New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

FORMALIST APPROACHES 77
after a period of intensive research on the structure of plot,
narratologists gradually turned their attention to the discursive
aspects of narrative. While…narratology includes both the poetics of
plot and its textual manifestations, some researchers…tend to restrict
narratology to the textual study of narratives, thus eliminating… the
abstract level of plot…. There are areas where an abstract narrative
structure independent of its discourse-manifestation is indispensable
for an adequate representation of our literary knowledge.
(Pavel 1985:15, emphasis added)
THE STRUCTURALIST ANALYSIS OF NARRATIVE
While the first discussions of narrative structure in film were conducted by
the Russian Formalists in the late 1920s, the two most important
influences on the development of film narrative analysis in the 1970s were
the structuralist theory of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the folklore studies of
Vladimir Propp. Here, although the terminology is different, we find a
debate that nearly replicates the Formalist discussion of the relative
importance of fabula or style in syuzhet patterning. While Lévi-Strauss had
an enormous impact on all branches of semiotic inquiry, his influence on
early film narrative theory was especially pronounced, inspiring an
approach which used the methodology of linguistics to provide wideranging
cultural readings of certain film genres, notably the Western and
the musical. The work of Propp, on the other hand, was influential
primarily for its usefulness in analyzing the plot structure of individual films.
By focussing on the formal structure of plot composition, sometimes by
directly applying Propp’s model for the Russian wondertale, writers on film
began to illuminate the underlying dynamic principles governing the
movement of narrative—the cause and effect logic linking one narrative
event to another. These two influences led to two different schools of
narrative inquiry, which are largely distinct even today; SEMANTIC—
which deals with the relation of the signs and messages produced by
narrative to the larger cultural system which gives it meaning; and
SYNTACTICAL—the study of the syntagmatic ordering of plot events as a
kind of armature of narrative progress and development.
Analyzing North and South American Indian myths in terms of the
logical structure of binary oppositions, Lévi-Strauss proceeded by breaking
up the lateral, cause and effect relations of the plot and setting the events,
characters and settings into new paradigmatic groups. The syntagmatic
relations of the narrative, the order of events occurring in succession, were
seen as a kind of surface structure, which concealed the deeper logic of the
myth. Greimas characterized the arrangement of the narrative elements of
myth into binary oppositions as its “deep structure”: while the ostensible
signification of the myth resided in the unfolding sequence of events, its