Film Text Analysis

New Perspectives on the Analysis of Filmic Meaning

Janina Wildfeuer, John A. Bateman, Janina Wildfeuer, John A. Bateman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317434214
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book examines film as a multimodal text and an audiovisual synthesis, bringing together current work within the fields of narratology, philosophy, multimodal analysis, sound as well as cultural studies in order to cover a wide range of international academic interest. The book provides new insights into current work and turns the discussion towards recent research questions and analyses, representing and constituting in each contribution new work in the discipline of film text analysis. With the help of various example analyses, all showing the methodological applicability of the discussed issues, the collection provides novel ways of considering film as one of the most complex and at the same time broadly comprehensible texts.

1 Introduction

Bringing Together New Perspectives of Film Text Analysis

John A. Bateman & Janina Wildfeuer

1 Introduction to the Introduction

Just as the contributions to this collection were being put into their final form, and the first versions of this introduction were being drafted, there was a happy coincidence in the selection of topic in Richard Dyer’s 2016 contribution to the Kracauer Lectures in Film and Media Theory at the Goethe-University Frankfurt (Dyer 2016; see also the reference in Wildfeuer in this volume). Dyer’s discussion of “The Persistence of Textual Analysis” articulated many of the points giving rise to and motivating the direction that we pursue here. The idea of ‘text’ or ‘textual’ analysis in film is at the same time one that is traditional, often to the point of being considered old fashioned, and one that remains subject to ongoing critique. Several of the themes taken up by Dyer resonate closely with the direction in which we wish to suggest pushing film text analysis, both with respect to his considerations of criticisms brought against the notion of ‘text’ in film and his proposals for taking film text analysis further.

Dyer begins with the idea that film text analysis is “nothing special” – which is a reoccurring motif among those talking of ‘textual analysis’ nowadays. Under this view, it is simply a skill that is grounded in “looking and listening” closely to what is actually (physically, manifestly) present in individual films and film extracts. In terms reminiscent of a further discussion from David Bordwell, such looking and listening must also be centrally reliant on ‘common sense’ (Bordwell 2011). Dyer’s view of ‘filmic text’ and its analysis then focuses on starting from the image and sound in order to pull out the range of meanings, affects, and emotions that a film or film extract ‘makes available’ for its audience or spectators. In many contexts such an approach is so naturalized as to be indistinguishable from analyzing film as such – after all, each film analysis starts with considering what the films and film segments analyzed may mean for their spectators. Variations (and critiques) surface when the next step is taken, i.e., when it is asked just how such potentials for meanings might be found. Analytic attention then turns to assessing the role and importance of the films’ contexts of production, of their contexts of consumption (audience studies), and of the contexts of cultural knowledge employed when engaging with any ‘text’.

Dyer wishes to argue that, regardless of any such extensions and broadening of attention, engagement with actual film material should be maintained as a constitutive and definitional component of film studies. And, as we shall see below, this is indeed a powerful strategy for avoiding and defusing some of the problems that arise from many of the less restrained notions of what might constitute a ‘text’ that have emerged over the past half-century. The principal and inescapable question remaining is just how that is to be done in a manner that is not only appropriate for film in all the medium’s multimodal richness, but which is also systematic, precise, and rigorous (to any of the standards applicable to ‘humanistic’ knowledge of this kind). This emphasis places the search for suitable methodologies that support more precise practices of film text analysis in a particularly central position, in order to avoid more subjective, individual ‘readings’ where one view is ‘as good’ as any other.

For reasons that we will summarize below, the predominant methodologies currently employed within film studies have come to draw overwhelmingly on literary standards – and this despite one of the critiques of the applicability of ‘text’ in film analysis that Dyer mentions, i.e., that ‘text’ is traditionally very closely bound to the products of (literary) writing. Any such grounding of ‘text’ among the concerns of literature demands that the inherent relationship arising as a consequence between ‘text’ and ‘film’ be theoretically problematized. After all, it takes several steps in abstraction to bring ‘written literature’ and ‘film’ together under a single analytic category in any intelligible fashion; it is by no means considered obvious by all that such steps are worthwhile, or even possible. The development of a path of abstraction by which ‘written text’ and ‘film’ come to be closely related has been supported by the increasingly flexible use made of the notion of ‘text’ itself in literary studies, in cultural studies, and in almost all branches of semiotics. But this very generality brings its own raft of problems.

For many, Dyer included, ‘textual analysis’ and ‘analysis’ come to be treated as more or less synonymous – a certain behavior or artifact, regardless of appropriateness, may be described as ‘text’, or ‘textual’, simply as a by-product of conducting the analysis. For others, ‘text’ as such is a domain of contention and struggle, marking both strong ideological orientations and deep divisions within and across disciplinary discourses (cf. Mowitt 1992). Questions of the cultural and ideological specificity of ‘readings’ of texts, of the ‘boundaries’ (if any) of texts, or of the extent to which ‘texts’ are defined as (and by virtue of) including their interpretations have been discussed in detail. These issues have all worked against the achievement of methodologies capable of supporting textual analysis in its ‘original’ (which we will set out more below) sense of engaging closely with material manifestations. Indeed, the notion of text has often become so diluted and general that it is impossible for the specific textual qualities of individual types of text (e.g., film) to be respected sufficiently for reliable analysis. Much of what is specific to ‘texts’ and their ‘textuality’ then falls out of focus, leading to justified critiques of the relevance and appropriateness of ‘text’ analytic approaches tout court.

This has proved particularly divisive in film studies, as reflected in the carefully patrolled borders still being drawn between literary-culturally inflected film studies, film aesthetics, and approaches building on, or with, the psychology and neuroscience of film. The earlier, more analytic and closely argued textual analyses of individual films that emerged primarily in the 1960s and 1970s (see below) have, over the years, been reconfigured in terms of more impressionistic, distanced readings of film as ‘cultural texts’, what Bordwell (1989) has discussed in terms of ‘symptomatic interpretations’. Some notion of ‘text’ remains over the course of this transitioning, but much of the methodology and precision of those earlier accounts, even if quite limited or more prospective than actual, does not. Indeed, if they appeared today, those very accounts might well face criticism as reductionist, exhibiting insufficient sensitivity to the aesthetics of the medium, lacking attention to historical context or conditions of production, and so on. On the one hand, such critiques are appropriate and necessary because they increase the self-critical reflexivity necessary for analysis of any kind; on the other, they have equally often undermined much of what made those earlier text analyses compelling – i.e., their search and reliance on patterns in the material that is being examined. This aim, which we will take as the hallmark of text analysis, requires far stronger methodological underpinnings to be pursued, methodological underpinnings that current disciplinary borders have made it difficult to articulate.

Much of what we undertake in this collection of articles illustrating different forms of textual analysis directly addresses this methodological difficulty. Our claim is that the primary consequence of diluting the notion of ‘text’ to serve a variety of disciplinary masters has been to compromise precisely those benefits that accrue when more finely articulated notions of ‘textuality’ are allowed to serve as methodological guides for the theory and practice of film analysis. This means that we will be working throughout the book with a more restricted notion of ‘text’, one that is not only capable of regaining the precision of the individual, detailed analysis of particulars seen in early film text work, but which is also responsive to the many advances that have been made since then concerning our understandings of what texts are and how they work as mediators between material artifact and interpretation/response.

To return, then, once more to Dyer’s assessment of the state of film text analysis: we agree both that it is necessary to orient to the ‘text’, the concrete film material supporting an analysis, and that, for this to be anything more than a subjective (if informed) response to what strikes one as ‘significant’ (or not) in the work under study, a stronger methodological construction of what constitutes ‘text’ and its study is essential. This is the ‘new perspectives’ intended in our title: there are understandings of text and textuality that have, as we shall see, moved on considerably from what is commonly addressed in film studies. And these understandings undercut most of the critiques still being brought against the idea of ‘text analysis’ when applied to film. Developments of this kind open up an important area for both discussion and practical work, particularly when we note that Dyer’s call for methodological rigor in his lecture actually remained just that, a call. Suitable methodologies for guiding film analysis beyond simply ‘looking and listening’, even if done with considerable attentiveness, sensitivity, and knowledge, were not forthcoming. This gap is then precisely what the present edited collection of papers responds to.

To prepare the way for the illustrations of method that our contributions present, however, it is necessary to remind ourselves of the long and complex interaction between ‘text’ and film theory that has shaped, and which continues to shape, the field. This background is important to our purpose because presuppositions and judgments concerning both the nature of text and its applicability to film have become as diverse as theories of ‘text’ itself – and these presuppositions and judgments are by no means always supportive of analysis. A short review of the emergence of ‘film text analysis’ within film studies will consequently offer an appropriate contextualization, assist in moving us towards the new perspective on ‘film as text’ that we pursue, and finally, situate that view within a more contemporary constellation of understandings of what ‘text’ can be. This will, in turn, let us approach the diverse analyses offered in the following chapters in a way that brings out more readily their many points of interconnections and common directions for the future, as well as showing their natural differences in orientation and questions posed.

2 The Notion of Filmic Text in Film Theory

Despite reoccurring criticisms, the broad notion of ‘film as text’ has of course accompanied film since the medium’s emergence. Time and again theoreticians and practitioners alike have proposed meaningful ‘text-like’ connections among filmic devices or have discussed similarities between film and language directly. Pudovkin (1926), for example, considered analogies between film images and words. Dziga Vertov, also in the early 1920s, talked of ciné phrase (‘film sentence’) and ciné langue (‘film language-system’). Eisenstein, again from that time, explicitly brought together film and literature, highlighting the ‘organic’ (Eisenstein 1949: 195) relationship across the two by comparing montage structures in both forms. Eisenstein, in fact, drew parallels and similarities in both directions. He argued that the work of the nineteenth-century novelist Charles Dickens was already cinematographic in its organization, while that of the early film-maker David Wark Griffith was equally text-like by virtue of the many specific techniques Griffith introduced for narrating extended stories in film (cf. Wees 1973). By highlighting these narrative or textual functions carried by technical features, such as the use of the close-up “to signify, to give meaning, to designate” as well as montage’s general role as a “means of speaking, a means of communicating ideas” (Eisenstein 1949: 238, 245; emphasis in original), Eisenstein did much to prepare the ground for the long and enduring discussion of the relations between film and verbal text that followed.

This discussion has grown to be extremely complex, with sites of divergence and contrast echoing not only diverse understandings of the nature of text and language but also equally broad variation in attitudes towards the appropriate methods and institutional role of film studies. We cannot do more than scratch the surface of these debates here and there are, in any case, several extensive and historically grounded characterizations available (cf., e.g., Bordwell 1989). Our point will, therefore, be narrower and oriented more to the future than to a review of the past, although the trajectories set up and which we now attempt to push further are, of course, inescapably products of historical development. This must always also be borne in mind. Contributing to these trajectories are not only disciplinary concerns, including the relative importance given to approaches and questions raised in literary studies, studies of narrative, semiotics, aesthetics, and cognition, but also methodological concerns. These concerns include diverging attitudes adopted to the nature and value of scientific method, to the role of creativity and expressiveness in film and its description, as well as to evaluative judgments concerning the aesthetic appropriateness of filmic techniques – as, for example, with André Bazin’s much discussed rejection of montage in favor of deep focus on the grounds of ‘realism’. While the force of many of these debates has moderated with time, their shaping influences remain, marking out ideological boundaries and disciplinary fracture lines still readily discernible in the paradigms practiced today.

We begin by making two of the contributing lines of discussion introduced above more explicit in their own right. The first, theoretically rather more simple, revolved around the issue of whether film could sensibly be considered ‘a language’ at all. Since formulations such as ‘the language of film’ have appeared at least intuitively meaningful, as evidenced by their reoccurrence over the years, it has been necessary to ask on a more theoretical level whether this is just a turn of phrase, a more or less useful metaphor of some kind, or whether it is indicative of a deeper connection between ‘language’ and ‘film’ as communicative practices and/or semiotic systems. Pursuing this, earlier suggestions of more superficial connections, such as for example Pudovkin’s proposals for treating film shots as analogous to words, were made progressively more sophisticated, eventually ending up with the extensive encounters between film theory and semiotics found in the work of Christian Metz, Umberto Eco, Paolo Pasolini, and others (cf. Metz 1966, 1974a, 1974b; Eco 1976; Pasolini 1971). The second line of discussion, considerably more complex, crystallized around the contested notion of ‘text’ itself. The understanding of ‘text’ underwent substantial upheavals in the 1960s, particularly in the context of structuralism and reactions against structuralism – evidenced, for example, in the changing positions of (particularly relevant for film) Roland Barthes (1977). What then might be meant by taking a film to be a ‘text’ at all became a subject of heated debate. Again, interactions concerning varied positions on this question can be observed across film studies and developments in the traditionally ‘text’-oriented disciplines of both semiotics and linguistics, although the three increasingly went their own ways from the 1970s onwards.

Closely entwined and interacting with both lines of discussion have been reoccurring considerations of the nature specifically of film analysis and its appropriate methodologies. Debate, for example, has revolved around whether film analysis should be pursued along the model of the natural sciences, as an ‘empirical-rational’ activity – as already seen with the overtly positivist arguments of filmologie in the 1940s (cf., e.g., Cohen-Séat 1948; Souriau 1951) and now reconfigured in the form of cognitivism and its strong foundations in psychology and the neurosciences (cf., e.g., Bordwell 1989, 2011) – or alternatively draw more on literary styles of interpretation. We see in this latter orientation the full force of approaching ‘text’ as an intrinsically ‘literary’ construct, where the influences exerted by the changing conceptions of ‘text’ from the 1960s and 1970s have had considerable and lasting impact. ‘Text’ then comes to be tracked across a predominantly literary and cultural landscape and constitutes a crucial destabilizing moment which served the valuable task of pushing out the increasingly untenable ‘positivist’ positions of the 1950s and before.

Earlier views, according to which texts were to be analyzed ‘scientifically’ for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of  Table and Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Bringing Together New Perspectives of Film Text Analysis
• 2 Towards a Semiotics of Film Lighting
• 3 Editing Space as an Audio-Visual Composition
• 4 Movie Physics or Dynamic Patterns as the Skeleton of Movies
• 5 From Visual Narrative Grammar to Filmic Narrative Grammar: The Narrative Structure of Static and Moving Images
• 6 From Text to Recipient: Pragmatic Insights for Filmic Meaning Construction
• 7 Intermediality in Film: A Blending-Based Perspective
• 8 Eat, Pray, Love: Expanding Adaptations and Global Tourism
• 9 Conclusion: Film Text Analysis – A New Beginning?
• List of Contributors
• Film Index
• Name Index
• Subject Index