New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

210 CINEMATIC REALISM
sociologistic paradigms interested only in extrinsic class-biographical and
ideological determinations. Bakhtin attacks the limitation of the literary
scholar-critic’s interest exclusively to the “literary series,” arguing for a
more diffuse dissemination of ideas as interanimating all the “series,”
literary and non-literary, as they are generated by what he calls the
“powerful deep currents of culture.” Literature, and by extension the
cinema, must be understood within what Bakhtin calls the “differentiated
unity of the epoch’s entire culture” (1986:5).
Dialogism operates, then, within all cultural production, whether literate
or non-literate, verbal or non-verbal, highbrow or lowbrow. The
contemporary film artist, within this conception, becomes the orchestrator,
the amplifier of the ambiant messages thrown up by all the series—literary,
painterly, musical, cinematic, commercial and so forth. A film like The
Band Wagon, as Geoffrey Nowell-Smith points out (in Narremore, 1991:
16–18), is a virtual melting-pot of “high” and “low” artistic discourses,
with references to ballet, folk art, Broadway, Faust, Mickey Spillane and
film noir. This inclusive view of intertextuality would see a film like
Woody Allen’s Zelig as the site of intersection of innumerable intertexts,
some specifically filmic (newsreels, archival material, home movies,
television compilation films, “witness” documentaries, cinema verité, film
melodrama, psychological case-study films like Spellbound, “fictive
documentaries” like F for Fake, and more immediate fiction-film
predecessors like Warren Beatty’s Reds); others literary (the Melvillean
“anatomy”), and some broadly cultural (Yiddish theatre, Borscht-Belt
Comedy). The film’s originality, paradoxically, lies in the audacity of its
imitation, quotation and absorption of other texts, its ironic hybridization
of traditionally opposed discourses. 9
Partially inspired by Bakhtin’s notion of the generating series, Kristeva
distinguished between the PHENO-TEXT, i.e. the “outside” or
“remainder” of the signifiance of the text, the “flat” surface of its
structured signification, but which bears traces of the productivity of the
GENO-TEXT, i.e. the process of productivity itself, the “operation of the
generation of the phenotext.” While the pheno-text is “available” for
formal, linguistic analysis, the geno-text has to do with the play of
signifiers before meaning. To study the geno-text is to study the operations
of textuality itself.
TRANSTEXTUALITY
Building on Bakhtin and Kristeva, Gerard Genette in Palimpsestes (1982)
proposed a more inclusive term, TRANSTEXTUALITY, to refer to “all
that which puts one text in relation, whether manifest or secret, with other
texts.” Genette posits five types of transtextual relations. He defines
INTERTEXTUALITY, more restrictively than Kristeva, as the “effective