New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

12 THE ORIGINS OF SEMIOTICS
battleground between rival elements or codes. The Formalists came more
and more to see artistic texts as dynamic systems in which textual moments
are characterized by a DOMINANT, i.e. the process by which one
element, for example rhythm or plot or character, comes to dominate an
artistic text or system. Although first conceptualized by Tynianov, the
concept is best known to us as developed by Jakobson in his essay “The
Dominant,” where it is defined as “the focusing component of a work of
art: it rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components. It is the
dominant which guarantees the integrity of the structure…” 1 As Jakobson
develops it, the notion applies not only to the individual poetic work, but
also to the poetic canon and even to the art of a given epoch when seen as
a totality. (In the Romantic period, for example, supreme value was
assigned to music.)
Another aspect of Russian Formalist theory subsequently taken up by
contemporary film theorists is the notion of INNER SPEECH. This
concept, very much “in the air” in the Soviet Union of the late 1920s and
early 1930s, was formulated with the greatest depth and precision by the
psychologist Lev Vygotsky, in essays ultimately collected in the volume
Thought and Language, first published in 1934. Influenced by Jean Piaget’s
investigations into the speech behavior of pre-school children, Vygotsky
posited the existence of a modality of speech, having origins in childhood
but continuing into adult life, which entailed a verbalized mode of intrapsychic
signification, a flux of dialogue within the individual
consciousness. Inner speech is characterized by a radically altered and
abbreviated syntax, a tendency to syncretic imagery, and condensations
and syntagmatic distortions. Boris Eikhenbaum posited inner speech as a
kind of discursive glue which holds the meaning of films together in the
spectator’s mind. The director constructs the film in such a way as to elicit
the appropriate inner speech in the consciousness of the spectator.
Eikhenbaum also discusses film images which translate, as it were, the
colloquialisms of natural language, where linguistic tropes provide an
anchorage for meaning. (We will discuss the ways that these ideas were
developed in the 1970s in Part II.)
THE BAKHTIN SCHOOL
During the later period of Russian Formalism, the so-called “Bakhtin
Circle” or “Bakhtin School” developed a provocative critique of the
Formalist method. (The authorship of several key works from the Bakhtin
School is in dispute, and for purposes of simplicity we will treat even the
co-authored works as by “Bakhtin.”) The relevance of the work of the
Bakhtin School to our discussion derives from its critique of two of the
source-movements for film semiotics—Saussurean structural linguistics and
Russian Formalism—as well as from its indirect influence on film semiotics