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Alicja
Helman
One thing can be said of film, television and theater performance - they are definitely practices of audiovisual communication. There are no concise and comprehensive concepts which grasp all the rules governing this communication. There is no convincing proof that there exists a system which determines such communication, nor can the existence of such a system be excluded. It is generally known that various audiovisual messages refer to communication systems which existed before, but it is not known whether these potential communication systems at a particular time and place may create a specific system governed by certain rules. Some authors claim that such a system exists, others reject such a system and say that the ultimate instance which governs the audio-visual message semiosis is the structure of a given message.
Not much is known about the signs, the components of audio- visual messages. There appears a basic difficulty concerning their decomposition into constitutive parts being equivalents (precise or analogous) of the distinctive units of verbal language. There is the difference between mechanical division of film tape into frames, shots and reels and the articulation of the senses of the audiovisual message.
It can be said about a painting or a sculpture that from the sign point of view it is a primary and nondivisible unity; more precisely, it is a unity which does not result from combina- tion processes satisfying the rules of a certain syntax. For ana- lytical purposes we can divide the unity into fragments - spots, lines, angles or objects and into parts there of - remembering at the same time that a picture does not constitute their sum.
It cannot be said, however, that a film, a television or theater performance constitute one sign in the same sense as a sculpture and a picture. We know intuitively that we deal here not with one sign but with a number of signs, a flow of signs. What next then?
This is where universal agreement ends and a possibility of choice between various concepts arises. These can be divided into two groups :
- according to the first one, there exist things like a film sign, a television sign and a theater sign, although it is not known how to isolate these signs in particular messages and what relations exist between them ;
- according to the second one, film, theater or television signs do not exist. Particular messages bring the signs characteristic of the languages or codes which create them, or the messages form the codes which, while being coexistent, do not form any global signs. Most theories, formulated in the last fifteen years, have assumed that there exist no units corresponding to phonemes, monemes and sentences in the audiovisual messages. The category which begins both perception and analysis, is the utterance. Thus, the only possible syntactic film theory is the great syntagmatics by Metz, who dealt with this problem at the narration level and distinguished the types of narrative segments in film. Syntagmatics performs the function of syntax since, according to Metz, no other syntax is possible in film. The syntagmatic chain in film is linked by narration. Each syntagmatic event of a particular filmic character assumes an association between at least two motives in two images (editing) or in the image itself (camera movements or even static implications). Syntagmatics functions thanks to procedures which make its existence obligatory, namely the logics of implication and induction .
If we agree that utterances are the only units the existence and functioning of which in the audiovisual messages can be postulated without any doubt, then we may ask whether this implies that the utterances are further indivisible, similarly as paintings and sculptures.
We can choose here among three possible answers:
- utterances cannot be divided into smaller units;
- utterances probably
can be divided into smaller units but we do not know how to do this;
-
utterances can be divided into smaller units but this process remains hidden to
the receiver and must remain so if film percep- tion is to be possible at all.
The first two attitudes can be left without comment - their nature seems to be obvious. The third attitude is favored by the semiotic theories stemming from psychoanalysis. Jean - Louis Baudry's concept can be the most comprehensive illustration of this thesis. The author states:
"The projection operation (projector and screen) restore continuity of movement and the temporal dimension to the sequen- ce of static images. [...] The effect of meaning does not depend solely no the content of the images but also on the material procedures by which an illusion of continuity, dependent on the persistence of vision, is restored from discontinuous elements. These separate frames differ one from another which is necessary for the creation of an illusion of continuity, of a continous passage (movement, time). However, the differences are capable of creating the illusion in one particular circumstances: when they become effacted as differences.[...] The mechanical apparatus both selects the minimal difference and represses it in the projection, so that the meaning could be constituted; this refers simultaneously to direction, continuity nad movement. The projection mechanism allows the differential elements (the discontinuity inscribed by the camera) to be suppressed, bringing only the relation into play. The individual images as such disappear to make space for movement and continuity. However, the movement and continuity are the visible expression [...] of their relations, derived from the discontinuities between the images" .
This the way the problems of non-continuity and discrete units could be introduced anew, the problems which could not be solved by linguistics. However, if we want to discuss the prob- lems of "visual expression", the question of the primary unity of utterances with regards to its meaning becomes the crucial issue.
The semiotic definition of utterance is, from the material point of view, the same as the technical definition of a shot. This is a unit contained between two cuts or editing figures; thus, it is univocally determined by the time and space. There can be no doubt as to what is and what is not a shot in a film. The situation in television seems to be more difficult because of the difference in technique. Let us confine ourselves, for the sake of simplicity, to film. The identification of a shot with an ut- terance is a doubtful and unsure operation. It is possible to postulate this identification as an approximate working hypothe- sis. Certainly, there exist shots which can be considered uttera- nces (or vice versa, regardless of the point of view) but we must remember that there exist utterances composed of several shots and shots containing several utterances.
What links a shot with an utterance is their more or less au- tonomous relation to the whole message. A shot is a unit expres- sed by technical means which can, but need not, be at the same time an utterance, ie an independent meaningful unit. Comparison of a shot-utterance to a picture understood as an indivisible sign seems to be very easy in the case of a sequence of short shots connected by means of cutting, where the time coefficient and the movement do not play any important role. But how to interpret long, ten-minute-take of Hitchcock`s film or, in general, the shots the meaning of which is given successively in a certain time interval? Shall we assume that such a shot is presented as a revolving sculpture, arelief or a Japanese picture which has the form of a scroll? This would mean that we accept the assumption that the time coefficient has an exterior character, not the constitutive one.
Or, should we perceive such an utterance in the same way as we do with the literary utterance and not a plastic one, i.e. as a unity composed of a sequence of signs?
Again, we are confronted with the problem of division of an utterance into smaller meaningful units and must ask ourselves why it cannot be done.
Let us turn to a comparison to a work of music. The simplest way to describe it would be to say that it consists of sounds, which are easy to distinguish both in the melody sequence as in the chord composition. We can hear them and put them down as separate units of their own pitch, intensity, duration. Similarily, their relations with other units are precisely defined. Electronic techniques, however, produce both constant sound transmissions in the horizontal order and cohesive vertical clusters in the place of chords. Thus, discontinuity, so fundamental for music has been replaced by continuity. Particular sounds have no borders, they are transmitted one into another without any break. For instance, the pitch may change but neither our senses nor the score will help us grasp the moment of transition. A similar thing happens with film, television and theater performances. Following Baudry`s understanding of the concept of eliminated differences (the process which takes place at another level), we perceive a flow of pictures and are awa- re of that fact that there occur changes which are the source of a new meaning. However, neither in the course of the film nor in its graphic representation can we show the moment of transition from one meaning of the sign to another.
Common sense resists such a thesis. In film we deal with pictures, with a sequence of pictures which change and follow one after another. It is known when a picture changes. However, when hard editing or stylistic figures do not come into the picture then nothing is known. The questions about sign border and about picture border are closely connected. If we could answer one of these questions then we would also be able to answer the others.
In the light of all these problems it is clear why it is necessary to identify a shot and an utterance in analytical operations. We get thereby a clearly defined basis for all possible kinds of research procedures.
In consequence, the editing of shots should be understood as a syntax of utterances, which are narration segments. Metz`s theses are here the most famous, but, nevertheless, almost all other texts devoted to syntax adopt similar approach regardless of whether they are subjected to the rigors of theory or not.
In film the semantic information is conveyed according to certain rules explicated in handbooks or tacitly assumed by the creators and the audience. The rules concern the editing of shots or scenes within a sequence thereby operating on the level of large meaningful units. Thus, the notion of film syntax functions with respect to this set of rules, although contemporary authors most often realize that syntax understood in this way does not correspond exactly to the syntax of the verbal language. The only exception here is John Carroll` model in which the grammar of film is assumed to resemble the transformational-generative model of linguistic grammar. In his ideas, the author consistently followed Chomsky's method .
However, one may challenge the assumptions adopted by Carroll. He tests film sequences in the same manner as one would with the verbal language sentences. Besides, he identifies the "native speaker of language" with an "experienced film viewer" who is able to decide whether the formed sequences are correct or not.
Carroll's model rejects ambiguous, paradoxical and confu- sing sequences belonging to the idiolects suggested by modern artists. The films by Resnais or Bunuel would be unacceptable ex definition.
Worth claims that the notion of syntax as applied to film is a "metaphor" because the images produce an effect in themselves, out- side the framework of language and it is only the "faculte de langage", universally present in receivers, that makes us refer linguistic rules to all symbolic messages .
Metz, as I have already mentioned, replaces the notion of syntax with the concept of syntagmatics while other authors, e.g. Jerry Lee Salvaggio, retain the notion of syntax but with a univocal reservation that the syntax is nonlinguistic here . Taking the event in space as an equivalent of a unit participating in syntax processes, Salvaggio assumes the existence of a syntax of film language which, contrary to the syntax of verbal language, must remain unexplicit. "An event in space" is, in other words, a shot the author identifies with an utterance. The explicitness of rules is out of the question because there would have to be infinite number of them. Some authors try to enumerate the basic rules, Salvaggio himself formulates 17 such rules. These rules form the group reluctantly and rarely violated by the creators who deliberately break other rules.
Thus, the pragmatics of film communication is based on a system of explicit and implicit rules, the latter of which, although not named, are internalized by the audience. Both kinds of rules together give rise to a system of expectations. The syntax rules discussed here are something else than the variable stylistic norms, since the former, in contrast to the latter, remain unchanged or change very slowly. In this sense, one could claim that a typical film employs the language of Griffith, early Ford and Murnau.
Hence, if the notion of syntax applied to film seems to be metaphorical, then the metaphor is not an empty structure, an unwarranted borrowing from linguistics, but refers to a set of rules enabling an articulation of messages comprehensible to the audience. The syntax we speak of here, no matter whether in inverted commas or not, is in fact, as we already said, a syntax of utterance.
Metz's proposals were subjected to multi-sided sharp criticism but have so far not been replaced, by any other new concepts. However, I am particualrly interested in the syntax within a shot and within an utterance. A film shot has not only a temporal dimension but also a spatial dimension. It is an area which combines signs which are related one to another in various ways, not only in a sequence. Most of these relations can be placed in the dimension of depth and are simultaneously realized between the visual and the sound components of a shot.
The problems of "spatial syntax" have been known to linguists for a hundred years. The problems appeared when the aboriginal sign languages were studied. We mean the Plains Sign Language used by the North-American Indians in particular. It was obvious to the researches that languages which make use of the visual channels of communication differ from the spoken languages as far as the principle of successivity and simultaneity were concerned. West wrote about "spatial syntax" that "the obligatory grammatical relationships are established not by the temporal order or syntax but by spatial relationships, both within the execution of a single sign and between positions of execution of succeeding signs" .
Mallery applied the notion of "sign picture" which was later taken over by Scott who wrote:
"A conversation in the sign language resembles a series of moving pictures, and as the relations between object's actions in such pictures are represented by the relative posi- tions and sequence, and are evident to the eye, so are those expressed in the sign pictures when viewed by a person trained to see with the eye of a non-civilized man [...] .
An obvious association with the mimical-gesture systems of the silent cinema comes to mind. Sticking to this analogy, it is possible to extrapolate the systems into the sound cinema, because researches know of numerous cases of the sign language used together with the spoken language. Numerous opinions of the authors who deal with these problems have been summed up by Sebeoks:
"Aboriginal sign language when used with the spoken language, can be compared with pictorial illustrations to written texts. Both words and sign have their own meaning in reference to their respective semiotic system, yet each influences the interpretation of other, the visual image amplifying the verbal and vice versa. This type of intersemiotic activity must be viewed as a unique and complex process of mutual interpretation" .
The same assumptions are adopted by the theoreticians of audiovisual communication, especially by film theoreticians. It is also possible to point out the existence of other relations which connect research on the aboriginal sign languages and the research on audiovisual messages, but no concept of spatial syntax formulated expressis verbis has appeared so far.
Some intuitive theses were formulated by Pier Paolo Pasolini . However, no other theoretician has elaborated on them, because the author took into account the model of verbal language and developed the concept of relation between a shot and the objects that are contained in a shot. Taking a shot as an equivalent of a moneme, Pasolini tried to prove the existence of a double articulation in film pointing at the object in the frame, called by him the cinema, as a unit equivalent to the verbal language phoneme.
This concept has been criticized many times and it seems futile to once again summarize the objections raised by other authors. It is suffice to remember that the photographed object has none of the properties of a phoneme and that its function in a frame cannot be compared with the function of a phoneme. Nevertheless, the idea that the mutual relations between particular objects and behaviors within a frame are important is in a sense right. One should add that in order to decipher the semiosis of a cinematic utterance it is not enough to take into consideration only objects and behaviors. Pasolini could restrict his opinions to them because he treated cinema as "semiology of reality" and as a "written language of this reality". But all concepts of cinema, not only in semiotic ones, seem to recognize the "sign transformations" of the world on screen in relation to the profilmic world. The very process of making a film is not a mys- terious alchemy which transforms objects into signs. On the contrary, the methods and techniques used by film makers prove the existence of a variety of semiotic strategies which can be seen, but do not exist in spoken languages.
The most explicit example of this is the phenomenon described as the narration connected with the deep focus. It consists in a simultaneous presentation of a situation which literature, or any other verbal description, could present only in the linear order. A certain succession, a certain event with its phrases and phases is shown as an icon.
Decoding this type of messages - as Miller noted when writing not about film but about aboriginal sign languages - "the internal composition or sequence of sign is not recalled by the addressee, while the general meaning, or "picture" of the whole sequence is retained in the memory" .
Let us take a shot from Citizen Kane by Orson Welles which presents an episode from the protagonist's childhood, the episode which determines his fate. The content of the frame is distributed in three planes. In the first plane Thatcher, a newcomer from the town, talks to Kane's mother; in the second plane the boy's father is seen surrounded by the objects which prove that the house is poor and modest; deep in the background, through the window, a boy is seen playing with a sled. The arrangement of the three centers reveals the relations between the persons.
Deprived of subjectivity, a little boy deep in the frame is an object of an argument between the Mother (a dominating figu- re) and Thatcher who oppose the Father (a subordinated figure). The Mother and Thatcher want to bring up the boy in such a way that would be appropriate for the future owner of a big fortune. The Father argues for leaving the child in the family, but his arguments are defeated. One glance at the spatial arrangement allows to embrace and understand the relations which are not conveyed by the dialogue. The dialogue brings the questions important for the development of the plot, and raises our doubts as to the spatial relations between people and objects.
Welles`s techniques are not intended to present the world which would bring the effect of neutrality; on the contrary, it gives "strange" pictures, the "artificial nature" of which requires the interpretation of meaningful elements. The sizes of objects are not natural, the contrast of light and shade is over stressed, the relations of elements in the frame are subordinated to the preplanned meanings, not to their probability. The shots from the ground make Kane monumental. He seems to crush anybody who wants to get into closer contact with him. The shots from above make a person smaller and unimportant. Kane's second wife is shown almost always in such a way so as to obtain the psychological of annihilation. A camera takes the person from a certain height both when the person hangs about the scene and when it "disappears" in huge, empty, dead and infinitely spreading halls.
Film, television and theater have at their disposal a potentially infinite number of objects and the infinite number of meaningful relations between them, since audiovisual media offer great opportunities for the creators.
The organizational foundations of the underlying sign space which is the space for a shot are not easy to identify. On the one hand, when we analyze a particular film we are able to define a number of examples of intra-shot relations significant for the process of creating the meaning, but on the other, if we describe numerous forms of film expression which are possible within a shot, still we would be far from indicating a system of laws constituting hypothetical spatial syntax. We may refer to the set of numerous implicit rules which function on the assumption that the shots may have different form and content.
Worth claims that the shots are arranged into sequences according to the information the creator wishes to com- municate . I would paraphrase this and suggest that the internal structure of a shot is subordinated to that same commu- nicative intention; ie. to what appears as meaningful on the screen. I shall repeat the conviction, implicit in many film theories, that the form of the image is more meaningful than its content. The hierarchy of planes, size relations, form contrasts, color relations, differences and similarities, distance and proximity, mutual "illumination" of objects, the multifaceted symbolicity of representations - all strike our perception as a simultaneousness of many meaningful references. The iconographic-iconologic analysis may be useful in the interpretation of those meanings but we also need another type of analysis that would determine the sets of rules, if any, governing the meaning relations within a shot, i.e. a syntactic analysis (if we still use the metaphor of spatial syntax to describe this phenomenon).
The question arises why we should resort to this vague metaphor, if we can use the notion of composition here. However, it seems to be even less useful than syntax, since it refers to creative activities, idiolects, functioning in virtue of abstract laws which enable communication through such means.
"Of course, to some extent, an ability to interpret perspective is necessary in order to infer meaning from a perspective drawing, but it seems to me a distortion, or at least not very helpful device, to refer to such conventions in perspective as the language or grammar of pictures" .
Nevertheless, we can say that there exists "something" that ought to be related to another "something" if the pictorial mea- ning is to be communicated and received. The terms taken from linguistics are tools that enable us to articulate the subject matter; we know instinctively what the researcher has in mind when he speaks of "language" and "syntax" in the context of film. The early film semiotics sought the analogies or equiva- lents of linguistic categories while contemporary semiotics deli- berately stresses the "nonlinguistic" meaning of these notions.
Thus, the structure of shots is governed by a set of abstract laws which form the basis of each image and which are generally obeyed by film-makers; which does not mean, however, that they are inviolable. It seems to me that the objective of research should not consist in enumerating the operational rules, but in formulating the questions as to the system which generated them.
That is why we may look for the principles by means of which we read the multiple meanings and relations in the space deli- mited by the shot frame. Does our "faculte de langage" cause that we perceive them in linear order, as it is claimed by for example Eisenstein who believed that we read images from left to right? . Does there exist a hierarchy of meaning relations wit- hin the shot and is it at all identified by the viewer? Do there exist primary and secondary meanings within the shot? Do particular meanings undergo summation, or do they form the product, and should they be considered in such categories at all? Do partial meanings augment each other, or neutralize each other, and in which cases do they do so? Are there "strong" and "weak" orders within the shot?
Film theory has always attached less importance to the autonomous meaning of shots. In the 1920s Soviet theories downright disregarded what the formalists used to call the "frame semantics", on the contrary, Soviet theoreticians confined their studies to the "semantics of editing" . More contemporary theoreticians were also concentrated primarily on the problem of contextual meaning and on investigating relations between shots in a sequence.
The analysis of rules and regularities governing the spatial syntax of the shot will not only restore the unsettled balance of film studies but, as I believe, will make it possible to descend to lower level than the syntax of utterance, ie, to the region of the most elementary principles of audio-visual communication.
Notes:
1. Metz, Ch. 1972, The language of Film. New York.
2. Baudry, J.-L., 1974-75, Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus, "Film Quarterly", vol. XXVII, no 2.
3. Carroll, J., 1980, Toward a Structural Psychology of the Cinema. The Hague.
4. Worth, S., 1982, Pictures Can't Say Ain't [in:] Film Culture. Ed. by Sari Thomas. London.
5. Salvaggio, J. L., 1980, A Theory of Film Language. New York.
6. Mont West Jr., La, 1960, The sign language. An analysis. Unedited doctor's disertation. Indiana University - Bloomington.
7. Mallery, G., 1972, Sign language among North American Indians compared with that among other people and deaf-mutes. The Hague. (First edition Washington 1881).
8. Scott, H., L., 1989, The sign language of the Plains Indians, "Archives of the International Folklore Association", no 1.
9. Umiker-Sebeok, J., Sebeok, T., 1977, Aboriginal sign "languages" from a semiotic point of view, "Ars Semiotica: International Journal of American Semiotics", no 1/4.
10. Pasolini, P., P., 1966, La lingua scritta dell'azione, "Nuovi Argomenti", no 2.
11. Miller, W., R., 1982, Report on the sign language of the Western Desert (Australia) [in:] Aboriginal sign languages of the America and Australia, vol II, ed. Th. A. Sebeok, D. Jean Umiker- Sebeok, New York.
12. Worth, S., 1968, Cognitive Aspects of Sequence [in:] "Audio- Visual Communication Review", vol. 16, no 2.
13. Worth, S., Pictures Can't Say Ain't... p.107
14. Eisenstein, S., 1940, Vertykal montaz, "Iskusstvo kino", no. 9.
15. Kraiski, G., ed., 1971, I fomalisti russi nel cinema. Milano.