New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

FORMALIST APPROACHES 83
abstract model of plot structure could be devised. The individual analyses
were less important for the insights they provided into specific films than
for the attention they gave to the structural organization of plot. Indeed,
many of the individual treatments of films exhibit striking lapses, as has
been pointed out recently by Bordwell:
morphological analyses have failed through distortion, omission,
unconstrained associations, and theoretical inadequacy. There is at
present no sound reason to conclude that films share an underlying
structure with folktales, or that film studies’ version of Propp’s
method can reveal the structure underlying a narrative film.
(Bordwell 1988:16)
The larger point, however, is that Propp’s method provided the context and
the groundwork for research on plot grammar in film, just as it did for
literature. Literary narratology has since made great strides in the area of
plot analysis, particularly in the work of Bremond, Greimas, Barthes and
Pavel; all of these approaches were derived in some fashion from Propp.
Plot analysis in film has not yet developed as a research area, probably
because of the pressing interest of other theoretical programs, but it remains
one of the founding gestures of narratological inquiry. Writers working in
feminist theory, such as Laura Mulvey and Teresa de Lauretis, have
sometimes used Proppian categories as a way of defining gender codes in
film, suggesting that plot analysis can inform some of the most difficult
areas in contemporary theory.
SEMANTIC AND SYNTACTIC APPROACHES
Certain writers on film have attempted to unify the semantic and the
syntactic approaches. A case in point is the work of Rick Altman on genre.
Altman argues that a combined SEMANTIC/SYNTACTIC model of genre
can account for the difficult problem of historical development and change
in the generic corpus. While not strictly a theory of narrative, his approach
has relevance to narrative analysis for it stresses the interplay of these two
registers in ways which can be seen as characteristic of narrative in general.
For example, Altman finds that the musical genre in film developed
different semantic and syntactic conventions as it evolved over time. In the
first musicals, a backstage or nightclub semantic universe was linked to a
melodramatic plot syntax, which is structured around sorrow and death.
Yet in 1930s musicals these same semantic elements were joined to a
syntax emphasizing the couple, the community and the joys of
entertainment. Here the genre is seen to grow out of the linking of a stable
set of semantic elements to a changing syntax, similar to the approach Will
Wright takes concerning the Western. An opposite but complementary