New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

FROM REALISM TO INTERTEXTUALITY 193
notion of truth. Dominant cinema inherited from the nineteenth-century
novel a precise kind of textual structuration which positioned the
reader/ spectator in a specific way. Classical texts privileged certain
discourses over others; the narration provided a metalanguage, a site of
unquestioned authority from which the other discourses might be tested,
rejected or approved. The classic text was reactionary not because of any
mimetic inaccuracies but rather because of its authoritarian subjection of
the spectator.
David Bordwell, meanwhile, argued that MacCabe’s view of the novel
was simplistic in comparison to the more nuanced Bakhtinian notion of the
novel as the privileged site of heteroglossia or the competition of
discourses. Both building on and critiquing the work of the cinesemiologists,
Bordwell argued that commonplaces about “transparency”
and invisibility were unhelpful in dealing with the narrational procedures
of the classical film. In Narration in the Fiction Film, Bordwell delineates
these procedures in so far as they concern the classical Hollywood cinema.
Combining issues of denotative representation and dramaturgical
structure, Bordwell highlights the ways in which CLASSICAL
HOLLYWOOD NARRATION constitutes a particular configuration of
normalized options for representing the story and manipulating style. The
classical Hollywood film, he argues, presents psychologically defined
individuals as its principal causal agents, struggling to solve a clear-cut
problem or to attain specific goals, the story ending either with a resolution
of the problem or a clear achievement or non-achievement of the goals.
Causality revolving around character provides the prime unifying principle,
while spatial configurations are motivated by realism as well as
compositional necessity. Scenes are demarcated by neo-classical criteria—
unity of time, space and action. Classical narration tends to be omniscient,
highly communicative and only moderately self-conscious. If time is
skipped over, a montage sequence or scrap of dialogue informs us; if a
cause is missing, we are informed about its absence. Classical narration
poses as an “editorial intelligence” that selects certain stretches of time for
full-scale treatment, pares down others, and presents others in a highly
compressed fashion, while presumably scissoring out inconsequential
events. Classical style, meanwhile, (1) treats film technique as a vehicle for
the syuzhet’s transmission of fabula information; (2) encourages the
spectator to construct a coherent, consistent time and space of the fabula
action, and (3) consists of a limited number of technical devices organized
into a stable paradigm and ranked probabilistically according to syuzhet
demands. (Lighting, for. example, may be “high-lit” or “low-key,” threepoint
or single-source, diffuse or concentrated. In a comedy, high-key
lighting is more probable.)