New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

FORMALIST APPROACHES 79
His denial of significance to the story itself is simply untenable… each
particular myth must be interpreted as in some sense an allegory of
social action…interaction takes place in the story of a myth, not in
the structure of oppositions…in order to understand the social
meaning of a myth, it is necessary to analyze not only its binary
structure but its narrative structure—the progression of events and
the resolution of conflicts.
(Wright 1975:24)
Lévi-Strauss’ influence was extremely widespread, however, and
the methods of structural analysis were often adopted by writers who
simply employed binary oppositions as a formal tool without being bound
to the questionable analogy of films to myths. (For a thorough critique of
this analogy, see Sheila Johnston’s discussion of myth criticism in Cook
1985: 233, 234.) Raymond Bellour, for example, found that the formal
level of the text—the level of shot sizes, framing and movement—could be
analyzed in terms of binary oppositions, and that variation and repetition
among the oppositions gave the narrative sequence its central thrust and
impetus (Bellour 1979).
Bellour takes as his object of inquiry the classic American film, with the
films of Hitchcock serving as a primary example. Unlike Kitses and
Wright, who emphasize semantic oppositions at the level of the story,
Bellour focusses on the formal permutations of editing and framing.
Seeking to define the qualities of transparency, closure, and the impression
of naturalness that characterizes the works of the classic American cinema,
Bellour (1979) closely analyzes the shot patterning—the alternation and
repetition of shots—as a vehicle for narrative advance in films such as
North by Northwest, The Birds, Gigi and The Big Sleep. Bellour’s
approach, at this stage of its development, was quite close to the stylistic
narrative analysis called for by Tynianov, and later championed by
Bordwell.
Narrative progress and development in film, he argues, is built on a shotby-shot
basis. Rather than emphasizing story events, Bellour’s work
stresses the pattern of binary oppositions, including framing, point-of-view
and movement, which link and disrupt a given series of shots. Narrative
progress occurs almost as a by-product of these formal permutations and
oppositions, he suggests. Describing the basic narrative dynamic of film as
a structure of SEGMENTATION—an internally coherent shot series
containing a number of oppositions—and ALTERNATION—the
systematic distribution of oppositions from one shot to the next—Bellour
sought to chart the trajectory of narrative development in terms of certain
cinema-specific codes. His analysis of the Bodega Bay sequence in
Hitchcock’s The Birds is characteristic; it stresses the organization of
oppositions within three codes: point-of-view (seeing/seen); framing (close/