Conventions of Viewpoint Coherence in Film Object of That Glance
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Philosophers’ volume 000, no. 000 Over the last century, the philosophical study of meaning, including Imprint january 0000 the areas of semantics and pragmatics, has overwhelmingly focused on language. In this paper, we examine the interplay of semantics and pragmatics in the alternative domain of film— understood to include CONVENTIONS OF all variety of video and animation, as they appear in cinema, television, and online. Far from a marginal case, film is one of the primary means by which humans exchange narrative in contemporary society. VIEWPOINT Films consist of one or more shots organized into linear temporal sequence; our focus are those films which combine multiple shots to ex- COHERENCE IN FILM press their content. While, in principle, each shot in a given sequence could depict a completely isolated situation with no implied connec- Samuel Cumming⇤ tion to the next, filmmakers have discovered methods of montage, or editing, by which shots are arranged so as to reliably convey unbroken Gabriel Greenberg⇤ stories, taking place in continuous space and time. How sequences of †1 distinct images (and sounds) are able to express such coherent content Rory Kelly is one of the central questions of classical film theory, and is the subject of this paper.2 Department of Philosophy ⇤ The semantic view of film holds that the expression of unified con- University of California, Los Angeles tent through the juxtaposition of shots is made possible in part by a †Department of Film, Television and Digital Media system of semantic conventions. Like the rules of language, such con- University of California, Los Angeles ventions constitute specific interpretive principles which go beyond our everyday capacities for perception, thought, and action. In the case © 2016 Cumming, Greenberg, and Kelly of film, they function to introduce implicit temporal, spatial, and nar- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons rative relationships between the events represented by adjacent shots. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License But, unlike some of the examples familiar from language, these con- <www.philosophersimprint.org/000000/> ventions need not be fully arbitrary; instead, they may be naturally motivated in part by prior expectations and tendencies. For example, edited sequences following the common point-of-view convention move 1. All authors contributed equally to this work. The film sequences were produced with assistance of Judy Phu (Cinematography), Jean Tyson (Cin- from a shot of a character’s face to a shot of the scene they perceive, ematography), Dylan Chapgier (Cinematography) , Nathan Mead (Assistant echoing the natural transition from noticing a glance to looking at the Camera/Gaffer), David Preggerson (Production Assistant), Jonathan Oldham (Actor), and David Atlas (Actor). We are grateful for the comments and sug- gestions of reviewers and colleagues, as well as audiences at the University of Oslo, Cornell, SCSMI, UCLA, and Haverford. This project was supported in 2. Of course, editing is just one of the mechanism that can drive film narrative. part by the UCLA Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research Transdisciplinary Filmmakers may exploit techniques of camera movement and mise-en-scène to Seed Grants. convey in a continuous shot what could also be approximated by editing. cumming, greenberg, and kelly Conventions of Viewpoint Coherence in Film object of that glance. Versions of the semantic view have been widely and sound track. What it denies is that conventions play any signifi- explored from a semiotic perspective, most prominently in the work cant role in deriving the content of a film. Since filmic representation of Metz (1974, chs 3-5).3 More recent advocates of the semantic view does not systematically depend on conventions, and conventionality is include Bordwell (2008, ch. 2), Bateman and Schmidt (2012), and Wild- the hallmark of linguistic representation, pragmatic theorists reject any feuer (2014).4 substantive analogy between film and language. In so far as there are While scholarship in the semantic tradition has made a certain any interpretive conventions of film, they hold, these are scattered and amount of headway, it also faces a number of obstacles. For exam- unsystematic— notable exceptions rather than the norm.5 ple, there is little agreement about the first-order issue of which rules In this paper we set out to develop a new version of the seman- in particular are the ones which govern film representation, and what tic view, one which offers definite answers to the challenges posed their exact content is. And the foundations of the semantic view are above. We articulate the semantic view for a particular pair of conven- even more unsure: in what sense of “convention” are the rules of film tions that govern spatial relations between viewpoints. One such rule conventional? how are they analogous to linguistic conventions? and is already well known; sometimes called the “180◦ Rule,” we term how are they compatible with apparent counterexamples? There are it the X-Constraint; to this we add a hitherto unrecorded rule, the even doubts about the motivations for positing semantic conventions T-Constraint. Both have the effect, in different ways, of limiting the of film in the first place. For perhaps all film interpretation can be un- way that viewpoint (or camera position) can shift through space from derstood in purely pragmatic terms instead. Clearly, advocates of the shot to shot over the course of a film sequence. Using these as exem- semantic view have some explaining to do. plars of semantic conventions in film, we’ll argue that in this case the The absence of decisive answers to these questions has engendered semantic view provides the correct account of the means by which reasonable skepticism, leading a number of scholars to develop a prag- films express their content. matic view of film, in contrast with the semantic view. Authors in this Section 1 outlines the general framework of the semantic view, with vein include Harman (1977), Wilson (1989, ch. 10), Currie (1993, 1995, particular attention to the role it assigns conventions in its account of ch. 4), Cutting (2005, 22), and Carroll (2008, 116-121). According to film expression. Section 2 defines the X-Constraint and argues that the pragmatic view, films are understood in more or less the same we must treat it as a semantic convention. Section 3 introduces the way that the experiences of everyday life are understood: through T-Constraint. Section 4 construes both constraints as a relations of view- a holistic mixture of perception, rationality, knowledge of the world, point coherence, analogous to the coherence relations which govern and general principles of psychology— but without regular recourse linguistic discourse. Section 5 addresses a well-known challenge for to specialized rules of film interpretation. The pragmatic view doesn’t deny that there are conventions which guide film production, such 5. Thus Currie (1995, 135), softening the message of Currie (1993), allows for as genre-based conventions governing character types, plot structure, the possibility of certain specialized conventional rules governing inter-shot relations. For instance: the technique of fading to black to indicate the passage of time may be an isolated semantic convention. To this we might add: the 3. See Nöth (1995, 463-471) for a survey of work on film in the semiotic tradi- convention of using xylophone scales to indicate the beginning of a dream or tion. fantasy sequences, and the use of a circular mask to indicate seeing through 4. McCloud (1993, ch. 3) develops a similar analysis for comics. Though he a telescope. But pragmatic theorists like Currie hold that such rules do not observes cultural variation in the application of interpretive rules, his emphasis constitute any kind of system, and they crucially disagree with the specific is on their psychological basis, rather than their conventionality. cases of semantic conventions defended below. philosophers’ imprint - 2 - vol. 000, no. 000 (january 0000) cumming, greenberg, and kelly Conventions of Viewpoint Coherence in Film the semantic view: successful film sequences which seem to “violate” The latter is the distinctive problem created by editing. Each indi- the X-Constraint. Finally, Section 6 provides a semantic analysis of the vidual shot depicts a space, populated with people and objects, over a X-Constraint and sketches a formal implementation. Section 7 is a con- short span of time. To reconstruct a coherent story, a viewer must effec- clusion. tively stitch together these fragmentary situations, identifying the spa- tial, temporal, causal, and narrative relationships that connect each one 1. Semantic Conventions in Film to the next. For successful communication to take place, the filmmaker This paper defends the view that the expression of content by film is and viewer must be aligned regarding the assumed relationships be- governed in part by a system of conventional semantic rules. Before tween each shot. taking up a particular account of these rules in the remainder, we turn There are no in-principle limits to the cognitive resources viewers in this section to describe the central role of convention in our account may draw upon in attempting to solve this problem. A host of broadly of filmic representation. pragmatic factors may come into play, including perceptual and cogni- Our focus will be the kind of communication characteristically tive tendencies, knowledge of the world (including knowledge of the aimed for in mainstream film, where filmmakers seek to convey co- filmmaker’s own psychology), and knowledge of the world depicted herent and logical stories, and viewers expect them to achieve this by the film— all marshaled together by “common sense” and rational standard.6 A viewer watching such a film faces the challenge of de- inference. So long as these faculties are the common possession of both termining, from infinitely many possible interpretations, what content filmmaker and viewer, and so long as their exercise leads to predictable the film expresses.