New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

FROM REALISM TO INTERTEXTUALITY 195
books as Geoffrey NowellSmith’s Visconti (1968) and Peter Wollen’s Signs
and Meaning in the Cinema (1969). The auteur-structuralists put the
director’s name in quotation marks, to emphasize their view of the author
as critical construct rather than an originary, biographical flesh-and-blood
person.
Both structuralism and post-structuralism relativized the notion of
the author as the sole originating and creative source of the text. For
Barthes, the “author” became a kind of by-product of writing. The author
was never more than the instance writing, just as linguistically the subject “I”
is nothing more than the instance saying “I”. Barthes spoke, somewhat
demogogically, of the “death of the author” and the consequent “birth of
the reader” (Barthes 1977:148). Foucault, meanwhile, foresaw a future
“pervasive anonymity of discourse.” The film author, as a consequence of
the post-structuralist attack on the originary subject, tended to shift from
being the generating source of the text to becoming merely a term in the
process of reading and spectating, a space where discourses intersect, a
shifting configuration produced by the intersection of a group of films with
historically constituted ways of reading and viewing.
Since the concept of writing is performative, rather than one of mere
transcription, it implicitly undermines the mimetic view which regards the
work as a mirror-like reflection of pre-existing reality. For Barthes and the
contributors to Tel Quel, ECRITURE evoked avant-garde literary
practices, as well as the philosophical concept elaborated by Jacques
Derrida. Saussurean linguistics, Derrida argued, systematically devalued
writing; while the voice is seen as the source and sign of truth and
presence, writing is regarded as secondary and derivative. But for Derrida
écriture refers to whatever resists the centrifugal force of logocentric
discourse of speech-aspresence, undoing logocentrism through the tropings
of textuality. DECONSTRUCTION, for Derrida (although Derrida
himself employed the term but rarely) was the critical activity which drew
out the contradictory logics of sense and implication within philosophical
or literary texts. By calling attention to the figurative gestures of the text,
deconstruction exposed the extent to which all that was consciously
excluded from the text, all that was pushed to the margins, was in fact
necessary to its organization. Derridean deconstruction undercuts the
binary structures on which logocentric thought is presumed to be based:
reality/appearance, inside/outside, subject/object, destabilizing dualisms by
disrupting the illusion of priority which coalesces around one of the terms.
FROM “WORK” TO “TEXT”
Semioticians preferred to speak not of films but of texts. The concept of
text (etymologically “tissue,” “weave”) tended to emphasize the film not as
an imitation of reality but rather as an artifact, a construct. The term had