FILMMAKING AS SYMBOLIC TRANSFORMATION
Cinema is a living medium when it forces the filmmaker to make the symbols by which he expresses himself come alive.
—Federico Fellini
FILMS ARE EXPERIENCED AND VALUED IN THE KNOWLEDGE THAT familiar realities are not only being shown but are being transformed, as if “before one’s eyes.” Without doubt there is no one recipe for artistic filmmaking. And creative originality on the part of a filmmaker, however explained, continues to differentiate films with more artistic merit from standardized cinema products designed for mass consumption, as but one of today’s prepackaged and presold commodities for the delivery of leisure-time entertainment and little more. Granting this much, in seeking to better understand the symbolic transformations of experience inherent in cinematic art, we must address the sorts of processes that go into turning the highly disparate materials of filmmaking, drawn from highly disparate sources, into complex and “moving” artistic worlds (no matter how comparatively rare some of these processes and the artistic intentions behind them might be in the total cinematic landscape, past and present). In broad outline this is the focus of the present chapter, as well as the two following it. Yet to theorize further about the how and why of this transformation, we need first to identify what is transformed.
The question of what the basic, or “raw,” material of cinematic art is, analogous perhaps to the words of a poem or the stone of a sculpture, is as old as film theory itself. And there seems no one simple and unequivocal answer. In a well-known 1934 essay, Erwin Panofsky argues that owing to its photographic basis, a film’s material, which he somewhat problematically equates with the film “medium,” is “physical reality as such,” the arrangement and appearance of which the filmmaker works with and on for the camera.1 Taking a contrasting perspective to Panofsky’s, V. F. Pudovkin states in his classic 1933 essay “Film Technique” that a “film is not shot but built up” and that the raw materials of this creative construction are “separate strips of celluloid,” already imprinted with photographic images.2 Pudovkin’s definition thus minimizes, or at least takes for granted, as it were, not only what Eric Rohmer has called “the camera’s foremost power, to transfigure reality on the plane of shooting,”3 but also the activities, choices, and intentions that precede the generation of images on those strips of celluloid and determine their content, as well as some of their meaning. A good deal of the difference between the classic realist and formalist positions in film theory boils down to the ideas that (genuine) film art consists of working on (or with) either the physical, material world and its given perceptual appearance or the images, sounds, and signs already abstracted from it (via the camera) and waiting to be creatively organized into meaningful and expressive forms on the editing table—or, today, use of a digital, nonlinear editing suite.
Even apart from the ways in which digital technologies and processes may now call this dichotomy between physical reality and camera-given images into question, it is deeply problematic. For the “material” of cinematic art must be seen to include both objects in the real world, as selected, arranged, lit, and framed for the camera, and the images it produces, which are, in turn, edited, retouched, and otherwise manipulated versions of this more extensive process, occurring in both celluloid and digital-video filmmaking, in both live action and animation. A concept of cinema as art must at least have the potential to accommodate these and a number of highly consequential preimage and presound recording stages of filmmaking: encompassing, for instance, screenwriting, location scouting, casting, production design, staging, lighting, framing, and any number of other activities, all of which are also fundamentally creative, transformative, and work-constitutive in their own ways. In broader terms, we cannot confine either the film artist’s (or artists’) material or his or her most significant creativity to any one stage or aspect of the clearly many-staged, highly complex, and collaborative creative process that filmmaking typically involves.4 Nor can the profoundly heterodox and irreducibly “composite nature of filmic material,” in Burch’s apt phrase,5 be reduced to any one sort of thing.
François Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973) is often celebrated for its celebration of what (with reference to the film) Diana Holmes and Robert Ingram refer to as the “transformational processes whereby film can absorb the most disparate elements of ordinary life, the most awkward and unexpected events,” and endow them with a formal, fictional, and expressive significance.6 In its primary foregrounding and exploration of the relations between “film and life,” Day for Night not only shows the results of cinematic transformation but dwells on the pretransformed existence of its many materials, allowing the viewer to compare their onscreen and offscreen, pre- and postfilmic, modes of existence. In doing so, it constitutes only a more self-conscious and concentrated amplification of the inescapable comparative and contrastive dimension of all film viewing and interpretation (certainly of an aesthetic kind). This includes, but also surpasses, that constant “fiction-making” comparison on the part of viewers discussed earlier, as concerning the relation between the fictional, or represented, world-in a film and known facts of reality outside of it.
In Day for Night Truffaut himself plays the central character, the director Ferrand at work on an international production entitled “Meet Pamela,” which is being shot in the French Riviera city of Nice. In one early sequence Ferrand is seen consulting with the film’s prop man, Bernard, in the hallway of the hotel in which the cast and crew are staying. As evidence, if any were needed, of the multitasking ability possessed by, and often required of, filmmakers, Ferrand, while conversing on another matter, notices a vase sitting on a table. Finding it suited for a particular interior setting in “Meet Pamela,” he requisitions it for the film in progress (as we may perhaps surmise, Truffaut also requisitioned objects unexpectedly discovered during the shooting of Day for Night) (fig. 3.1). Indeed, Ferrand’s action is testament to that perpetually appropriating gaze of filmmakers, for whom every aspect of life is an open field of material to be captured and used, sometimes rather ruthlessly.7 Later in the film, the vase is shown in its new home on the set of “Meet Pamela,” decorating the character Séverine’s (Valentina Cortese’s) dining room, while a sequence of the film-within-the-film is being shot.
Holmes and Ingram note that the vase is a “doubly fictionalized object,” appearing in both the narrative of Day for Night and “Meet Pamela.”8 Yet it is (even) more than that: the vase functions as a double metaphor and metonym for the filmmaking process. Outside of the world of each film it is simply a vase. But as represented within Day for Night and “Meet Pamela,” it is a constitutive element of both. As such, like any other object or prop brought inside a film’s magic circle of transformation as it is being created, it is (potentially) part of a singular, dense, and complex narrative and symbolic (including here, self-reflexive) network, which greatly determines the object’s (artistic) significance. In Ferrand’s “Meet Pamela,” the fictional film-within-the-film, the vase plays a very modest supporting role as one of a number of ornaments decorating the background of a room in which two of the main characters interact. In Truffaut’s Day for Night, however, it serves the very cinematically self-reflexive and global, metaphorical function here suggested—one further emphasized by the insistent movement of Truffaut’s camera toward the vase later in the film, ending in a screen-filling close-up.
FIGURE 3.1 Conscripted film world materials and a vase as more than a vase in Truffaut’s Day for Night.
Although endowed with such new contextual and figurative significance in Day for Night, which it does not possess in its ordinary (real-life) mode of existence, the vase remains recognizably a vase. Yet, of course, the transformation at work in filmmaking is seldom only a matter of arranging or combining preexisting materials whose perceptual appearance (and other features) remain more or less the same in the finished work as they do outside of it. The film’s English title and its original French one (Lanuit américaine) refers to the practice in Hollywood and elsewhere of using lens filters to shoot scenes representing night during daylight hours. As indicated by both of these titles and the process to which they refer, filmmaking also consists of making its materials something other (and sometimes radically other) than what they are normally seen or heard as being, on perceptual as well as fictional-representational levels: from day turned to night, and the faces and bodies of actors and actresses becoming those of the characters they are playing, to soap “becoming” snow (as in the final sequence of Day for Night), or images of Chicago or Toronto transformed into (a fictional) New York City. Admittedly, some of these transformations may be relatively invisible in the finished work, given that viewers may not be in a position to recognize or know the materials or processes behind the image; nor may the work do anything else (i.e., for artistic purposes) to encourage specific reflection upon them. Others, however, are highly visible, literally and figuratively, and films sometimes call particular attention to them as part of their intended designs, and the running artistic “commentary” on a film’s fictional and represented (denoted) world-in on the part of its particular cinematic and stylistic presentation.
As Day for Night emphasizes, the diverse classes of materials used in the creation of a film—concrete physical objects and events; less tangible, perceptual realities (e.g., the manipulated light referenced in the film’s title); language (in dialogue, voice-over narration, titles), all manner of culturally coded images and visually rendered symbols—enjoy some different and active manner of existence prior to the camera’s pointing and rolling (or recording). By the same token, during a film’s creation much of its constituent physical material (as captured by the camera) is, of course, relatively untouched by it in the sense of not being “used up” in the manner of the marble of a sculpture or the paint of a painting. Foregrounded by Day for Night at every opportunity, such physical and ontological duality of profilmic materials (including objects, places, and actors)—as recognizably existing (in different ways) within and without the cinematic work simultaneously—gives creative filmmakers access to extranarrative domains of associational meaning and affect (transcending the diegetic world) that are foreclosed to some other, nonphotographic art forms and media. In the case of performing human and sometimes animal “materials” (e.g., the cat in Day for Night that obstinately refuses to act on cue), this independent, extrawork “life” of materials (adding to what Burch refers to as the “refractory” quality of that which the filmmaker works with) is a literal one.9
No doubt most of the materials conscripted for use in any art form largely preexist the beginning of the activities of the artist, having all manner of anterior, preaesthetic meanings and uses, comprising both the settings of natural worlds and the so-called furniture of practical and cultural ones. But the especially pronounced, more tangible extent to which this is true of the materials of camera-based filmmaking sets cinema apart from many other arts, including drama. This owes not only to cinema’s photographic (iconic and indexical) substratum but its status as thoroughly “hybrid” (Gerald Mast calls it “the most hybrid artistic process in human experience”),10 together with what Langer refers to as its “omnivorous” character,11 in combining, as it does, so many recognized aspects of other, older art forms and modes of communication and representation, verbal and textual as well as visual, and in pronounced temporal as well as spatial dimensions. In addition to music in films, one finds the transposed reflections on the screen of still photography; painting; the narrative forms of the epic, the novel, and the short story; tragic and comedic drama; dance; design; fashion; and video and computer-generated imagery (as well as, in some cases, other arts and crafts). Additionally, in so-called intertextual terms, whereas novels, symphonies, paintings, or works of architecture may not only reference other works (in the same or different form) but seek to concretely include aspects of them in their own design, cinema is distinguished by its far greater ability (in terms of medium properties) to incorporate (some of) the actual text, sounds, image(s), and spaces of works in all these other art forms, not to mention images, sounds, and sequences of other films. Clearly, what distinguishes this additional class of potential materials is their being at one remove, at least, from quotidian physical and social reality, having already undergone at least one prior, first-order transformation into artistic (or artistic-cinematic) form and meaning before appearing in a film.
In sum, as theorists and filmmakers have long recognized the sheer variety of the natural and human materials filmmakers have at their disposal for transformation in the pursuit of artistic meaning and expression is unprecedented. With reference to today’s hi-tech production environment, while digital filmmaking, and the full range of CGI processes and effects, may in some ways alter the particular courses of the material-to-work appropriations from reality filmmaking involves, they certainly do not dispense with or negate them. Indeed, given the computer’s power to augment familiar realities (and almost create them from scratch) on a virtual plane, there is today, if anything, a huge expansion of this range and variety.
Brought to reflective attention by Day for Night, a number of these basic and oft-remarked-upon facts about filmmaking as a transformation of the preexisting (and often as a “transfiguration of the commonplace,” in Arthur C. Danto’s phrase),12 on cinematographic, narrative, and extranarrative levels (sometimes simultaneously), are systematized in the film theory and criticism of Jean Mitry and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Both filmmakers as well as theorists, Mitry and Pasolini each address the subject of a film work’s constituent materials, and their cinematic and artistic transformations, in the context of charting the relation between the medium (and what are deemed its basic features, or “ontology”) and its symbolic and aesthetic uses. Moreover, they each do so in ways that are in keeping with the symbolic-expressivist tradition I have described and a number of the specific arguments and more general themes to be found in Cassirer’s, Langer’s, and Goodman’s aesthetics, in particular.
These instructive similarities are rooted in the ways in which Mitry and Pasolini explicitly seek to go beyond linguistics-based paradigms in semiotics (as greatly in vogue at the time of their respective writings), toward a broader conception of the referential and expressive dimensions of films and their created worlds. They independently perceive the need for a film semantics that is more amenable to the specific nature of narrative cinema’s “presentational form,” in Langer’s terms, as simultaneously audiovisual, concretely realized, cinematographic, formally hybrid, and profoundly durational, as well as fictional-narrative (and with a capacity for “discursive” meaning and expression in a different mode than language). Indeed, both of these thinkers, who are later joined by Deleuze in this respect, hold that with its “iconic” images and recorded sounds—together with the cinematographic relations among space, movement, and time—cinema is always much closer to experiential reality than (the general symbolic form of) language, the latter being a multi purpose tool of practical communication possessed of such well-known attributes as being highly conventional, closely systematized, and abstract. Yet as Mitry, Pasolini, and Deleuze also insist, the film image is still at a highly mediated technological, subjective, and sometimes artistic remove from any ordinary (and three-dimensional) perceptual and imaginative engagement with the common “lifeworld.” In other words, film images (and films as wholes) are too bound to prelinguistic, perceptual reality to be part of a “language” in their communicative dimension yet too constructed, intended, and culturally and individually mediated to be experienced and theorized as perceptually “real” or “objective.”13 Consequently, they are inevitably more than, and different from, the indexical, camera-produced objects of experience modeled in realist and phenomenological film theory, on the one hand, and the highly systematized, conventional structures of encoded signs emphasized in most semiotic (Saussurean) conceptions of cinema, on the other.
For these reasons and others, Pasolini’s semiotic “heresy,”14 Mitry’s call for a “semiotics beyond linguistics” (rooted in the recognition that “cinema before being a language is a means of expression”),15 and Deleuze’s embrace of and Bergsonian modifications to Peirce’s extralinguistic concept of the sign, all reflect a general conception of cinema and of cinematic art consistent with Cassirer’s and Langer’s formulation of the complex aesthetic “symbol,” and a work of art (as a unified whole), as prototypically occupying an intermediate position between language and “myth,” subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, feeling and thought. Moreover, and awaiting further explanation below, it is perhaps the form of cinematic art in particular—coming, of course, well after the origin of the symbolic-expressivist tradition—that provides the most persuasive support for, and examples of, this symbol-centered paradigm (alongside, it should be added, aspects of the heterocosmic view of art and artworks). This is true not least in regard to the ways cinema may effect a synthesis and represent a pronounced amplification of the symbolic, affective, and “world-like” properties of all artworks.
JEAN MITRY: FROM OBJECT TO SIGN TO SYMBOL (AND ART)
Mitry’s The Aesthetics and Psychology of Cinema has been widely seen as a reevaluation and attempted reconciliation of central aspects of the major realist and formalist accounts of cinema coming before it.16 This synthesis is achieved, in part, through a particular conception of relations among (1) the “profilmic” reality that the film camera records, (2) the film image resulting from it as a perceptual reality and its recognized contents, and (3) the singular spatiotemporal, cognitive, and affective network or structure in which the image is placed—a structure that is both formal and expressive, as well as fictional-narrative.
These three aspects may be seen to reflect both stages in the process of filmmaking and experiential levels of a finished film seen and interpreted. They are intended to describe the abstraction and transformation a cinematic work effectuates, wherein three-dimensional images of things in the world—acting as wholly iconic (or analogical) “signs,” in what Mitry considers a “psychological” as opposed to standard semiotic (linguistic) sense—become artistic “symbols” that together constitute a “world” created by a film.17 However, in this primary movement toward the symbolic and aesthetic (with the two more or less equated by Mitry), the profilmic object and the image as its recognizable analogue are never simply left behind or eclipsed. Rather, they inhere in the film image as one part of the fully fledged artistic symbol. Mitry regards this as roughly analogous to the semiotic notion, as stressed by Barthes and others, that in the language system all figurative connotations contain the literal denotations that they build on and to which they are bound.18 Yet, and perhaps more to the central point, it is also a consequence of what I have described here as the particular enclosure of the represented (denoted) world constructed by a narrative film, within the presented world of it as a work of art in total, with the latter including, but certainly not confined to, what might be adequately theorized as connotation.
Brian Lewis has noted that just as in Cassirer’s and Langer’s aesthetics, the bedrock of Mitry’s film theory is a conception of the “concrete” visual symbol of art and the “unique powers of non-discursive symbolic expression.”19 Unlike the discursive linguistic sign (as general and “arbitrary,” or highly conventional) a film image (including its full range of references) is “always new and original,” and, for this reason, there can be no proper film grammar, or fixed lexicon.20 Pointing to the camera’s “reproduction of concrete reality,” Mitry stresses the “aboutness” of film images (“images of something”)21 as the starting point of cinematic art. Psychologically tied to the specific objects they recognizably present and stand-for in concrete fashion, they have various natural and cultural meanings; and because the film image is pictorial, it is always potentially richer in certain respects than any discursive formulation.
Yet, as Mitry also argues, this character of the cinematic image is only the “ontological” basis, and means or instrument, as it were, of the cinematic work. For such filmic reproduction is but the material-causal and psychological-perceptual beginning for a complex symbolic construction, in which film editing is a major part and which includes but is not limited to the establishment of a represented story-world. In its characteristic movement “from the concrete to the abstract” filmmaking starts with a “concrete representation of the world and its objects. Then it exploits these direct data as instruments of mediation” (58). Every film image is a singular perceptual reality, and the contents and connections to the “real world” that it visually reproduces and presents (in this unproblematic sense) are generally recognized as such. The image, however, as the product of the camera, is in turn material for transformation into a formal, expressive, and symbolic reality possessing a meaning (or meanings) unique to the cinematic whole of which it is a part. Such work (and interpretation) dictated meanings always transcend (and in some cases render moot or even contradict) any number of (other) natural and cultural meanings of the real or imaginary extrawork object(s) of which the film image is a perceptual “analogon” (88).
In his explication of the dynamic in question, Mitry analyzes a close-up image (and the sequence to which it belongs) from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, wherein pince-nez spectacles dangle from the eponymous battleship’s steel hawser. Belonging to the ship’s doctor, who has been seen thrown overboard in the sequence preceding it, owing to the context in which they appear, the image of the spectacles comes to assume not only a unique narrative meaning but also a metaphorical (metonymic) one—as concerning the represented downfall of an entire social class by virtue of a revolutionary act on the part of the sailors. Mitry takes the meaning in question to show that in cinema when the image does signify directly (in something roughly like the linguistic semantic sense), it tends to signify “something quite different from what it shows,” (e.g., simply a pair of spectacles, or a fairly ordinary vase), “though it does so through what it shows” (39). Such a problematizing of the reference relation, as it might be called, follows from the fact that the intended meaning in question is something beyond, and not inherent in, the object filmed and presented; it stems, rather, from what the film as a constructed and intended work, and as providing a new context for the object, instills in its cinematic image. Thus, while in its concrete psychological presence as “represented reality” the film image strictly speaking “means nothing,” as it is experienced, “it symbolizes, generalizes, and refers all concrete reality to the abstract. It becomes “transcendent” by being the analogon of a reality with which it stops having any phenomenological association. Consequently, it becomes the sign of what it reveals” (88).
Such considerations prompt Mitry to distinguish between film images as (a) “represented data,” equivalent to the psychological, “reality-capturing” aspect of cinema, and (b) intentionally formed “representations” resulting from all of the stylistic resources of filmmaking, and as ultimately constituting a film’s aesthetic aspect. He writes that “as represented data, film images prove to be similar to the ‘direct images’ of consciousness, but, as representations, they are aesthetically structured forms” (75). Evident hyperbole aside, Mitry is right to argue further that “nothing will ever be understood in the cinema as long as the represented data are regarded as its final thematic purpose. It is all too obvious, in mediocre films, that the theme is contained in these data, this ‘narrative’” (51). Crucially, Mitry’s distinction (which he reiterates in a number of different ways) may also be seen as valid and operational not just on the level of the individual film image but throughout the whole diegetic dimension, as copresent with but still distinct from both nondiegetic form and presentation and a good deal of referential content.
As has been discussed, films have many types and whole levels of meaning that are nonliteral in nature. Or, rather, they transcend the literal in ways long thought to be characteristic of exemplary works in other art forms, the grasp of which depends on “the intelligence or cultural awareness of the reader,” as Mitry aptly observes (376). Reflecting a difference between the world-in and the world-of films, and also between (all) basic representation and aesthetic expression, Mitry’s core claims speak to the fact that the “iconicity” of the film image, or, if one prefers, its denotation—entailing “the logic of everyday life,” or “experienced reality” (376)—is distinct from, yet the foundation of, both basic storytelling in film and the wider expanse of cinematic art (in both descriptive and normative senses).
Throughout The Aesthetics and Psychology of Cinema Mitry explores how nonliteral, contextual meaning necessarily works in and through concrete cinematographic representation. With reference to his Battleship Potemkin example, as well as to the opening of Citizen Kane, and as is true (he argues) of all cinema, he maintains that “we are informed through a reality presented first of all for what it is but almost always indicative of something else. In fact, we are informed of something through something. It is through the pince-nez that we are informed of Dr. Smirnov. . . . It is through the glass ball slipping from Kane’s grasp that we are informed of his death” (51). Crucially, however (and to further extend the point), through the perceptually concrete film image we are not informed only of (a) a literal, narrative fact—Kane is dead, the doctor has been thrown overboard—which may also be conveyed in innumerable different cinematic ways with little difference to the fictional fact. But, also and simultaneously, we are encouraged to grasp what (b) these deaths mean or symbolize in thematic or conceptual terms (as interpreted) and, beyond this, to understand (c) the film work’s unique artistic-cinematic form, or design (and use of relevant techniques), as intended to convey both (a) and (b), as the literal (narrative) and figurative meanings in question. All of this assumes, of course, that a cinematic work often calls the viewer’s attention to its (i.e., the filmmaker’s) artistic intentions toward objects, events, and ideas (as will be further analyzed in chapter 5).
Here it should be noted that in some of Mitry’s examples, including the image of the spectacles in Battleship Potemkin, the higher-order contextual and symbolic meanings and intentions conveyed and grasped through association and juxtaposition, drawing on both the viewer’s imagination and constructive memory (as well as perception), are relatively obvious (one must assume) to original as well as present-day audiences. In the case of Battleship Potemkin this is a reflection of the stylistic formula of Eisenstein’s work in its early, more didactic mode and the film’s particular ideological, as well as aesthetic, intentions. The image and sequence in question (and the film as a whole) are clearly not interested in the multivalence, ambiguity, and complexity of symbolic articulation of ideas and emotions that characterize nonliteral significance in many other artistically ambitious films. In choosing the example, Mitry is surely aware, however, that this makes his main points stronger, not weaker, by showing how even all relatively more obvious and directed cinematic communication on a thematic level (although still, in this case, highly culturally specific and knowledge-dependent) operates one register above, as it were, the perceptually recognized contents of images in themselves. And further, it is dependent on the simultaneous creation of an expansive interconnected, formal-structural, and symbolic network of meanings and associations—“a whole universe of forms and relationships,” as he writes (12)—which is unique to every film. This last point serves to return us to the observation of Deleuze (quoted in my introduction), of which we may now begin to better appreciate the full significance; viz., “a film does not just present images, it surrounds them with a world.” In other words, a film (or rather the filmmaker or -makers) creates a surrounding, contextual whole, which gives symbolic and aesthetic meaning and value to images and their sequence(s) (and thereby to that world), beyond the narrative structure that powerfully assists in the cinematic world-making project. Indeed, Mitry also speaks expressly of the multifaceted, semantic, and affective structure a film presents (as opposed to only represents) as its “world” (which is also described as a “reconstructed” or “postfabricated” one, with reference to its transformation of basic representational contents) (80, 275). One could say, in sum, that while camera-given representation binds films and their experience to “the world”—in an often more direct, transparent, and powerful sensory fashion than other arts—the “aesthetic organization of these moving pictures towards a specific signification” (71) is partly responsible for the fact that the work is also the creation of a new, singular world.
Throughout his detailed arguments, Mitry reminds us that such a world is the product of a creative and artistic intentionality on the part of the filmmaker(s). This ensures that a cinematic work is not only a representational field of recognizable objects and events existing within a fictional story nor, however, only a formally structured, distinctly cinematic presentation (of these objects and story). But it is also, and profoundly, an expressive interpretation of—or “discourse upon” (275)—some aspect(s) of extrawork reality both in general, as corresponding to a film artist’s “worldview,” and with respect to the particular external realities or subjects with which a film is concerned. In this sense the true “subject” of a film qua audiovisual artwork is not (or, more precisely, not confined to) that which it literally denotes and depicts—for example, the life of Napoleon, a tragic love affair, the inner workings of a disturbed psyche—but “what it offers to our eyes, our emotions, our intellect, through its interpretation of the world” (340). Such an interpretation, in other words, includes, and is revealed by way of, these specific, literal subject matters and concrete objects of representation alike. On this subject Dufrenne, echoing but also expanding on Merleau-Ponty’s statements along similar lines, writes that “art liberates a strange power in the humblest things it represents, because representation surpasses itself towards expression, or, to put it another way, because in art the subject becomes symbolic.”22
For the work to achieve this goal, which is both cognitive or information-bearing and expressive-affective, and for the subjective (i.e., singular, perspectival) artistic and stylistic interpretation in question to be grasped (in any representational work), this interpretation of X on the part of the constructed film image, sequence, and work, must, in Mitry’s words, be “isolated” from the image’s literal representation as X, or, as one might better say, meaningfully and purposefully differentiated, made to stand out as over and above it. It must be differentiated, that is, from the extrawork reality to which the film, in this case, visually refers us, while at the same time “replacing it” with its own artistic-cinematic version of that reality (as Goodman would stress). In one of Mitry’s examples, drawn from painting, it is only relative to an actual field of corn (even in the form of a generalized memory-image of one on the part of the viewer) that we are able to fully appreciate Van Gogh’s style, “thoughts,” and feelings, as both informing and transforming this subject matter, in a way typical of his art (340), and, to some degree, of the more general style or styles of painting—for example, symbolism or postimpressionism—to which the painting may also be seen to belong.
Thus, the argument continues, in all representational art forms—and contrary to what some more stringent formalist and expressivist conceptions of art (and cinema) maintain—the factual “objectivity” of (denoted) representation in no way hinders, but instead allows for, the full “subjectivity” of expression and its artistic significance. And cinema is no exception. Indeed, Mitry argues coherently and fairly persuasively that in some respects it has a head start in this expressive and artistic process, given, that is, the powerful and more immediate ways in which a film may establish a represented (and fictional) world as “concrete fact,” through the film image’s copresence as both “psychological sign” (or “analagon”) of reality and artistic symbol (340). In a nutshell: the medium’s oft-heralded perceptual (photographic) realism may be thought to establish a baseline, which, as means rather than as end, allows the viewer to recognize and appreciate a filmmaker’s creative and transformative treatment of a given object of (lifeworld) perception, as a new and alternative version of it. Such a version stands out against the familiar reality in question (within the minds of viewers).23
Arguably, Mitry actually goes too far in pressing cinema’s exceptionality in this case since, as in his own example, a representational painting (and certainly a highly realistic or mimetic one) may be equally “concrete” in the relevant and necessary sense. The difference between cinema and other representational arts here, although far from negligible, seems instead to be much more one of degree than of kind. It is perhaps best thought of in terms of the psychological power of address of such a typically iconic and indexical medium. Any comparison with other arts aside, the basic premise here is sound. As I have suggested, it is one that Mitry explicitly finds in Dufrenne’s aforementioned concept of the represented and expressed sub-worlds of aesthetic objects, which, fused through the aegis of an individual style, create its full and genuine aesthetic “world.”24 As Mitry summarizes, closely following Dufrenne: “The aesthetic quality, that extra quality, is measured by the distance separating the represented from its representation, that is . . . the distance separating the original object—its elementary meaning, its specific emotional qualities—from the meaning and values it acquires from its representation. This is what we mean when we speak of creative form” (341).
For the moment, the key summary points to take on board here are two: just as in all vision-based forms, but more so in the cinema, a work’s creator(s) use known, recognizable, concrete reality and its perception or recognition as a conduit for creative interpretation, transformation, and expression via an artistic style and intentions. But, for the full measure of its nonliteral meaning, and “personal” (e.g., creator-specific) style and affective expression to be grasped, so too must the viewer, in experiencing a film as art, be aware—either on their own, or with the substantial assistance of the work and its creators as prompting such awareness—of that which is simultaneously presented, referenced, and transformed. If in narrative cinema basic, camera-provided representation is but a stepping stone for the conveyance of a singular creative interpretation of reality (and related affect), it is, in these senses (and amplified by basic features of the medium) both a necessary and artistically beneficial one. Here, and from a normative artistic and aesthetic perspective, we return to the specifically aesthetic function and potentials of a cinematically represented and fictional world-in (as I described in chapter 1), as a formal and referential means rather than a (narrative or emotional) end in itself—given, that is, its particular perceptual and psychological presence, concreteness, and relative objectivity, as per cinematographic (and more contemporary digital) reproduction, recording, and registration. While these latter features of cinematic representation are ones that realist theorists such as André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Stanley Cavell stress, these same theorists have also tended to underemphasize many of their higher-order transformative and aesthetic potential(s). Thus, we come to consider the full “world-making” powers of the dialectic of cinematic representation and expression that Mitry and Dufrenne (as well as Deleuze) call specific attention to, as taking cinema away from a single, given “real world” (of perception and experience) as much as toward it.
PIER PAOLO PASOLINI: FILMMAKING AS VISUAL POETICS
The main themes of The Aesthetics and Psychology of Cinema, and some of its specific arguments concerning cinema’s symbolic transformation of reality, are also to be found in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s (roughly contemporaneous) writings, including his widely reprinted 1965 essay “The ‘Cinema of Poetry.’” Coming at the subject from a markedly different cultural and intellectual (as well as filmmaking) background, however, Pasolini’s account of artistic filmmaking also offers some novel ideas and insights highly relevant to our primary concerns.
As well as being one of the most significant narrative filmmakers of the second half of the twentieth century, Pasolini was an accomplished poet, painter, and influential film critic and theorist. His writings on cinema have been described aptly as a “very personal blend of linguistics, politics, and existential concerns,” with a “particular relationship with praxis” (not only that of his own films but also that of other directors).25 In “The ‘Cinema of Poetry’” he attempts to summarize the filmmaker’s artistic activity in a discussion that is mindful of film’s temporal and sequential but still presentational form.26
Like Mitry, Pasolini sees the differences between the film image and written and spoken language as unbridgeable, since the two are anchored in patently different relations to the sensible reality from which they abstract in order to represent.27 Again like Mitry, Pasolini’s conception of cinema stresses the fundamentally “concrete” audiovisual basis of cinematic communication and of the a priori familiar and expressive nature of the basic material with which the filmmaker begins: “familiar” and “expressive” in both natural, or pan-human, and culturally specific ways. Akin in some ways to Eisenstein’s earlier attempt to identify and locate the unique meaning content of film images in “sensual and imagist thought processes,”28 Pasolini wishes to connect films to the imagistic (and temporal) form and content of visual and episodic memory, and dreams, as well as to ordinary, externally directed visual perception. In the aggregate, these are seen to form the subjective visual landscape of inner conscious life. They represent the subject-centered “place” from which all cinematic communication, as well as genuine and expressive cinematic art, springs.
Pasolini appreciates that the images of dreams, waking life, and memories of past sights and scenes often convey meanings and feelings to us—and sometimes multiple, complex, and mixed ones. These sorts of imagistic mental representations are not nearly as closely bound together and conventionally fixed as the senses and literal references of spoken or written words, and they cannot be encompassed in any sort of comprehensive dictionary. While necessarily subjective at their point of origin in individual minds, a great many of these mental image-contents, and their more general or specific meanings and associations, are, however, found to be interpersonally shared and communicable by visual and other sensory means. Pasolini’s term for this broad category of semantic (or proto-semantic) materials—which he considers in some respects analogous to the words of a language that furnish the poet with his or her working material—is im-signs (in Italian imsegni, short for “image signs”).
Regarded as the primary stuffof conscious (and perhaps unconscious) life, insofar as it is capturable in imagistic form, im-signs “prefigure and offer themselves as the ‘instrumental’ premise of cinematographic communication.”29 They are not only mental pictures but “signs” in the sense of having recognizable, transsubjective meanings either within given cultures or communities, or across them, and prior to any appropriation and use by filmmakers. Reminiscent of Cassirer’s arguments as to the origins of aesthetic symbolism and expression in the “mythical consciousness” to which it still bears some similarities, for Pasolini, below the rationally constructed, causal surface of every narrative film, even the most conventional, lies a prerational and, as he suggests, “mythical” power of the medium and its art to connect with the stuff of lived, experiential reality prior to its translation into the abstract schemas and grid work of the language system.30
The proto- or paralinguistic and highly expressive gestural signs of faces and bodies that frequently accompany our verbal communications, as well as what Pasolini calls “environmental” (i.e., natural) signs, are major subtypes of im-signs. Together with dream-signs and memory-signs, they are seen to form the basic semantic elements of cinematic expression. As Naomi Greene notes, Pasolini’s introduction and discussion of these “infinite and noncodifiable ‘natural communicative archetypes’ as the base of cinematic language” is an idea that Deleuze draws on considerably in formulating his own, now much more discussed (as well as far more developed), typology of (1) prelinguistic “images,” as “movements and processes of thought,” and (2) presentational “signs” of memory, dream, and affect as “ways of seeing these processes and thoughts” (as distinct from linguistic and other types of signs).31
Pasolini’s concept of the im-sign captures the core truth that prior to their creative incorporation a great many of a film’s constitutive materials in the form of the image-objects the camera transmits are not objective in the sense of pristine and unmediated like the features of a newly discovered landscape. They are, rather, shared among minds in one or more communities or national or international cultures, as belonging to collective consciousness (and perhaps also something like the Jungian collective unconscious). Because of their highly informal mode of existence and distribution, any endeavor to use im-signs to create an aesthetically significant and expressive film, or to establish a distinctive cinematic style, entails a film artist’s gaining, or attempting to gain, some significant manner of personal, creative ownership of them and, in so doing, to invest them with a new and additional feeling and meaning. Pasolini’s own highly poetic, gestural, and oneiric films, such as The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, Oedipus Rex, and Theorem, reflect one version of this process, and its artistic achievements, in exemplary fashion.
Cassirer has argued, primarily with regard to the universal form of myth, that the phenomenal world is “ready-made” for symbolic appropriation because of the expressive affinity between humans and their environment. Similarly, and despite his insistence on the subjective, “primitive,” and “irrational” provenance of the im-signs that constitute primary creative materials in the hands of the filmmaker, Pasolini stresses that they are neither parts nor reflections of “brute reality” since “all are sufficiently meaningful in nature to become symbolic signs.”32 As selected and used in filmmaking, they come “pre-interpreted,” which is to say, freighted with all sorts of collective sociocultural, as well as personally authored, meanings and affective resonances. At least to some degree, viewers can be counted on to recognize and understand im-signs, as the stuff of common life experience. For instance, in Pasolini’s chosen example, a cloud of steam surrounding a turning wheel may represent (metonymically) a train in motion onscreen, which in turn may prompt a number of related associations and affects (to do with movement, technology, travel, etc.) both germane to the narrative and transcending it. As he explains, the filmmaker “chooses a series of objects, or things, or landscapes, or persons as syntagmas (signs of a symbolic language) which, while they have a grammatical history invented in that moment—as in a sort of happening dominated by the idea of selection and montage—do, however, have an already lengthy and intense pregrammatical history.”33 While at any given point in time im-signs encountered on screen may be more or less conventional or clichéd as a result of their past cinematic use, they are also familiar prior to, and apart from films, that is, from other domains of individual and cultural experience and its representation. Such familiarity and history is akin to a symbolic short-hand that cinematic storytelling and artistic expression alike draw upon. In relation to the latter, and adding to Pasolini’s argument, it must be stressed that from one perspective it is not in spite of but because such “images” may already be cinematic clichés at the time of their use that they can forward artistic, as well as general symbolic, significance in films. This is because, as Deleuze also insists in assigning them a key role to play in what he conceives as distinctly modern or postclassical cinema, their very overfamiliarity is a significant platform for aesthetic transformation in the hands of great film artists. They, like poets in the case of metaphors, find ways of endlessly renewing such images, endowing them with new and unexpected significance in a process that represents yet another way in which film-world creation may be aptly described as a symbolic transformation of experiential reality at any given point in time.
In some respects Pasolini’s theory of im-signs places much greater stress than Mitry’s account on the a priori shared cultural meanings of cinematographically represented image-objects prior to, and after, their incorporation within the spatiotemporal, edited structure of a film and thus apart from any specifically work-generated context and meaning.34 In Pasolini’s view, however, as in Mitry’s far more systematically developed account, a narrative film consists equally of situating preexisting profilmic materials (here defined as some collection of im-signs) within a relatively clear, comprehensible narrative and audiovisual structure, one that extends or alters whatever their prior meaning contents may be. Such a structure follows established filmmaking conventions, narrative and otherwise, to various degrees, yet it remains open and flexible enough to be innovated, expanded, and altered by individual filmmakers, often in the light of precedents set by past works (in something like the manner Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson describe narrative “paradigms,” as known and established cinematic “devices,” that work together in more individualistic, functional networks or “systems,” which, in turn, serve to constitute specific narrative styles).35
More specifically, and as a direct consequence of all that has been said, Pasolini argues that the artistically ambitious filmmaker faces three distinct but profoundly interrelated tasks. These mirror, to some degree, Mitry’s tripartite breakdown of a cinematic work’s semantic and expressive constituents (viz., of profilmic objects, psychological signs, and narrative-artistic symbols) together with the means through which they are linked. First, the filmmaker must choose and “extract” im-signs—that is, take them out of their originary or customary contexts—and place them in a new filmic one; this occurs on the level of a film’s imaginative conception and planning and during its actual framing, shooting, editing, and so forth. Second, for the purpose of storytelling having extracted for use powerful im-signs, ones that “say something to us” from the chaotic “jumble of possible expressions,” the filmmaker assembles them into a coherent cinematic-narrative structure within which they acquire new mutual relations.36 However creative and original, such a structure must remain amenable to cause-and-effect reasoning of some sort to ensure the literal comprehensibility of its denoting elements. Courting some confusion, it must be said, Pasolini terms this unique, work-created, and nongeneralizable system of meaning “governing filmed objects” (to quote Metz’s gloss on Pasolini’s concept) the individual “grammar” of a given film.37 From this perspective—and still not yet at the level of singular aesthetic import and expression—a given narrative film is a system that both uses but always surpasses (in its individuality) the cultural meanings (and codes) attached to its representations. It does this together with, it should be added, the particular cinematic techniques or structures—what Metz calls “cinematographic paradigms”38—which it may share with any number of other films—for example, parallel montage constructions, shot/reverse shot patterns, narrative framing devices, and so on.
Echoing Mitry’s view that in cinema, in contrast to literature, for instance, the imagistic and concrete is the only major road to more abstract figurations and expressions, and that this general route of transformation is central to cinema as art—as distinct from basic filmic communication—Pasolini maintains that in order to more than simply tell a story such a comprehensible symbolic-narrative structure must also be made aesthetically expressive, through more and different creative acts and intentions. This represents the third, and what he identifies as the specifically “artistic,” stage or aspect of the general process outlined, one of fully giving “a purely morphological sign its individual expressive quality.”39 This task is achieved through the creative decisions of the filmmaker about how im-signs operate in relation to the whole of the film: not just in terms of fictional narrative content and literal meaning, however, but in terms of both global cinematic form and nonliteral (e.g., thematic, allusive, reflexive) meaning. For Pasolini such nonliteral and “extranarrative” significance and expression is the clearest and most powerful manifestation of a fully fledged artistic film style.
Although there is some sense in which this “third-level” manifestation may be considered an “extra quality” of a narrative film, in Mitry’s phrase (anticipating talk among later theorists of nonnarrative “surplus” or “excess” equated with the distinctly aesthetic aspect of narrative films), Pasolini stresses that the aesthetic dimension is not an afterthought, an addition “on top of” literal representational and narrative construction. For genuine film artists, from the conception of the work onward, these stages are interrelated and inseparable (as Mitry also observes). Indeed, while Pasolini tends to present them as discrete, sequential steps in a process, if we accept this analysis, they are also, and necessarily temporally overlapping and in some cases, one imagines, simultaneous. For instance, returning to the suggested first “task,” owing to the plethora of available and potential im-signs, their selection on the part of filmmakers is in itself a major exercise of creative artistic and cinematic intelligence. As Pasolini writes, in the creative moment or act “the choice of images cannot avoid being determined by the filmmaker’s ideological and poetic vision of reality,” which is already operative at the time of a film’s conception (whatever precise form this takes), and as thus mediated, “the language of im-signs” is already subject to a pronounced “subjective coercion.”40 (In his first “Kino-Eye” lecture, Dziga Vertov stresses a roughly equivalent, largely mental, activity on the part of the filmmaker, which he considers a form of cinematic “montage” well in advance of a film’s shooting and physical editing.)
Viewing this model and suggested process from a wider perspective, for all manner of reasons (financial, institutional, generic) some films undeniably privilege literal and logical comprehensibility in their representations and storytelling over more figurative and associative (and background-knowledge-requiring) meanings and affect. Others, on the relatively more artistically centered or experimental end of narrative cinema (in this sense), may do something like the reverse. Indeed, the second half of Pasolini’s “‘Cinema of Poetry’” is devoted to contrasting what he terms a “cinema of prose,” associated with mainstream, conventional Hollywood-style cinema, and a specific mid-1960s “art cinema” mode of filmmaking, which, on the basis of his critical-theoretical framework, he terms a “poetic cinema.” (This distinction, it should be said, not only anticipated, but fed directly into, Deleuze’s binary categories of a more conventional and objective “action-image” cinema and the post–Second World War cinema of the “time-image,” which tends to privilege and cultivate, rather than avoid, the disruption of cause-and-effect reasoning, ambiguity of meaning, often pronounced self-reflexivity, and the global conveyance of shifting subjective states of mind and feeling.)
Moreover, there are, of course, comprehensible films that tell stories and contain cultural and natural “signs” and the expressivity (i.e., affect) these entail, without intentionally creating art (at least in a normative sense of the term) and without exhibiting any particularly notable individualistic style. By the same token, no matter how artistically intended, innovative, or successful, all narrative films, by definition, possess some basically comprehensive narrative structure and draw on preestablished filmmaking techniques and traditions. This variability accepted, in summary of Pasolini’s basic view, all cinema is symbolic construction and manipulation in its cognitive dimension (in a sense close to Goodman’s world-making, as we will see)—which, if and when combined with artistic intentions, a distinctive style, and work-generated affective expression (all three of these aspects being mutually constitutive) may also be or become genuinely “aesthetic.”41 In these ways, and in common with Mitry’s film theory, Pasolini’s schema helpfully reemphasizes that the relation between the narrative structure of a film (and its fictional world-in), on the one side, and its aesthetic meaning and expression, on the other, is not only codependent, but variable, relative, and work-specific, rather than fixed in any a priori terms.
If Pasolini’s general framework is accepted, it must also be stressed that the selection, isolation, and artistic use of that vast range of elementary materials in the nature of im-signs is still only the most basic, atomistic level of film-world creation and transformation (as the Italian theorist-director at points appears to acknowledge). The objects of this creative alteration and representation, its cognitive and affective consequences, and the key processes involved also operate on relatively higher levels of creator and viewer imagination, intention, and attention. And just as the conceptual apparatus and description of physical processes on an atomic scale will differ from those on a molecular or macroscopic one, so, to extend the analogy, do the higher-level (in this sense) aspects of film worlds call for different theoretical models and frames of reference.
CINEMA’S EXPRESSIVE MATERIALS: A FIRST GLANCE
Thus far in this chapter we have focused on some of cinema’s raw materials that are primarily cognitive, or sense-bearing. In rather brief, condensed form, Pasolini addresses another major issue of consequence for cinematic world creation and experience, one that is invariably bound up with the articulation of his “poetic” conception of the filmmaker’s creative activity. Discussed but not particularly emphasized by Mitry, this involves what Metz has termed the “problem of filmic expressiveness” and, more specifically, how “aesthetic expressiveness” in cinema is and can only be (in Metz’s view) “grafted onto natural expressiveness.”42
As we have considered, the poetic model of filmmaking in question entails emphasis on the transformation of the preexisting and the conventional into something novel, figurative, and aesthetically expressive in a pronounced and symbolically dense fashion. This process may be seen as roughly analogous to the poet’s creative use of his or her inherited base language. Implicit here, however, is that in cinema, as in other art forms, rather than disappearing or changing in appearance and affect entirely, the “natural” or “innate” psychological expressiveness of materials—colors, gestures, actions, sounds, objects, events—captured in or by cinematic images inheres in each finished film to some degree. Not only this, but it may “shine forth,” to borrow Heidegger’s term for the process he describes with respect to the perceptual and affective presence of a traditional artwork’s constitutive material, or “Earth,” as inhering and persisting in the work’s total created design. (In Heidegger’s later thought such materiality is reflective of “matter,” as such, which in the work of art is dialectically fused with what he terms “World,” as human-made cultural reality.)43
However, like an organism native to one environment that not only survives but thrives in a new, different, and sometimes apparently hostile one, something of the original “language of expressive reality” (in Pasolini’s phrase) as clinging to the film object (or im-sign) survives its transformational passage into the singular symbolic structure of a film as a narrative and aesthetic world—that is, in its newly acquired status as a virtual and aesthetic element within it. Sometimes this is survival by accident, as it were, and sometimes it is clearly a consequence of a filmmaker’s creative purposes.
Within a given film world, a profilmic object chosen for representation—such as a human face with a particular expression—may retain all or most of its prior or inherent (“real world”) psychological significance and emotive power, even as now under harness, so to speak, to the designs of that particular work and world. As Pasolini writes, if the “pregrammatical qualities of spoken signs have the right to citizenship in the style of a poet,” so, too, may expressive features of objects and persons having made this journey into a cinematic work in-progress have the “right to citizenship in the style of a filmmaker.”44 The citizenship to which Pasolini refers remains, however, a highly precarious one, apt to be revoked. For, in general, both such innately expressive (affective) qualities and the representations that occasion them are highly liable to be altered, suppressed, or even exiled from a film-in-progress’s confines for failing to serve its specific narrative, symbolic, and aesthetic intentions and interest. As is also true of other higher-level creative facets of filmmaking that both Pasolini and Mitry identify, the main reason why the “affective” judgment, responsibility, and challenge in question is faced by the film director in most cases, at least (as opposed to any one of his or her collaborators) is aptly encapsulated in Michelangelo Antonioni’s description of the director as the one person who not only “fuses in his mind the various elements involved in a film” but is “in a position to predict the result of this fusion.”45
We will return to the important issue of the “naturally expressive” in much greater detail in the context of a broader based analysis of the affective and emotional experiences of films and their worlds (in chapter 6). For the moment it suffices to observe that it is precisely because filmic representation, both celluloid and digital and including its narrative and aesthetic uses, is so well suited to powerfully conveying such expression (and, indeed, to powerfully amplifying it) that it must often be somehow controlled, and frequently altered, in the context of artistic filmmaking, broadly defined.
FILM SEMANTICS AND BEYOND
The theorists discussed in this chapter advocate a conception of cinematic art rooted in a general semantics of the film image, which yet recognizes that filmic representation is far too culturally contingent and contextual, nuanced and dense to be reduced to the terms of any formal semiotic system. In general, what is required is, in Mitry’s words, a “semiology beyond linguistics” and a schema or model “based on the constantly changing casual and contingent relationship between form and content.”46
In placing symbolic structure and transformation at the heart of filmmaking, while stressing the differences between cinematic and linguistic communication without ever losing sight of a film as a unique aesthetic object or event, aspects of these theories are in many ways more useful in developing a more holistic account of film worlds as art worlds, and their symbolic basis, than Metz’s semiotics, for instance (and other theories of the film sign it has directly or indirectly inspired). This relevance owes, not least, to a greater focus on (often) less literal symbolic and affective expression in narrative films and its aesthetic relation to the literal (“denoted”), together with the guiding conception that films transform (to some degree) all that they present to our vision, hearing, and minds.
The worlds of film works are self-enclosed, integral, aesthetic wholes. But, as I have already stressed, they are also dependent, for their capabilities to mean and express in artistic ways, on the making of external references, to the extent the film image, as Deleuze rightly notes, is always “legible as well as visible.”47 The transformations to be found in filmmaking are never only formal, for instance, as they go hand in hand with creating new meanings, new referential relationships, new possibilities for film narrative and thematic content. Crucially, however, and to evoke Panofsky’s art-historical distinction, this involves not only the most common and public schemes of signification, or “iconography,” but also that more singular “iconology” of works that is a matter of symbolic meaning relations that the artist, here filmmaker, him- or herself has a far larger hand (if seldom an entirely free one) in creatively shaping and developing.48 Such freedom stems in part from the meaning relations in question transcend ing medium-given features of cinema tic representation and their “natural,” universal, and psychological effects and affects (in a way similar to that which Metz claims for cinematic “connotation”).
In sum, a film’s aesthetic (or, preaesthetic) constituents are in part the products of an operation of cultural mining and extraction from among preexisting realities, material and nonmaterial (or ideational) alike. For the most part these are already symbolically mediated and informed, just as they are also already “naturally” imbued with varying degrees of affective content channeled through traditional cinematographic or video-digital representation. The creation of a novel and aesthetically expressive totality within which these individual “units” function as expressive parts is, in turn, bound to a new and singular narrative-cinematic structure created by the filmmaker(s) on the basis of principles that are always a matter of convention and tradition, on the one hand, and an originality and innovation that is specific to individual film worlds (and their creators), on the other. However, as characterized by artistic ends rather than those of entertainment alone, for instance, the criterion guiding this latter process is not simply that of literal intelligibility or of “telling a story” in the clearest, most direct, and transparent fashion. Rather, it is also the creation and conveyance of all manner of (related) figurative meaning and affect through original forms that incorporate, yet at the same time transcend, whatever meanings and affects are possessed by the materials used in a film’s creation (i.e., as owing to nothing more than their natures and histories). Thus, in the general and synthetic view at which we have arrived, first, the central differences between work-constitutive materials and resulting aesthetic elements, between conventional signs and artistic symbols in a cinematic work are upheld, and, second, the productive interaction between these—in, through, and around—a fictional-narrative story and story-world (world-in) is also strongly affirmed.