New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

10 THE ORIGINS OF SEMIOTICS
close?… Is my voice too loud?”—point to the precise kinds of selecting and
combining involved in making a film.
RUSSIAN FORMALISM
Another important source-movement for contemporary semiotics was
Russian Formalism. The origins of the movement, which flourished
roughly from 1915 through 1930, date back even before the Russian
Revolution to the activities of the Moscow Linguistic Circle, founded in
1915, and to the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (OPOJAZ),
founded in 1916. Roman Jakobson was a leading figure in the Moscow
Linguistic Circle (and later founded the Prague Linguistic Circle in 1926),
while the major figures in OPOJAZ were Victor Shklovsky, Roman
Jakobson, Boris Eikhenbaum and Yury Tynianov. (Todorov’s publication
of French translations of key Formalist texts in Théorie de la Littérature in
1966 indicated not only the importance of Formalist theories for literary
critics but also further solidified the already significant relationship
between Formalism and structuralism.) The Formalists rejected the eclectic
and belletristic critical approaches which had dominated previous literary
study in favor of a scientific approach concerned with literature’s
“immanent” properties, its structures and systems, seen as independent of
other orders of culture and society. The subject of this science was not
literature as a whole or even individual literary texts but rather what the
Formalists called LITERARINESS (LITERATURNOST) i.e. that which
makes a given text a work of literature. Literariness, for the Formalists,
inheres in the form of a text, its characteristic ways of deploying style and
convention, and especially in its capacity to meditate on the qualities of its
form.
The earlier phase of Formalism was dominated by the Futuristinfluenced
polemical writings of Victor Shklovsky, whose 1916 essay “Art as
Technique” (Shklovsky, in Lemon and Reis 1965) was among the first to
outline major Formalist tenets. According to Shklovsky, it is not the
“images” that are crucial in poetry but rather the “devices” deployed for
the arrangement and processing of verbal material. The Formalists
generally downplayed the representational and expressive dimensions of
texts in order to focus on their self-expressive, autonomous, uniquely
literary dimensions. They saw poetic speech as involving a special use of
language which achieves distinctness by deviating from and distorting the
“practical” language of everyday life. (Later, in the work of Jakobson, the
opposition between poetic and practical language was to give way to a less
rigid distinction between poetic and practical functions of language.) While
practical language is oriented toward communication, poetic language has
no practical function but simply makes us see differently by
“defamiliarizing” ambiant objects and “laying bare” the artistic device.