New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

MINIMAL UNITS 59
the syntagmatic chain of the editing code—but rather between whole
syntagmas. These demarcating devices articulate the large segments which
form the diegesis of the narrative film. Their special status derives from the
fact that they are not analogical signs and therefore do not directly
represent any object or set of objects. Yet the spectator accepts them “as if”
they formed part of the diegetic “universe” and thus are indirectly linked to
analogical representation. Devices such as the lap-dissolve foreground the
essential unreality of filmic representation, since they represent nothing yet
are transformed by the desiring spectator into the “imaginary” of the
diegesis.
Since the cinema does have devices which function as macropunctuation,
the problem arises of differentiating between the diverse types, between
those, for example, which connect two individual shots and those which
articulate entire segments. Markedly visible punctuation effects, for Metz,
are optional, since the film-maker can also choose the “straight cut” or
“zero-degree” of enunciation. In Rosemary’s Baby, the passage from one
segment to another is frequently marked only by a shot dramatically closer
in scale, one which provokes questions in the spectator’s mind—What
object is this? Where is it? Why is it being foregrounded here? In short, it is
only the overall diegetic coherence that retroactively allows us to recognize
the sudden close-up as a variation on a punctuating effect. The straight cut,
meanwhile, avoids all markers of transition from segment to segment. It
stands in paradigmatic relation to the other visible optical effects, but is
evidenced, paradoxically, only by the refusal of marks of punctuation.
Some optical effects, furthermore, do not function as macropunctuation.
Certain lap-dissolves function as the filmic equivalents of
Genette’s ITERATIVE—i.e. they denote duration of repeated actions, as in
the cinematic evocation of a woman’s fruitless search for employment in
Marcel Hanoun’s Une Simple Histoire, in which successive lap-dissolves
suggest the frustration of repetition. In Hitchcock’s Vertigo, repeated lapdissolves
denote a semi-oneiric state, and in Chris Marker’s La Jetée, the
lap-dissolves generate ersatz movement in a film consisting almost entirely
of still photographs. In all these cases, the lap-dissolves do not demarcate
distinct segements of the diegesis but operate strictly within one of them.
Other “unorthodox” uses of optical devices would include the “jump-cut”
lapdissolves within Antoine’s interview with the psychologist in Truffaut’s
400 Blows, or the fade-ins and fade-outs which intervene between the
individual shots that compose the initial lovemaking sequence in Godard’s
A Married Woman. In such cases the optical devices mark a miniautonomy
within a larger segment while simultaneously rendering it more
formally coherent and homogeneous.
Metz speaks of the punctuating “functions” of certain cinematic
signifiers which themselves have no intrinsic signifieds apart from that
given them by a specific text. When a lap-dissolve separates two segments,