New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

30 CINE-SEMIOLOGY
Spottiswoode’s Grammar of Film (1935) and Robert Bataille’s Grammaire
Cinégraphique (1947). In other pre-semiotic discussions, the film-language
metaphor became intimately linked to the cognate tropes of the “camera
pen” (Astruc) and “film writing.” In post-war France, especially, this
“graphological” figure, as we shall see in some detail in Part V, became a
key structuring concept subtending film theory and criticism.
THE CINEMATIC SIGN
It was only with the advent of structuralism and semiotics in the 1960s,
however, that the film-language concept was explored in depth by theorists
like Umberto Eco, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Christian Metz. Much of the
early discussion had to do with the nature of the filmic analogon. The
initial tendency was to contrast the arbitrary signs of natural language with
the motivated, iconic signs of the cinema. In his earliest work, Metz
emphasized both the analogical nature of the filmic image as well as the
causal photo-chemical connection between representation and prototype.
But in a 1970 article, “Beyond Analogy, the Image,” Metz nuanced his
argument, pointing out that to see an image as simply analogical is to forget
that it can be analogical and motivated in some respects and yet be
arbitrary in other respects. Representational images, in sum, can
themselves be coded (Metz 1972).
Another important figure in the theorization of the image was Roland
Barthes. For Barthes, the image is characterized by POLYSEMY (literally,
many “semes” or meanings), i.e. it shares with other signs, including
linguistic signs, the property of being open to multiple significations. The
accompanying captions of photographs, or written materials in a film,
Barthes suggested in “Rhetoric of the Image,” often function as
ANCHORAGE, i.e. as a verbal device which “disciplines” polysemy by
coaxing the observer’s perception into a preferred “reading” of the image.
The anchoring words “fix the floating chain of signifieds”; they guide the
viewer among the different possible significations of a visual representation.
Barthes gives the example of an advertisement showing fruits scattered
around a ladder, an image that might connote “paucity of harvest,”
“damage due to high winds,” or “freshness”; the caption “as if from your
own garden” anchors the meaning of “freshness” (Barthes 1977). In
Camera Lucida (1980) Barthes theorizes the specific pleasures provoked by
the “force of silence and immobility” typical of still photography. He
speaks of two ways of apprehending the same photograph: the STUDIUM
deploys objective signs and coded information, while the PUNCTUM
triggers the play of chance and subjective association, investing the photo
with personal desire.
Other analysts also took up the Peircean trichotomy. Peter
Wollen argued in Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1969) that cinema