New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

FROM REALISM TO INTERTEXTUALITY 213
ARCHITEXTUALITY, Genette’s fourth category of transtextuality,
refers to the generic taxonomies suggested or refused by the titles or
infratitles of a text. Architextuality has to do with a text’s willingness, or
reluctance, to characterize itself directly or indirectly in its title as a poem,
essay, novel, film. In literature, Genette points out, critics often refuse a
text’s self-designation, arguing, for example, that a certain “tragedy” by
Corneille is not “really” a tragedy. (Juri Lotman, in the same vein, speaks
of GENRE MISTAKES, situations where critics are induced into
misattributing a given generic status to a film, and thus confusing the film’s
textual characteristics.) A text’s refusal to designate itself homogeneously,
meanwhile, often provokes debate about the text’s “real” genre or
conflation of genres. (A Bakhtinian approach would allow for the multigeneric
status of a text.) Fielding’s characterization of Joseph Andrews as a
“comic epic poem in prose” or Godard’s description of Contempt as a
“tragedy in long shot” (a scrambling of Chaplin’s famous definition of
tragedy as close-up and comedy as long-shot) are designed to prod the
critics/readers/spectators toward more complex responses.
Some film titles align a text with literary antecedents. Sullivan’s Travels
evokes Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and, by extension, the satiric mode. The
title of Woody Allen’s Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy begins by alluding
to Shakespeare and ends with a comic fall into prurience, all the while
echoing Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night. Coppola’s Apocalypse Now
offers a disenchanted 1970s variation on a famous Utopian theatrical
performance of the 1960s, the Living Theater’s Paradise Now. Other titles
signal a sequel: Return of…Son of…Rocky V. The graphic and linguistic
unconventionality of the titles of many avant-garde films—Paul Sharits’
T.O.U.C.H.I.N.G. — announce a similar unconventionality in cinematic
approach. Although a film need not designate itself as, first and foremost, a
film, certain reflexive film-makers have chosen to accentuate the obvious in
their titles: Mel Brook’s Silent Movie, Bruce Conner’s A Movie. The
extended literary “subtitles” of certain films: Doctor Strangelove: Or How
I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb; A Married Woman:
Fragments of a Film Made in 1964—finally, suggest a kind of
rapprochement with literary practices.
HYPERTEXTUALITY, Genette’s fifth type of transtextuality, is
extremely suggestive for film analysis. Hypertextuality refers to the relation
between one text, which Genette calls hypertext, to an anterior text or
HYPOTEXT, which the former transforms, modifies, elaborates or
extends. In literature, the Aeneid’s hypotexts include The Odyssey and The
Iliad, while the hypotexts of Joyce’s Ulysses include The Odyssey and
Hamlet. Both the Aeneid and Ulysses are hypertextual elaborations of a
single hypotext—The Odyssey. Virgil recounts the adventures of Aeneas in
a manner generically and stylistically inspired by Homeric epic. Joyce
transposes the central mythos of The Odyssey into twentieth-century