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The Cognitive Semiotics of Film The Cognitive Semiotics of Film WARREN BUCKLAND Liverpool John Moores University PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA http://www.cup.org 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia Ruiz de AlarcoÂn 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain q Warren Buckland 2000 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2000 Printed in the United States of America Typeface Palatino 10/13 pt. System DeskTopPro/UX [BV] A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Buckland, Warren. The cognitive semiotics of ®lm / Warren Buckland. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-521-78005-5 1. Motion pictures ± Semiotics. I. Title. PN1995 .B796 2000 791.43©01©4 ± dc21 00-026227 ISBN 0 521 78005 5 hardback Contents Preface and Acknowledgements page ix 1 The Cognitive Turn in Film Theory 1 2 The Body on Screen and in Frame: Film and Cognitive Semantics 26 3 Not What Is Seen through the Window but the Window Itself: Re¯exivity, Enunciation, and Film 52 4 The Institutional Context: A Semio-pragmatic Approach to Fiction and Documentary Film 77 5 All in the Mind? The Cognitive Status of Film Grammar 109 Conclusion 141 Notes 145 Bibliography of Works Cited 163 Index 171 vii CHAPTER ONE The Cognitive Turn in Film Theory We have witnessed a number of attempts to by-pass [®lm theory's] most dif®cult conceptual problems by replacing it with something else. The ``something else'' is sometimes ®lm history or aesthetics; sometimes it is a new object, such as television, popular culture, video; and sometimes it is a question of new methodologies, which may resemble dusted off methodologies from the social sciences, such as audience questionnaires or interviews, procedures that haven't bene®tted from the literature in the social sciences that has interrogated its own methods and limitations. (Janet Bergstrom)1 uring the eighties, ®lm studies gradually adopted D`new' methodologies from cultural studies and the so- cial sciences, which displaced the speculative ideas of ®lm theory. Rather than construct hypotheses and models about the general structure and spectators' experience of ®lm, ®lm studies has moved toward the `something else' enumerated by Janet Bergstrom. How- ever, a number of ®lm scholars, in both Europe and North America, have persisted with ®lm theory's most dif®cult conceptual prob- lems, which they tackle from the perspective of cognitive science. This book is a report on the knowledge generated by these cogni- tive ®lm theorists. But because this knowledge is fragmentary and incomplete, I have endeavored to expand and develop it in new and unforeseen ways. However, for the most part, I do not report on the knowledge generated by the well-known cognitive ®lm theorists in North America (David Bordwell, NoeÈl Carroll, Edward Branigan, Joseph Anderson, among others) but discuss the much lesser known ®lm theorists working in the cognitive tradition in Europe ± particularly Francesco Casetti, Roger Odin, Michel Colin, and Dominique Cha- teau.2 Despite their similarities, the two groups evidence a marked 1 2 THE COGNITIVE SEMIOTICS OF FILM contrast in their work: Whereas the North American cognitivists decisively reject the basic doctrines of modern ®lm theory (a.k.a. `contemporary' ®lm theory, based upon structural linguistics, se- miotics, Marxism, and psychoanalysis), the European cognitivists inaugurate a revolution in modern ®lm theory by returning to and transforming its early stage ± that is, the semiotic stage.3 Both groups therefore reject psychoanalysis and replace it with cognitive science. However, the European cognitivists assimilate cognitive science into a semiotic framework, whereas the North American cognitivists work within a pure cognitive framework (one un- tainted by semiotics). Treating the work of a group of individuals as representing a homogeneous position is always risky. Nonetheless, all the North American cognitivists I have named belong to the Institute for Cognitive Studies in Film and Video, which to some extent uni®es the agenda of the individual authors.4 What uni®es the European cognitivists is that their work critically responds to Christian Metz's ®lm semiotics. This response involves transforming Metz's semiot- ics by means of theories of pragmatics, cognitive science, and trans- formational generative grammar (which is in fact one of the main research programs in cognitive science). The European cognitivists attempt to overcome the `translinguistics' of Metz's ®lm semiotics ± that is, Metz's insistence that ®lm semiotics be based exclusively on the methods of structural linguistics ± by combining semiotics with pragmatics and cognitive science. Structural linguists over- emphasize language's rigid, limiting capacity, and a semiotics based exclusively on structural linguistics conceptualizes all other semiotic systems in a similarly rigid manner ± limiting and condi- tioning the meaning of human experience ± at the expense of the language user's re¯ective and creative capacities to manipulate signs. By combining semiotics with cognitive science, the European cognitivists restore the balance and begin to conceptualize natural language and other semiotic systems as both enabling and limiting. Because of the dual emphasis in the work of the European cognitiv- ists on semiotics and cognitive science, I shall call them the `cogni- tive ®lm semioticians'.5 Figure 1 shows the relations among the classical ®lm theory of the 1930s±1950s, modern ®lm theory, the North American cognitivists (from now on, simply `the cognitiv- ists'), and the cognitive ®lm semioticians. In this book I aim to outline the common theoretical assump- THE COGNITIVE TURN IN FILM THEORY 3 1. CLASSICAL FILM THEORY (a) Montagists (Rudolf Arnheim, Sergei Eisenstein, etc.) (b) Realists (André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, etc.) 2. MODERN FILM THEORY (a.k.a. ‘contemporary’ film theory) (a) Film semiotics (Christian Metz of Film Language, Language and Cinema) (b) Post-structural film theory (a.k.a. second semiotics, psycho- semiotics): Marxist and psychoanalytic film theory of Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe, Metz of The Imaginary Signifier, Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean-Louis Baudry, Raymond Bellour, etc. (the transition from 2a to 2b was effected by theories of enunciation based on the linguistics of Fig. 1 Benveniste) 3. COGNITIVE FILM THEORY David Bordwell, Noël Carroll, Edward Branigan, Joseph Anderson, Torben Grodal, Ed Tan, Murray Smith 4. COGNITIVE FILM SEMIOTICS (development from 2a) (a) New theories of enunciation (Francesco Casetti, Metz of The Impersonal Enunciation) (b) Semio-pragmatics of film (Roger Odin) (c) Transformational generative grammar and cognitive semantics of film (Michel Colin, Dominique Chateau) tions held by cognitive ®lm semioticians and clarify their relation to the broader traditions of twentieth century intellectual thought. Cognitive ®lm semiotics represents the next stage ± and arguably the maturation of ± semiotic ®lm theory. Despite the revolution it has inaugurated, cognitive ®lm semiotics remains virtually un- known in Anglo-American ®lm studies. This is unfortunate because it develops a more informed understanding ± than either semiotics or cognitive science alone ± of ®lm's underlying structure, together with the way spectators comprehend ®lms. By writing this book I hope to introduce cognitive ®lm semiotics to the Anglo-American community of ®lm scholars and, more generally, encourage a re- evaluation of the role of semiotics in ®lm theory. Before outlining cognitive ®lm semiotics, I shall brie¯y review the cognitivists' position, particularly their reasons for rejecting linguistics and semiotics as viable paradigms for studying ®lm. I 4 THE COGNITIVE SEMIOTICS OF FILM shall also attempt to point out several problems with their purely cognitive-based ®lm theory. To what extent is the dispute between modern ®lm theory and cognitivism based on conceptual disagreement, and to what extent is it simply based on misunderstanding? Brie¯y, I shall argue that the cognitivists' criticism of the psychoanalytic dimension of mod- ern ®lm theory is based on conceptual disagreement and, moreover, that this disagreement is partly justi®ed. However, I shall also ar- gue that the cognitivists' critique of the linguistic and semiotic dimensions of modern ®lm theory is based on misunderstanding, which has led them to refute its premises falsely. If ®lm theory is to make any advances, it needs to establish the grounds for disagreement among its various schools and must identify misunderstandings. Peter Lehman argues that scholars should develop a dialogue with other scholars. He asks: ``How do we teach students to respectfully argue with the perspectives of their peers or teachers if the materials that they read encourage them to dismiss those critical methodologies and ®lm styles with which they are not in agreement?'' And: ``Students should also realize that what they can learn from someone may have little or nothing to do with their agreement with that person's methodology or critical judgement.''6 Similarly, NoeÈl Carroll argues
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