tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-76528126096247375482024-02-06T19:57:05.150-08:00Departamento Cinema/Imagem em Movimento (Interno)Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7652812609624737548.post-82748932237029937852007-10-13T08:54:00.000-07:002007-10-14T07:29:15.958-07:00ROLAND BARTHES - The Third Meaning<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 1pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; line-height: 16.55pt;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">Research notes on some Eisenstein stills </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 12.2pt 1.7pt 0.0001pt 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; line-height: 12.45pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> Here is an image from </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">Ivan the Terrible </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">(<span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">I</span>):</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgixCuUayaXikit9RZGv4FPVdc1Ly9c0SiFRS9ldZLkx4uh1ot4LjQXcPvsVHJLhW1yQWZv7MF2akKvilacHB9eWyK5MkG6sX-mjcXdA95x-g49pQLBI9LmMz8BuyslRU1QAmZvaRfJBwI/s1600-h/Img067+copy.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgixCuUayaXikit9RZGv4FPVdc1Ly9c0SiFRS9ldZLkx4uh1ot4LjQXcPvsVHJLhW1yQWZv7MF2akKvilacHB9eWyK5MkG6sX-mjcXdA95x-g49pQLBI9LmMz8BuyslRU1QAmZvaRfJBwI/s200/Img067+copy.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5121179818595948514" border="0" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> two courtiers, two </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">adjuvants, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">two supernumeraries (it matters little if I am unable to remember the details of the story exactly) are raining down gold over the young czar's head. I think it possible to distinguish </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">three levels of meaning in this scene:</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 1.7pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; line-height: 12.45pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">1) </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">An informational level, which gathers </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">together every</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">thing I can learn from the sett</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">ing, the costumes, the charac</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">t</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">ers, their relations, their insertion in an anecdote with which I am (even if vaguely) </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">familiar. This level is that of communication. Were it necessary</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> to </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">find a mode of </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">analysis for it, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">I should turn to the first semiotics (that of the 'message'); this level, this semiotics, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">however, will be of no further concern here.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.05pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; line-height: 12.45pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">2) A symbolic level, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">which is the downpour of gold and which is </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">itself stratified. There is the referential symbolism: the imperial ritual of baptism by gold. Then there is the diegetic symbolism: the theme of gold, of wealth, in </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">Ivan the Terrible </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">(supposing such a theme to exist), which makes a significant intervention in this </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">scene. Then again there is the Eisensteinian symbolism - if by chance a critic should decide to demonstrate that the gold or the raining down or the curtain or the disfiguration can be seen as held in a network of displacements and substitutions peculiar to S. M. </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">Eisenstein. Finally, there is an historical symbolism, if, in a manner even more widely embracing than the previous ones, it </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">can be shown that </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">the gold brings in a (theatrical) playing, a </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">scenography of exchange, locatable</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> both psycho</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">analytically and economically, that is to say semiologically.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.05pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 12.45pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">Taken in its entirety, this second level is t</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">hat of </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">signification. </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">Its mode of analysis would be a semiotics more highly developed than the first, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">a second or neo-semiotics, open no longer to the science of the message but to the sciences of the symbol (psychoanalysis, economy, dramaturgy).</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.2pt 6.45pt 0.0001pt 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; line-height: 12.45pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">3) Is</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> that all? No, for I am still held by the image. I read, I </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">receive (and probably even first and foremost) a third meaning<sup>1</sup> </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">- </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">evident, erratic, obstinate. I do not know what its signified is, at least I am unable to give it a name, but I can see clearly the traits, the signifying accidents of which this - </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">consequently incomplete - sign is composed: a certain compactness of the courtiers' </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">make-up, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">thick and insistent for the one, smooth and distinguished for the other; the former’s 'stupid' nose, the latter's finely traced eyebrows, his lank blondness, his faded, pale complexion, the affected flatness of his hairstyle </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">suggestive of a wig, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">the touching-up </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">with chalky foundation talc, with face powder. I am not sure if the reading </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">of this third meaning is justified </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">- if it can be generalized - but already it seems to me that its signifier (the traits to which I have tried to give words, if not to describe) possesses a theoretical individuality. On the one hand, i t cannot be conflated with the simple </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">existence </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">of </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">the scene, it exceeds the copy of the referential motif,</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> it compels an interrogative reading (interrogation bears precisely on the signifier not </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">on the signified, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">on </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">reading not on intellection: it is a 'poetical' grasp); </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">on the other, neither can it be</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> conflated with the dramatic meaning of the episode: to say that these traits refer to a significant 'attitude' of the </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">courtiers, this one detached and bored, that one diligent </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">('They are simply doing </span></i><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">their job as courtiers'), </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">does not leave me fully satisfied; something in the two faces exceeds psychology, anecdote, function, exceeds meaning without, however, coming </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">down to the obstinacy in presence shown by any human body. By contrast with </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">the first two levels, communication and signification, this third level - even if the reading </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">of it is still hazardous - is that of <i>signifiance, </i>a word which has the </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">advantage of referring to the field of the signifier (and not of signification) and of linking up with, via the path opened by Julia Kristeva who proposed the term, a semiotics of the text.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.2pt 2.15pt 0.0001pt 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; line-height: 12.45pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">My concern here lies not with </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">communication </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">but with signification </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">and <i>signifiance. </i>I must therefore name as economically as possible the second and third meanings. The symbolic meaning (the shower of gold, the power of wealth, the imperial rite) forces itself</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> upon me by a double determination: it is intentional (it is what the author wanted to say) and it is taken from a kind of common, general lexicon of symbols; it is a meaning which seeks me out, me, the recipient of the message, the subject of the reading, a meaning which starts with SME </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">and which goes on <i>ahead of me; </i>evident certainly (so too is the other), but <i>closed </i>in its evidence, held in a complete system of destination. I propose to call this complete</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">sign <i>the </i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"><i>obvious meaning. </i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"><i>Obvius </i>means <i>which comes ahead </i>and </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">this is exactly</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> the case with this meaning, which comes to seek me out. In theology, we are told, the obvious meaning is that </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">'which presents itself quite naturally </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">to the mind' and this again is </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">the case here: the symbolics of the raining down of gold appears </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">to me as for ever having been </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">endowed with a 'natural' clarity. As for the other meaning, the third, the one 'too many', the supplement that my intellection cannot succeed in absorbing, at once persistent and fleeting, smooth </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">and elusive, I propose to call it <i>the obtuse meaning. </i>The word springs readily to mind and, miracle, when its </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">etymology is unfolded, it already provides us with a theory of the</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> supplementary meaning. <i>Obtusus </i>means <i>that which is blunted, rounded in form. </i>Are not the traits which I indicated (the make-up, the whiteness, the wig, etc.) just </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">like the blunting of a meaning too clear, too violent? Do they not give the obvious signified a kind of difficultly prehensible roundness, cause my reading to slip? An obtuse angle is greater than a right angle: </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"><i>an obtuse angle of 100°, </i>says the dictionary; the third meaning also seems to </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">me greater than the pure, upright, secant, legal perpendicular of the narrative, it seems to open the field of meaning totally, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">that is infinitely. I even accept for the obtuse meaning the word's pejorative connotation: </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">the obtuse meaning appears to extend outside culture, knowledge, information; analyti</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">cally, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">it has </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">something derisory about it: opening out into the infinity of language, it can come through as limited in the eyes of analytic reason; it belongs to the family of pun, buffoonery, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">useless expenditure. </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">Indifferent to moral </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">or aesthetic categories (the trivial, the futile, the false, the pastiche),</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> it is on the side of the carnival. <i>Obtuse </i>is thus very suitable.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 18pt 0.25pt 0.0001pt 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; line-height: 11pt;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">The obvious meaning</span></i><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> <o:p></o:p></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5.75pt 0.95pt 0.0001pt 0cm; text-align: justify; line-height: 12.45pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">A few words with regard to the o bvious meaning, even though it is not the</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> object of this study. Here are two images in which it can be seen in its pure state. The four figures in <span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">II</span></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhuTC41PtPU86W9fHTZ1eYswfC5H6XXj1pW2XE_vHjJxEDmdJjRvK2ne5iZ2lqjH_jscGuDuL58qOZLU39JW0gpI15ULeKCDt7mlmJbKv0Vy8OhrE7bpJNZ0_rJTgdo1wtgjzohuESF39S/s1600-h/Img067.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhuTC41PtPU86W9fHTZ1eYswfC5H6XXj1pW2XE_vHjJxEDmdJjRvK2ne5iZ2lqjH_jscGuDuL58qOZLU39JW0gpI15ULeKCDt7mlmJbKv0Vy8OhrE7bpJNZ0_rJTgdo1wtgjzohuESF39S/s200/Img067.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5121181523697965058" border="0" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> 'symbolize' three ages of life and the unanimity of mourn</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">ing </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">(Vakulinchuk's funeral). The clenched fist in <span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">IV</span>,</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUQhzX2VfGgeuglvDuEAk4zfngPXNYvtQfj0GRMjw43kNTlEAjn6gCr4fT2c4yGKnC_Hf2IZPjZLfGgY8M8li_PhMFCAsjBtpvewmCLwPYjewyoEGRvOCDdBpfBatFPNkcY5emZIKVTX1N/s1600-h/Img066.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUQhzX2VfGgeuglvDuEAk4zfngPXNYvtQfj0GRMjw43kNTlEAjn6gCr4fT2c4yGKnC_Hf2IZPjZLfGgY8M8li_PhMFCAsjBtpvewmCLwPYjewyoEGRvOCDdBpfBatFPNkcY5emZIKVTX1N/s200/Img066.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5121180875157903346" border="0" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> given in full 'detail'</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">signifies indignation, anger mastered and chan</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">n</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">elled, the determination of the struggle; metonymically </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">joined </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">to the </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">whole Potemkin story,</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> it 'symbolizes' the working </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">class in all its resolute strength, for, by a miracle of semantic intelligence,</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">this fist which is <i>seen wrong </i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"><i>way up, </i>kept by its </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">owner in a sort of clandestinity </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">(it is the hand which <i>first of all </i>hangs down naturally along the trouser </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">leg and which </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">then </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">closes, hardens, </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">thinks </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">at once its future struggle, its patience and its prudence), cannot be read as the fist of some hoodlum, of some fascist: it is </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">immediately </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">a proletarian fist. </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">Which shows that Eisenstein's</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> 'art' is not polysemous: it chooses the </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">meaning, imposes it, hammers it home (if the signification is overrun by the obtuse meaning, this is not to say that it is thereby denied or blurred): </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">the </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">Eisensteinian meaning devastates ambiguity. How? By the </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">addition </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">of an aesthetic value, emphasis. Eisenstein's 'decorativism' has an economic function: it proffers the truth. Look at <span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">III</span>:</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjj_wHIDa7ysn3ScAjz2kMUna5xO_6sz5hJ2mETp7KRxE17sljAixxOaodF_o4bvgjCIFzKdQTZZ2p9CoKnaY-6T3WTv1LVV3vCfvFzSD_qksWDoGN74M5pBFobh_vH8EQECUg363CjMiol/s1600-h/Img066+copy.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjj_wHIDa7ysn3ScAjz2kMUna5xO_6sz5hJ2mETp7KRxE17sljAixxOaodF_o4bvgjCIFzKdQTZZ2p9CoKnaY-6T3WTv1LVV3vCfvFzSD_qksWDoGN74M5pBFobh_vH8EQECUg363CjMiol/s200/Img066+copy.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5121181970374563858" border="0" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> in extremely classic fashion, grief </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">comes from the bowed heads, the expressions of suffering, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">the hand over the mouth stifling a sob, but when once all this has been said, very </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">adequately, a decorative trait says it again: the superimposition of the two hands aesthetically arranged in a delicate, maternal, floral ascension towards the face bowing down. Within the general detail (the two women), another detail is mirroringly inscribed; derived from a pictorial order as a quotation of the gestures to be found in icons and </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">pietà, </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">it does not distract but </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">accentuates the meaning. </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">This accentuation (characteristic of all realist art) has </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">some </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">connection with the 'truth' of </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">Potemkin. </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">Baudelaire spoke of </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">'the emphatic truth of gesture in the important moments </span></i><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">of life'; </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">here it is the truth </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">of the 'important pro</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">letarian moment' </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">which requires emphasis. </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">The Eisensteinian aesthetic does not constitute an independent level: it is part of the obvious meaning, and the obvious meaning is always, in Eisenstein, the revolution.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 20.6pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; line-height: 10.8pt;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">The obtuse meaning</span></i><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> <o:p></o:p></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 1.2pt 0.0001pt 0cm; text-align: justify; line-height: 12.45pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">I first had the conviction of the obtuse meaning with image <span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">V</span></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpol1EDLk0xuiBxdKuh2voGzvl3RRn56iybCC6yRTzOau1QBKCFhpvLtQ749SWkUuhdr1Ge54Ul-_VpzyzhTD4vdmvXSIfE00RHWAbmloso6aFmspm_xESBwF-m5ZOjnMKit8FIinZzgGi/s1600-h/Img079+copy.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpol1EDLk0xuiBxdKuh2voGzvl3RRn56iybCC6yRTzOau1QBKCFhpvLtQ749SWkUuhdr1Ge54Ul-_VpzyzhTD4vdmvXSIfE00RHWAbmloso6aFmspm_xESBwF-m5ZOjnMKit8FIinZzgGi/s200/Img079+copy.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5121182502950508578" border="0" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">. A question forced itself upon me: what is it in this tear</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">ful old woman that poses for me the question of the signifier? I quickly convinced myself that, although perfect, it was neither the facial expression nor the gestural figuration </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">of grief (the closed eyelids, the taut mouth, the hand </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">clasped on the breast): </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">all that belongs to the full signification, to </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">the obvious meaning of the image, to Eisensteinian realism and </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">decorativism. I felt that the penetrating trait - disturbing like a guest who obstinately sits on saying nothing when one has no use for him - must be situated somewhere in the region of the forehead:</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> the coif, the headscarf holding in the hair, had something to do with it. In image <span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">VI</span>,</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivU6mI0gqgrBhtUXn0yDeEAyudRpqDHXpuA_6HVI-tDXujDaN1z8UqF15QfhIa3v3HRCgNPNJ-V2VLU-fHsrZiticpUdGiBGZU5L0CGiH1KabrF0u-SxVvuQkVN8syidtCyLL_VW1x0usP/s1600-h/Img079.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivU6mI0gqgrBhtUXn0yDeEAyudRpqDHXpuA_6HVI-tDXujDaN1z8UqF15QfhIa3v3HRCgNPNJ-V2VLU-fHsrZiticpUdGiBGZU5L0CGiH1KabrF0u-SxVvuQkVN8syidtCyLL_VW1x0usP/s200/Img079.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5121182795008284722" border="0" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> however, the obtuse</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> meaning vanishes, leaving only a message of grief. </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">It </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">was then I understood that the scandal, supple</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">ment or drift imposed on this classic representation of grief carne very precisely </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">from a tenuous relationship: that of the low headscarf, the closed eyes </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">and </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">the convex mouth; or rather, to use the distinction made </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">by SME himself between 'the shadows of the cathedral' and 'the enshadowed cathe</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">dral', from </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">a relation between the 'lowness' of the line of the headscarf, pulled down abnormally </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">close to the eyebrows as in those disguises intended to create a </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">facetious, simpleton look, the upward circumflex of the faded eyebrows, faint and old, the excessive curve of the eyelids, lowered but brought </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">together as though squinting, and the bar of the half-opened mouth, corresponding to the bar of the head</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">scarf and to that of the eyebrows, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">metaphorically speaking 'like a fish out of water'. All these traits (the funny </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">headdress, the old woman, the squinting eyelids, the fish) have as their vague reference a somewhat low </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">language, the </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">language of a rather pitiful disguise. In connection</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> with the noble grief of the obvious meaning, they form-a dialogism so tenuous that there is no guarantee of its intentionality. The charac</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">teristic of this third meaning is indeed - at least in SME </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">to blur the limit separating expression from disguise, but also to allow that</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> oscillation succinct demonstration - an elliptic emphasis, if one can put it like that, a complex and </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">extremely artful disposition (for it involves a temporality </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">of signification), perfectly described by Eisenstein himself when he jubilantly </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">quotes the golden rule of </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">the old K. S. Gillette: </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"><i>'just short of the cutting edge'.</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"><i> <o:p></o:p></i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0.2pt 1.2pt 0.0001pt 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; line-height: 12.45pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">The obtuse meaning, then, has something to do with disguise. Look at Ivan's beard raised </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">to obtuse meaning, in my opinion, in image <span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">VII</span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">;</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCEc0A1spzhMLGsc9pvs7DZmqWODNTYhW_GkNWb9NerOZ6EAQ4D89Ju_hgz4YTgxaumg-vUv2844CZU5WSAXqcTjIuRGVUo4nZFIVUDhLfE_b3M94dHS8kUMKBF5UFtAYSLlPWEIbkPhbW/s1600-h/Img068+copy.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCEc0A1spzhMLGsc9pvs7DZmqWODNTYhW_GkNWb9NerOZ6EAQ4D89Ju_hgz4YTgxaumg-vUv2844CZU5WSAXqcTjIuRGVUo4nZFIVUDhLfE_b3M94dHS8kUMKBF5UFtAYSLlPWEIbkPhbW/s200/Img068+copy.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5121193455117113458" border="0" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> it declares its artifice </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">but with</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">out in so doing abandoning the 'good faith' of its referent (the historical figure of the czar): an actor disguised twice over (once as actor in the anecdote, once as actor in the </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">dramaturgy) without one disguise destroying the other; a multi-layering of meanings </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">which always lets the previous meaning continue, as in a geological formation, saying the opposite without giving up the contrary - a (two-term) dramatic dialectic that Brecht would have liked. The Eisen</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">steinian 'artifice' is at once falsification of itself - pastiche </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">and derisory fetish, since it shows its fissure and its suture:</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> what can be seen in image <span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">VII</span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> is the join </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">and thus </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">the initial disjoin of the beard perpendicular </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">to the chin. That the top of a head (the most 'obtuse' part of the human person), that a single bun of hair (in image <span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">VIII</span>)</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIWUjIFagC_clOb5WjDEMW1abQviD2qKzjwj7s0NfkyR0G9uSq0sdyHfbSl2TsrCZvGBsbxUUsPmuoENxlKaj_PdAfqCSRKUpR7xt7wXJt4x6PnciQ0aq-A0sxBaiT4kdxoqlnvqlW3MBj/s1600-h/Img068.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIWUjIFagC_clOb5WjDEMW1abQviD2qKzjwj7s0NfkyR0G9uSq0sdyHfbSl2TsrCZvGBsbxUUsPmuoENxlKaj_PdAfqCSRKUpR7xt7wXJt4x6PnciQ0aq-A0sxBaiT4kdxoqlnvqlW3MBj/s200/Img068.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5121193609735936130" border="0" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> can be the <i>expression </i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">of grief, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">that is what is derisory - for the expression, not for the grief. Hence no parody, no trace of burlesque; there is no aping of grief (the obvious meaning must remain revolutionary,</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> the </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">general mourning which accompanies Vakulinchuk's death has a historical meaning),</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">and yet, 'embodied' in the bun, it </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">has a cut-off, a refusal of contami</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">nation; the populism of the woollen shawl (obvious meaning) stops at the bun; here begins the fetish - the hair - and a kind of <i>non-negating derision </i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">of the expression. The whole of the obtuse meaning (its disruptive force) is staked on the ex</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">cessive mass of the hair. Look at another bun (that of the woman in image <span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">IX</span>):</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjir94rDFiB4bJZEVVjONV5yK0sywTh12OVa5mdQRdbp1qxkTKwzhx2FP31RMb9QEcDi-VmarJE3RO5-ufCj3-iu_Ihp-5bwOBqmZarEc_w-Ocy8WBStcHL-7AzFLfZKQNUMqO4PoBEQZFV/s1600-h/Img069+copy.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjir94rDFiB4bJZEVVjONV5yK0sywTh12OVa5mdQRdbp1qxkTKwzhx2FP31RMb9QEcDi-VmarJE3RO5-ufCj3-iu_Ihp-5bwOBqmZarEc_w-Ocy8WBStcHL-7AzFLfZKQNUMqO4PoBEQZFV/s200/Img069+copy.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5121194391419984018" border="0" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> it contradicts the tiny raised fist, atrophies it without the reduction </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">having the slightest symbolic (intellectual) value; </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">prolonged by small curls, pulling the face in towards an ovine model, it gives the </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">woman something <i>touching </i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">(in the way that a certain generous foolishness can be) or <i>sensitive </i>- these antiquated </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">words, mystified words if ever there were, with little that is revolu</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">tionary </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">or political about them, must nevertheless be as</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">sumed. I believe that the obtuse meaning carries a certain <i>emotion. </i>Caught up in the disguise, such emotion is never</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">sticky, it is an emotion which simply <i>designates </i>what one loves, what one wants </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">to defend: an emotion-value, an evaluation. Everyone will agree, I think, that SME's pro</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">letarian ethnography fragmented the</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> length of Vakulin</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">chuk's funeral, is constantly informed by something</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> loving (using the word </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">regardless of any specification as to age or sex). Maternal, cordial, virile,</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> 'sympathetic' without any recourse to stereotypes, the Eisensteinian people is essentially <i>lovable. </i>We savour, we love the two round-capped heads in image <span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">X</span>,</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7mRCbS-qpZ1oAGWWMRzAHL9rMj2oAhvO4Op4qgThBl4r9YBBReA1SjW-W3JV3O8Y55FuHcgS77I5fp8FkW0dfb2qRPgDOdn_jUEK1LubJp_k4osxNr8AQVmZreUS_cAt3sUQlfX4l4Kh5/s1600-h/Img069.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7mRCbS-qpZ1oAGWWMRzAHL9rMj2oAhvO4Op4qgThBl4r9YBBReA1SjW-W3JV3O8Y55FuHcgS77I5fp8FkW0dfb2qRPgDOdn_jUEK1LubJp_k4osxNr8AQVmZreUS_cAt3sUQlfX4l4Kh5/s200/Img069.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5121194859571419298" border="0" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> we enter into complicity, into an understanding with them. Doubtless beauty can work as an obtuse </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">meaning; this is the case in image <span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">XI</span>,</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFwrqYmFebZV9a9zAgg8qN52OIdIB68b3zkkRgGi3Jj7PBZ6JPDc-MACwC67reLvi6vWPz2mxmmUxLsDstvjNl9taQ106VJeSlOuQJpxKlmg5E40p0xBs1pHfdeRQnRslIgcjfNgwrjl3R/s1600-h/Img070+copy+2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFwrqYmFebZV9a9zAgg8qN52OIdIB68b3zkkRgGi3Jj7PBZ6JPDc-MACwC67reLvi6vWPz2mxmmUxLsDstvjNl9taQ106VJeSlOuQJpxKlmg5E40p0xBs1pHfdeRQnRslIgcjfNgwrjl3R/s200/Img070+copy+2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5121194979830503602" border="0" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> where the extremely dense obvious meaning (Ivan's attitude, young </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">Vladimir's half</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">wit foolishness) is anchored and/or </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">set adrift by Basmanov's beauty. But the eroticism included in </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">the </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">obtuse meaning (or rather: the eroticism </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">which this meaning picks </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">up) </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">is no respector of the aesthetic: Euphrosyne is ugly, 'obtuse' (images <span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">XII</span></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjodjg9NIDWPNyaxFmrjUU771i3L7w16TcRUHGoxRW7FFzUqFuhRROM814YoKt983a1-KH2F1ez0aMhSKCVgQXNMbpX42JxmBLw3cb7kCM3vjiAqSDOCpLPzccgVWXMDCtSfuFZnZLz2EdD/s1600-h/Img070+copy.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjodjg9NIDWPNyaxFmrjUU771i3L7w16TcRUHGoxRW7FFzUqFuhRROM814YoKt983a1-KH2F1ez0aMhSKCVgQXNMbpX42JxmBLw3cb7kCM3vjiAqSDOCpLPzccgVWXMDCtSfuFZnZLz2EdD/s200/Img070+copy.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5121195143039260866" border="0" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> and <span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">XIII</span>)</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihKluCyPrpHnhPKJJ3djZPTqJb1SXG0GmSOzpyCYfPursSE9BpSUO1dqxrSIWxo6anZT7gsY3rKhDHpGkXnpFziPi8GvLqzkFJ1nzHbwq_UMFKIwQ3QFXZQpk00ysGmZhfDpzJ3seUGeOJ/s1600-h/Img070.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihKluCyPrpHnhPKJJ3djZPTqJb1SXG0GmSOzpyCYfPursSE9BpSUO1dqxrSIWxo6anZT7gsY3rKhDHpGkXnpFziPi8GvLqzkFJ1nzHbwq_UMFKIwQ3QFXZQpk00ysGmZhfDpzJ3seUGeOJ/s200/Img070.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5121195297658083538" border="0" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">,</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> like the monk (image <span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">XIV</span>),</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO5pDLfndDkRgy_6rcKoZ1nDwTUGA6KcbQQUPQqdnDI7oQVsTaqFYa928uAg7bioYMOtdrhxJgNyxvSpWIIKfys5vR8APEYegVV-a5sMiYwSDrRqwCJI3EFTQSNSHD1oZH9bqnVuyIiN7e/s1600-h/Img071+copy.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO5pDLfndDkRgy_6rcKoZ1nDwTUGA6KcbQQUPQqdnDI7oQVsTaqFYa928uAg7bioYMOtdrhxJgNyxvSpWIIKfys5vR8APEYegVV-a5sMiYwSDrRqwCJI3EFTQSNSHD1oZH9bqnVuyIiN7e/s200/Img071+copy.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5121195452276906210" border="0" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> but this obtuseness exceeds the anecdote, becomes a blunting of meaning, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">its drifting. There is in the obtuse meaning an eroticism which includes the contrary </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">of the beautiful, as also what falls outside such contrariety, its limit - inver</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">sion, unease, and perhaps sadism. Look at the flabby innocence of the 'Children in the Fiery Furnace' (image <span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">XV</span>),</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0KEP52yiRLvbs7NjuBZgaBBLsAtm1lIoMeZpXP38IvyE7DQUywXA0qALyFe0KjenJUrVbjbr0aaYauHNl2b6jYuJc3uYLdYM2G-OhGzmRFpOkUOh6aoFdi_MiPlRNsA_VnnhYYU31b75C/s1600-h/Img071.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0KEP52yiRLvbs7NjuBZgaBBLsAtm1lIoMeZpXP38IvyE7DQUywXA0qALyFe0KjenJUrVbjbr0aaYauHNl2b6jYuJc3uYLdYM2G-OhGzmRFpOkUOh6aoFdi_MiPlRNsA_VnnhYYU31b75C/s200/Img071.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5121195563946055922" border="0" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> the schoolboyish ridicule of their mufflers dutifully tucked up </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">to the chin, the curds-and-whey skin (of their eyes, of their mouths set in the skin) which Fellini seems to have</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> remembered in the hermaphrodite of his <i>Satiricon </i>- the very same mentioned by Georges Bataille, notably </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">in that text in </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">Documents </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">which situates for me one of the possible regions of obtuse meaning, 'The big toe'.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.7pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; line-height: 12.45pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">Let us continue (if these examples will suffice to lead on to one or two more theoretical remarks). The obtuse meaning is not in the language-system (even that of symbols). Take away the obtuse meaning and communication and signi</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">fication still remain, still circulate, still come through: without it, I can still state and read. No more, however, is it to be located in language use. It may be that there is a certain constant in Eisensteinian obtuse meaning, but in that case it is already a thematic language, an idiolect, this idiolect being provisional (simply decided by a critic writing a book on SME). Obtuse meanings are to be found not everywhere (the signifier is rare, a future figure) but </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">somewhere: </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">in other </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">authors </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">of films (perhaps), in </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">a certain </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">manner of reading 'life' and so 'reality' itself (the word is simply used here in opposition to the deliberately fictive). In image <span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">XVI</span></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgR1JJgWeTvZ6D2eaESIzheicM8nOQEhQDJtZVAJ9A7FZFDLgugu81lo_iXMJsrjk6oXamgQGTxjDJRp3iR69BdBPZMZQwICCWfXciqpdT1G2CTDc65eRX1u59wPl5OkpjJMd98XKT06EqU/s1600-h/Img072+copy.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgR1JJgWeTvZ6D2eaESIzheicM8nOQEhQDJtZVAJ9A7FZFDLgugu81lo_iXMJsrjk6oXamgQGTxjDJRp3iR69BdBPZMZQwICCWfXciqpdT1G2CTDc65eRX1u59wPl5OkpjJMd98XKT06EqU/s200/Img072+copy.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5121195705679976706" border="0" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> from </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">Ordinary Fascism </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">(by Mikhail Romm), a documentary image, I can easily read an obvious meaning, that of fascism (aesthetics and symbolics of power, the theatrical hunt), but I can also read an obtuse meaning: the (again) disguised, blond silliness of the young quiver-</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">bearer, the flabbiness of his hands and mouth (I cannot manage to describe, only to designate a location), Goering's thick nails. his trashy ring (this already on the brink of obvious meaning, like the treacly platitude of the imbecile smile of the bespectacled man in the background - visibly an 'arse-licker'). In other words, the obtuse meaning is not situated structurally, a semantologist would not agree as to its objective existence (but then what is an objective read</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">ing?); and if to me it is c1ear (to me), that is </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">still </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">perhaps (for the moment) by the same 'aberration' which compelled the lone and unhappy Saussure to hear in ancient poetry the enigmatic voice of anagram, unoriginated and obsessive. Same uncertainty when it is a matter of </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">describing </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">the obtuse meaning (of giving an idea of where it is going, where it goes away). The obtuse meaning is a signifier without a signified, hence the difficulty in naming it. My reading remains suspended<u> </u>between the image and its description, between definition and approximation. If the obtuse meaning cannot be described, that is because, in contrast to the obvious meaning, it does not copy anything - how do you describe something that does not represent anything? The pictorial 'rendering' of </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">words is here impossible, with the consequence that if, in front of these images, we remain, you and </span><b><span dir="rtl" style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" lang="HE" >I,</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">at the level of articulated language - at the level, that is, of my own text - the obtuse meaning will not succeed in existing, in entering the critic's metalanguage. Which means that the obtuse meaning is outside (articulated) language while nevertheless within interlocution. For if you look at the images I am discussing, you can see this meaning, we can agree on it 'over the shoulder' or 'on the back' of articulated language. Thanks to the image (fixed, it is true; a factor which will be taken up later) or much rather thanks to what, in the image, is purely image (which is in fact very little), we do without language yet never cease to under</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">stand one another. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 12.2pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; line-height: 12.45pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">In short, what the obtuse meaning disturbs, sterilizes, is metalanguage (criticism). A number of reasons can be given for this. First and foremost, obtuse meaning is dis</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">continuous, indifferent to the story and to the obvious meaning (as signification of the story). This dissociation has a de-naturing or at least a distancing effect with regard to the referent (to 'reality' as nature, the realist instance). Eisenstein would probably have acknowledged this in</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">congruity, this im-pertinence of the signifier, Eisenstein who tells us concerning sound and colour: 'Art begins the moment the creaking of a boot on the sound-track occurs</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> against a different visual shot and thus gives rise to corresponding associations. It is the same with colour: colour begins where it no longer corresponds to natural colouration... ' Then, the signifier (the third meaning) is not filled out, it keeps a permanent state of </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">depletion </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">(a word from linguistics which designates empty, all-purpose verbs, as for example the French verb </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">faire). </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">We could also say on the contrary – and it would be just as correct - that this same signifier is not empty (cannot empty itself), that it maintains a state of perpetual erethism, desire not finding issue in that spasm of the signified which normally brings the subject voluptuously back into the peace of nomin</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">ations. Finally, the obtuse meaning can be seen as an </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">accent, </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">the very form of an emergence, of a fold (a crease even) marking the heavy layer of informations and signifi</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">cations. If it could be described (a contradiction in terms), it would have exactly the nature of the Japanese </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">haiku </span></i><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">anaphoric gesture without significant content, a sort of gash rased of meaning (of desire for meaning). Thus in image <span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">V</span>:</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiReFi1YvBRZ0Kp5oxPsXfVqwQMHANqsjKij0fkEU_o6RXTs1rwYz2Mn92R1VNaSAw9po0GuvF7g2QvLBO9BXyVOlIVFg3OvPvzdXRdN-VuxYpq0hMNyy0MbPFtotDeGe01sEm6a_jNDb2F/s1600-h/Img079+copy.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiReFi1YvBRZ0Kp5oxPsXfVqwQMHANqsjKij0fkEU_o6RXTs1rwYz2Mn92R1VNaSAw9po0GuvF7g2QvLBO9BXyVOlIVFg3OvPvzdXRdN-VuxYpq0hMNyy0MbPFtotDeGe01sEm6a_jNDb2F/s200/Img079+copy.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5121195813054159122" border="0" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 6.45pt 99.8pt 0.0001pt 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; line-height: 12.45pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">Mouth drawn, eyes shut squinting, <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 6.45pt 99.8pt 0.0001pt 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; line-height: 12.45pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">Headscarf low over forehead, <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 6.45pt 99.8pt 0.0001pt 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; line-height: 12.45pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">She weeps. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 6.2pt 1.65pt 0.0001pt 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; line-height: 12.45pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">This accent - the simultaneously emphatic and elliptic character of which has already been mentioned - is not directed towards meaning (as in hysteria), does not theatrica</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">lize (Eisensteinian decorativism belongs to another level), does not even indicate an </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">elsewhere </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">of meaning (another content, added to the obvious meaning); it outplays meaning - subverts not the content but the whole practice of mean</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">ing. A new - rare - practice affirmed against a majority practice (that of signification), obtuse meaning appears necessarily as a luxury, an expenditure with no exchange. This luxury does not </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">yet </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">belong to today's politics but</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">nevertheless </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">already </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">to tomorrow's. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0.2pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; line-height: 12.45pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">Something has still to be said concerning the syntagmatic responsibility of the third meaning: what is its place in the movement of the anecdote, in the logico-temporal system without which, so it seems, it is impossible to communicate a narrative to the 'mass' of readers and spectators? It is clear that the obtuse meaning is the epitome of a counter-</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">narrative; disseminated, reversible, set to its own tempo</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">rality, it inevitably determines (if one follows it) a quite different analytical segmentation to that in shots, sequences and syntagms (technical or narrative) - an extraordinary segmentation: counter-logical and yet 'true'. Imagine 'following' not Euphrosyne's schemings, nor even the character (as diegetic entity or symbolic figure), nor even, again, the face of the Wicked Mother, but merely, in this face, this attitude, this black veil, the heavy, ugly flatness</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">-</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">you will then have a different time-scale, neither diegetic nor oneiric, a different film. A theme with neither variations nor development (the obvious meaning is fully thematic: there is a theme of the Funeral), the obtuse meaning can only come and go, appearing-disappearing. The play of presence/absence undermines the character, making of it </span><span dir="rtl" style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:13;" lang="HE" >li </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">simple nub of facets; a disjunction expressed in another connection by SME himself: </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">'What is characteristic is that the different positions of one and the same czar </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">... <i>are given without link between one position and the next.' <o:p></o:p></i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 4.05pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; line-height: 12.45pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">Precisely. The </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">indifference </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">or freedom of position of the supplementary signifier in relation to the narrative allows us to situate with some exactitude the historical, political, theoretical task accomplished by Eisenstein. In his work, the story (the diegetic, anecdotal representation) is not destroyed - quite the contrary: what finer story than that of </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">Ivan </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">or </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">Potemkin? </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">This importance given to the narrative is necessary in order </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">to be understood </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">in a society which, unable to resolve the contradictions of history without a long political transaction, draws support (provisionally?) from mythical (narrative) solutions. The </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">contemporary </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">problem is not to destroy the narrative but to subvert it; today's task is to dissociate subversion from destruction. It seems to me that SME operates such a distinction: the presence of an obtuse, supplementary, third meaning - if only in a few images, but then as an imperishable signature, as a seal endorsing the whole of the work (and the whole of his work) - radically recasts the theoretical status of the anecdote: the story (the diegesis) is no longer just a strong system (the millennial system of narrative) but also and contradictorily a simple space, a field of permanences and permutations. It becomes that configuration, that stage, whose false limits multiply the signifier's permutational play, that vast trace which, by difference, compels what SME himself calls a </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">vertical </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">reading, that </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">false </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">order which permits the turning of the pure series, the aleatory combination (chance is crude, a signifier on the cheap) and the attainment of a structuration </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">which slips away from the inside. </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">It can thus be said that with SME we have to reverse the cliché according to which the more gratuitous a meaning, the more it will appear as a mere parasite of the story being narrated; on the contrary, it is this story which here finds itself in some sort parametric to the signi</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">fier for which it is now merely the field of displacement, the constitutive negativity, or, again, the fellow-traveller. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 6.95pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; line-height: 12.45pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">In other words, the third meaning structures the film </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">differently </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">without - at least in SME - subverting the story and for this reason, perhaps, it is at the level of the third meaning, and at that level alone, that the 'filmic' finally emerges. The filmic is that in the film which cannot be described, the representation which cannot be represented. The filmic begins only where language and metalanguage end. Everything that can be </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">said </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">about </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">Ivan </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">or </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">Potemkin </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">can be</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"> said of a written text (entitled </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">Ivan the Terrible </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">or </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">Battleship Potemkin) </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">except this, the obtuse meaning; I can gloss everything in Euphrosyne, except the obtuse quality of her face. The filmic, then, lies precisely here, in that region where articulated language is no longer more than approximative and where another language begins (whose science, therefore, cannot be linguistics, soon discarded like a booster rocket). The third meaning </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">theoretically locatable but not describable - can now be seen as the </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">passage </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">from language to </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">signifiance </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">and the founding act of the filmic itself. Forced to develop in a civilization of the signified, it is not surprising that (despite the incalculable number of films in the world) the filmic should still be rare (a few flashes in SME, perhaps else</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">where?), so much so that it could be said that as yet the film does not exist (any more than does the text); there is only 'cinema', language, narrative, poetry, sometimes extremely 'modern', 'translated' into 'images' said to be 'animated'. Nor is it surprising that the filmic can only be located after having - analytically - gone across the 'essential', the 'depth' and the 'complexity' of the cinematic work; all those riches which are merely those of articulated language, 'with which we constitute the work and believe we exhaust it. The filmic is not the same as the film, is as far removed from the film as the novelistic is from the novel (I can write in the novelistic without ever writing novels). <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 19.65pt 0.25pt 0.0001pt 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; line-height: 11.25pt;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">The still <o:p></o:p></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 4.05pt 3.85pt 0.0001pt 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; line-height: 12.45pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">Which is why to a certain extent (the extent of our theoretical fumblings) the filmic, very paradoxically, cannot be grasped in the film 'in situation', 'in movement', 'in its natural state', but only in that major artefact, the still. For a long time, I have been intrigued by the phenomenon of being interested and even fascinated by photos from a film (outside a cinema, in the pages of </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">Cahiers du cinéma) </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">and of then losing everything of those photos (not just the capti</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">vation but the memory of the image) when once inside the viewing room - a change which can even result in a com</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">plete reversal of values. I at first ascribed this taste for stills to my lack of cinematic culture, to my resistance to film; I thought of myself as like those children who prefer the pictures to the text, or like those clients who, unable to attain the adult possession of objects (because too expensive), are content to derive pleasure from looking at a choice of samples or a department store catalogue. Such an explana</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">tion does no more than reproduce the common opinion with regard to stills which sees them as a remote sub-</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">product of the film, a sample, a means of drawing in custom, a pornographic extract, and, technically, a reduction of the work by the immobilization of what is taken to be the sacred essence of cinema - the movement of the images. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.45pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; line-height: 12.45pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">If, however, the specific filmic (the filmic of the future) ·lies 110t in movement, but in an inarticulable third meaning that neither the simple photograph nor figurative painting can assume since they lack the diegetic horizon, the possi</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">bility of configuration mentioned earlier,</span><span dir="rtl"></span><sup><span dir="rtl" style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" lang="EN-US" ><span dir="rtl"></span> </span></sup><sup><span dir="rtl" style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:10;" lang="HE" >2</span></sup><span dir="ltr"></span><span lang="HE" style="font-family:Georgia;"><span dir="ltr"></span> </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">then the 'move</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">ment' regarded as the essence of film is not animation, flux, mobility, 'life', copy, but simply the framework of a permutational unfolding and a theory of the still becomes necessary, a theory whose possible points of departure must be given briefly here in conclusion. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.45pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; line-height: 12.45pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">The still offers us the </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">inside </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">of the fragment. In this connection we would need to take up - displacing them </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">Eisenstein's own formulations when envisaging the new possibilities of audio-visual montage: ' ... the basic centre of gravity ... is transferred to </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">inside </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">the fragment, into the elements included in the image itself. </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">And the centre of gravity </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">is </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">no longer the element "between shots" </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">- <i>the shock </i></span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span></i><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">but the element "inside the shot" </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">- <i>the accentuation within the fragment </i>... ' </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">Of course, there is no audio-visual mon</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">tage in the still, but SME's formula is general insofar as it establishes a right to the syntagmatic disjunction of images and calls for a </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">vertical </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">reading of the articulation. More</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">over, the still is not a sample (an idea that supposes a sort of homogeneous, statistical nature of the film elements) but a quotation (we know how much importance presently accrues to this concept in the theory of the text): at once parodic and disseminatory. It is not a specimen chemically extracted 'from the substance of the film, but rather the trace of a superior </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">distribution </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">of traits of which the film as experienced in its animated flow would give no more than. one text among others. The still, then, is the fragment of a second text </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">whose existence never exceeds the fragment; </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">film and still find themselves in a palimpsest relationship without it being possible to say that one is </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">on top of </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">the other or that one is </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">extracted </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">from the other. Finally, the still throws off the constraint of filmic time; which con</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">straint is extremely powerful, continuing to form an obstacle to what might be called the adult birth of film (born tech</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">nically, occasionally even aesthetically, film has still to be born theoretically). For written texts, unless they are very conventional, totally committed to logico-temporal order, reading time is free; for film, this is not so, since the image cannot go faster or slower without losing its perceptual figure. The still, by instituting a reading that is at once instantaneous and vertical, scorns logical time (which is only an operational time); it teaches us how to dissociate the technical constraint from what is the specific filmic and which is the 'indescribable' meaning. Perhaps it was the reading of <i>this other text </i>(here in stills) that SME called for when he said that a film is not simply to be seen and heard but to be scrutinized and listened to attentively. This seeing and this hearing are obviously not the postulation of some simple need to apply the mind (that would be banal, a pious wish) but rather a veritable mutation of reading and its object, text or film - which is a crucial problem of our time. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; line-height: 16.55pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">1970 <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm; line-height: 16.55pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:85%;" lang="EN-US" >1. </span><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:85%;" lang="EN-US" >In the classical paradigm of the five senses, the third sense is hearing (first in importance in the Middle Ages). This is a happy coincidence, since what is here in question is indeed </span><span style="font-size:85%;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">listening: </span></i></span><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:85%;" lang="EN-US" >firstly, because the remarks by Eisenstein to which reference will be made are taken from a consideration of the coming of sound in film; second, because listening (no reference to the </span><span style="font-size:85%;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Georgia;">phoné </span></i></span><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:85%;" lang="EN-US" >alone) bears within it that metaphor best suited to the 'textual': orchestration (SME's own word), counterpoint, stereophony.<o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:85%;" lang="EN-US" ><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> <span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:85%;" lang="EN-US" >2. There are other 'arts' which combine still (or at least drawing) and story, diegesis – namely the photo-novel and the comic-strip. I am convinced that these 'arts', born in the lower depths of high culture, possess theoretical qualifications and present a new signifier (related to the obtuse meaning). This is acknowledged as regards the comic</span><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:85%;" lang="EN-US" >-</span><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:85%;" lang="EN-US" >strip but I myself experience this slight trauma of <i>signifiance </i>faced with certain photo-novels: <i>'their stupidity touches me' </i>(which could be a certain definition of obtuse meaning). There may thus be a future </span><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:85%;" lang="EN-US" ></span><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:85%;" lang="EN-US" >or a very ancient past - truth in these derisory, vulgar, foolish, dialogical forms of consumer subculture. And there is an autonomous 'art' (a 'text'), that of the <i>pictogram </i>('anecdotalized' images, obtuse meanings placed in a diegetic space); this art taking across historically and cultur</span><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:85%;" lang="EN-US" ></span><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:85%;" lang="EN-US" >ally heteroclite productions: ethnographic pictograms, stained glass windows, Carpaccio's <i>Legend of Saint Ursula, images d'Epinal, </i>photo</span><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:85%;" lang="EN-US" >-</span><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:85%;" lang="EN-US" >novels, comic-strips. The innovation represented by the still (in com</span><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:85%;" lang="EN-US" ></span><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:85%;" lang="EN-US" >parison with these other pictograms) would be that the filmic (which i t constitutes) is <i>doubled </i>by another text, the film.</span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1