New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

192 CINEMATIC REALISM
the concept of subject positioning was superfluous to politicalideological
analysis, since the subject’s subordination to the reigning social order was
better explained by what Marx called the “dull compulsion of economic
relations” than by any hypothesis concerning subject-construction.
THE CLASSIC REALIST TEXT
The impression of reality in the cinema, semioticians argued, was also
reinforced by conventions of narrative construction. The notion of
CLASSICAL CINEMA, first formulated by Bazin but subsequently
extended and critiqued by others, denotes a set of formal parameters
involving practices of editing, camera-work and sound. Classical cinema
evokes the reconstitution of a fictional world characterized by internal
coherence, plausible and linear causality, psychological realism, and the
appearance of spatial and temporal continuity. This continuity was
achieved, in the classical period of the Hollywood film, by an etiquette for
introducing new scenes (a choreographed progression from establishing
shot to medium shot to close shot); conventional devices for evoking the
passage of time (dissolves, iris effects); conventional techniques to render
imperceptible the transition from shot to shot (position matches, direction
matches, movement matches, and inserts to cover up unavoidable
discontinuities); and devices for implying subjectivity (subjective shots,
shot-reaction shots, eyeline matches, empathetic music). The classical
realist film stood for TRANSPARENCY, i.e. the attempt to efface traces of
the “work of the film,” making it pass for “natural,” and thus reproducing
the vague and non-theorized world of common sense, i.e. of dominant
ideology in Althusser’s sense. Film semioticians also drew on Barthes
notion of fictional REALITY EFFECTS, i.e. the artistic orchestration of
apparently inessential details as guarantors of authenticity, designed, in the
Barthesian perspective, to engender a tacit acquiescence in the ideology of
verisimilitude. The representational accuracy of the details was less
important than their role in creating the optical illusion of truth. By
effacing the signs of their production, “dominant” cinema persuaded
spectators to take constructed simulations as transparent renderings of the
real.
It was through such procedures, by combining the codes of visual
perception introduced in the Renaissance with the codes of narration
dominant in the nineteenth century, that the classical fiction film acquired
the emotional power and diegetic prestige of the realistic novel. Indeed, in
its dominant mode, the cinema prolonged the aesthetic regime and the
social function of the nineteenth-century mimetic novel. It was within this
perspective that Colin MacCabe spoke of the CLASSIC REALIST TEXT,
definable as a literary or filmic text in which a clear hierarchy orders the
discourses composing the text, a hierarchy defined in terms of an empirical