Making Meaning

Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema

David Bordwell

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1991
• Print ISBN:
  9780674543362
  9780674543355
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674252585
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Film & Video

David Bordwell's new book is at once a history of film criticism, an analysis of how critics interpret film, and a proposal for an alternative program for film studies. It is an anatomy of film criticism meant to reset the agenda for film scholarship. As such Making Meaning should be a landmark book, a focus for debate from which future film study will evolve.

Bordwell systematically maps different strategies for interpreting films and making meaning, illustrating his points with a vast array of examples from Western film criticism. Following an introductory chapter that sets out the terms and scope of the argument, Bordwell goes on to show how critical institutions constrain and contain the very practices they promote, and how the interpretation of texts has become a central preoccupation of the humanities. He gives lucid accounts of the development of film criticism in France, Britain, and the United States since World War II; analyzes this development through two important types of criticism, thematic-explicatory and symptomatic; and shows that both types, usually seen as antithetical, in fact have much in common. These diverse and even warring schools of criticism share conventional, rhetorical, and problem-solving techniques—a point that has broad-ranging implications for the way critics practice their art. The book concludes with a survey of the alternatives to criticism based on interpretation and, finally, with the proposal that a historical poetics of cinema offers the most fruitful framework for film analysis.

1

Making Films Mean

For better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.

—Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“I do not know,” remarks Roland Barthes, “if reading is not, constitutively, a plural field of scattered practices, of irreducible effects, and if, consequently, the reading of reading, meta-reading, is not itself merely a burst of ideas, of fears, of desires, of delights, of oppressions.”¹ Barthes’s doubt seems to me too strong; a systematic metacriticism of interpretation is a plausible project. Nonetheless, the task does require some ground-clearing.

Interpretation as Construction

To speak of “interpretation” invites misunderstanding from the outset. The Latin interpretatio means “explanation” and derives from interpres, a negotiator or translator or go-between. Interpretation is then a kind of explanation inserted between one text or agent and another. Originally, interpretation was conceived as wholly a verbal process, but in current usage the term can denote just about any act that makes or transmits meaning. A computer interprets instructions, a conductor interprets a score. A divinator interprets the will of the gods, while at the United Nations an interpreter translates between languages. In the criticism of the arts, interpretation may be counterposed to description or analysis; alternatively, criticism as a whole is sometimes identified with interpretation. A perceptual psychologist may describe the simplest act of hearing or seeing as an interpretation of sensory data, while a philosopher may speak of interpretation as a high-level act of judgment. Our first problem, then, is to interpret “interpretation.”

I start by stipulating some exclusions. Some writers take “interpretation” to be synonymous with all production of meaning.² The chief notion behind this broad usage is that any act of understanding is mediated; even the simplest act of perceptual recognition is “interpretive” in that it is more than a simple recording of sensory data. If no knowledge is direct, all knowledge derives from “interpretation.” I agree with the premise but see no reason to advance the conclusion. Psychologically and socially, knowledge involves inferences. In the chapters that follow I shall use the term interpretation to denote only certain kinds of inferences about meaning. For much the same reason, I shall not be using reading as a synonym for all inferences about meaning, or even for those interpretive inferences about films’ meanings. I reserve the term reading for interpretation of literary texts.³

Introducing the concept of inference enables us to flesh out a common conceptual distinction. Most critics distinguish between comprehending a film and interpreting it, though they would often disagree about where the boundary line is to be drawn. This distinction follows the classic hermeneutic division between ars intelligendi, the art of understanding, and ars explicandi, the art of explaining.⁴ Roughly speaking, one can understand the plot of a James Bond film while remaining wholly oblivious to its more abstract mythic, religious, ideological, or psychosexual significance. On the basis of the comprehension/interpretation distinction, tradition identifies two sorts of meaning, summed up in Paul Ricoeur’s definition of interpretation: “the work of thought which consists in deciphering the hidden meaning in the apparent meaning, in unfolding the levels of meaning implied in the literal meaning.”⁵ Thus comprehension is concerned with apparent, manifest, or direct meanings, while interpretation is concerned with revealing hidden, nonobvious meanings.⁶

To speak of hidden meanings, levels of meaning, and revealing meanings evokes the dominant framework within which critics understand interpretation. The artwork or text is taken to be a container into which the artist has stuffed meanings for the perceiver to pull out. Alternatively, an archaeological analogy treats the text as having strata, with layers or deposits of meaning that must be excavated. In either case, comprehension and interpretation are assumed to open up the text, penetrate its surfaces, and bring meanings to light. As Frank Kermode puts it: “The modern critical tradition, for all its variety, has one continuous element, the search for occulted sense in texts of whatever period.”⁷

Yet to assume that sense is “in” the text is to reify what can only be the result of a process. Comprehending and interpreting a literary text, a painting, a play, or a film constitutes an activity in which the perceiver plays a central role. The text is inert until a reader or listener or spectator does something to and with it. Moreover, in any act of perception, the effects are “underdetermined” by the data: what E. H. Gombrich calls “the beholder’s share” consists in selecting and structuring the perceptual field. Understanding is mediated by transformative acts, both “bottom-up”—mandatory, automatic psychological processes—and “top-down”—conceptual, strategic ones. The sensory data of the film at hand furnish the materials out of which inferential processes of perception and cognition build meanings. Meanings are not found but made.⁸

Comprehension and interpretation thus involve the construction of meaning out of textual cues. In this respect, meaning-making is a psychological and social activity fundamentally akin to other cognitive processes. The perceiver is not a passive receiver of data but an active mobilizer of structures and processes (either “hard-wired” or learned) which enable her to search for information relevant to the task and data at hand. In watching a film, the perceiver identifies certain cues which prompt her to execute many inferential activities—ranging from the mandatory and very fast activity of perceiving apparent motion, through the more “cognitively penetrable” process of constructing, say, links between scenes, to the still more open process of ascribing abstract meanings to the film. In most cases, the spectator applies knowledge structures to cues which she identifies within the film.

Taking meaning-making to be a constructive process does not entail sheer relativism or an infinite diversity of interpretation. I take the informing metaphor seriously. Construction is not ex nihilo creation; there must be prior materials which undergo transformation.⁹ Those materials include not only the perceptual output furnished by mandatory and universal bottom-up processes but also the higher-level textual data upon which various interpreters base their inferences.¹⁰ A composition, a camera movement, or a line of dialogue may be ignored by one critic and highlighted by another, but each datum remains an intersubjectively discriminable aspect of the film. While critics build up meanings by applying institutional protocols and normalized psychological strategies, we shall see that they typically agree upon what textual cues are “there,” even if they interpret the cues in differing ways. Indeed, in Chapter 11 I shall argue that one virtue of a poetics of cinema is that it offers middle-level theoretical concepts that capture intersubjectively significant cues.

Both comprehension and interpretation, then, require the spectator to apply conceptual schemes to data picked out in the film. What sorts of conceptual schemes might be used?

The first candidate might be a theory. A film theory consists of a system of propositions that claims to explain the nature and functions of cinema. Many critics today would assert that, consciously or unconsciously, the interpreter employs some theory in order to pick out relevant cues in the film, organize them into significant patterns, and arrive at an interpretation. For example, to execute a Freudian interpretation of a film is to utilize a theory about, say, how cinema channels desire, and this will affect the selection of data and the inferences which the critic draws from them. Less obviously, many critics would go on to assert that even the critic who claims to subscribe to no theory but seeks only to understand the film “in itself” can be shown to have a tacit theory (humanist, organicist, or whatever) that shapes the interpretive act.

In several respects, I think, theories do play a role in conceptual schemes, particularly in contemporary criticism. There seems little doubt, for instance, that psychoanalytic theories of cinema do assist many critics in making meaning. But we must ask how this assistance takes place. In what sense does the interpretation follow from the theory?

Perhaps the critic’s interpretation tests a theory. That is, a critical exegesis, judged acceptable on grounds of interpretive propriety, functions to confirm, revise, or reject a theoretical argument. This makes the interpretation roughly analogous to the scientific experiment that tests a hypothesis, while the conventional procedures across theoretical schools become something like an accepted scientific method.

In the course of this book I shall be trying to show that no such pure separation of theory and method obtains within film criticism. For now, I simply suggest that film interpretations do not conform to the “testing” model. Unlike a scientific experiment, no interpretation can fail to confirm the theory, at least in the hands of the practiced critic. Criticism uses ordinary (that is, nonformalized) language, encourages metaphorical and punning redescription, emphasizes rhetorical appeals, and refuses to set definite bounds on relevant data—all in the name of novelty and imaginative insight. These protocols give the critic enough leeway to claim any master theory as proven by the case at hand.

Merely finding confirming instances does not suffice as a rigorous test of a theory in any event. This is the error of “enumerative inductivism.” A confirmed scientific hypothesis must also pass the test of “eliminative inductivism”: it must be a better candidate than its rivals.¹¹ At any given time, a scientific claim is tested against a background of alternative theoretical explanations. But this condition is usually not met within the interpretive institution. Even interpretations which tacitly claim to be the most adequate do not characteristically present themselves as confirming one theory at the expense of others.

Instead of positing an inductivist separation of theory and criticism, perhaps we should think of the critic’s interpretation as deductively deriving from the theory. According to this line of argument, no description of anything is conceptually innocent; it is shot through with presuppositions and received categories. Therefore every critical interpretation presupposes a theory of film, of art, of society, of gender, and so on. Stanley Fish pushes this notion toward a thoroughgoing “coherentist” account, whereby every interpretation necessarily confirms some underlying theory; there is no Archimedean point outside the theory on which the interpreter can stand.¹²

On conceptual grounds, the deductivist conception is far from cogent. A theory has conceptual coherence, and it is designed to analyze or explain some particular phenomenon. Assumptions, presuppositions, opinions, and half-baked beliefs do not add up to a theory. My conviction that credit sequences come at the beginning and end of movies, that the film’s star is likely to portray the protagonist, and that Technicolor is aesthetically superior to Eastmancolor does not constitute a theory of film. Nor can a theory be inferred from my entire (very large) stock of such beliefs—a stock which, incidentally, contains fuzzy, slack, and contradictory formulations.

Even if every interpreter tacitly harbored a full-blown theory of film, it would not necessarily determine the details of any given interpretive outcome. Two psychoanalytic critics might agree on every tenet of abstract doctrine and still produce disparate interpretations. In any event, no critic acts as if every theory automatically extruded an interpretation that is challengeable only in terms of that theory. Critic B can agree with Critic A’s putative theory but suggest that certain aspects of the film still need explaining. Or Critic B can accept the interpretation as valuable and enlightening while proceeding to dispute the theory. Neither critic assumes that the theory dictates the interpretation.

So might we simply say that the critic’s interpretation illustrates a theory? Jacques Lacan opens his seminar on Poe’s “Purloined Letter” by announcing: “We have decided to illustrate for you today the truth which may be drawn from that moment in Freud’s thought under study—namely, that it is the symbolic order which is constitutive for the subject—by demonstrating in a story the decisive orientation which the subject receives from the itinerary of the signifier”¹³ In a similar fashion, some theoretically inflected criticism has used films to illustrate the theories proposed.¹⁴

This is a much weaker claim than the inductive and deductive conceptions. To make an interpretation a parable of a theory is not to undertake to establish the truth of the theory. Any doctrine, be it psychoanalysis or Scientology, can be illustrated by artworks. More-over, this proposition runs into a problem already mentioned. If not every set of beliefs relevant to the interpretive act counts as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Making Films Mean
• 2. Routines and Practices
• 3. Interpretation as Explication
• 4. Symptomatic Interpretation
• 5. Semantic Fields
• 6. Schemata and Heuristics
• 7. Two Basic Schemata
• 8. Text Schemata
• 9. Interpretation as Rhetoric
• 10. Rhetoric in Action: Seven Models of Psycho
• 11. Why Not to Read a Film
• Notes
• Index