial films, but not of serial cinema, etc. On the contrary, in certain propositions concerning the code and it alone, one much more frequently finds the anomaly which causes 'film' to appear where 'cinema' was expected. We have already mentioned Film is a language, Film is an art. One also comes across sentences like It is difficult to compare literature with film, for..., or still, Film achieves spontaneously and effortlessly what baroque art has long been striving toward. Uses of this sort are almost unacceptable in ordinary language, but occur quite frequently in conversations or books on the cinema. This means that there exists a sort of sub-usage, which may be judged to be unfortunate but which has its own rules. These rules predict that the interchangeability of 'cinema' and 'film' is unilateral: 'film' cannot be replaced by 'cinema', but 'cinema' may be replaced by 'film' (at least when it does not bear Cohen-Seat's meaning, and refers to filmic facts). The idea of a code is more clearly present in 'cinema' than the idea of message in 'film'. In addition, 'cinema' is ruled out when speaking of the message, but 'film' is apt to designate both the fact of the code and the fact of the message, or at least does not exclude the code as clearly as 'cinema' does the message. 'Film' is thus capable of being used in all cases, while 'cinema' may be employed only when speaking of the code. This is precisely why 'film' can always replace 'cinema' without the reverse being true. Why is this sub-usage unfortunate ? Because it deprives us of a term which is clearly opposite 'cinema' as message to code, and which designates only this message. And also because it creates with 'cinema' and 'film' an unnecessary pair of terms when it is a question of referring to specific codes. We shall thus reject this particular usage in order to preserve the tacit definitions of more general usage: 'film' designates the message in its plurality and its codical heterogeneity, 'cinema' the ensemble of homogeneous and specific codes. The two words are interchangeable only when what one wants to say applies, in effect, to the two corresponding objects. We shall conclude this chapter by remarking that the existence of

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this sort of overlap is inseparable from certain characteristics of the semiotic enterprise itself, as well as of the facts that it attempts to understand. If 'cinema' and 'film' are sometimes interchangeable, the first reason is that certain phenomena, by their very nature, belong both to cinema and to film. What we call cinematic, you will recall, is the cinematic-filmic. Any cinematic fact is a filmic fact (although the reverse is not true). Thus, the processes included in what one occasionally calls the 'rhetoric of the screen' (montage figures, camera movements, splicings, etc.) belong both to the cinema (and thus are cinematic) and appear in films (thus, they are filmic). This is why, as long as one is describing the most general principle of a form of montage, without any detail - as in the example of the lap dissolve and the cross-cutting montage mentioned above - one can correctly speak of it indifferently as afigureof cinema or of film. In addition, there exists a level of analysis at which general codes can be described as being made up of the combination of characteristics common to all particular messages ('the cinema' thus rejoins 'the film'), with the exception, however - the unavoidable exception - of the very fact of the message. In addition, different features of signification lend themselves to being analyzed, at least during a certain time, as belonging to both cinema and film, or more exactly as being situated beyond the point where the distinction is meaningful. Thus, the two notions have in common a part (and only a part) of their content, as is witnessed by the very existence of 'cinematic-filmic'. But even in regard to this shared part they continue no less to differ radically in terms of their definition, and to represent two objects which have every reason to remain distinct in regard to the analytic procedure. Code always differs from message in that one is code and the other message, and - even if the complete list of what one finds in the message were identical with the total list of what one introduces into the code (a hypothesis which is immediately ruled out when several codes are at work within the same message) - it would still be true that these traits should be understood in the future as being associated with one another throughout a given discourse, and thus linked by the coherence of a logic which is always tacit. The cross-cutting montage, envisaged in its most general sense, can very well be both a process of the cinema and film. It is nevertheless (or in any case it ought to be) conceived of in the film as a form capable of occupying a particular segment of the film tape, and in the cinema as a figure - another figure, and yet the same, hence the confusion - which realizes one of the

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logical possibilities authorized by a purely ideal combinatorics. In addition, beyond the area of applicability common to the two words, i.e., surrounding it as well as within it, we shall attempt to maintain each term in its proper place, such as the preceding chapter tried to delineate: film on the side of the message (and thus on the side of the heterogeneous), cinema on the side of the specific and the homogeneous (thus on the side of the code).

4

PLURALITY OF CINEMATIC CODES

4.1. GENERAL AND PARTICULAR CODES

The reader will have noticed that until now the notion of the cinematic has been defined in terms of two distinctive features. To say that something is cinematic means first that it occupies a position (or that one hopes to assign it a position) within a generally coherent system, i.e., a code. As long as a trait is found in a message and one merely limits oneself to establishing its presence or superficially describing it, one is treating it as a filmic trait. From the moment that one thinks of it in terms of a code it becomes - or at least one tries to make it - a cinematic trait. Codicity (i.e., the position with regard to the code, to what is no longer the bare message) is thus one of the distinctive characteristics of the cinematic. The other is specificity : we will speak of the 'cinematic' only if the codes which we have in mind belong to a certain means of expression (called the 'cinema'), or if we have the intention of demonstrating that they do. However, popular opinion and current usage implicitly associate the notion of cinema with a third characteristic which cannot be confused with specificity or with codicity - namely, the seme generality. The word 'cinema' represents to most minds an ensemble of traits common to all films. 'The cinema' is frequently opposed to 'films', and in doing so it is not so much (or not immediately) the difference between code and message, or between specific and heterogeneous, that one has in mind, but much more spontaneously, the difference between the general and the particular. This suggestion, no matter how widespread, is the result of a misunderstanding. The notion of the cinematic only involves generality when the word is used in its absolute sense and with no modifier. The indication of generality is thus limited to this use of the term and not to the term itself. If I say that The cinema is a concrete art, I obviously be-

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lieve that my statement applies to all films. But I can just as well say that Films are more concrete than books and the suggestion of generality would be just as strong, in spite of the absense of the word 'cinema'. Inversely, it suffices to modify 'cinema' with some modifier in order to make the idea of generality disappear: when someone talks to me about the German cinema, or about the avant-garde cinema, or the cinema between the two Wars, what follows is not expected to concern all films. It is once more necessary to note that the word 'cinema' (a substantive) is hardly ever used in the plural (when one speaks of 'cinemas' one is thinking of movie theaters). This preponderance of the singular form certainly contributes to a large extent to the misunderstanding that we would like here to eliminate. One confusedly imagines the cinema as a unique and global thing. (Likewise, it is because the word 'film' is very often used in the plural that the notion is commonly felt to be distributive and particularizing.) With the adjective 'cinematic' the error is less pervasive, and the suggestion of an automatic generality disappears. Since one can speak of cinematic styles, of cinematic codes, of cinematic genres, etc., a fact can be cinematic and yet limited to certain films. Thus, cinematic phenomena are not necessarily common to all films. They can be, in which case it is a question of general cinematic phenomena. In this category, one can include not only the traits which are in fact cinematic, but also those which are potentially so. It is clear, for example, that the pan shot - if one means by this the figure itself, and not just one of its particular values, which already puts us on the level of a sub-code - is capable of appearing in any film, while other traits are not (e.g., certain types of long shots are common only to the Western, certain types of camera movements only to the German expressionist school, etc.). The pan shot thus constitutes a general cinematic phenomenon, and yet its generality is only potential, for some films do not include a single pan shot. We shall call general cinematic codes those systemic processes (which are to be constructed by the analyst) to which may be attributed those features which not only characterize the big screen, but which in addition are (actually or potentially) common to all films. Opposite the general cinematic codes, particular cinematic codes include those elements of signification which appear only in certain types of films (which is why they are particular), but which nevertheless are realized only in films (which is why they are cinematic). The

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presence of codes of this sort is quite evident in films which belong to a well-defined 'genre' like the classic Western. The Western manifests a code (or a combination of codes) which is distinct from those which characterize films in general (in the Western, the former are in addition to the latter), but also from those which would play a role in the organization of a song or an oral narrative of the American West. The 'genre' is, however, only one example of those classes of films to which particular cinematic codes correspond. There are others, such as the films of a given 'school' (if a unity of choices really exists for it), or a given epoch, or a given country (if indeed they have traits in common which differ from those of other countries), or a given cineast, etc. We shall return to these problems in Chapter Seven, Parts 1 and 2. A particular code is not a particular system. Both a particular code and a system are obviously general, as is indicated by their respective names. But they must still not be confused. Each film has its own structure, which is an organized whole, a fabric in which everything fits together; in short, a system. But this system is valid only for one film. It is a configuration which results from diverse choices of elements, as well as from a certain combination of the chosen elements. These choices have been made from among the resources provided by diverse (general or particular) cinematic codes - but also by non-cinematic codes. A film is not 'cinema' from one end to another, and what it contains of the non-cinematic (its political background, for example, or its character sketches) is just as important as the rest when it comes to defining its uniqueness, i.e., to defining what differentiates it from all other films. To the extent that films are considered as unique totalities, each contains within itself a system which is as unique as the film itself. It is a system, but not exactly a code, since it would have only a single 'message'. Particular cinematic codes, on the other hand, in spite of their particularity, well deserve to be called codes, for each of them is at work in several messages (even if not in all the messages of the cinema) and does not specifically concern any one of these messages. One should be careful, then, not to confuse the particular with the singular (in spite of the lack of generality common to both), for the particular is still on the side of the code, while the singular refers to the structure of the message (see Chapter 5.5). Note, in addition, that the general and the particular, despite the difference of their scope, have in common the fact that they are not singular, i.e., that they remain codes. In a word, if common intuition (incorrectly) attaches to the notion

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of the cinematic the idea of an obligatory generality, it is because the most common opposition is the one established between 'the cinema' and 'films' (where one of the terms is taken in its absolute sense, the other in its distributive usage). This vaguely perceived general opposition results, in fact, from a pluralism of two distinct paradigms, the paradigm of nouns and the paradigm of number. The idea of generality and non-generality is based on the second paradigm, and on it alone, but one is not accustomed to taking it apart analytically. However, it suffices to compare 'CINEMATIC STYLES' and 'FILMS' (only one

of the possible examples) in order to neutralize one of the oppositions, and to isolate the other. In this way it becomes evident that, all things being equal in regard to generality (or rather, in this example, in regard to non-generality), one has to do with the difference that distinguishes messages, taken altogether ('films'), from homogeneous and specific codes ('cinematic styles').

4.2. PLURALITY ALONG TWO AXES

The notion of 'particular cinematic code' deserves some special attention. We can well imagine that a cinematic code is general: since it is cinematic, it must be linked in one way or another to the adoption of that vehicle known as cinema, and consequently it must be capable of being realized in any message entrusted to this vehicle. But if this is the case, how is it possible that other cinematic codes are particular ? We shall see that this notion is due, after all, to the simple but important fact that there exist several cinematic codes, not just one. The filmic, as we have said, is characterized by the multiplicity and heterogeneity of the codes which it comprises. The cinematic, in turn - although it excludes by definition a large number of filmic codes consists of a combination of codes and not just one. The plurality of cinematic codes is first a consequence of the plurality of films themselves. There exist a considerable number of films differing in their subject, intention, filming technique, sociological context, etc. Thus classes of films are formed which are themselves numerous. What is called 'American comedy from between the two wars' is one class of films, the 'burlesque of the silent screen' another, the 'Kammerspiel' yet another, and so forth. Each of these groups of films includes different codes of its own, and it is because the speaker senses or feels their presence that he spontaneously arranges several films into a single

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category. These codes are as particular as the classes of messages to which they correspond, but they remain absolutely distinct from these messages since they are ideal, constructed by the analyst, lack textual actualization, and since each of them is specific to several films. However, the plurality of cinematic codes is due not only to the multiplicity of films and classes of films but is itself a multiple plurality along several axes. Even if we consider only general cinematic codes, and thus provisionally neutralize the first axis of plurality, nothing would permit us to say, according to the present state of research, that the remaining material will be organized into a single code. The 'general-cinematic' domain, as we have defined it, may itself consist of different micro-systems, each of which is by definition more specific than it is and yet continues to concern all classes of films. The dividing lines between these partial codes do not coincide with those between groups of films. If one takes as one's object of study what is known as cinematic 'punctuation', camera movements, or even the main types of relationships between sound and image, one would obviously have 'divided' the cinematic phenomenon. But one will have divided it in the same way only if several sorts of films have been distinguished within it, for each subdivision, in this case, concerns the ensemble of films. When one examines general cinematic problems, one emphasizes first (as is normal) diverse partial codes such as the code of montage within the sequence (the problem of the principal types of sequences), or the code of 'splicings', or the code constituted by the most common temporal dislocations : backward motion ('flashback') in its subjective and objective forms, the 'flash-forward' (leap into the future) which allows the same variants, etc. Apparently it is much easier and faster to present a quite precise, even an already pre-formalized study, of these small, restricted systems - by demonstrating their logical and symbolic coherence, their authentically codical nature - than to achieve the same result for the entire set of general cinematic facts. Of course these different systems may be linked to one another by ties which axe themselves systemic, so that they form, in the end, a sort of single, vast super-system. This is the situation of what is called 'the system of a language', which is more precisely a system of systems. There is the phonological system, morphology, syntax, different lexical configurations, etc., but it is nevertheless possible to speak of a language as a basically unitary system, for the links between partial systems have already been studied and are in some cases quite well understood. Within the transformational generative model, for example, the dif-

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ferent 'components' of the linguistic mechanism (syntactic, transformational, and phonological components, lexical matrices, etc.) are closely articulated one after the other, so that the output of each becomes the input to the next. The situation is quite different with cinematic studies, not only because investigations are much less advanced but, more fundamentally, because the cinematic language is perhaps not as tightly organized as a natural language since it constitutes one of those semiotic ensembles whose 'suppleness' is underlined by popular opinion, i.e., which includes a large number of codes and thus an appreciable margin of flexibility, such that it would be impossible to rule out the possibility that general cinematic facts are definitely divided into a certain number of micro-systems only imperfectly related to one another and so-to-speak insularized. Be that as it may, and until we know more about the question, anyone studying the zoom and the counter-zoom (or the combination of types of temporal relations possible between two contiguous frames) finds himself confronted by a cinematic code which is general (since it concerns virtually allfilms),but which is at the same time particular, since it makes use of only some of the figures of signification of the screen. Thus it is possible without further explication to classify cinematic codes into the 'general' and 'particular', since there exist two distinct axes of plurality and because a code which is general along one of these axes may be particular along another. We must remember that a code is not something one finds there before oneself, already constituted, but rather a coherent construction upon which the analyst may confer the exact degree and type of generality or particularity that he wants, on condition only that his conclusions be measured against this initial act of delineation (this is the principle of distinctiveness). In like maimer, a linguist can set as his goal the study of the code of polite French, informal French, or of what is common to the two; it is only necessary to make this explicit. A study of camera movements in the cinema - and some have been made - has as its specific subject a system which is general along the axis of films (since it does not properly concern any category of messages), but particular along the axis of resources, since it takes into consideration the movements of the camera and only these movements, refusing to consider the other expressive resources of cinematic discourse. Inversely, anyone studing the cinematic style in American hardboiled detective films has to deal with a system that is general along

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the axis of resources, but particular along the axis of films. Hence the problem of assigning names. In which cases is one going to say that a cinematic code is 'general' ? One could, of course, restrict oneself each time to specifying along which axis it is general. This is, moreover, the only thing there is to do when there is a possibility of confusion. But otherwise this would be tedious and inconvenient. An expression like 'cinematic-code-particular-along-the-axis-of-films' would not fit into any English sentence, spoken or written. However, a solution does suggest itself, one which is due to the fact that, of the two axes in question, there is one which, much more than the other, comes immediately to everyone's mind - namely, the axis of films. Thus, in a bibliography, a study of the different uses of the lap dissolve will normally be counted among the 'general works', despite its particularity along the axis of resources and for the sole reason that it does not concern some films more than others. Inversely, one would consider as a 'particular study' any work concerning cinematic processes in the classic Swedish cinema, even though this work is general along the axis of resources, but does not concern films as wholes. We shall agree, then, except where it is necessary to be more explicit, to rely uniquely on the axis of classes of films in judging whether different cinematic codes are particular or general. A code is 'general' if, even if of a very restricted content, it is of interest to all films. A code is 'particular', even if rich and of vast extension, if it selectively concerns certain films and does not play a role in others. In sum, as the axis of resources does not play a part in this terminological process, it could happen that, along this axis, certain 'particular' codes are quite general and certain 'general' codes quite particular. This is the terminological convention which was adopted, in anticipation of this discussion, in the preceding chapter.

4.3.

'CINEMATIC LANGUAGE SYSTEM' (Π)

These reflections on the plurality of cinematic codes make it possible for us at this time to refine (without modifying) the notion of cinematic language system as defined in Chapter 2.4. We shall leave aside cases where this expression is provided with a context which alone can determine its exact meaning. If I read that The cinematic language system, in 'Ordet', succeeds without any difficulty in ... it is clear that what one is talking about is in fact a unique

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system, proper to a single film. It is no longer really the cinematic language which is in question, but the use made of it in a specific instance. Similarly, if one says that The cinematic language system has its own special way of dealing with punctuation, it is because one is really thinking of one general cinematic code (only one, the code of punctuation), i.e., one part of the cinematic language system rather than the language system itself. In all cases of this sort, one notices that the context furnishes specific information, but distorts the notion: one knows exactly what one is talking about, but it is not the cinematic language system. There remain those cases, which are also common, in which one speaks of 'cinematic language system' without further qualification by the immediate context, for example in sentences beginning with cinematic language system is.... [adjective] or the cinematic language system is characterized by its... [substantive], etc. This time the notion appears, so-to-speak, in its purest form, so that it is most important to determine exactly its meaning. Earlier (Chapter 4.1), we established two defining traits, codicity and specificity; we may now add a third, inasmuch as the first two are equally present (and even more explicit) in the term 'cinematic code'. We shall see, moreover, that this additional refinement is already implicit in the ordinary use which is made of the expression 'cinematic language'. Cinematic codes are multiple, while current usage represents the cinematic language system as something unique which is always referred to in the singular. To put forward this notion would be, for example, to reorganize into a sort of unique system the different particular cinematic codes which have succeeded one another during the course of the history of the cinema (i.e., cinematic codes which are in a diachronic relation to one another). Certainly one could say that The cinematic language system has greatly evolved, but this way of saying it has the effect of presenting it as change in a single code, and not as the succession of several codes. Similarly, the expression commonly serves to lump together different general cinematic codes which differ from one another along the axis of resources. Anyone who speaks without further qualification of 'cinematic language system' has in mind a sort of ideal ensemble which would include at the same time the system of montage, the system of the camera movements, transitions, etc., and it is not by chance that popular manuals devoted to cinematic language system are most often composed of a series of chapters divided in this way. The cinematic language system is also the sum - or the temporary syn-

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cretism - of all the particular cinematic codes which belong to diverse sorts of films. Such was the case in the example of diachrony mentioned a moment ago (for films of the same period constitute a class of films, such that by speaking simply of the 'cinematic language system' one temporarily neutralizes the periodic variations, i.e., one of the variations possible along the axis of classes of films). Similarly, in saying that The shot/reverse-shot belongs to the cinematic language system, one is abstracting from variations which, according to the school, genre, country, and epoch, come to affect the 'value' of the shot/reverse shot. Once again, in this case, the cinematic language system is so-to-speak the common denominator of all individual cinematic codes, and even if one declares that The cinematic language system varies greatly from one school to another, one represents a series of particular cinematic codes as so many variants of a single general code. To summarize, then, current usage consists in speaking of 'cinematic language system' when one wants to present as a vast systemic unit the ensemble of properly cinematic codifications for all the classes of films and all the expressive resources of the screen. We shall continue this usage, which can be useful. At certain levels of analysis (and at certain moments in discussions), it is quite true that all cinematic codes may be considered as a block. One can imagine different propositions applicable to all of them, e.g., the propositions that cinematic language system resembles a discourse more closely than a language, that it only has rather large units, that it has nothing which corresponds to the word, etc. (In fact, the class of things that can be said concerning, indiscriminately, all cinematic codes constitutes a rather vast domain.) On the contrary, in cases where one wants to discontinue this general neutralization - the systemic nature of which should always be kept in mind - one specifies that what is intended is some specific general or particular cinematic code. In conclusion, we shall define cinematic language system as the combination of all particular and general cinematic codes, to the extent that the differences between them are temporarily ignored, and that their common roots are treated, through fiction, as a real, unified system.

5 FROM CODE TO SYSTEM; MESSAGE TO TEXT

5.1. THE STUDY OF FILMS': TWO DIFFERENT APPROACHES

A distinction is commonly made between authors who study the cinematic language system and those who study films. Thus, 'theoreticians' are sometimes classified as belonging to the former group, 'critics' to the latter. In any case, the first are those who write about the cinema in general, the second about some specific film. According to this opposition, 'films' does not refer to simple filmic material, for in this case the distinction would not hold. Anyone reputed to study the cinematic language system relies upon a corpus which is also made up of films and only films (thus we could say that he 'studies films'). What the usual distinction means - or its least unreasonable interpretation - is that two sorts of analysis exist: those which have for a goal the reorganization of filmic traits into as many systems as there are films, and those which try to regroup filmic traits into one system (or a group of systems) which does not concern any film in particular. Both consist of studying films : what is it, in fact, that 'is studied', if not the object pre-existant to the study ? When it is said of an author that he does not study the cinematic language system but films, this is understood to mean that he tries to established the way in which films, taken individually, are constructed, the organization of their themes and motifs, the particular use which is made in them of diverse cinematic processes, the relations which hold between this use and the 'content 'of the film, etc. In sum, if studies of this sort have 'films' as a point of departure, their destination (the goal they are trying to reach) is in no way films, but the systems proper to films. This common distinction between two sorts of studies seems at first glance to contradict the definition just given of the cinematic language system, since it involves the exclusion from the study of the cinematic language system of the consideration of certain particular cinematic

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systems, so that the cinematic language system seems no longer to be the set of all cinematic codes. Obviously, it would be possible to consider that it is a question here of a completely superficial misunderstanding, as sometimes happens. 'Cinematic language system', as noted a moment ago, refers to the entire set of cinematic systems : to study one of them thus would not constitute a study of the cinematic language system. In fact, it is not a matter of studying it in all its dimensions, but only a part of it. It would thus be only a simple terminological misunderstanding. One could just as easily say that to study English conjugation is not to study the English language, or that to study the fadeout is not to study the cinematic language system. But in the present case it is not a question of this. First, note that when a study concerns a given system or a given properly cinematic figure, no one would hesitate to say that it belongs to the analysis of the cinematic language system, even if it involves the study of only one film. Thus, everyone would agree that a text on The montage in "Muriel" is of interest to the study of the cinematic language system. What is called the study of films is something else again and is opposed to the study of the cinematic language system; it is an analysis in which the film is no longer considered simply as an example or specimen of a given general or particular cinematic code which is not of any exclusive concern to it, but as a unique totality examined as such, and whose system one tries to establish. This system is as unique as the film being studied, and is thus not a general code or even a particular one; it is not a code at all, since there is only a single 'message'; it is, precisely, a singular system. It is quite true that anyone attempting to analyze such a system has ceased to be concerned with the cinematic language system, not because he is studying only a part of it, but because he is studying something else entirely. Of course the total organization of each film borrows its elements (or at least some of them) from diverse general or particular cinematic codes; but it cannot be confused with them as a system. What it borrows from them, more exactly, is only certain elements; as far as form and the network of relations are concerned, it is distinct from any cinematic code. Furthermore, this particular system borrows the elements which it combines not only from cinematic codes, but also from non-cinematic codes and cultural forms of all sorts. Clearly, these noncinematic meanings which participate in films must be ignored when studying the cinematic language system. This is a legitimate methodological abstraction without which the study would lose all principle of

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relevance. But when one treats the film as a unique totality, the same rigor of relevance demands that one take into consideration all the codes which are manifested in the film in question, including those which are not cinematic. There are, however, many of them, and they play a most important role. There are a thousand things in a film which do not come from the cinema (even if their realization within the film - their 'treatment' - is capable of borrowing properly cinematic means); for example, all the filmic material commonly subsumed under labels like 'the psychology of personality', 'the study of customs', 'the psychoanalytic background', 'the social (or religious or political) theme', of the film, 'thematics'. (It is of little importance that all this is incorrectly named - i.e., that the cinematic and the non-cinematic, within a film, are not as opposed as a pure 'form' to a pure 'content'.1 In any case, what remains is that certain elements of the film, with their form and their content, are intrinsically tied to the cinema, while others are not.) Thus it is true that the study of individual filmic systems is quite distinct from the study of the cinematic language system or the diverse cinematic codes underlying it. All this confirms the fact that there are two different ways of being interested in a given film and that common usage, when it speaks of the 'study of films', often fails to distinguish clearly between them. A film may serve simply as an example for a study of the cinematic language system, or some general or particular cinematic code. In this case it is a question of a process whose real point of application is not the film, but the cinema (or at least some aspect of it) on the basis of the example of this film. Among all the semiotic material afforded by the film, the traits which the analyst will retain as relevant will be those which are not unique in this individual film. It could also happen (and the solution is in a sense the same) that one wants to examine one or several non-cinematic codes, using this film as an example, as when sociologists study certain social systems of representations or expectations behind films of fiction which do not, in themselves, interest them. (In other words, one must understand that anyone who studies the forward travelling shot on the basis of these very films is not more 'intrinsically' interested in films than is the sociologist; the latter is more interested in the cinema than the former, not in the films which serve as examples for both. A film, in other words, is not only an example of cinema, but also of culture.) 1

We have studied this point in particular in "Propositions methodologiques pour l'analyse du film".

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Or rather - and this is the second main possibility - the film is analyzed as a unique event, i.e., to the extent that it is distinct from any other film and even from any other cultural product. The film in question is thus the same, but the traits which are considered to be relevant are not the same: they are now those which are unique in this particular film; or again: the singular combination of the different individual selections which this film makes from among the resources offered by diverse (non-singular) systems, whether they are cinematic or not. And now it is the latter that are no longer being studied 'for themselves', i.e., that do not serve as the specific object, or principle of distinctiveness, of the analysis. Nevertheless, one should not forget, even in regard to the second case, that what the analysis is trying to bring to light - and which is no longer a code - is still a system. The goal toward which all descriptive work strives is not the film as a real discourse (a series of images, sounds, and words arranged in a certain order, an object that may be attested), for the latter is already an achieved object before the analysis even begins. What a description hopes to establish is, rather, the system which organizes this realization: the structure of this text, and not the text itself. The system is nowhere clearly visible in the actual unwinding of the film: a system, as such, is never directly attested. It is because the analysis searches for a system that it must select from among the elements of the filmic text, retaining some as relevant and temporarily ignoring others. For the text (the same text) also contains other traits, which will be pertinent to the study of diverse non-unique systems (i.e., codes) which are at work in the film. Thus the text, as text, is distinct from any system, and even from the unique system of which it is the only text. And the system, even if unique, is distinct from any text, including its own. The semiotician's work begins at the point where the cineast's ends. The semiotician finds before him the already realized film. He thus has nothing to do with making it, and nothing to say about how it ought to be made (this is the task of the normative theoretician). He is concerned with seeing how the film is constructed. He does not work toward the film (which is the direction the cineast takes), but, on the basis of the film he moves toward one or another of its systems. The path that the semiotician follows is (ideally) parallel to that of the film viewer. It is the path of 'reading', not of 'composition'. But the semiotician forces himself to make explicit this procedure, step by

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step, while the viewer practices it directly and implicitly, wanting above all 'to understand the film*. The semiotician, for his part, would also like to be able to understand how the film is understood, a path 'parallel' to the spectator's, we have said, but one which also goes one step further; the two paths are truly parallel, in sum, and not at all intersecting. The semiotician's reading is a meta-reading, an analytic compared to the 'naive' reading (in fact, the cultural reading) of the spectator. The semiotician follows a path which leads in the opposite direction from that of the cineast. The cineast starts with diverse (most often implicit, sometimes even unconscious) systems in order to arrive at a demonstrable text. The semiotician focuses on the text in order to reconstitute (and always explicitly) the systems which are implied by it, which are invisible in it, and which are discoverable in it alone. What the cineast constructs is the text, while the analyst constructs the system. This distinction between the two approaches does not necessarily presuppose the physical separation of persons nor of 'works'. We know that, in regard to a book, the writer and the writing, to use Roland Barthes' terms, occasionally tend to converge (Blanchot, etc.). The notion of deconstruction advanced by the 'Tel Quel' group refers, among other things, to the site of this juncture. There is no reason why we should, in principle, ignore the cinematic equivalent of this (see the studies undertaken in journals such as Cahiers du cinima or Cinethique). It is simply more difficult to realize in practice, for the average degree of theoretical maturity, judging from the whole of the 'domain', is appreciably smaller when it is a question of the cinema and also because the problem of the equivalence of the metalanguage becomes much more complicated here. An expos6 written about the cinema is not of the same form as what it is talking about, contrary to what occurs in the theory of literature. Inversely, the utilization of the cinema as a metalanguage reflected by (and reflecting upon) itself is still an uncommon and very difficult operation, for it is not rooted in the rich reflective past which exists for written works.

5.2.

CODE/SINGULAR SYSTEM

We were led, in the preceding chapter, to introduce a distinction between system and code (which had been used, until then, as synonyms), and consequently between their respective opposites, text

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and message. The terminological pair 'text/system' is taken here in the general sense defined by Louis Hjelmslev.2 Every code is a system, and every message is thus a text. But the inverse is not true, and certain systems are not codes but singular systems (despite their systemic nature, they involve only a single text); and certain texts are not messages but singular texts: they constitute the single manifestation of a system, not one of the multiple manifestations of a code. Of course the same discourse may be both a unique text and a message of a code (or even of several codes); it is a fact that the distinction is not a physical one, but is related to the point of view which dominates the analysis. Each film is treated as a unique text in the exact measure that one is trying to discover its unique system. But this film contains within it, among other things, different camera movements, each of which is a message (one of numerous messages) of the code governing camera movements, i.e., of a general cinematic code. And this very film - if, for example, it were produced at the beginning of the era of talking pictures - will manifest in several of its passages a deliberately 'a-synchronous' treatment of the sound material which, by its time-lag with the visual image, will recall that the film belongs to a certain historically quite dated aesthetics, one which is seen in many other films. Each of the a-synchronous passages of the film will thus be a message (one of the numerous messages) of that particular cinematic code that constitutes sonorous non-coincidence, as it was theorized and practiced in the period between 1928 and 1933 by a certain movement in the cinema (see Anaheim, Baläzs, Eisenstein, Poudovkine, Ren6 Clair, etc.).3 And neither should one forget that other elements of the same film are the messages of various non-cinematic codes. What characterizes the systemic (the non-textual) is its nature as a residual object constructed by the analyst. The system has no physical existence; it is nothing more than a logic, a principle of coherence. It is the intelligibility of the text, that which must be presupposed if the ' See the first nine chapters of Proligom&ne ά une thiorie du langage. The opposition of these two terms reoccurs, moreover, in all of Hjelmslev's writings. He frequently used procks in place of 'texte'. ' Concerning L'Esthetique et Psychologie du cinema by Jean Mitry, we have progressed to a rapid historico-bibliographical 'focusing' on this question: pp. 191-93 of "Problömes actuels de theorie du cinema", Revue d'esthetique XX:2-3, special issue on "Le cinema", 1967, 180-221.

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text is to be comprehensible. We see that codes have all the characteristics of the systemic, which is why they are systems, although not the only ones. What characterizes the textual (the non-systemic) is that it consists in an actual unwinding, a 'concrete' object which predates the intervention of the analyst; it is that which calls for an explanation. We see that messages have all the characteristics of the textual; this is why they are texts, although not the only ones. Text and system thus differ from one another as an actual unfolding from an imputed intelligibility. As for message and code, they differ along this same axis, but they have an additional distinctive trait, which is the same for the code as for the message, and which could be called non-singularity. A code is a system which is valid for several texts (and these texts thus become messages); a message is a text which is not the only one to manifest a given system (and this system thus becomes a code). The system which is not a code (a singular system) has only one text; the text which is not a message (a singular text) is the only one to manifest its system. This distinction seems to us to be of great importance for any structural analysis (not just a cinematic one), and up to now it has not been sufficiently stressed, even though it is a rather simple one. It comes down to saying that it is the peculiarity of certain structures that they underlie entire series of events while concerning none of these events in particular (thus the code of a language is present in every sentence, narrative codes in every narrative, the typographical code in every printed page, etc.), while other structures are linked from the very beginning to unique events which they characterize and which are soto-speak by definition unfit to be used again, at least not in exactly the same way. Such is the structure of a sonnet (not the sonnet-form) or of a sonata (not the sonata-form). The manner in which this chapter presents the notion of a singular filmic system should be considered to be essentially provisional. Later (Sections 6.2 and 6.3), we shall try to show that the 'singular system' is more accurately the site of a perpetual displacement, that it is constructed as much against the codes as with them, and that it corresponds, finally, to what could be called, in the strictest sense of the term, filmic writing (not to be confused the with cinematic language system). Nevertheless it is not yet time to try to explain just what these singular systems are. It is necessary first to indicate their place in relation to other (non-singular) systems, and, more generally, in relation to the

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entire set of possible filmic studies. This first definition will remain external and so-to-speak purely negative. If we consider Carl Dreyer's Ordet, in its uniqueness as a finished work of art, as a singular text, we find in it only a single system, one overall system which coincides with what many would call the 'structure' of this film. If we look at it as a particularly rich source of diverse and specific frame lines,4 Ordet (or rather its frame lines) are no more than the messages of a general system, the system of frame lines in the cinema - or of a more particular system but which does not specifically concern Ordet (or any other film), and thus which remains a code, the code of frame lines in films of a certain (sometimes called 'expressionistic') style. There are thus, concerning the film, three main types of systems, the first two of which are codes and the third singular systems : general cinematic codes, particular cinematic codes, and systems proper to diverse films. With the singular systems we apprehend the film as a 'work', while with the codes it is seen rather as a fact of language, as the product of a particular means of expression. One could say then - in temporarily yielding to an impoverishing and all too common classification - that the singular systems maintain a more visible, more obvious, relationship to the 'aesthetic' approach to the filmic fact, and the codes to its 'semiotic' approach. However, as a singular system is at bottom only a combination of several codes (and as, inversely, what is common to all codes is that they are combined in singular systems), the so-called aesthetic approach could only do itself damage if it neglected codes, and the so-called semiotic approach would be dangerously incomplete if it ignored singular systems. We have come, then, to propose a distinction between codes and singular systems. Each of the systems, it was said, borrows its elements from the codes, while remaining distinct from them as a system. Thus, for example, the cinematic codes include, among other elements, the possibility of that particular construction known as the parallel montage, but the study of these codes, in itself, would never tell us to what extent and in what manner the parallel montage dominates the total composition of D. W. Griffith's Intolerance. For to focus on this point and to understand its exact significance, it no longer suffices to consider the parallel montage as such, nor even to know what its place is in the * See Philippe Parrain et al: "Dreyer, cadres et mouvements" Etudes cinematographiques 53-56, Paris, 1967.

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cinematic language system. What must be examined is its place in Intolerance, i.e., in a total configuration which, in addition to being but one realization of the cinematic language system among thousands of others, represents, in many respects, the realization of diverse structures which are basically completely foreign to the cinema. However, in the system proper to this film (which will be studied more closely in Chapter 6.3), both are closely imbricated and become interdependent. The parallel montage should be related, notably, to the political opinions of Griffith, his humanitarian ideology, his vision of history, his method of making a film 'with a message', etc. We are quite far from the cinematic language system to which the parallel montage belongs, however, since it is here, and not in Intolerance or any other singular system, that it enters into paradigmatic relation with (for example) the cross-cutting montage, an opposition which gives to the two figures their exact signification (and without which, moreover, we would not know that it is a question of two distinct entities, such that the unit 'parallel montage' would not even exist). We see, then, that the codes enjoy a complete structural autonomy in relation to the singular systems with which they furnish signifying material, and the singular systems enjoy the same autonomy in relation to the codes from which they borrow their elements. One could say, in this sense, that the codes are sets of possibilities, that they are never, as such, experienced, while the singular systems are realized systems. In effect, nowhere is the cinematic language system uncovered and exposed in all its ramifications. (At least no such place exists prior to the intervention of the analyst, for the analyst, to the very extent that he maintains a continuous discourse on the cinematic language system, may create such a place, but one which is thus, by definition, artificial). On the contrary, before any analytic undertaking there exists a place where the system proper to Intolerance is revealed in a single instance, and this place is Intolerance itself (if we mean by this the text of this film, its literal unfolding such as is preserved by 'copies' of the film which have not been damaged). There is another difference closely connected with this one: if one thinks of cinematic codes, what is known as 'parallel montage' is only one of the possibilities of a combinatorics, while if one thinks of the system of Intolerance, what one designates by the same term is the fragment of a real film in which the 'parallel' construction appears. It is thus true that codes are to singular systems as possibilities to the realizations of these possibilities. However, we should be

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eautious about saying that singular systems are 'real', for a system is never real (only a text is). If the singular systems seem to be real, it is because they are singular, and thus located in a unique and 'concrete' place. But this place is concrete only to the extent that it is a text. The corresponding system, for its part, is nowhere made explicit, even in this place. What the film copy in good condition preserves for us, what it offers us, is the text of the film and not its system. Thus the system is not 'real', which is why it is a system (a fabrication of the analyst, like codes). What remains, nevertheless, is that the analyst may effect this construction on the basis of a single text, while in order to construct a code it is necessary to refer to multiple and dispersed messages. Thus, the basic material one begins with (the corpus) coincides in one case with an ensemble which was unified even before being made into a corpus, while in the other case its unity is due only to the organization especially undertaken by the analyst in view of constituting a corpus. If one gets the impression that singular systems are more real than codes, it is, after all, because the latter have several messages while the former have only one. Obviously one could, on the contrary, assign the characteristic of being 'real' to the investigator's own construction: this construction could be rigorous, coherent, and account for the facts. But in this case too it is clear that the codes will not be less real than the singular systems. We may conclude, concerning this point, that it is possible to contrast codes and singular systems as systems of possibilities to realized (but not 'real') systems - and that this distinction does not involve introducing, between these two sorts of constructed sets, any difference in the empirical degree of reality, but simply asserting (in another way) that a singular system is a combination of several codes. 5.3. GENERAL AND PARTICULAR CODES (II)

The distinction between 'general' and 'particular' cinematic codes is somewhat crude, and fails to account for different degrees of generality which a cinematic code may represent. These degrees form a vast scale, for the total number of films to which a code may apply can represent, according to the code in question, a quite variable proportion of the total filmic production. Thus, between codes common to all films (thus very general ones) and those which characterize the Italian Western® • This concerns a genre which has been greatly developed over the last few

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(much less general ones), one also finds those which belong to the Western, and correspond thus to an intermediate degree of generality. But if one simply divides codes into the general and the particular, those of the Western and those of the Italian Western would uniformly belong to the class of particular codes. It should be understood, then, that the so-called 'particular' codes are codes which are more or less particular - and, from this, that the dual division of general and particular codes has as its only effect (and also as its only goal) to distinguish clearly from all others those cinematic systems which present the maximum degree of generality. The principal dividing line, in fact, passes between phenomena which concern all films and those which do not concern all films. When it is a question of the latter, the difference between those which concern a slightly greater or lesser number of films is not, of necessity, of comparable importance. It is a question, in any case, of phenomena which, even if authentically cinematic, are differentially significant, i.e., which distinguish certain films from others. General cinematic traits, for their part, distinguish the film from what is not film : the study of these traits thus poses very directly the very problem of the cinema itself, while in establishing particular codes one deals with problems which are posed, so-to-speak in the cinema. But if this is the case, one could object, perhaps, that particular codes are not truly cinematic, since what they are associated with is not the cinema but a group of films. A fact deserves to be called cinematic only if it belongs to the cinema, and thus to all films. The only cinematic traits would thus be those which we call 'general cinematic', and even this label would be a pleonasm. And 'particular cinematic code' would be a contradiction in terms. In fact, this is not at all the case, for certain traits present the remarkable characteristic of appearing only in certain films, and of nevertheless appearing only in films (at least in the exact form in which they are observed). Hence there are characteristics which, without belonging to all films, nevertheless belong to the cinema. Phenomena of this sort are numerous and one comes across them at every step. It is clear, for example, that the 'strong' forms of montage, as explored by Soviet cineasts from 1925 to 1930, are so many properly cinematic structures, although they have been noticed in only a small number of films in relation to all those which exist. In sum, a cinematic trait is years, by cineasts such as Sergio Solima or Sergio Leone. To this day, the best knows film of this genre is Leone's II etait une fois dans L'Ouest.

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not necessarily a trait which appears in all films, but it is necessarily a trait which appears only in films. This comes down to saying that there are several forms of cinema, that the cinema-fact may take several shapes, and, since each of them is only one shape, it is not found in all films. However, it belongs to the cinema and not to something else. This is the case every time that a cinematic figure permits several variants or that a 'process' (like the shot/reverse-shot or the high angle shot) permits several 'values'. Each variant is particular, since others exist, but each is cinematic, since it is a cinematic figure of which it is a variant. Of course, in a definition of the cinema, it is the general cinematic traits which will hold pride of place. If our definition were sufficiently brief, they would even be the only ones. This may be expressed as follows : to define an object is not to enumerate all its traits. Thus, we can imagine a definition of the cinema which would include the phenomenon of montage without mentioning, for example, the particular form which it has been given by the Soviet school at the end of the era of silent pictures. It is thus true that particular cinematic traits, although cinematic, do not fit exactly the definition of the cinema, for their role is rather to refine this definition, and especially to position the different forms in which its various traits may appear. We shall return to this problem below (Chapter 7.3), where we shall see that general and particular codes are related to each other as codes to subcodes. Meanwhile, we shall repeat that the study of general codes and the study of particular codes, although both analyses of cinematic specificity, nevertheless represent two quite distinct tasks. Tradition, moreover, has to a certain extent established a point of de facto separation between works which reflect upon traits common to all films and those which examine the cinematic traits which differentiate some films from others. In actuality, the latter sort are, in practice, called 'criticism of the cinema' or 'history of the cinema', a pursuit essentially reserved for men purely devoted to the cinema. They are the ones who establish and enumerate styles, schools, and periods. General works, on the contrary (commonly classified as 'theory of the cinema'), are gladly left to men of the 'humanistic sciences' (psychologists of perception and cognition, aestheticians, sociologists of the modern media, filmologists) - if not to promoters or pedagogues by vocation (high school teachers, film critics who direct cinema clubs, etc.) concerned with bringing to the largest number of people an intelligent initiation into the 'language of images' -

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or, finally, to a small number of men of the cinema (critics, cineasts, historians : e.g., Bazin, Eisenstein, or Mitry) drawn more than the others (who are, on the average, rather little attracted), toward 'theoretical' problems. Obviously this distribution is not particularly rational and is due rather to old, established habits, as well as to the sociological distribution of tastes, dispositions, and competence among intellectuals who for one reason or another profess an interest in the cinema. It remains, however, that general cinematic studies (where one remains constantly within the confines of the cinematic fact) and particular studies (where one remains, in principle, within the cinema) do not exactly represent the same type of work to everyone involved with them. To arrive at a definition of a style or a school of cinema, one must view a large number of films, and certain specified films (not replaceable by others). One must above all know how to compare these films with others. In order to study a given general trait of the cinema, it is necessary to view a rather large number of films of all sorts (but, except for the most important ones, rather easily substitutable by others, on condition that the sample remains varied and representative). It is necessary, above all, to know how to deal with diverse extra-cinematic data: linguistic, semiotic, psychological, sociological, etc. On the other hand, there is no reason for analytic methods to differ from one case to another, if you consider that cinematic traits (whether particular or general) consist of formal and intelligible configurations of a systemic order, and that the proper object of research is to uncover these configurations. This is why 'particular' studies themselves would have good reason not to remain closed to modern research developments in different extra-cinematic disciplines, for it is there - much more than in traditional 'books on the cinema', or at least in most of them - that one will find desirable examples of precision and rigor. Inversely, we would hope that all those who write about the cinema, even if it is in the tradition of the humanistic sciences or 'filmology', would make an effort to acquaint themselves with what they are talking about. They should view some films, know whose they are, and not confuse dates and countries. But this touches upon a vast problem which does not appear to be on the point of being resolved (despite recent progress) - namely, that it is unusual that authors very well acquainted with the cinema sufficiently master the technical apparatus and conceptual complexities of modern thought, and that it is also uncommon that investigators having such a scholarly education are interested in the cinema. A s long as this is the case, we are afraid that the

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literature on the cinema will remain as it is most frequently today, a small, somewhat 'dull' universe a little outside the mainstream of ideas. This is a long-range - fortunately quite attenuated - consequence of the situation which the cinema has known since its beginning - namely, that men of culture blinded themselves to the significance of this new means of expression, and men of the cinema appeared as primitive souls for whom the existence of signs in the world had begun only in 1895.

5.4.

TERMINOLOGICAL POINTS

The terminology adopted in Chapter 5.2 might at first glance give the impression of being arbitrary : why especially choose the word 'system' as the most general term, and the word 'code' to refer to a particular sort of system ? In fact, if 'code' was selected here to refer to non-singular systems, it is because in all its present uses it already (and exclusively) designates such systems. In its original context, i.e., information theory, it serves to name a system of similarities and differences which, by definition, is designed to serve repeatedly and to remain the same across numerous 'messages'. In linguistics, into which the word was later imported, it refers to langue (but not langage, discourse, or utterance), which presents the same character of anonymous repeated applicability. In sociology and anthropology, where it is sometimes used, 'codes' are systems of behavior, expectations, or collective representations which are manifested on numerous occasions in the life of a group, and not just once in the history of its development. In ordinary speech itself, the word 'code' always designates systems with multiple manifestations and frequent reutilizations, e.g., 'highway code', 'the code of maritime navigation', 'cipher code', 'Social Security code number', etc. In truth, the idea that there exist, except accidentally, several messages for a single code - i.e., the idea that a code is a system capable of being infinitely reutilized - is an inherent part of the word itself, as it is employed today. Moreover, when one talks about a 'code valid only for a single message', as happens in the structural analysis of poems, it is always in a so-to-speak manner, presenting this definition as metaphoric. Because it assumes the multiplicity of messages, the word also has a connotation of instrumentality : a code is a tool, and if it normally has several messages, it is because it is designed to serve. It is also quite true that this instrumentality, this 'transitive' characteristic, inevitably

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becomes associated with every system which happens to be used more than once. This applies to cybernetic codes as well as natural language (if the language capacity in general is not a tool, but man himself, a particular language, for its part, is among other things an instrument). This also applies to social codes of etiquette as well as to the postal zip code system, and even to diverse codes in use in the arts. Whether it is a question of classical rhetoric, fixed forms of versification, the 'art of the fugue', or the 'grammar of montage' in the cinema, every system which re-serves (i.e., every code) is to some extent a tool; there is also instrumentality within the art. The word 'system', on the contrary, is likely to refer to configurations realized a single time, as well as structures which have multiple reapplications. We speak of the 'system' of a natural language, different social 'systems' of behavior; we call the two principal codes of maritime signalling recognized by international conventions 'lateral system' and 'cardinal system'. But one also says of a great strategy, in regard to a celebrated battle - of a great lawyer in regard to a celebrated trial - that the 'system' of defence was such and such; one admits that the great literary texts involve, more or less implicitly, a 'system' of relations, proportions, echoes, or dissonance. Common, or even informal speech calls a method destined to resolve a habitual and recurrent practical problem a 'system', just as well as an arrangement or a special device put to work in an exceptional situation. The connotation of instrumentality which accompanies the word in some of its uses, for example, technologically, 'water cooling system', 'patented system', etc. - disappears in other cases, as when one says that a work of art, form of thought, or doctrine is 'systematic', or when one speaks of an individual 'system' of affects, of the 'system' of colors and values which is found in some impressionist painting, etc. On the other hand, what the word system strongly implies, in all its uses, is that one is thinking of a coherent and integrated ensemble - an 'autonomous entity of internal dependencies', as Hjelmslev said of the notion of structure6 - of an ensemble within which all elements hold together and have a value only in relation to one another. However, it is precisely this characteristic that codes and singular systems have in common : a partial resemblance which makes it possible, as mentioned above, to occasionally assimilate the latter to 'codes with only one message'. * "Linguistique structurale", editorial in Acta linguistica (Copenhagen: Nordisk Sprog og Kulturforlag, 1959) 21-26. Passage cited :23.

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There is a second idea - also quite welcome - which is consistently associated with the word 'system', although with different degrees of implication. The word never refers to the concrete object which one is in the process of talking about, but rather to its conceptual organization, its principle of intelligibility. This is true even for the uses of the term which would seem to be the most 'concrete' (a fortiori in the others) : thus in automobile mechanics, when speaking of the 'water cooling system', one is not exactly thinking of the radiator, of the core, or of the hoses, but rather of the technological principle according to which the rotation of a body of water in a closed circuit is charged with the cooling of the motor. Words like 'system' and 'code' sometimes provoke discussion and misunderstanding, especially when they are used in relation to signifying units which, like the cinema or the film, are partially of an artistic or aesthetic order. Anyone speaking of a system or a code sometimes finds himself reproached for having missed, with an incredible naivete (or a regrettable doctrinal rigidity, depending on the case), what is most characteristic of the artistic fact - namely, its perpetual uniqueness, the impossibility of associating it with a general code, the radical difference between the creative act and the manipulation of an idiom, etc. We shall emphasize here that the word 'system', for us, has no other sense than that which is conferred upon it by its contrast with 'text'. The play of the two terms serves to designate what separates a discourse with an actual unfolding, from an ensemble which is not manifest, which is constructed and coherent. In the same way, the 'code' is that which is not the message. This use of these words has two consequences: first, that in many cases, in the eyes of the semiotician, the 'system' is nothing more than the necessary and unique construction which accounts for a unique and irreplaceable work of art, and which semiotics is traditionally being accused of misunderstanding. Besides very general systems (i.e., codes) which underlie films and are so-to-speak indifferent to each of them (such as the idioms underlying poems), one also finds, as we have said, as many systems in the cinema as there are films; and the more a film is aesthetically accomplished, the more 'beautiful' it is, and the more forcefully its system expresses itself. In the second place, since the systemic, here, is simply the nontextual, the word system will often refer to entities which a certain terminological tradition would consider not very 'systematic' (and the

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word code to entities which, according to this tradition, would not be rigorously 'codified')· Some minds, as we have just said, are incapable of disengaging from these words a connotation of an egalitarian leveling process and an anti-aesthetic uniformization. In the same way, it is sometimes beyond their powers to conceive of an entity being of a systemic nature if it does not appear to be visibly and meticulously ordered, an explicit or draconian codification of a military type, a quasi-geometrical configuration, with the regularity of a blueprint. In the extreme, 'systemic' (or 'codified') becomes synonymous with rigid, or monotonous, or drawn in a straight line. However, it is clear that in the cinema (as in every phenomenon of any socio-cultural depth), we will not find any such 'systems' - or, more exactly, that studies which purport to be scientific (or even simply rigorous) are presently too little admired in such areas to enable us to usefully present the systems studied in a formalized way. It is characteristic of all cultural facts that they function according to systems but are not felt or experienced as such. It is distinctive of such systems that they remain unfixed, purely implicit, submerged in history as well as in individual variations, etc. - but it is also distinctive that they appear more and more clearly as systems as our analysis of them gradually advances. Who would have said that myths are logically 'systemic' before ethnology had succeeded in demonstrating it ? For how many was it clear that language is a system before Saussure so ably demonstrated it ? We will thus call a system (and also code, if there is occasion) any underlying organization which is logical and symbolic, i.e., of a nontextual order, even if it is still poorly understood (as is so often the case in the cinema), and even if it is not - and if one does not pretend that it is - 'systemic' or 'codified' in the sense which these words have in the humanist tradition, or in the rhetoric of undergraduate courses. We will not dwell here upon another misunderstanding which is too elementary and too inexcusable to warrant much discussion, and which is also provoked by words like 'code', 'system', or even 'cinematic grammar', 'cinematic syntax' - namely, the idea that the semiotics of film is trying to establish normative rules designed to tell future cineasts how they should make films ! Let us simply recall that the most fundamental procedure of semiotic analysis is exactly contrary to this sort of thing (semiotics is a descriptive enterprise, its material composed exclusively of so-to-speak established facts) - and also that this accusation is particularly unwarranted in the cinematic domain, where it is traditional (and not semiotic) theory which is in many cases

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normative, and sometimes in the crudest and most naive manner. (It has happened that, in the world of cinema, one calls 'theoreticians' persons whose writings are devoted to advising cineasts to deal in their films with 'social' rather than 'psychological' subjects.) Another terminological refinement, this time relative to the word 'text': It is evident that this term, for us, does not apply solely to the verbal element of the film. In one of its current uses, the term has a restrictive sense and refers only to an intelligible series of words (and even of written words, rather han spoken ones). But we will take it here in Hjelmslev's sense, that is to name any semiotic expression ('process' according to the Danish author), whether it is linguistic, nonlinguistic, or a combination of both (talking pictures are associated with the third of these cases). A series of images is also a text, as is a symphony, a sequence of sound effects, or a series including images, sound effects, and music, etc., together. This point will be further discussed, in regard to the film, in Chapter 8.5.

5.5.

'STRUCTURE OF THE MESSAGE' OR STRUCTURE OF THE TEXT ?

Let us touch upon one final terminological point which is probably more important than the preceding ones. The reader has perhaps wondered why what we call 'singular system' could not more simply be called structure of the message, as is the case in some semiotic discussions, and as we have done, provisionally, in some of the opening passages of this book. It is sometimes thought that there is on one side the code (which is by definition a general sort of thing), and on the other the message, always singular, and which thus has its own structure. But this way of looking at the situation is in reality far from satisfactory. To speak of a structure of a message, in effect, is to assume that the message has a structure which belongs to it alone, i.e., which is not the same as the structure of the code. However, the 'message' (or at least what is referred to in this expression) can only have its own structure if several codes are conjointly at work in it, for in this case the combination of these codes forms an autonomous level of articulation, by definition irreducible to any one of these codes and thus characteristic of the message as such. But at the same time we see that this message is quite incorrectly labelled : it is no longer a question of a message, but of a fragment which contains several messages,

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since there are several codes. The autonomous structure one is trying to find is thus not the structure 'of the message', but of the combination of messages. Inversely, to be able to speak justifiably of a structure of the message, in the singular, it would be necessary to have before one a fragment representing a single code (or even, which comes to the same thing, a fragment which one has decided to analyze with regard to only one of its codes). However, this message - correctly named at last - would no longer have a structure of its own, so that the moment the second half of the expression becomes exact ('of the message'), the first ('structure') ceases to be so. In the present case, the analyst would, as a working hypothesis, attribute to the single code all the structural regularities found in the message. He would thus have a structure in the message. This would not be a 'structure of the message', but rather the structure of the code implicitly present within the message. Thus, when a discourse is the message of a single code (or when it is provisionally treated as such), it has no structure distinct from the structure of the code. When one studies a natural language by abstracting from all the codes of connotation grafted onto it, the structure onefindsin each utterance is nothing more than one manifestation of the structure of the idiom (of its grammar, its phonology, etc.), which is present in that utterance as in any other, and which does not account for its uniqueness. But if one takes into consideration other codes (stylistic, intonational, etc.) represented in this utterance, a structure appears which this time cannot be confused with the structure of any of the codes which are involved in it, since it consists, by definition, in combining them in a certain way. It is this type of structure which we would prefer to call a 'singular system'. The corrolary of this system on the level of manifestation (i.e., the perceivable discourse in which this system is found) is not the message, since it contains several messages, but the text: to be exact, the text of that particular system, of that single and overall system (for each of the messages within this text itself remains a text, i.e., one of the texts of the corresponding system, which is in this case a code). Strictly speaking, there is never a structure of the message. This is not paradoxical, but simply logical: only a plural text can offer a singular system. We shall return to this problem, from another direction, in Chapter 7.6. But if this is so, one could then say that this singular system, which must not be called structure of the message, could at least be called structure of the text. Does not the above discussion show, in fact, that

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this second expression is not subject to the objections which were just made in regard to the first, and even that the rejection of the first expression is based on considerations which seem to recommend the second ? It is true that, in speaking of the 'singular system specific to a film', one only refers to what everyone would think of if one had said 'the structure of this film'. Films, similar in this to all somewhat complex discourses found in cultures, are not messages but texts, for each of them contains several codes and as many messages. This is why each of them, as we have just said, truly has a structure of its own which deserves to be called, literally, 'structure of the text'. So why should we also retain the term 'singular system' ? Because the two terms are not synonymous. They denote the same object, but not from the same point of view. They have the same referent, but not the same signified. Moreover, no one would sense a tautology in a proposition like The structure of each text is a singular system. In this sentence, the subject syntagm and the predicate syntagm both designate the same intelligible configuration (the same form), but presenting the subject as 'structure of the text' accents its ties with an actual discourse, reminds one that it is in this discourse that it can be discovered and that it is the intelligibility of this discourse that it furnishes - while referring to the predicate as a 'singular system' emphasizes, on the contrary, its ties with other systems (notably with the codes which are combined within it), and reminds us that (similar to codes) it is of a systemic nature, and that (like them) it is so-to-speak on the side of the nonactual, or ideal. In sum, this form presents the double characteristic of being relative to an object and of being one system among others. In calling it the structure of the text, we define it on the basis of the object whose form it is, and in calling it a singular system we define it in terms of the family to which it itself belongs (the class of systems). If until now we adopted the second term, it is because it was a question of examining the similarities and differences (as well as the combinatory relations) which exist between systems which are singular and those which are not. All this obviously poses the more general problem of what sort of relations hold, even outside of the particular cases just examined, between the notions of structure and system. Without pretending to fully treat this question, we will simply note that it is no pleonasm to speak of the structure of a system, and that this is in fact not uncommonly done (example: This system has a binary structure). It also happens that in saying 'structure', one always implies at the same time

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the object whose structure this structure is (in our example, this object is itself a system) - while in saying 'system', one suggests that the form, for its part, tends to become a sort of object and that this object, like all objects, has its own structure. Take, for example, the proposition The structure of this system is very complex (or numerous other sentences of this sort): if it has any meaning, it is because the system is assumed to be known, constructed, already demonstrated by the analyst. It thus becomes itself a sort of text (an artificial one), and it is of this text that one asserts that it has a complex structure.

6 TEXTUAL SYSTEMS

6.1.

THE FILM AS A UNIQUE TOTALITY

We said in Chapter 5.1 that the statuses of general or particular cinematic codes and that of unique filmic systems are profoundly asymmetrical with regard to the problem of cinematic specificity. It is appropriate at this point to examine this question a bit more closely. The study of a cinematic code always involves by definition several films. Of course, there are cases where this plurality may remain temporarily only potential. One could devote an entire article to the detailed analysis of the function of 'entrances and exits from view' in Jean Renoir's La regle du jeu .-1 how do the characters penetrate into the filmed space, how do they leave it, how does the camera itself vary its range in relation to the movements of the actors, etc. ? There is in this a whole system which is a part of the dramaturgy of the cinema, and it is certain that by examining Jean Renoir's film from this point of view one will better understand the nature and exact significance of this code. However, if it is in this dramaturgical code (and not in the poetics of Jean Renoir) that one is really interested, one could not rely solely on La regle du jeu. One ought to examine how the entrances into and exits from the field of vision are organized in various other films. But it is also clear that one could not rely on analyzing these films in their entirety; obviously one will concentrate attention on the entrances into and exits from the field of vision, and the other elements of the films will only be taken into consideration to the extent that they are relevant to these comings and goings. (It was to a similar methodological procedure in linguistics that Louis Hjelmslev gave the name catalysis.) Thus, the entire organization of the field of vision is found 1

Andre Bazin outlined such a study in a well known article which is intelligent and biased at the same time : "Renoir fran^ais", Cahiers du Cinema 8, January 1952, 9-29.

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to be modified when one moves from the so-called standard screen to the big screen (cinemascope and other patented techniques).2 One must therefore take this variable into account in the study of entrances into and exits from the field of vision, and the latter will perhaps give rise to several appreciably different systems, according to the principal types of screens. (These systems would thus be so many particular cinematic codes.) No matter what the situation in regard to this point - which is a question of fact, to which one can only respond by examining the filmic material - it should be noted that if one has brought into play an element other than the entrances and exits from view, it is still in relation to these entrances and exits, and in looking at them, so-to-speak, from their point of view. In principle, therefore, a study of the cinematic code always involves several films, and only certain aspects of these films. For one or the other of these reasons, such a study can never understand a film as a unique totality: it is always, and always both at the same time, more than and less than this. What it is concerned with is always more than a film and less than a film, but never a film. Underlying studies of this sort one finds a sort of selection taking place. From among the available films, one chooses those in which the code under study seems to play a particularly important role, and, from among the different traits of the films thus selected, one examines only those which participate in the code in question or which are related to it (principle of relevance). This is why these studies, by the very process which creates them, are always certain to remain within the domain of the 'specifically cinematic', since they have by design set aside, as much in the range of films as in the diverse aspects of each film, all that does not concern the particular code whose intuited existence has guided selections from the very beginning. This is not the case in the study of singular filmic systems, for the latter constitute the place where, by definition, the cinematic and the non-cinematic - the 'specific' and the 'non-specific' - come together and closely overlap. The system of a film is, among other things, a unique utilization, proper to this film, of the resources provided by the cinematic language system, but it is also a certain vision of the world, a certain thematics, a combination of obsessive configurations which are ' Many cineasts have remarked this, in their response to the inquiry conducted by Figaro (Paris) into cinemascope, in 1955, as have many critics during the debate begun in 1953-54 (see Cahiers du Cinima 21, 25, 27, 31), when the first film in cinemascope, The Robe by Henry Koster, was presented in France (December 1953).

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no less proper to this film, and which are nevertheless not inseparable from the cinematic fact (although they are linked to it in the film in question). All this, it might be said, applies to films which are original, and it may happen that a film comes close to platitude and banality : to speak of what this film 'has in its own right' thus becomes problematic. Let us accept this, at least temporarily (for the absence of peculiar characteristics is still, in one sense, a peculiar characteristic). It remains, in any case, that this lack of peculiarities can just as well characterize - depending on the film - the use which is made of cinematic codes, the use which is made of non-cinematic codes, or the use which is made of one and the other at the same time. Thus, it is not only filmic systems in their realization and their manifestation which combine the cinematic and the non-cinematic; this same combination is also associated with their disappearance, i.e., with, in the extreme, their 'absence'. We shall refrain, then, from using the confused notion of originality and banality to create pseudo-problems. The distinction, if better understood (for it would be impossible to eliminate it entirely), corresponds to something completely different. Certain ways of utilizing codes are more common than others, certain combinations of codes are more common than others, and certain codes are more common than others. But this fact is of a very general validity, and applies as much to non-cinematic as to cinematic ones. That is not all. A banal film is in reality not a film that is lacking a singular system; it is a film whose singular system is banal. This is not at all tautological, if at least one admits that a banal system is a system quite similar to numerous other systems. Quite similar, but not identical, for each banal film is banal in an original way, and you will not find two banal films which are banal to exactly the same degree or in exactly the same way. Banality allows many variations, quantitative and qualitative. If one defines it with reference to the commonplace, it remains true that large numbers of cinematic and non-cinematic commonplaces exist, and that these are not the same ones that appear in diverse commonplace films. It also remains true that no film is made solely of commonplaces, and that two films which would be identical in regard to their quantity of commonplaces - a hypothesis which is already extreme if taken literally - would continue to differ from each other according to the small portion which, in each of them, escapes the commonplace. Obviously, there are many other ways to define origin-

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ality and banality. One could define them, for example, in terms of the subject of the expression, i.e., in an original work, the subject which 'expresses itself' is a unique and singular being, an individual - while in the banal work this subject is, in reality, a social group, or an anonymous ideology, or an ensemble of collective representations, or an archetype stemming directly from some profound but impersonal psychology, etc. (in this conception, the 'official author' of a banal work is thus not its true author). If one adopts this defining frame, the fact remains that the anonymous forces which thus come to be expressed in banal works are also quite numerous and of very diverse natures, and that it is never exactly the same ones that inspire two banal works. One could also define the original and the banal in terms of codes : the banal is the mechanical application of a code (or reliance upon a combination of codes which is itself codified), while the original is the 'play' on the code or codes, the deviation of the code from itself, the new shifting of one code onto another, etc. But even here it is necessary to note that the codes (or combinations of codes) capable of being applied mechanically are numerous, that there are several mechanical ways of making use of the same code, etc. More generally, it is clear that none of the criteria which may be invoked in order to define the banal allow us to say that a banal film is one that lacks a singular system. This may be expressed as follows : if a film is banal, it is because the spectator, in seeing it, experiences a combination of impressions which he summarizes by declaring that the film is banal (there exists no other primary foundation for the notion of banality than the impression of banality itself); and if the semiotic analysis of this film is carried to its logical conclusion, i.e., if it succeeds in accounting explicitly for the intuitive impression of the spectator, what it will inevitably show is that the singular system of this film is banal. This film therefore has a singular system; and if it is, in turn, more or less banal, it is because it is more or less similar to a greater or lesser number of other singular systems. This reasoning may even be pushed to its extreme: if it happened that the singular systems of several banal films were absolutely identical (a completely improbable hypothesis, after all), each of the examples of this apparently non-singular system would remain a singular system in the sense that we are here trying to define, namely that each of them, in effect, would continue to express the whole structure of a given film conceived of as a singular totality, would continue to combine diverse codes within it, would continue to be distinct from all the

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codes which are combined in it (and to be distinguished from them as a realized system to potential ones), etc. It would mean, simply, in this extreme case, that a certain number of totalities (of texts), by the play of some amount of chance in statistical distributions, would push the similarity to a quasi-identity (which would become a total identity at the level of the structure, which is always 'poorer' than the text). Thus genetic laws sometimes produce identical twins, quintuplets, and Siamese twins. But, as far as similarities between films, the general case doubtless the universal case - is that of a 'simple (non-identical) banality'. Many filmic systems show partial resemblances (although these are sometimes quite extensive) with many other filmic systems, under conditions such that each of them nevertheless continues to be singular (and, this time, even in the ordinary sense of the term). This situation is not at all uncommon, and is not without correspondence in the most diverse areas : fifteen fools, no matter how uniformly insignificant one supposes them to be, nevertheless remain fifteen persons. We shall put aside, then, in the discussions which follow, the problem of banal films. One will recall only that singular has never been synonymous with original, and that in any case it is not in these pages that it threatens to become so. This may be expressed in a different way. A film is a concrete entity, a closed text, a finished discourse. In addition, it always contains an ultimate principle of unification and intelligibility, commonly called its 'structure'. (This system is, in fact, a system of systems, but this does not alter the situation.) If the film is 'original' or 'beautiful', aesthetic theory will call this ultimate structure 'organic unity';3 but it also exists if the film is a failure, if it is dull, if judgments of taste do not recognize in it an organic unity, in a word if the principle of intelligibility of the film has not been willed by the cineast, or if the principle which was finally imposed upon it was poorer than what had been intended, indeed even if nothing similar to either of these was even perceived by the author, such that only a depth sociology (or psychoanalysis) would be capable of accounting for it. (This is not to say that this depth sociology, this psychoanalysis, this cultural semiotics would be deprived of 3

In the domain of the cinema, this notion has been adopted notably by Eisenstein; see "The structure of the film", in Iskusstvo kino, (Moscow, June 1939); reprinted in Film Form (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949); in French, a portion of the article was published in Reflexions d'un cineaste (Moscow: Editions en langues etrangeres, 1958), 57-67, under the title "L'unite organique et le pathetique dans la composition du Cuirasse Potemkine".

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all explanatory power before a concerted and closely constructed work, a work with an organic unity. In this case, they would simply no longer be the only relevant ones, and they would be less directly relevant. It would be necessary to reckon with all the refractions, tricks, and restructurations involved in the real intervention of a will of writing, whether conscious or unconscious. And then, of course, there are all the other possible cases : there are those films with a strong organic unity but whose real structure is otherwise; there are those films which have been willed banal, and which are or are not such; there are those which pretend to be disordered, but which, as they can realize only a certain sort of disorder and not all possible sorts, thus find their own order.) All these different cases correspond, as we see, to as many types of relationships between the system of the film and the personality of the

cineast; but the system of the film, for its part, always exists. We shall see below (Chapter 6.4) that this system is not necessarily unique, and that it is not always necessary to look for one structure behind it. This is how one would go about discovering 'original' films. Meanwhile, it is still necessary to examine the position of (original or unoriginal) singular systems in relation to cinematic specificity. From the moment, as we have said, that one studies a film as a unique totality, one is forced to take into consideration all the codes which play a role in it, non-cinematic as well as cinematic. While the analyst who studies a cinematic code can allow himself to make a selection from the material of each film that he examines, anyone interested directly in a given film gives up any possibility of such a selection. He cannot reject as irrelevant the non-cinematic traits of the film being studied, since these traits, although non-cinematic, are present in the film. Ideally, the final construction of the analyst (the singular system of the film) should account for all traits of any importance which appear in that film. If the study of filmic systems is inevitably conducted with frequent and extensive excursions outside specifically cinematic territory, it would seem that this is due to the absence of any selection just mentioned. And yet, the analyst of a particular film also makes a selection; he also makes use of a principle of relevance, without which his undertaking would be condemned to a confused and impotent globality, and his task impossible to carry out. But it is the criterion on which this selection is based that is entirely different. The study of a singular system must take into consideration all the codes, but none of them is the proper object of its effort. It is necessary only (and this is already

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quite a lot) that it establish in what way the use made of each of these codes in this particular film is singular, or rather, that it establish that the use made of some of these codes is not at all singular (in the case of banal films). It is even more necessary that it analyze how these diverse codes, whether or not employed in a singular manner, enter into the film in an overall combination which is never a simple juxtaposition but which always has a certain form, i.e., which implies intercodical selections and hierarchies, and which, consequently, is always more or less singular. Thus, the desire to comprehend a film as a totality has the effect of considerably displacing the line of separation between the distinctive and the non-distinctive. The distinctive, from now on, is everything that differentiates one film from others. The codical traits, i.e., all those traits which are distinctive for codes (and, among others, to specific codes of the cinema), are for the moment irrelevant, since they are by definition traits common to all films (or to several) and do not properly characterize any of them. As for those traits which do, on the contrary, become distinctive, these are either codical variations or inter-codical combinations, and thus in both cases are non-codical traits. This is why the study of an individual filmic system is never a study of cinematic specificity (this specificity, in effect, consists of a number of codes). It is true that the most widespread conceptions of the subject tend rather precisely to affirm the contrary. Many critics or theoreticians of the cinema are ready to recognize that the film contains a large number of configurations and structures which are not properly cinematic, that the film does not belong only to the cinema, that it is an open system where significations of very diverse origins come together. But most of the time, this is to add immediately that, in the film, these figures, which come from all directions, are integrated into a new order of discourse whose ultimate principle could only be cinematic. Today one hardly ever encounters this particularly naive form of cinematic fanaticism, according to which any structure appearing in a film is a structure proper to the 'seventh art', for which the film was throughout a festival of cinematic resources and only that. But one still quite frequently encounters a sort of irredentist nostalgia (sadly become more lucid and more cautious) for this archaic belief in a total specificity. The sometimes implicit assertions which this twisted position inspires could be summarized in the following way: semiotic structures are not all cinematic when they first enter into the film, but they are all cinematic so-to-speak when they leave it, i.e., when the

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audience perceives them. At the outset the film 'adopts the most diverse forms, but in the end all these forms have become cinematic, for each of them has undergone a transformation which is the proper work of the cinema, and has thus been augmented (or altered) by a sort of automatic coefficient of cinematization. Such conceptions, however, as we said in Chapter 2.4, in fact come down to a begging of this question and leave untouched the problem that they are meant to resolve. In fact both things can be reduced to one. This cinematization is understood as concerning the physical form of the signifier, and in this case one has stated nothing more than the obvious (it is quite certain that any signification which enters into a film becomes materially 'cinematized', since it is physically transmitted through the medium of the cinema); but this comes down to saying that this signification, initially forged outside the cinema, has merely turned up for the moment in a film. In sum, every signification which enters into a film is found in this film! With the intention of demonstrating that this signification has become cinematic, we have simply proved that it has become filmic. Or, on the other hand, the process of automatic 'cinematization' invoked may be understood as affecting the very form of the signification, i.e., its structure and not merely the physical nature of the signifier. This is to admit, in this case, that the structures are modified solely by virtue of a physically filmic transmission. Moreover, to the extent that it is clear that a change in the physical nature of the signifier can in some cases lead to a change in the structural form itself, it is difficult to consider such a process as unfailing and automatic. The film can transform the non-cinematic structures that it takes up, but it can also be content with merely adopting them as they are, i.e., inscribing them in a new material while preserving their original form. It is always the case, for example, that the sound film does not modify the structures of a language (which it nevertheless 'borrows'); it simply inscribes these structures in the recorded phonic material ('sound-tape'), while in their natural state it was the directly perceived phonic material which transported them. This modification does not, however, have the effect of adding a tense or an aspect to the conjugation system, of displacing the differentiation between voiced and voiceless phonemes, of creating a new series of suffix derivations, etc. (The film introduces new forms of spoken discourse, not new forms of language. Thus linguistic meanings, noncinematic in principle and origin, remain non-cinematic when they

appear in a film.) The coefficient of cinematization, if considered to

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apply to the structures themselves, is thus not at all automatic, no matter what popular opinion has to say about it. It simply represents a possibility which is realized for certain extra-cinematic codes (and for certain films) and not for others. We shall return to this question, from two different perspectives, in Chapters 6.3 and 10.7. It is a common occurrence that films, consciously or not, reflect various systems of political thought, and that these - even if this time they are expressed in the framework of a film rather than a book or a poster - are not, by this fact alone, unerringly modified in their structure. Once more in this regard we come across the problem of original films, which should not give rise to a confusion of another sort, viz., that where an inventive cineast can profoundly renovate, even in its very structures, the system of political thought which initially inspired it, this remodelling itself is not necessarily a 'cinematization', for the new system may remain on the same level as the old one, i.e., remain, like it, purely political, and not maintain any more of a necessary relationship with the cinema, although it was in a film that it happened to be elaborated. To modify a code is not necessarily to render it more cinematic. It is cases like this that critics of the cinema are thinking of when they say that some film has a rich and new 'content' in a still classic or even banal 'cinematic form'. 6.2.

THE SYSTEM OF THE FILM AS

DISPLACEMENT

We begin to better understand why the study of singular systems is constantly 'astride' both considerations which are specifically cinematic and others which are not. The reasons for this, as we discussed a moment ago, number only two : (1) If each film is singular, it is such by virtue not only of what is contains of the non-cinematic, but also what it contains of the cinematic; (2) A non-cinematic code does not become cinematic solely by virtue of its presence in a film. Even with these two points, however, we are still not at the center of the problem, for it is not only a question here of different cinematic or extra-cinematic, 'cinematized' or 'non-cinematized' codes which account for the diverse parts of the film, its various aspects, or its different levels of meaning. It is a question of structures each of which is partial in regard to the film itself, i.e., the film as a complete text. However, if one is interested in the latter, the principal analytic objective is to go back to the global structure (by means of a consideration of all these partial systems, which is indispensable) - or again

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(according to the 'direction' of the method one adopts), to descend again to these partial systems through the global structure which is initially grasped in its general outline and then refined and confirmed in the course of the study.4 In any case, it is this global structure which is in some sense, as said above, a system of systems. It is this structure, and it alone, which constitutes, properly speaking, 'the' singular system of the film, at least in cases where there is only one (for other cases, see Chapter 6.4). It is not a question, then, at present, of examining individually each of the codes that the film contains in order to see if it is or is not of cinematic origin - and, in those cases where it is not, if the filmic nature of its manifestation has or has not had the effect of modifying its structure in the direction of a greater cinematicity. What we are considering now are not the partial systems integrated by the film, but the activity of integration (or of disintegration) - the process of composition or 'writing' - by which the film, relying on all of these codes, modifies them, combines them, plays them one against the other, eventually arriving at its own individual system, its ultimate (or first ?) principle of unification and intelligibility. However, it is when one is situated at this level of the integration of the whole that certain beliefs in the specificity of the cinema are the most difficult to dispose of. In our day, these beliefs relegate, without too much difficulty, certain partial structures of the film to a noncinematic (and eventually 'non-cinematized') status, as long as they are considered in isolation; but they readily accept as always purely cinematic the overall movement which integrates them within the film. This idea is rather widespread among film critics. It is not always expressed in the form we have just given it, but it underlies many of the common assertions which are more or less felt to be self-evident. It is said, for example, that each film takes its materials from the areas where it finds them (in the biography of the cineast, his circle of friends and acquaintances, his epoch, in literary influences, in the consciousness of delivering a 'message' etc.), but that its overall construction concerns the cinema and it alone; that the special character of the film is to integrate the most diverse meanings into a cinematic 'composition'; that the proper task of the cineast is to 'make cinema' (and not only to * We know that Lucien Goldmann, concerning literary texts, was a supporter of this second stage, and not the first — "Structuralisme genetique et analyse stylistique", in Linguaggi nella societä e nella tecnica. Proceedings of a colloquium held in October, 1968, in Milan (Milan: Edizioni di Comunita, 1970), 143-61.

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'make films') with anything that is available to him; that it is not sufficient to have many things to say in order to make good films, but that in addition one must be capable of putting them onto the screen and of 'thinking cinema', etc. Moreover, all these observations are correct to the degree that they imply that the structure of each film results from a sort of interaction between properly cinematic factors and external properties. But they are false in that they all assume, quite improperly, that the final word in this dialectic rests with the cinema in an automatic and unilateral fashion ('or else the film is bad'...). There is no final word on this subject, and the interaction is a true one, without a victor or a vanquished. From the moment that a text assumes the form of a film, cinematic codes (or some of them) are always present in it - and their very disappearance (in the extreme, their absence) still has a meaning which remains cinematic: 'icriture blanche', refusal to 'make cinema', rejection of certain codes in favor of others which do not yet appear to be such (this is the case of those films regularly described as 'shattering the cinematic language', while, if one is to believe the same analysis, this language was already 'completely destroyed' by another film just a few years ago). But from the moment that a film talks about something - and all films say something, despite the formalist's illusions about this subject - extra-cinematic codes are always present in it, for there is nothing which can be said which does not have any form. Saying that a filmic system is a combination of several codes also implies that it consists essentially in a displacement. To the extent that one envisages each of the codes that appear in films individually, one can without difficulty - by a useful methodological convention, somewhat analogous to the one underlying the notion of synchrony ('state of a language') in linguistics - allow oneself to treat the systemic as static. It is true that a code - a code - functions at a given moment of its historical evolution as a closed system which regulates choices which can be listed, and which permits syntagmatic combinations which can themselves be enumerated. (This is also the case, appearances to the contrary, in transformational generative g r a m m a r : the originality of this linguistic theory is in directly applying itself to the infinite number of possible 'grammatical' messages, but the elements at the base of its combinatorics - 'constituents' and 'rules' - are still finite in number. It is thus not by chance that it has as its goal the study of a single code, the 'model of competence'.) On the contrary, no code plays a central role in the overall structure of a given text, not even those 'mobilized'

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by the text. What 'makes' the system of a film is the passage from one code to another; each film takes shape with various codes, and it is in this 'with' that the importance lies. With diverse codes, but also against them. In this sense, each film is built upon the destruction of its own codes. It is not enough to prove that in a filmic system each code is inessential because it is only the combination of codes that is essential. It is necessary to understand, beyond this, that the proper task of the filmic system is to actively underplay each of these codes by asserting its own particular logic and because it asserts it, an assertion which is necessarily accomplished through the negation of that which is not itself, i.e., codes (which are, as such, no longer important and become but the 'building blocks' of another structure). In each filmic system, the (cinematic or extra-cinematic) codes are both present and absent: present because the system is built upon them (on the basis of them, with/against them), absent because the system is only a system to the extent that it is something other than the message of a code (or a series of these messages) i.e., because it begins to exist only when (and where) these codes begin to cease to exist in the form of codes, because it is this very movement of negation, of destruction-construction. In this regard, certain notions advanced by Julia Kristeva in another domain are applicable to the film. The relations between a code and its message are peaceful: in being expressed, the message also expresses the code, since it has no other structure than that which it has taken from this code. Thus each spoken utterance expresses the code of the language (to the degree that this language is considered by a legitimate abstraction as a uniform code of pure denotation, i.e., to the extent that one ignores the other codes which are at work in the same utterance : expressivity, connotations, etc.). The situation is the same every time that one has to deal with 'domains of a single semiotic dimension': groups of texts that follow a single code, or that one wants to analyze in relation to only one of their codes (this notion will be elaborated upon below, in Chapter 7.6). But the relationship between a text and its codes cannot be this harmonious. Within the overall system of a text, the different codes do not align themselves next to one another in places which could be predicted in advance. The filmic system is not a mere accumulation of codes but an original combination which demands to be executed (the notion of 'composition' in the theoretical writings of Eisenstein, of 'production' in contemporary Marxist studies, of 'realiza-

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tion' or of 'staging' for certain film critics and aestheticians). This combination, which is new for each text, certainly constitutes a structure, but one which is inseparable from an active process of restructuration, without which a filmic system would be nothing more than the sum of its codes (however, a code is not a text, and it is necessary to explain how one goes from one to the other). The only thing which can be said to be distinctive of the system of a film is that it integrates several codes, that it cannot be reduced to any one of them (or to the sum of them), and that it too plays them one against the other. The system of the text is the process which displaces codes, deforming each of them by the presence of the others, contaminating some by means of others, meanwhile replacing one by another, and finally - as a temporarily 'arrested' result of this general displacement - placing each code in a particular position in regard to the overall structure, a displacement which thus finishes by a positioning which is itself destined to be displaced by another text. The intrinsic consideration of a code does not tell us how it may be articulated with other codes (or with which ones), and at what level it may play a part in the general economy of a long and complex text (as is every film, even the most rudimentary). It is not the code which decides its own particular place in the system of the film, or which determines which other codes will become its temporary neighbors; it is the system of the film itself which does this. Κ the study of a code of cinematic montage does not tell us which function it will fulfill in a given film, this is simply because a code of montage does not make a film; even less does it do so alone. It is not a question here of reverting to the old idea according to which the film is an example of a language without a code,0 a pure invention arising without cease, a creation ex nihilo - or again (which comes to the same thing) an activity of organization and reorganization arising directly from 'reality'. What is called reality - i.e., the different prefilmic elements - is nothing more than a set of codes, that set of codes without which this reality would not be accessible or intelligible, such that nothing could be said about it, not even that it is reality. Whether the film is 'invention' or 'creation' is dependent solely * In our early articles (notably "Le cinema: langue ou langage ?", Communications 4, 1964), we were rather wary of this conception (the influence of Andre Bazin on cinematic studies was stronger then than it is today). Hence the autocritical notes which were added in the second publication of this article in our Essais sur la signification au cinema (1968). Conversations with Italian semioticians (in particular Umberto Eco and Emilio Garroni) have contributed to this development

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upon the degree to which it is operation, i.e., to the extent to which it adds something to pre-existent codes, producing structural configurations which none of them alone could have anticipated. Thus, this addition itself (the coefficient of modification and work which is appropriate to the text) does not intervene in relation to a simple, basic reality, nor in some void which would strangely carry within itself the promise of a future and unfailing creativity, but in relation to codes. This is why the movement of the code seems to us to retain all of its importance : not only because the study of codes, outside of any filmic system, is, for semiotic research, an end in itself (although not the only one), but because filmic systems themselves, as active processes of displacement, are only intelligible if one has some idea of what it is that has been displaced. Just as the literary work, which can only exist thanks to some natural language, is nevertheless constructed against it rather than in it (since it is a working of the language, and since it is nourished by what this language lacks as much as by what it possesses) - so the overall system of a film consists essentially of a double and unique movement, a movement by which are 'mobilized' diverse codes without which the film would have nothing on which to maintain its drive, a movement which relegates these very codes to a secondary position, and by which the filmic system is detached from them, by which it tells us that it is something more than these codes, that it is, strictly speaking, this difference itself, this re-impulsion. We noted a moment ago that when the analyst moves from the study of codes to the study of filmic systems, he must introduce a change of distinctiveness : we see now that this conversion is not only imposed upon the activity of the analyst, but is also, so-tospeak, 'pre-inscribed' on what one could call the activity of the ßm, i.e., on the movement by which the film, in being expressed, refuses to allow itself to be confused with the diverse codes which, outside of it, are more general than it is but, in it, more particular. Κ it is possible to treat a code as an 'immoveable' object, it is by virtue of its anonymity. A code is a system which does not specifically concern any of its messages, which is tied to no particular discourse; it thus escapes, by definition, all 'compromise' in the unfolding of a text, in its displacement, in its concrete enunciation. It is in this sense that a code is a 'potential system' (see above, pages 78-79); it is not the system of a text. A filmic system, on the contrary, is directly tied to one text and one alone (even if it is not clearly exposed in this text); it is thus a system which is constructed while the text itself is being

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constructed. (The difference between the two, which still remains, is due to the fact that the film presents itself as an unfolding observable by all, while the first - which nevertheless presides over this unfolding - can only be extracted from it by analysis.) While the film in the course of its development abandons one code for another, the filmic system, at that instant, is this very abandonment, this replacement. While the film purposefully brings together two codes which are normally separated, the filmic system, at this instant, is this very unification. This is not to say that it suffices to have noted the bringing together of these codes in order to adequately deal with the system of the film. But this bringing together is one of the elements of the system, one of its distinctive features, while the two codes which have been brought together are not. Or, more exactly, it is the structure proper to each of the two which is not distinctive, for it is the fact that it is these two rather than others which is of the greatest concern to the system of the film. 6.3.

CINEMATIC AND EXTRA-CINEMATIC: FROM DUALITY TO MIXTURE

Since we define singular filmic systems in this way, the reader will perhaps wonder why we persist in refusing to consider them as being wholly endowed with cinematic specificity. Is not the singular system, as described a moment ago, profoundly tied to the unfolding of the film, to its composition, to the arrangement of its images and sounds ? In sum, is it not a cinematic thing from one end to another ? There is in this regard, in effect, a difference - and an important one - between the codes which appear in films and the systems of these films themselves. Among the first, some, as we have said, are largely extra-cinematic, and it may even happen that their adoption by a film scarcely affects their proper structure. The process of 'cinematization', for a code, is not at all infallible. In its absence, the influence of the film on the code modifies only the material of expression and thus brings about only a renewal of the manifestation of this code, throughout which the form, i.e., the relational network of oppositions and of combinations, remains intact. Thus, when the 'plastic effects' frequently employed in painting are adopted as such by certain color films preoccupied with 'beautiful images', in still shots naively presented for prolonged contemplation, the code has not changed, but only the physical definition of its signifies In the first case, it is the colored

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image made by hand, in the second case it is the colored image obtained by means of a camera. No matter how common they are in films, phenomena of this sort have a paradoxical appearance. One would expect, rather, that the change in manifestation would involve a change of form - a transformation that one does not have reason to expect in every case but which would seem, at least, to be capable of consisting quite frequently in a series of distortions, displacements, and inflections which together would suffice to establish a new code distinct from the initial one, even if similar to it. It happens, however, that even this is not the case, because the code is not the film, but simply the partial material of the film, such that its internal structure is not necessarily engaged in the general movement of displacement by which the film is a film. The films, moreover, may be content to actualize the code so-to-speak in passing (to utilize it without working it), and in this case, if the initial code is extra-cinematic, it will remain as such after having become filmic. The proper task of the filmic system is to modify the codes that it integrates; however, it is a question of an overall modification established at the level of the entire film. This does not mean that every film modifies all of its codes, and leaves untouched that vast domain in which the analyst uncovers so many filmic codes which remain extracinematic. But all this changes when attention is focused upon the system of the film itself. This system is not a material out of which the text is constructed : it is this construction itself. It is not a partial element of the film, but a structure coextensive with the entire film. Is it or is it not compromised in the work of the film, and to what degree ? This question can no longer be asked, since it is this very work. In addition, the system of a film, differing in this from all (cinematic or extra-cinematic) filmic codes, cannot under any circumstances consist of a 'form' which is totally extra-cinematic. It does not follow from this that one must jump to the other extreme, i.e., that it is necessary to admit, as has been done all too often, that afilmicsystem is an entirely cinematic structure. The diverse figures which invade the film from without, i.e., which come to it from some other cultural domain (from other arts, from everyday, already organized semiotic practices, etc.), do not penetrate into it solely by means of its codes; one does not see the mysteriously insurmountable barrier which keeps them from being introduced into the film from another direction and from making their importance felt in the overall

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composition which animates the film. However, there is still one difference - namely, that, when this influence is exerted at this level, it is from the very outset mixed up with cinematic constructions. A code, in sum, may be cinematic or extra-cinematic, while a filmic system is always both cinematic and extra-cinematic; it is the system of a film, and not of a book, social behavior, or any other 'text', but this film, in turn, may not be reduced to a 'pure' product of the cinema alone. There are two sorts of codes but only one sort of filmic system, which is mixed. According to one current conception, the proper task of the film is to organize diverse non-cinematic materials into a cinematic construction. What we are maintaining here is that the proper task of the film is to integrate cinematic codes and non-cinematic codes into an overall construction which preserves this duality, while surpassing it in the logical and structural unity of a singular system, i.e., which transforms duality into mixture. Consider David Wark Griffith's film, Intolerance (1916), one of the classics in the history of the cinema. The text is composed of four distinct narratives, each of which evokes a particularly spectacular instance of intolerance, fanaticism, or persecution (one has as a context ancient Babylon, another France of the 16th Century and the Religious Wars, another Palestine at the time of the crucifixion of Christ, and the fourth, modern America). It has often been remarked that parallel montage and acceleration play a central role in the overall structure of this ample filmic fresco - in the system of the film, as we say here. At the beginning of the film, each episode is presented at length before passing on to the next; eventually, the unfolding of images increasingly intermixes the four stories, according to an alternation whose rhythm becomes more and more rapid, until a final crescendo where the mixture becomes a visual whirlpool and induces in the spectator a sort of fourtermed mental superimpression, the symbolic intention of which is clear, and even emphasized. This configuration, which dominates the whole film (and, literally, assembles it), is obviously not absolutely lacking in cinematic specificity. With another means of expression (written language, for example), alternation - and its acceleration - could not have been organized into as direct, and as tightly knit an affective and visual whirligig. The author could not have rendered the constantly underlying humanitarian symbol in the same manner: the rapid unfolding of the four images gives one the feeling of an almost physical interpenetration among the four different historical epochs, and the acceleration in the periodicity of

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the visual breaks slowly exalts this interpenetration to the point of conferring upon it the affective status of a fusion, such that the symbol, even in its imaginary force, is to some extent realized on the screen. On the other hand, the parallel montage is a sort of syntagmatic process which is located in a properly cinematic code (a code of montage, in this particular case), for it only has a meaning - and even an existence by its opposition to other iconic series capable of appearing on the screen, and not only in opposition to the so-called cross-cutting montage (in which the cyclical return of images signifies first the simultaneity of events at the level of a literal chronology, instead of referring directly to some directly connotative 'relationship' which transcends the times and places of denotation), as with another form of cinematic montage, where the alternation of 'shots' corresponds simply to an alternation of the events represented. In diverse regards, then, the filmic system of Intolerance may be considered to be cinematic. Of course, the code of montage - or the sub-code of montage exploited by Griffith - is content to offer the film a sort of 'schema' (in this case the parallel montage), with the organization proper to it, as much on the level of the signifier as on that of the signified. This 'donor' code alone does not specify whether the parallel montage is going to be used within a single sequence of the film (or in several different sequences), or if, on the contrary, it is going to distribute the alternation of its elements on the level of the entire film. It may be one or the other (the code does not specify which) or - as in Intolerance an original combination of both, where the parallel montage doubles back on itself: at the end of the film, the 'parallelism' is within the sequence, in the middle of the film it is effective between sequences, in the beginning, between groups of sequences; thus, to anyone considering the text in its full extension, internally alternated segments become (retroactively) the elements of a larger alternation, which in turn functions as one of the terms of an alternation of the third degree. It is the textual and successive unfolding of these three dimensions - in the reverse order in which they have been mentioned here - which gives the film its characteristic profile of acceleration while keeping it until the very end in parallelism. The acceleration is in this case only a suppressed parallelism. The filmic system thus cannot be reduced to a fact of a cinematic code, nor even to that code to which it owes the most (parallel montage). If it makes use of this code, it is, on the contrary, in order to work it, to multiply it, to displace it (at the same time that it assigns it its place in the film), to negate it insofar as it is a general code,

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a code capable of being readopted by other films, each of which will in turn negate it in another way. The system of Intolerance already displays its non-codical (or trans-codical) nature, but, from where we stand now, it remains of a purely cinematic order. It is the system of a film in the exact measure to which it 'works' a cinematic code (and not in the measure that it applies it), but the code that it works is cinematic. The system, as analyzed for the moment, consists precisely in a working of the cinema by the film, i.e., in a movement by which the film reelaborates its specific codes, and the process of elaboration is also cinematic. But, in other aspects, the general structure of Intolerance is noncinematic (even though its manifestation is thoroughly filmic). In fact it is clear that parallel montage, at least the particular use made of it in this film, is inseparable from a segment of ideology announced even in the film's title. (The reader will note, in this regard, that the titles of films are not formulated in 'cinematic language', but in one or another natural language.) Griffith establishes an insistent opposition between humanitarian sentiment (which delegates in the film the allegorical image of a young mother near the cradle of her infant, an image recurring in the manner of a refrain) an the intolerance or fanaticism that he conceives of - somewhat in the manner of Voltaire - as bad instincts ingrained in the psychic nature of man, capable of reappearing identically across the most diverse historical situations, and punctuating the history of humanity with their (repeated and yet intemporal) bloody manifestations, recapitulations which invite in the text a reverse scansion by which the cineast, this time speaking directly for himself, throws in the face of his own film the 'leitmotif' of a blond and sunny Maternity which succeeds in contemporalizing the great persecutions of universal history, since it remains the same face in all four of them. In addition, it is not unimportant for the system of the film that this theme of intolerance - instead of being built up on the basis of the evocation of a single historical event, or even several with separate and successive descriptions - was maintained in the four narratives that the film both distinguishes and equates, that it distinguishes first in order to better equate them subsequently. All the movement of the film is toward this progressive displacement by which the interpenetration of four moments in history (and, finally, their symbolic fusion) inexorably gains ground - ground which is nothing less than the filmic text - over their separation, proclaimed at the beginning of the film. What the parallel montage and its auto-acceleration mean - what they mean in the film, and not in

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the code of montage from which they nevertheless come - is that the historic and geographic diversity of acts of fanaticism is an illusion, that the more profound nature of intolerance remains the same in all times and places, that it is like the contrary of the maternal (humanitarian) sentiment invoked by the visual refrain. At this level, all the images of intolerance in the film may be regrouped into a single 'motif', which in turn enters into parallel montage with Maternity: an alternation of the fourth degree, which opposes Maternity with Intolerance while the other three assimilate the three faces of Intolerance. This construction is closely linked to a certain idea of intolerance itself and, beyond that, to a certain idea of history, of human nature, etc., all things which are not primarily cinematic, but ideological. What should be examined here is the state of American society at the time when the film was produced, Griffith's cultural and social antecedents, his political opinions, etc. Such a fragment of ideology can just as easily be expressed in a novel, in the propoganda poster of a philanthropic association, or in an allegorical painting. There is an extra-cinematic input, then, which nevertheless, as pointed out above, plays an essential role in the structure of the film. The filmic system would appear - and it is in this that it is profoundly, intimately mixed - as the place where the cinematic and the extracinematic meet, where they form a juncture (more or less 'happy' depending on the case), where each is transformed in relation to the other and where both take on the same form and give rise to correlative choices. What is distinctive in the system of Intolerance is neither the parallel montage nor the humanitarian ideology, both of which appear elsewhere, nor even a unique use of parallel montage or a unique version of the humanitarian ideology, for nowhere (and above all not in Intolerance) can one find one without the other. The system of the film is the interaction of one with the other, the active fashioning of one by the other, the exact point - the only point - where these two structures succeed, in every sense of the word, in 'working' together. Each film is the site of a (more or less) productive encounter between the cinema and that which is not the cinema - 'between the cinema and the world', as is sometimes said, but on condition that what is meant by 'world' is an extremely varied collection of figures and cultural systems which have in common only that they were not created by the cinema. If the parallel montage rather than some other form of montage dominates the entire development of Intolerance, it is because this

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organizational principle of images - which in the cinematic code is defined by the directly connotative bringing together of distant events in the time and/or space of fictional reality - was more appropriate than others to the ahistorical conception of fanaticism which underlies the film. Thus, the selection made from among the resources offered by the cinematic code has been imposed by extra-cinematic considerations. But the reverse is also true : the cinematic technique of the film founded on parallelism quite obviously shapes the notion of intolerance, such that in the end it becomes disengaged from the text, and floats toward a timeless horizon. The influence of ideology may be stronger in one direction or another, depending on thefilmor the cineast - perhaps also depending on the epoch and the (conscious or unconscious) principles which guide the practices of the different men of the cinema. There are some extreme cases : in the classic 'propaganda' film, cinematic choices are under the direct influence of extra-cinematic purposes; in the 'art' film, it is just the opposite. There are also less simplistic cases, to begin with all films of any interest and substance; on the other hand, the new sort of 'political' film - like those the journal Cinethique would like to see spread, and which would not treat explicitly political themes in every instance - constitute a good example of a double and balanced influence. These films would be inspired by extra-cinematic systems of thought such as historical or dialectical materialism, but would aim at transporting Marxist thought into new cinematic codes, or reformulating it in terms of pre-existent cinematic codes (the notion of 'deconstruction', borrowed from similar investigations concerning written works). One could say, to summarize, that the balance of forces between cinematic and external properties is quite variable from one filmic system to another. But these considerations involve the social psychology of cineastic 'creations' (and of spectator receptivity), as well as diverse problems of general epistemology, rather than the structural analysis of the films themselves, in which specific and nonspecific elements are in any case accessible only from within a unique and hybrid system, no matter what their respective motivational weight before the film (at the moment of its conception) or after it (in what each public retains of it). It is not, moreover, always easy to respond to this question of the balance of forces, even when it is a case of a cineast (like Griffith) of a rather unpolished temperament, and of a film, like Intolerance, whose system is ingenious but not at all subtle. We know that Griffith

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was fond of films with a message, that he was a great amateur of 'humane messages'; thus extra-cinematic schemes could have determined his cinematic selections. But we also know that he had a passion for formal research and that his own, powerful and naive at the same time, have made a historically decisive contribution to the fashioning and even to the invention of the cinematic language as a specific ensemble of codes and subcodes. We must not, therefore, underestimate the role that must have been played, in the elaboration of Intolerance, by what one could call the passion for parallel montage. (In a completely different frame, but somewhat in the same sense, Valery has remarked® that an entire poem may be born from an initially intuited rhythm, from an intensely desired metrical disposition.) It is the problem of 'formalism' that is involved here, and the attitude of an Eisenstein - who was, moreover, a great admirer of Griffith7 - would pose the same difficulties of interpretation, simply transposed onto a higher level of cinematic and general sophistication. No matter what its (conscious or unconscious) motivations, the system of Intolerance is defined by the close association, which it makes itself, between a certain use of parallel montage and a certain manner of understanding fanaticism. There was a reason for our having taken as an example a rather 'simple film', i.e., a film with a rather simple system. Other filmic systems would offer more complexity, but not necessarily a greater degree of mixture. Eisenstein's October is the result of a combination of studies of montage, of maximum fragmentation, of non-diegetic metaphor, and of a revolutionary conception of the work of art as a 'collectivist narration', without hero, punctuated by crowds in movement, itself divided by dialectic thrusts, and penetrated from one end to the other by a didactic concern : the function of art is to invite the spectator to raise himself up from the sensorial to the ideological; the public should in turn become involved in the iconic-intellectual circuit in which the film itself was elaborated. This sort of poetics - where Marxism and 'artistic heritage' are curiously blended - does not particularly concern the cinema but all the arts, to which Eisenβ

In "Poesie et pensee abstraite" (a lecture given at Oxford University, reprinted in Varietes V, 1944), and in "Au sujet du Cimetiere marin" (in Nouvelle Revue Frangaise, March 1, 1933, 399-411; reprinted in Varietes ΙΠ, 1936). Passages cited: 1338 and 1503 in Volume I of Paul Valery in the BibliotMque de la Pleiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1957, edition organized by Jean Hytier). T "Dickens, Griffith and the film to-day", Eisenstein's contribution to the collective volume Amerikanskaya kinematografyia: D. U. Griffit (Moscow, 1944, vol. I of Materiali pro istorii mirovogo kinoiskusstva). Reprinted in Film Form, 195-255 in the edition with The Film Sense (see note on p. 178).

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stein refers excessively in his written commentaries. However, a theoretical text is not a filmic text, and in October the same ideas - for they are indeed the same, as ideas - maintain a close and structural relation to cinematic studies of montage. It would be easy to demonstrate, on the basis of other examples, this characteristic mixture proper to the filmic system. - Reflections on memory, on forgetfulness and circular construction with the omnipresence of the 'chronological' in montage, in the varieties of photographic exposition and luminosity: Hiroshima mon amour by Alain Resnais. - Impression of existential fracture, of daily, almost phenomenological schizophrenia, of profound perceptive 'distraction' and perpetual sequential derailments in the rapid (rather, dispersed) montage: Muriel by the same cineast.8 - Keen, tragi-comic sense of a constant and derisive reversibility of possibilities, hopes, and beliefs and aggressive-arbitrary variegation of the image, with hesitant sequences which retrace their steps, which regret not having disposed of their 'shots' in some other order : 9 Pierrot le Fou by Jean-Luc Godard. - Reflections of a cineast on the reflections of a (different ?) cineast in the process of making a film different from the one that the first is in the process of making, but which will nevertheless become such at the end and double "art within art" construction of all of the filmic unfolding, which deliberately mixes images of several different 'degrees': 81/2 by Fellini.10 - The cineast's (as his hero's) will to power and abundant, egotistical, playful exuberance of the picture track, tumultuous recourse to the most diverse cinematic subcodes (which are seen to accumulate in the same passage of a film : rapid montage just before a shot-sequence, etc.) : Citizen Kane by Orson Welles. - Tortured cult of the female idol and interminable framelines * See Bernard Pingaud, p. 31 of "Cinema et roman" (Lecture of June 2, 1963, reproduced in Cinema et universite 7 ,1st Quarter 1964, 19-34). The author has reprinted and reworked this text, under the title "Nouveau roman et nouveau cinema", in Cahiers du Cinima 185, special issue "Film et roman. Probfcmes du recit", Christmas 1966, 26-40. * We have analyzed in detail one of these sequences of Pierrot le Fou (in calling it "potential sequence"), in Essais sur la signification au cinema, 213-15. 10 See Christian Metz. "La construction 'en abyme' dans Huit et demi de Fellini", in Revue d'ethetique XIX: 1, January-March 1966, 96-101. Reprinted in Essais sur la signification au cinema.

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calculated in relation to the face of the actress, which the camera (desire) envelops with long movements, taking in the fabulous and superabundant environment of a palace where convulsive statues grimace, torsos are pierced with arrows, then returning very close to the adored face, within reach of the batting of its eyelashes, of its too open eyes, of its irregular breathing wich tortures (without ever extinguishing) the flame of a candle placed too close to i t : The Scarlet Empress by Joseph von Sternberg, the cineast in love with his star, and wife, Marlene Dietrich. To say that the filmic system is always 'mixed' is to refuse (as in other passages of this book) to confuse the cinematic with the filmic; from this concern stems the very term which was chosen: singular filmic system (and not, singular cinematic system). Filmic as a whole, this system is only cinematic in part. It is also to refuse to confuse the (cinematic or non-cinematic) codes with the system associated with a particular discourse and with this discourse alone. It happens that this distinction is not always clearly maintained, from which arise the frequent and confused discussions (already mentioned above) when it is a question of knowing in what measure the film 'cinematizes' the elements which it uses. The most common response to this question by critics and aestheticians of the film is largely affirmative: they would readily concede, for example, that such and such a recent film issues from a reflection on the fickleness of the human heart, the difficult achievement of emotional freedom, the hazards of the 'modern couple', etc., but this would be to quickly add - with a precipitancy which could be interpreted as panic at the thought of getting outside the domain of the cinema - that these themes, when they appear in a film judged to be a 'success', are entirely expressed in ways proper to the cinema, that they are thus no longer the same after the film as before it, that the couple has become a cinematic couple, etc. However, such remarks have only a very general, and not very significant validity, and one which is specific to the cinema. It is true that every text (literary, pictorial, mythical, etc.), all organized social behavior, feeds back onto the codes which have inspired it, returning them somewhat different to the mass from which they were originally taken. Each time a word is used, its meaning as well as its pronunciation finds itself infinitesimally modified, and when the word returns to the language, it brings with it this miniscule deviation which, being added to thousands of others, will in the long run end by changing the

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language itself11 (without which we would not be able to understand how the codes have their characteristic diachrony). In this sense, each film slightly modifies all its codes; but it happens that this modification is negligible in the immediate context (if not, it is the notion of synchrony which would in turn become unintelligible). In addition, this modification, negligible or not, does not necessarily involve an injection of cinematicity (although this may sometimes happen, as we shall see below). A problematics of the couple, even if one makes films out of it, remains an (eventually modified) problematics of the couple, and the very fact of the couple - which refers to psychoanalysis, economics, ethnology, social psychology - will not automatically become cinematic by virtue of the numerous films which the 'modern' cinema devotes to it. The argument of an inevitable modification refers to a commonplace phenomenon which does not particularly concern the cinema. However, this argument is sometimes expressed in another way which pretends to be more relevant; this is the case when certain critics of the cinema remark that a system of thought, sentiment, or behavior (or any cultural configuration) only appears, in a film, in the same form, when an internal analysis of it is made - and when they hasten to attribute this difference (which apparently, and even literally, is due to the film) to the 'cinema'. It is the cinema, they tell us, which has transformed, reshaped, the cultural figure; taking into consideration its initial form would not in the least be able to increase our understanding of the film, for this is not what the film presents to us for interpretation, etc. However, this position is untenable, despite its appearance of correctness, for it rests entirely on the confusion between codes and textual systems, that is to say also between cinema (codes) and film (textual system) : in the film, obviously, the cultural figure is not essential as such; it has been 'transformed', it is true, since it has entered into new relationships with other figures (note, however, that the latter, in turn, are not all cinematic). But - in addition to the fact that one cannot know how the film has transformed it without considering what it was before its transformation - the modification of this figure in the film does not necessarily involve its modification in the code from which it comes and to which it eventually returns (for a code is not a text) - and even less a mysterious creation of some fundamental kinship between this code and some other cinematic code. The proximity of codes in a text does not always lead to contacts or links between these codes themselves. 11

See Paul Ricoeur, "La structure, le mot, 1'evenement", in Esprit X X X V : 360,. special issue "Structuralismes. Methodes et ideologies", May 1967, 801-21.

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Not always, but sometimes. One finds here the idea of an eventual cinematization of certain non-cinematic codes, as a possible consequence of their adoption by films, i.e., in cases where the filmization is accompanied by a cinematization (itself capable of several degrees). Sociologists like Edgar Morin have remarked12 - and common observation confirms it - that in certain times and places the courting behavior of adolescents was in some measure influenced by the erotic stereotypes proposed by films. These stereotypes thus become innovators; they fashion expectations and behavior, facilitate complicity, offer patterns of dress, bearing, speech, seduction, unconstrainedness, etc. Certain adolescents try to conform to them in their everyday life (take, for example, the 'James Dean phenomenon',13 whose astonishing magnitude in its day we all remember). In our view, what characterizes cases of this sort is that the interaction between the cinematic element (the role of the star, iconic charm, etc.) and an extra-cinematic code (for the case in point, a social code of everyday behavior, a small portion of a 'life style') comes to survive the film and continues to be expressed outside of the textual system. Thus we can speak, here, of a cinematization of the code itself, since it remains impregnated with echoes of the cinematic when it functions elsewhere than in a film. There is something two-directional in this: the film borrows certain codes which are external to it, but when it restores them to the culture, they carry with them, in varying degrees of strength, a little of the cinema with which they found themselves neighbors in the film (an association which, elsewhere, would have remained without consequence), and their proper (codical) structure as such finds itself modified or reshaped. The film reflects social behavior, but may also remodel it to a certain extent (which must not be overestimated). We are dealing with such phenomena each time that the film exercises an influence on something other than itself: not only on customs, but also on other means of expression (the influence of cinematic montage on certain narrative codes in use in modern American novels, etc.). The notion of cinematization makes sense only in relation to these cases, which are probably less numerous than is sometimes assumed. (In addition, we must not forget that the reverse process exists as well: cinematic figures become, so-to-speak, partially 'de-cinematized', i.e., modified and reshaped as a result of their contact with non-specific " a

Les Stars (Paris: Seuil, 1957), Chapter \ Ί Π . Ibid., Chapter V.

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elements, in favor of certain filmic systems.) But in order to return to the 'immanent' consideration of filmic systems, we shall set aside such problems, which are of greater interest to the problem of the diachrony of codes and the study of influences. Contrary to what is asserted by certain fanatical supporters of cinematic specificity, the film is not the place where 'the world becomes cinema', i.e., where a mysterious alchemy succeeds in transmuting extra-cinematic codes into cinematic ones. The film, as its name ought to indicate, is a place where extra-cinematic elements are filmized, i.e., integrated into the system of a specific filmic discourse. It is also - it is as much - the place where cinematic elements are also filmized (the definition of the term remains the same). It is thus in the film that these two sorts of elements, which remain distinct as elements of codes, enter into interaction within a non-codical, textual system. That this interaction in either direction may be prolonged after the film and may reshape these codes themselves is another problem. The preceding remarks authorize (and invite) a modification of one aspect of the terminology which has been proposed until now. The notion initially presented under the name of singular system (Chapter 5.2) would profit from being renamed textual system : we have been led, more and more clearly as we progress, to define it entirely according to its rooting in a given text (in a single text, but considered in its entirety). A special discussion (Chapter 7.7) will, moreover, endeavor to show that singularity is not exactly the defining characteristic of the textual, but rather a corollary of this definition: it is not because it is singular that a text is a text, but because it consists of a manifest unfolding anterior to the intervention of the analyst (as it happens, such unfoldings are always singular). In another passage (Chapter 7.1), we will make it clear that one can treat as a text, itself including a textual system, such and such a unit of the filmic development greater or smaller than the 'film' (that is to say smaller than the single and entire film) : thus, in certain cases, a part of the film is already a text; or a group of films, when the films present sufficient historical and cultural similarities, one justifiably considers to be a sort of single, vast film. However, a term like 'singular' suggests too much the exclusion of cases of this sort, and evokes the idea - perhaps linked to the Latin origin of the word - that the only texts will be individual films : never less and never more than one. Finally, we have already noted that 'singular' may provoke an unfortunate confusion with original - and thus risk supporting an aestheticizing

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mythology of 'pure creation' - while textual systems may be, and frequently are, banal.

6.4.

READINGS:

SEVERAL TEXTUAL SYSTEMS FOR A SINGLE TEXT

One hears it said quite frequently in discussions about the cinema that what characterizes somewhat complex and profound films, i.e., films with which we become involved and which live with us, is - contrary to that heavily insistent univocality which marks the overall nature of the filmic production - the capability of being understood in several ways, of offering their symbolism, outside of any semantic 'castration', to several systems of interpretation, of allowing several levels of reading. This is the theme of 'multiple readings' which is applied to the filmic text as to other sorts of texts, and with good reason.14 But the expression of this idea sometimes gives rise to a theoretical misunderstanding which is not without importance. It happens, in fact, that the plurality of readings is associated with the plurality of codes which give form to the film : the 'rich' or emancipated film would thus be one which makes use of diverse codes, the poor or conventional film one which is constrained by the tyranny of a single code, displayed in all its redundant self-sufficiency. What we maintain here, on the contrary, is that any film, even the dullest, contains within itself several codes, such that the diversity of possible readings in the most elaborate films corresponds to the number of textual systems, not to the number of codes. That several codes are at work in a text is a very general fact, as we have tried to show in the entire first part of this book, and one which does not especially characterize the great texts. But that several textual systems come into play in the same film - while the textual system is what unifies and organizes the film., and would thus seem to be obliged, in every case and with good reason, to remain unique - is already less probable (and in fact extremely rare). It is something slightly 11

At the origin of this theme one would expect to find specific authors, like Roland Barthes with the notion of plural reading, or Umberto Eco with that of open work, or Julia Kristeva with that of dialogism. And it is true that they are sometimes invoked in cinematic discussions, but this is rather rare, and on the whole very recent. In the realm of the film the (much more vague and general) idea of a multiplicity of levels of interpretation is often expressed without reference to such authors, and it was expressed before them. It is an 'indigenous' theme.

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miraculous which 'fashions' the text of the film (the text itself, and the text in us) in a completely different manner. To invoke the notion of 'multiple readings' too often, and without taking an exact measure of what its logic involves, is to obfuscate it. To say that a text allows several readings is to advance an idea which would lose all meaning if each of the readings invoked did not bear on the ensemble of the text, or if each of them did not provide it alone a sort of 'thread' guiding one from one end of the text to the other, such that these readings constantly maintain relations of substitution and exclusion, reduced to entirely eliminating each other or, even when they 'refer' to one another, can only do so, with each revolution of the semantic turnstile, by also referring the entire text to the reading. This is why their simultaneous assertion seems paradoxical and acquires a value which is both weak and strong. But we see at the same time that this particular structure, which met en resonnance ('sets to resonating')16 the textual surfaces, can only be established if each reading re-orders all, or at least the principal, elements of the film (re-orders, in sum, their very structural relations); the notion of 'level of reading' ceases to be intelligible if each reading should simply correspond to a code. In a film, each code is a partial element, and as long as these codes invest different parts or aspects of the film, their plurality gives rise only to the processes of combination, complementation, or reciprocal alternation which characterize any textual system (see Sections 6.2 and 6.3), and are found just as well in primarily univocal texts, albeit ones which are insistent and as closed as possible, as for example that of Intolerance discussed above. A film does not have to be subtle in order to be pluricodical. It is such by necessity, and simply in order to exist. If it wishes to tell a story, even an insipid one, it must rely on a narrative code; as it is necessary to tell it in a certain order, even a banal one, and thus to divide it into sequences or into 'episodes' of whatever nature, recourse to schemas of composition, conscious or unconscious, is imposed on it no matter what; as each of these sequences must be filmed, it cannot do otherwise than mobilize systems of cutting and of editing, even if it uses the poorest of them; as each frame must be 'lit', under pain of offering to the spectator only a black rectangle, it is necessary to select a type of lighting (and natural light, in 'outdoor' shootings, is also a choice); etc. u

Formula borrowed from Jeffrey Mehlman, "Entre psychanalyse et psychocritique", in Poetique 3, 1970, 365-383.

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What characterizes a code and distinguishes it from a textual system is that it never involves an entire film, a film in all its parts and all its aspects. This is why several codes are necessary to make up the film; this is also why they may co-exist in banality without their multiplicity conferring a particular symbolic depth to the textual fabric, of which they simply share the surface (see Chapter 7.5 and p. 181). There are exceptions to this, which we shall discuss separately (p. 182). But the plurality of textual systems in a film can never be resolved into a neutral co-habitation of this sort, for each of them is obliged to lay claim to the textual territory in its totality, such that this totality is perpetually torn apart by its opposing irredentisms; it is thus a true case of multiple readings. The idea that we would like to explicate here is not, moreover, absent from those very expositions which invoke the plurality of 'codes' in relation to films with many readings. It is asserted less clearly in these writings, and is in implicit contradiction with the use of the word 'code', but it is there nonetheless. It is in fact remarkable, in filmic analyses so oriented, that each of these so-called underlying 'codes' of one of the readings in fact turns out to constitute, as soon as its nature is more closely defined, a vast and complex system of interpretation, with an obviously inter-codical role, and not a localized code: thus, we are told (this is one of the most popular examples in the literature on the subject) that some of Bunuel's or Bergman's films - beyond their anecdotal and narrative reading, on the very first level - permit a psychoanalytic reading and a political one. This is not at all doubtful. But we also see that it is not a question of two codes; what one calls 'psychoanalysis' and 'politics' in such cases are instances of syncretization, each of which covers an immense field where many codes are already operative. The analytic or the political concern as principles of decipherment - which must not be confused with political or psychoanalytical codes of a more restricted significance, as may be uncovered at certain points in films which are quite localized (see p. 55 and p. 224) - can from the first be situated only above several codes and at the level of the relations between them, thus at the level of the entire film; it is the textual system, and not any particular one of its codes, which is bisected by this double concern.

7 TEXTUALITY AND 'SINGULARITY'

7.1. FILMIC TEXTS LARGER OR SMALLER THAN A FILM

Until now we have reasoned as if 'the film' - that is to say the single and entire film - constituted the only unit which offers a coherent text to which there corresponds a textual system; in sum, we have asserted (or have seemed to do so) that all textual-systemic units have the dimensions of a film, and that none of them is larger than a single film or smaller than an entire film. However, this is not at all the case. Textual-systemic units, in the sense in which we have tried to define them here, are capable of considerable variation in size. Thus, it is clear that to the classic Western, for example (which has already been the subject of a rather large number of books), there corresponds a single overall system. This system mobilizes at the same time diverse particular cinematic codes (a privilege accorded to mass shots, great panoramic shots, etc.) and diverse non-cinematic codes which are also particular: a certain code of honor and friendship, of restrictive rituals concerning gun duels, etc. These two sorts of codes do not belong only to the classic Western: shots of large, open spaces also appear in certain adventure films, the code of honor in songs of the old American West ('Western songs', not to be confused with 'Western films'). What characterizes the classic film of the West, and it alone, is a certain number of selections that are made from among these codes, and the arrangement of those elements into a quite definite overall configuration resulting from the interaction between the cinematic and the extra-cinematic options. This configuration is thus a textual system, since it displays exactly those characteristics which in the preceding chapters we have attributed to the system of each film. The only difference is that it is associated with a group of films, and not a single film. It is the text whose dimensions have changed: the analysis has chosen to consider the ensemble of classic Westerns as forming a single vast and continuous text.

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Certain properties of cinematic productions can but encourage this procedure. There are many films which have been fabricated in a serial fashion and thus present only weakly the characteristics of a 'work', even if a textual system is involuntarily asserted there. Certain genres, on the contrary, have a clear existence; their homogeneity, already felt in the simple viewing of the films, is confirmed by historical facts : we know that, in the cinema of Hollywood in its 'golden era', genres were in some sort institutions (and not only textual ensembles). Each genre had its regular script-writers, sometimes on yearly contract, its directors, its craftsmen, its studios, its partially autonomous financial circuits, etc. Nevertheless, this variation in the size of the text is not something which is self evident and without methodological implications. The film (the single and entire film) remains a privileged textual-systemic unit, since it represents, in principle, that which in cinematic art corresponds to the level of the 'work'. However - although the sentimentality about the work of art, in the naive and exaggerated form which it took during the 'classic' (that is to say romantic) period, is today in serious decline - nothing indicates that the group of works or the part of the work is gaining in the eyes of the analyst of 1970 a unity as significant as the whole work. And even if this were a case of the survival of an old illusion, the result would not be different, since, in each epoch, those who make analyses must work with the mental equipment which they have at their disposal (at least with the resources which have become operational for them), and not with the equipment they would like to have (i.e., which is simply glimpsed by them). On the other hand, this does not exclude the possibility of working in a manner such that the latter begins to influence the former - or, more exactly, that a part of the latter starts to become the former. This is why it seems possible for us, at present, to treat certain parts of works (not just any one, however), or certain groups of works (again, not just any), as textual-systemic units endowed with a greater or lesser degree of 'natural' reality - that is to say socio-cultural homogeneity - units which a filmic analysis may always focus upon as objects, on sole condition that this be clearly stated and that in each case the dimensions of the conclusions be strictly proportionate to the dimensions of the text which has been chosen as a corpus (this requirement is only another form of the principle of relevancy). Thus, certain 'sequences' of films, highly structured and endowed with some autonomy, offer the analyst a textual unit whose system

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he will be able to attempt to establish; it will suffice to keep in mind that this unit is in turn embedded in a larger unit, which in this case is the film. But as this film itself is embedded in other, even larger units, the act of methodological abstraction does not necessarily have to be considered as more sacrilegious if it intervenes at this particular level of size than if it intervened at other levels (such 'segmentations' are the condition and the price of all meticulous work, and are currently practiced in diverse disciplines). Besides, the sequence is not the only conceivable part of the film. The picture-track of a film is also (at least in certain cases) a text whose system one could explore. It would obviously be necessary to take into account its connections with the sound-track of the same film (especially in cases where the catalysis is indispensable), but this circumstance does not result in rendering illegitimate in and of itself the proposal to concentrate attention on the visual image rather than the sound. (We will reject on principle the somewhat childish but widespread criticism which cries out at the 'mutilation of the work' every time that a study limits its subject because of a concern for precision.) Similarly, one could study the linguistic series of a given film (the ensemble of its spoken utterances), or even the sound effects series, etc. One could focus on the picture-track and the linguistic series (a partial totality already significant in many films and causing afirstgroup of hybrid arrangements to appear, which one would not assume to be the only one in the film under study). More generally, a large number of textual-systemic segmentations is possible, as long as the analyst clearly measures the exact degree of arbitrariness which has influenced their initial delineation, and consequently the exact degree of autonomy of the unit which he is studying. This is not to say that any division whatsoever is permissible; thus, it has never occurred to anyone, understandably, to delimit an object of study made up of the sound-track of one film plus the picture-track of another. (This would be conceivable only if empirical circumstances, antecedent to the analytic undertaking, themselves invited as little generalizable a type of regrouping, e.g., a historically attested interpolation, an actual or probable 'filiation', etc. On the other hand, it would then be a question of a comparative study rather than of an analysis of a corpus.) Those who criticize the arbitrariness of these delimitations forget that they are small in number in relation to those which would be possible theoretically, and the majority of which is never realized : proof that the concern for real units is not absent in those inspired by formalistic aims. 'Parts of works', we have said, but also groups of works: there are

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several sorts of groups of films which constitute, each at their own level and in their own way, authentic textual-systemic units. Thus, what could that which is known as the 'work of a cineast' possibly b e - i n those cases where it has a minimum of coherence, that is to say existence - if not the single vast text of which each completed film becomes a chapter, and thus the vast system which is erected out of several sub-systems ? It would be necessary in principle to take into account all the films of a given cineast, but not everything in these films. One would, on the contrary, strive to isolate that which in these films stems from the system which characterizes this cineast (or is capable of demonstrating that such a system exists). Thus, among other traits of these films, those which refer to a single sub-system (to a single film of the cineast) would be excluded, except if they were found to be in structural correspondence - homologous or the reverse - with traits found in other films (in this case, moreover, one could no longer say that they refer to a single sub-system). In return, one would exclude those traits - if any exist, which depends on the cineast and on the film - which definitely belong to one of the films, and not to the 'work of the cineast'. However, it is precisely these which will be found at the center of the analysis if the 'work of the cineast' had as its declared object a single and entire film. We thus see that the universe of meaning includes a mass of signifying-units self-embedded ad infinitum, and maintaining among themselves thousands of relationships of intersection and of inclusion, such that the essential thing is always to know what one is talking about. This elementary and fundamental requirement is rarely respected in the domain of cinematic studies, where one is accustomed to mixing everything together; it is this perpetual uncertainty in regard to the subject treated and to the criteria of relevancy adopted which explains (in part) the frequency of misunderstandings and the violence of polemics in everything that touches films. The work of the cineast is not the only textual-systemic unit greater than the film. There is also what one calls the 'cinematic genre': burlesque, 'hard-boiled detective', musical comedy, etc. We have said above that one may apply oneself to the task of disengaging from a corpus composed of several Westerns (the number and choice of which depends on the exact orientation of each study), the distinctive traits of 'Westernness'. It is these traits that make a Western a Western, and make it so that - even if the thing is at no moment made explicit in the film, neither its credits, nor in the posters or taped announcements of its publicity

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campaign - it is unmistakably recognized as such by any public which has at its command the appropriate socio-aesthetic information, i.e., which is to some extent familiar with the system of the Western. Another textual-systemic unit larger than the film is the production of what was called a 'school' of cinema (Kammerspiel, the English documentary school, the Soviet school of the 'golden era', etc.) or the 'total production' of a given country, or of a given period, or of a given country in a given period (assuming, which is at first glance less probable, that it would seem to present a minimum of unity, and that one would attempt to support or invalidate this impression in constituting to this effect a corpus of several films, selected according to what one wanted to prove or disprove). It is useless to continue this enumeration, which is not exhaustive. If we brought it up, it was only to underline the fact that the real opposition is not between cinematic language system, on the one hand (that is to say the group of general or particular cinematic codes), and ßms, on the other (that is to say the systems proper to a single and whole film) - but rather that this distinction is only one particular form of a more vast and more essential division, which places on one side the codes (general or particular, cinematic or extra-cinematic), and on the other systems which are associated with particular filmic texts, texts whose 'length' is quite variable. We have called the latter textual systems; the totalities which correspond to them, whether small or large, are texts. The term filmic text does not assume anything about size. The single and entire film (film in the distributive sense, as defined in Chapter 3.1) is obviously the filmic text par excellence, but it is not the only one. If a portion of a film or a group of films may be texts (in the exact measure that one treats them as complete discourses), it may happen, inversely, that a film is not treated as a filmic text; one may simply see it as one message, among others, one code among others. Between the filmic texts which coincide with films and those which are larger or smaller than films, there is nevertheless a difference which cannot be done away with by the development of analytic procedures, which can be eliminated only by a profound change in cinematic practices themselves. At present, cinematic production is accomplished film by film. Also, when the analyst takes a film as a filmic text, he is sure that the external contours of his text, its material extension, have been fixed by others and exist prior to his analysis. It is not necessary to exaggerate the importance of this reassurance of object-

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ivity, for some genres or sequences have more reality than some films; nevertheless, there is in this a sort of guarantee which limits the degree of arbitrariness. But the whole problem is to know if one ought to draw from this a negative conclusion (the rejection of pluri-filmic texts, or, on the contrary, fragmentary texts) rather than a positive conclusion, which amounts to an effort of great prudence in dividing these somewhat particular texts, as well as a continuous respect for the initial criterion of distinctiveness (to measure conclusions against the act of selection without which these conclusions have different boundaries). In this sense, and as was said above, such analyses are always tentative. It is not really a question of asserting that a cinematic genre is a vast single film, but rather of seeing what one comes up with if one decides to treat it as such. Between the negative and positive solutions we would not hesitate to choose the second, considering the obvious importance of phenomena such as 'genre' (and, more generally, inter-filmic affinities) in the history of the cinema, and, at the other extreme, the very strong unity of certain sequences of films, which have made possible some of the most solid textual analyses available today.1

7.2.

GROUP OF FILMS AND CLASS OF FILMS

The preceding definitions (Chapter 7.1) bring us back to the notions group of films and class of films, already developed in Sections 4.2 and 5.3, and which may seem to be synonymous. This synonymy, as we shall see, is only apparent. But in order to show this, it is necessary first to consider the words 'group of films' in their most ordinary sense, that is to say short of the distinction towards which we are proceeding. Let us thus consider, for a minute, any unit whatsoever which includes several films and only films, no matter what the manner in which the principle of re-grouping is to be understood. A group of films may correspond to two quite different semiotic levels. It may be a question of the ensemble of messages of a single

1

Example: Raymond Bellour, "Les Oiseaux de Hitchcock: analyse