New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

FROM REALISM TO INTERTEXTUALITY 223
Bakhtinian translinguistics provides other conceptual categories which
ease the passage from the textual to the extra-textual. In “The Problem of
Speech Genres” (Bakhtin 1986), Bakhtin provides extremely suggestive
concepts susceptible to extrapolation for the analysis of cinema. Bakhtin
here elaborates his conception of a continuum of speech genres, which
move from the PRIMARY SPEECH GENRES, relatively simple forms like
everyday greetings or the literary aphorism, to SECONDARY SPEECH
GENRES, more complex genres of literary and scientific discourse, from
oral epic to the multi-volume treatise. The spectrum of speech genres thus
ranges all the way from “the short rejoinders of ordinary dialogue”
through everyday narration, the military command, to all the literary
genres (from the proverb to the multi-volume novel) and other “secondary
speech genres” such as major genres of social-cultural commentary and
scientific research. The secondary complex genres draw from the primary
genres of unmediated speech communion and influence them as well in a
process of constant back-and-forth flow. A translinguistic approach to
speech genres in the cinema might correlate the primary speech genres—
familial conversation, dialogue among friends, chance encounters, bossworker
exchange, classroom discussion, cocktail party banter, military
commands—with their secondary cinematic mediation. It would analyze
the etiquette by which the classical Hollywood film, for example, deals
with typical speech situations such as two-person dialogue (usually by the
conventional pingpong of shot/counter-shot), dramatic confrontations (the
verbal stand-offs of the Western and the gangster film), as well as with the
more avantgardist subversions of that etiquette. Godard’s entire career
constitutes a protracted attack on the conventional Hollywood decorum
for handling discursive situations in the cinema, whence his refusal of the
canonical back-and-forth of over-the-shoulder shots for dialogue in favor of
alternative approaches: pendulum-like lateral tracks (Le Mépris), lengthy
single-shot sequences (Masculin, Feminin), and unorthodox positioning of
the bodies of the interlocutors (Vivre sa Vie).
In the social life of the utterance, be that utterance a verbally proffered
phrase, a literary text, a comic strip or a film, each “word” is subject to
rival pronunciations and “social accents.” Bakhtin and his collaborators
invented an entire cluster of terms to evoke the complex social and
linguistic codes governing these rival pronunciations and accents (most of
the terms have simultaneous verbal and musical connotations). Bakhtin
used the term MULTI-ACCENTUALITY to refer to the capacity of the
sign to change meaning depending on the circumstances of use as defined
by dialogic interaction. The appropriateness of these terms to the cinema
becomes obvious when we remember that the fiction film, and especially the
sound film, can be seen as the mise-en-scène of actual speech situations, as
the visual and aural contextualization of speech. Sound cinema is perfectly
qualified to render what Bakhtin calls INTONATION, that phenomenon