New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

66 CINE-SEMIOLOGY
sequence of Strangers on a Train (1951), as a number of commentators
have pointed out, orchestrates an elaborate verbal and visual play on the
expressions “crisscross” and “double-cross” (crossed railroad tracks,
crossed legs, crossed tennis racquets, tennis doubles, double scotches,
alternating montage as double, lap-dissolve as a criss-cross of images and
so forth). Hitchcock’s cameo appearance, significantly, shows him carrying
a double bass, in a film featuring two doppelganger characters each, in his
way, “base.”
Language, at least potentially, exerts pressure on all the filmic tracks.
The music and noise tracks, for example, can embrace linguistic elements.
Recorded music is often accompanied by lyrics, and even when not so
accompanied, can evoke lyrics. The purely instrumental version of
“Melancholy Baby” in Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945) elicits in the spectator
the mental presence of the words of that song. Even apart from lyrics, the
allegedly abstract art of music is permeated with semantic values.
Musicologist J.J.Nattiez (1975), for example, sees music as embedded in
social discourses, including verbal discourses. Nor are recorded noises
necessarily “innocent” of language. Setting aside the question of the
cultural relativity of the boundaries separating noise from music from
language—one culture’s “noise” may be another culture’s “language,” as in
the case of African talking drums—we discover the frequent imbrication of
noise and language in countless films. The stylized murmur of conversing
voices in classical Hollywood restaurant sequences renders human speech as
background noise, while Jacques Tati films give voice to an international
esperanto of aural effects—vacuum cleaners that wheeze and vinyl seats
that go “pooof”—characteristic of the postmodernist environment. 4
Even when verbal language is absent from both film and movie theater,
semantic processes take place in the mind of the spectator through what
the Russian Formalists called “INNER SPEECH,” the pulse of thought
implicated in language. Film viewing, according to Boris Eikhenbaum, is
accompanied by a constant process of internal speech, whereby images and
sounds are projected onto a kind of verbal screen which functions as a
constant ground for meaning, and the “glue” between shots and sequences.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the journal Screen published a series of essays both
by and about Eikhenbaum’s theories of inner speech. Paul Willemen
(Screen 15, Winter 1974–5) saw the notion of inner speech as potentially
filling a gap in Metz’ theories by demonstrating the linguistic nature of
meaning and consciousness, as well as the link to psychoanalysis, since the
condensations and distortions of inner speech were closely akin to the
mechanisms explored by psychoanalysis. Willemen went on to evoke the
possibility of a specifically cinematic kind of inner speech essential to the
construction and understanding of films. Since this inner speech is
language-specific, the filmic images are often grounded in the tropes of
specific languages. Much of the discussion in the 1970s centered on the