Multimodal Film Analysis

How Films Mean

John Bateman, Karl-Heinrich Schmidt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136467547
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book presents a new basis for the empirical analysis of film. Starting from an established body of work in film theory, the authors show how a close incorporation of the current state of the art in multimodal theory—including accounts of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of organisation, discourse semantics and advanced 'layout structure'—builds a methodology by which concrete details of film sequences drive mechanisms for constructing filmic discourse structures. The book introduces the necessary background, the open questions raised, and the method by which analysis can proceed step-by-step. Extensive examples are given from a broad range of films.

With this new analytic tool set, the reader will approach the study of film organisation with new levels of detail and probe more deeply into the fundamental question of the discipline: just how is it that films reliably communicate meaning?

1 Analysing film

“I wanted to understand the ways in which a film pre-arranges its reception and pre-figures its spectator.” (Casetti, 1998: xvii)

“Start with this question, which I think is one of the most fascinating we can ask: What enables us to understand films?” (David Bordwell, May 2011, http://www. davidbordwell.net/essays/commonsense.php)

The quotations above express in a nutshell the task we will be taking on in this book. In common with many other authors over the years, we will be concerned with how a sequence of moving images can be constructed in ways that guide its viewers to entertain certain lines of interpretation rather than others. A fairly widespread proposal for how this works— one spanning some otherwise quite diverse theoretical positions—is that understanding film may be a capacity that is not particularly concerned with film at all, but rather forms part and parcel of a more general ‘sense-seeking’ behaviour in humans. This, after all, would explain why films appear to be much more broadly and readily comprehensible than, for example, texts written in some particular natural language.

Somewhat in contrast to this—or rather, as we set out in more detail below, complementary to this—we will be arguing that films are constructed in ways that guide interpretation even prior to handing over the task of understanding to some viewer's ‘common sense’. Films appear to more or less directly inform viewers which pieces of information have to be brought together, which not, and when. It is only this ‘pre-structuring’, we suggest, that keeps common sense from running wild—after all, many things might be compatible with what is shown, but films do not often leave their viewers guessing about which lines of interpretation to follow and which not. And even when films do do this, the effect is not achieved by chance—here again the structuring of the film has to be such that lines of interpretation are quite deliberately not closed off, remaining open and potentially relevant for understanding.

To reveal mechanisms of this kind, we need to drill rather more deeply into the foundations of film. This brings into play a range of further accompanying assumptions and theoretical positions concerning the nature of ‘film’, of ‘interpretation’, of ‘viewers’ and of much else besides. Our main task in this chapter will therefore be to indicate our own orientation to these issues, setting out the direction that the rest of the book will follow.

We also need to address one further question before we get started. Given that there are so many books now available which claim to tell us how to understand films, one might reasonably ask why we need another one! Our answer to this relies on the fact that we are not going to present here yet another overview of the resources that film provides, its historical development, its contexts of production and so on. Although these are all important components of an understanding of cinema and film, our emphasis in this book lies elsewhere. We will be taking for granted a broad understanding of film that is already quite sophisticated. Although we briefly introduce important terms that we take from film theory when they occur and give pointers to where the interested reader can best find further information if necessary, we will be assuming that the reader already has at least some familiarity with the more or less ‘standard’ ways of describing films. We then seek to move beyond this by developing a detailed analytic framework that is significantly more supportive of systematic and empirically-grounded investigations of the filmic medium.

In many cases, the analyses we provide will be consistent with high quality insightful analyses produced by more traditional means. They will, however, be reached in a way that is held more tightly to specifiable aspects of the filmic material than is usual in film analysis. One important consequence of, and motivation for, such an approach is that it also becomes possible to rule out bad, or mistaken analyses more easily—that is, our method will constrain analysis so that the analysis is more reliable and trustworthy, giving us better criteria for the evaluation of proposals and competing hypotheses. This is one of the chief requirements for any approach that is to support empirical investigations, which in our view is itself an indispensable precondition for a more robust state of the art.

A good indication both of the scope of our inquiry and of our reasons for believing that a foundation of the kind we propose is necessary can be drawn from David Bordwell's book length critique of film criticism Making Meaning (Bordwell, 1989). Bordwell, one of the leading film analysts of our times, argues for a distinction between film comprehension and film interpretation (Bordwell, 1989: 8–9). The former, film comprehension, is intended to pick out meanings that are in some sense ‘explicitly’ recoverable from the work analysed; the latter are further inferences made by the analyst in order to reveal more abstract, ‘implicitly’ made meanings. Similar distinctions are made across the board in the study of interpretation regardless of medium; Todorov (1990), for example, distinguishes for the case of literary works ‘signified facts’, understood solely on the basis of the ‘language in which the text is written’, from ‘symbolised facts’, interpretations which ‘vary from subject to subject’ and which necessarily involve considerations of cultural and individual context. Entire literatures have grown up around this question of whether meaning is ‘in the text’, ‘in the hearer’, ‘in the author’ or some complex mixture of these.

Pursuing these notions for film, Bordwell sees explicitly recoverable meanings as ranging from specific events and character actions portrayed within the story up to general statements made on the basis of these specifics, potentially with an accompanying moral if this is also mentioned in the film. In contrast, implicitly derivable meanings range from additional contextualisations of the explicit meanings, providing social valuations of the explicit patterns that are not themselves thematised within the material of the film, up to more or less ‘hidden’ meanings—Bordwell terms them ‘symptomatic’—that are compatible with the film but which also make contact with broader issues in society, reflecting the ‘ideology’ or concerns which the film ‘unintentionally’ manifests. Bordwell argues that particularly the latter processes require strict methodological principles in order to be kept within reasonable limits; a point that we will return to repeatedly below.

Discussions of where and whether exact boundaries can be drawn between these areas continue and show interesting parallels with similar discussions pursued for other communicative forms, including language. The complexity of the process of understanding often causes doubts to be raised that less abstract ‘elements’ can be identified before more abstract contextualising configurations have been fixed. This is a traditional philosophical concern taken up again and again and in various guises; we will return to several of the arguments as they apply specifically to film and our position with respect to them in subsequent chapters. For the present, however, we can pick out one general idea standing behind Bordwell's distinction that brings out well the direction we will take.

In order to achieve good analyses of film, we believe that it is better, before proceeding to interpretation, to make explicit just what is—in a sense that we will make precise below—‘in’ the filmic material under investigation. We claim that this is the basis for any further consideration that a viewer (or analyst) can reasonably undertake. Investigations which do not work in this way may also say interesting and useful things, but we will not consider them here as analyses of the films addressed: they are instead “symptomatic readings guided by a hermeneutics of suspicion” (Bordwell, 2005: 266). Our position throughout this book will be that we now know enough about film and its workings to move beyond this—not very far beyond this perhaps, but still enough to be worthwhile and necessary for advancing the state of the art.

We will accordingly be focusing on the ‘comprehension’ end of a viewer's engagement with films. We quite deliberately avoid any statements concerning the evaluation of aesthetic merit or the ‘deeper meanings’ of film in terms of cultural, historical, or social configurations—i.e., ‘film interpretation’ in Bordwell's sense above. Our analysis starts (and stops) at a more basic level: we will be seeking an analytic framework that allows us to bring out a particular ‘bandwidth’ of meanings that films ‘commit to’, and under what conditions, so that the foundation for further, more interpretative work can be maximally strengthened.

Despite this self-imposed limitation, there are many difficult, some would even say contentious, issues raised by choosing to approach film in this way. A further task of this introduction is therefore to ease us into the approach as a whole, motivating our particular demarcation of issues and the directions in which we will be seeking solutions. The next section starts on this directly by means of some examples. Although these examples all represent straightforward, commonplace cases of filmic comprehension, pulling them apart will reveal several lines of stress where traditional film description is in need of further support and where we can begin to look through to the foundations below.

1.1 Distinguishing the filmic contribution to meaning

As remarked above, our approach makes several basic assumptions—but perhaps the most fundamental assumptions of all are that it is possible for a sequence of moving images to signal meanings that are not limited to a redescription of what the images show, that are describable independently of any putative authorial intent, and which enter into active negotiations of more abstract interpretations with recipients as more than equal partners (i.e., ‘pre-arrange’ and ‘pre-figure’). This means that we will argue that there is information that is beyond the ‘referential’ story events but which must nevertheless be seen as ‘non-negotiable’ with respect to the film. The film consequently ‘commits to’ more than is directly portrayed. What this entails is crucial for understanding what we will be examining in this book, what not, and why.

To see this, we must characterise more finely the meanings grouped under Bordwell's ‘comprehension’ area. Bordwell relates narration and its interpretation primarily to what he describes as “the experiential logic of understanding a film's narrative” (Bordwell, 2007: 98). This foregrounds a position in which “the process of understanding many things in films is likely to draw upon ordinary, informal reasoning procedures” (Bordwell, 2007: 136). This is often described employing notions such as ‘scripts’ or ‘schemata’ (cf. Bartlett, 1932), made popular in Artificial Intelligence (cf. Schank and Abelson, 1977) and since applied in a broad range of ‘cognitively’-oriented disciplines, including approaches to film studies (cf. Bordwell, 1985; Branigan, 1992). While no doubt at least partially accurate—and we will see more of this in our detailed analyses in the middle chapters of this book—it also clearly locates the main guiding force of understanding in our knowledge of everyday situations and practical knowledge rather than in film.

The evidence for ‘additional’ information in film is considerable, however. This is commonly characterised as part of a film's style (e.g., Bordwell and Thompson, 2008: 7) and, particularly for film, these ‘non-representational’ effects are impossible to ignore; they force themselves on the viewer with an immediacy that appears far more effective and affecting than their equivalents in texts. We consider these kinds of meaning as making an essential contribution to how films work and how they can be reliably understood. Not including this kind of information within the comprehension level makes subsequent interpretation appear more difficult, and less constrained, than it actually is. We will argue throughout this book, therefore, that it is both possible and necessary to be far more systematic and detailed with respect to the fine-grained operation of this area.

We can gain useful leverage on this issue by invoking three broad types of meaning proposed within the linguistic theory that we draw on for inspiration in Chapters 2 and 3 below. These are conceived as providing general organising principles, called metafunction s, for all societally-anchored meaning-making.

The ideational metafunction is responsible for constructing worlds of activities, events, people and objects as well as their qualities and quantities (also grouped together as experiential meanings) and their various inter-connections (grouped together as logical meanings). The interpersonal metafunction is concerned with enacting interaction and evaluation and with appraisal, expressing emotion and emotional responses. And the textual metafunction is the ‘second-order’ phenomenon of deploying patterns from the other areas to build coherent and cohesive ‘textual’ wholes—i.e., of turning individual characterisations of the world or evaluative appraisals into textured unities capable of far more complexity in the ‘messages’ they can communicate.

The first two categories are already well explored for film. The ideational is involved in representations or mental models of the world, information generally taken to include knowledge of the form that people talking to each other are spatially and temporally co-located, as are observers and the things being observed, or that after going into a restaurant, one sits at a table, or that going up to the door of a building is followed by being inside that building, and so on. The ideational content that is portrayed corresponds to the ‘world of the story’ or, as it is called in film studies, the diegesis (cf. §5.2). The second category, the interpersonal, is centrally involved in considerations of affect and has been discussed for film by Smith (1995), Tan (1996), Smith (1999), Plantinga and Smith (1999) and others—particularly from the perspective of the orchestration of affect through structures of narration.

But the third area, the textual metafunction, is in need of considerably more attention. We will see that this area has a rich and complex organisation in its own right and needs to be described in its own terms. Rephrasing Bordwell from above, our focus in this book can be characterised as an investigation of ‘the textual logic of understanding a film's narrative’: this textual logic has, to date, been addressed piecemeal, if at all, even though it forms a critical part of the interpretative chain from perception to understanding. Revealing the operations of this aspect of how films make the meanings they do is therefore our principal goal.

Figure 1.1 Alternating slow-zoom construction from Eyes Wide Shut (1999, 2:00:35)

A simple example will already clarify the kind of meaning involved here. Consider the short extract shown in Figure 1.1 taken from Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999); the fragment starts at around two hours and thirty-five seconds into the film (i.e., as we shall write from now on, 02:00:35). Here we see an alternation between the main character (Tom Cruise) and a newspaper article that he comes across more or less by chance and which is centrally important for the story. Significant for us here is that over the entire fragment there is a slow camera zoom—i.e., there is a continuous effect of moving gradually closer, first to Tom Cruise, then to the newspaper, then to Tom Cruise again. This is not an ideational meaning—we nor anyone in the world of the film actually move here. It certainly does, however, have some interpersonal meaning, in that it suggests an emotional state and invites the viewer to share some concern. But, more importantly for our point here, it also involves a clear textual meaning. The particular use of the technical feature of the zoom necessarily groups this collection of shots together into a larger unit: i.e., no viewer can sensibly fail to see that these shots combine and, in some sense, are making a ‘single statement’. This is carried quite explicitly by the continuous zoom, over and above the particular world of the story depicted, and so is committed to by the film in the sense we are introducing.

Variants of zooms functioning textually are easy to find. Several can be seen, for example, in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), the most complex occurring around 01:53:00 involving a zoom towards the perceiving character (James Stewart), a similar zoom into the perceived object (a necklace), followed by an equally fast zoom out from a painting of that object (by which the perceiving character recognised the object in the first place). In many cases, such zooms can be seen more transparently, or ‘iconically’, as depicting so...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Studies in Multimodality
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 Analysing film
• 2 Semiotics and documents
• 3 Constructing the semiotic mode of film
• 4 Christian Metz and the grande syntagmatique of the image track
• 5 Foundations for analysis: filmic units
• 6 The paradigmatic organisation of film
• 7 The syntagmatic organisation of film
• 8 Combining syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis: a detailed example
• 9 Conclusions and outlook
• Appendix A: Formal definitions used in the book
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index of Works Cited
• Subject and Name Index