Ciné-Tracts a Journal of Film and Cultural Studies
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CINÉ-TRACTS A JOURNAL OF FILM AND CULTURAL STUDIES TWO ISSUES IN ONE TWO ISSUES IN ONE TWO ISSUES IN ONE 14 FILMS AND FILMMAKERS 15 Carlos Saura, Wim Wenders, Louis Lumiere, Ousmane Sembene, Mrinal Sen, Michael Snow The Bandwagon Wavelength Lightning Over Water LATIN AMERICAN FILM $3.50/£2.00 FILM & CRITICISM cine-tracts contents Ciné-Tracts, A Journal of Film and Cultural Volume 4, Numbers 2 and 3, Summer, Fall, 1981 Studies is published four times a year on an irregular basis and is a non-profit publication. NUMBER 14 Editorial and Business Office: 4227 Esplanade Avenue, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H2W 1T1. Signs, Icons and Subjects in the Structures of Cinema Art by Walter Rewar..................................................1 Ottawa Editorial Office: 62 Clarey, Ottawa Ontario, K1S 2R7. Wim Wenders, Nicholas Ray, and Lightning Over Water, by Ron Burnett..............................................11 Editor in Chief: Ron Burnett It Could be Oedipus Rex: Denial and Difference in Editors: Martha Aspler Burnett, Han Cohen, The Bandwagon or, the American Musical as Ameri- Phil Vitone, Alison Beale can Gothic by Dana B. Polan....................................15 Associate Editors: Ron Abramson, Peter An Interview With Mrinal Sen Harcourt, Teresa de Lauretis, Bill Nichols, by Sumita S. Chakravarty.........................................27 Zuzana M. Pick, Peter Ohlin, Virginia Fish, Rick Thompson. Notes on Communication and Representation in the Development of Educational Television by Phil Vitone............................................................33 Venice Strikes Again: The 1980 Film Festival © Please note that the articles printed in by Dedi Baroncelli.....................................................39 Ciné-Tracts are copyrighted and their repro- duction is not permitted without the consent of the editor. The viewpoints expressed in Ciné- Tracts are those of its authors and do not NUMBER 15 necessarily reflect those of the editors. Manuscripts are not returned and must be sent Loss and Recuperation in The Garden of Delights in triplicate, double spaced. Dépot Legale by Katherine S. Kovacs............................................45 Bibliothèque Nationale du Quebec et Bibliothèque Nationale du Canada. From Lumiere to Pathe: The Break-Up of Perspectival Space by Richard de Cordova.................................55 Indexed in the International Index to Film Periodicals (F.I.A.F.), Film and Literature In- Latin American Cinema: A View Towards the Future dex (Albany) and The Alternative Press Index. of Documentary Film Practice by Zuzana M. Pick..................................................64 Single Issue $2.50 /Subscription $10.00 per yr. / Institutional Subscriptions are $20.00 / Ousmane Sembene: Questions of Change Orders outside North America, please add by Roy Armes..........................................................71 $2.50 postage. Prophecy, Memory and the Zoom: Michael Snow's Wavelength Re-Viewed by William Wees.......................................................78 Second Class Registration Number 4104 ISSN 0704 016X CONTRIBUTORS Roy Armes is the author of numerous books and articles on film including a recent long work on Robbe-Grillet. Dedi Baroncelli is a free-lance writer living in Italy. Sumita S. Chakravarty is a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Richard de Cordova is completing his graduate studies in Los Angeles. Katherine S. Kovacs teaches at the University of Southern California. Zuzana M. Pick teaches in the Film Studies Department at Carleton University in Ottawa. Dana B. Polan teaches at The University of Pittsburgh. Walter Rewar teaches at Ohio State University, Columbus. Phil Vitone teaches film at Vanier College in Montreal. William Wees teaches film at McGill University in Montreal and is the President of the Film Studies Association of Canada. SIGNS, ICONS AND SUBJECTS IN THE STRUCTURES OF CINEMA ART by Walter Rewar Many readers suspect that Lévi-Strauss and Propp, Saussure and Freud have developed principles of explanation which have become permanent additions to the landscape of cinema criticism. The approach which has brought these writers to us has become indelibly 1 associated with the notions of code and message, and the special bonding of the signifier to the signified that creates the sign and mediates the levels of its necessary/conventional manifestations. Those interested in tracing what happens to linguistic and semiotic theories once they are transposed to the area of cinema criticism are likely to point out that the level of abstraction at which they are used, and the manner in which the distance between their respective philosophical, methodological, and historical contexts are crossed, determines the ultimate significance of the analyses they are asked to perform. Favorable commentators have praised structuralism's capacity to produce new insights without, in some instances, subjecting its major premises to an extensive critical evaluation. Commentators unconvinced by its claims have questioned the lack of historicity in its pre- mises, the static nature of its models, and its stress on precision, which is thought to go against the grain of a perceived textual variety. In the work of the born-again aestheticians, the linguistic Freud, discovered by Jacques Lacan, has begun to generate certain well- known models of interpretation, in which the symbolizations of houses, chambers, tunnels, blocked horizons, missing appendages, and yellow teeth are meant to tell us something or other about the structure of a motion picture. In the end, the relations Sa/Sé are made to dominate those — that Saussure felt to be far more significant — of the dynamic system in which they are inscribed. A series of crucial points get increasingly lost in the debate: we need to stipulate what it means to a theory of cinema that Lévi-Strauss' paradigmatic model of the narrative, in spite of the real progress it has made possible, derives from misleading views concerning variety, information, the structuring of indeterminacy and of communica- tion, all of which inform the organization of an artistic system. Similarly, few critics have ques- tioned the essentialist assumptions underlying the Proppian functions, and how they emerge as so many events in the coded narrative patterns of a verbal expression. When Vladimir Propp published the Morphology of the Folktale in 1928, the study was hailed as a great step forward that allowed the critic to synthesize the syntagmatic analysis of narrative structures. The study involved about one hundred tales, and it isolated count- less characters, motifs, events, and relational functions. Propp described the function as an act being performed by a character having some significance to the course of the plot. He also found that in spite of the variety found at the level of content the number of the func- tions was rigidly limited to thirty-one. Although each tale did not incorporate all of the func- tions, those that were used, always appeared in the same order. Lévi-Strauss, while deve- loping the so-called paradigmatic model of the narrative, found himself moving away from single level oppositions suggested by phonology. He demonstrated, in his studies of myths and kinship systems, that codes and messages can change from one system to another and from one level to another. Thus, even as Propp was underlining the redundancy of the functions as they unfolded under variable guises along the syntagmatic axis, Lévi-Strauss was suggesting that the redundancy of the functions was not as great as Propp imagined. Each function could carry a great deal of information because tales are stratified into levels, and each level is regulated by its own distribution of codes. To Propp's notion of a coded sequence of functions whose deployment was strictly controlled, Lévi-Strauss was oppo- sing the idea of a distribution of codes some of which are active at some levels and inactive at others. In other words, the Proppian functions (e.g. recognition, departure, defeat, deli- very, armed contest, etc.) do not find expression only in the semantic spheres of action of a given hero. They acquire new semantic fields and they manifest themselves with the help of different strings of codes. The latter may emphasize the senses of smell, taste, sight, hearing, and touch. Still others organize the altogether different structures of the social, cosmological, and culinary types. 2 Propp and Levi-Strauss were in no position to exploit the notions of redundancy and variety in the contexts of information and communication, and they made no effort to account for the movements of tension and release that are fundamental to the channeling of informa- tion and characterize a complex system's behavior at a given level of organization. They explain the symbolic structures themselves by relying on relations that are equal to one another in that they create unaccentuated paradigmatic and syntagmatic combinations. Both writers deny, in so doing, a fundamental insight developed by the theories of infor- mation and communication, namely, that structures are composed of moments of concen- tration and diffuseness, of convergence and fragmentation, of dissolution and emergence, which affect and are affected by the restrictive and channeling effects of the boundary. It follows that a systemic approach to cinema must stress that a narrative structure is not a homogeneous selection of paradigmatic relations evolving in diachrony. It is more like a series of intensifications