New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

FROM REALISM TO INTERTEXTUALITY 211
co-presence of two texts” in the form of quotation, plagiarism and
allusion. Although Genette largely restricts himself to literary examples,
one might easily imagine filmic instances of the same procedures.
QUOTATION can take the form of the insertion of classic clips into films:
Peter Bogdanovich quotes Hawks’ The Criminal Code in Targets; Godard
quotes Resnais’ Night and Fog in A Married Woman. Films like Resnais’
Man Oncle d’Amérique, as well as Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid and Zelig
make the citation of pre-existing film sequences a central structuring
principle. ALLUSION, meanwhile, can take the form of a verbal or visual
evocation of another film, hopefully as an expressive means of commenting
on the fictional world of the alluding film. Godard in Contempt alludes,
through a title on a movie theater marquee, to Rossellini’s Voyage in Italy,
a film by one of Godard’s favorite directors which recounts, like Contempt
itself, the slow undoing of a couple. Even an actor can constitute an
allusion, as in the case of the Boris Karloff character in Targets, seen as the
embodiment of old-style Gothic horror, the essential dignity of which
Bogdanovich contrasts with anonymous contemporary mass murder. A
cinematic technique can constitute an allusion: the iris-in to an informer in
Breathless, or the use of Griffith-style masking in Jules and Jim, allude by
the calculatedly archaic nature to earlier periods of film history, while the
subjectivized camera movements and point-of-view structurings in Brian de
Palma’s Body Double allude to the strong intertextual influence of Alfred
Hitchcock.
Indeed, Genette’s highly suggestive categories tempt one to coin
additional terms within the same paradigm. One might speak of
CELEBRITY INTERTEXTUALITY, i.e. filmic situations where the
presence of a film or television star or celebrity intellectual evokes a genre
or cultural milieu (Truffaut in Close Encounters of a Third Kind, Norman
Mailer in Godard’s King Lear, Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall).
GENETIC INTERTEXTUALITY would evoke the process by which the
appearance of the sons and daughters of well-known actors and actresses—
Jamie Lee Curtis, Liza Minelli, Melanie Griffith—evokes the memory of
their famous parents. INTRATEXTUALITY would refer to the process by
which films refer to themselves through mirroring, microcosmic, and miseen-abyme
structures, while AUTO-CITATION would refer to an author’s
self-quotation, as when Vincent Minelli cites his own The Bad and the
Beautiful within Two Weeks in Another Town. MENDACIOUS
INTERTEXUALITY would evoke those texts, e.g. the pseudo-newsreels of
Zelig or the ersatz Nazi films in Kiss of the Spider Woman, which invent a
pseudo-intertextual reference.
PARATEXTUALITY, Genette’s second type of transtextuality, refers to
the relation, in literature, between the text proper and its “paratext”—
titles, prefaces, postfaces, epigraphs, dedications, illustrations, and even
book jackets and signed autographs. The paratext is constituted by all the