Film Language: Saussure & Barthes
- Semiotic and political shift happening at the same time. METZ trying to plot out cinema as a language cinema (isolate codes). Grand Syntagmatic [a grid]: Scientific, not analytic. Narrative (language) structures. *shot sequence: variety of possibilities that can create autonymous segments (syntagms). 8 different ways we talk about shots: 1) autonomous shot (a syntagma consisting of one shot) 2) parallel syntagma [saloon partying and Chaplin by himself waiting for the girls in Gold Rush = theme] 3) bracket syntagma [montage] 4) descriptive syntagma 5) alternating syntagma 6) the scene 7) episodic sequence 8) ordinary sequence. Bringing cinema into the world of linguistic and rhetoric à discursive strategies.
Tout va bien (Dziga Vertov Group, 1972)
- Replace actual worker with actor because workers have always been kept quiet so how can they speak now? Long segments of direct address. Set is artificial (vs. location), theater set, 4th wall is gone, track-going back and forth, reflexive. Montand/Jacques/J-LG and Fonda/Susan as personal and social crises. Unions vs workers. Rethinking/revisiting May ’68. Bathroom scene, playing with soccer ball, penis photograph, silly scenes giving release after intense political babble, attraction for workers/peasants. DIALOGICAL (vs monological).
Language is the house we live in
- B. BRECHT: encourage an active spectator, an active/decoding spectator, aware of the thought you are being addressed, actively questioning: who is questioning me? Etc. Reject voyeurism by direct address. Make class division clear. Show contradictions à Alienation effect, CARNIVAL effect. Techniques should be strange and unusual, uneven style/tone. General goals: active spectator, rejection of voyeurism, becoming rather than being popular, rejection of entertainment-education dichotomy, critique of abuses of empathy and pathos, rejection of totalizing aesthetic, critique of fate/fascination/catharsis, art as a call to praxis, character as contradiction, immanence of meaning, dividing the audience, transforming production relations, realist in terms of social presentation, alienation effects, and entertainment. The politics of reflexivity.
Struggling on 2 fronts: J-LG (Peter Wollen)
- Godard and counter-cinema: Wind From the East. Attack on the 7 mainstream values and Godard is right to break with Hollywood, the most important director working today. Goal include to demystify ideology and the labor/production of fiction but this is only a starting point, it is not yet a different revolutionary cinema since it is defined in opposition to current practice.
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