File spoon-archives/film-theory.archive/film-theory_1995/film-theory_May.95, message 41


Date: Sun, 28 May 1995 10:05:40 +1000
From: amiles-AT-netspace.net.au (Adrian Miles)
Subject: Re: Shots and pixels (was: Re: Big Video)


Michael Raine, engaging Rob van Gerwen wrote:

>More generally, you seem to be taking the well-worn "ontological" path of
>much film theory, from the "naive realism" of early film journalism to the
>"naive formalism" of, say, Rudolph Arnheim. Why try to find an "essence"
>to cinema (or video) beyond the uses to which it's put? The quest only
>seems to blind you to the inventedness of film images and the reliance of
>video (historically if not "ideally") on existent objects.

This is *not* a well worn path. Bazin did lots on it, along came
structuralism which demonstrated that meaning is culturally produced,
provisional, and arbitrary. All these film scholars desperate for the
discipline to become disciplined saw, rightly, how this applied to cinema.
However, this in no way discounts Bazin's original arguments. (Jon, you out
there?)

Because meaning is contingent on interpretation and cultural coding is not
an argument about the representational relationship between the thing and
the cinematic sign (and as many seem to have pointed out, film signs are,
first and foremost, indexical, not symbolic). It is an argument about what
happens after the cinematic sign is read (ie become connotative, Bazin and
co are arguing about the nature of cinematic denotation, which is radically
different to that in the linguistic model).

I would suggest that to argue otherwise is in fact 'naive' since it
assumes, rather simply, an analogy between the linguistic economy of the
sign, and a photographic/videographic economy, that really cannot survive
being prodded.

In addition it is not a question of 'essence' if by 'essence' is meant some
idea of a pure unmediated meaning or sense. Of course this isn't the case.
But any argument about the nature of film, representation, realism, etc
needs to account for film's indexicality.

Cinema, if we use this language, has many 'essences' but it seems to me
once this is argued the authority of the criticism _vis a vis_ 'essence' as
singular point is irrelevant.

Adrian Miles (sorry about the hair trigger here, this is an argument that I
think I've had on this list, and in other places, before).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
amiles-AT-netspace.net.au
Chris Marker WWW site: http://netspace.net.au/~amiles/ChrisMarker.html
PhD student: Centre of Comp. Lit. & Critical Studies, Monash Uni.
Teach: Cinema/Media Studies, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
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