I. The Word and the Image
The debate of the image and the word is age old. A distinguished example comes from the 7th century when Serenus, the bishop of Marseilles, ordered that all images in his Episcopal city burned and destroyed. In response, Pope Gregory the Great wrote the following letter: “It is one thing to worship a painting, and quite another to learn from a scene represented in a painting what ought to be worshiped. For what writing proves for people who read, paintings provide for the illiterate who look at them, since these unlearned people see what they must imitate; paintings are books for those who do not know their letters, so that they take the place of books, especially among pagans.” (cited in Besancon 2000: 149) What Gregory was acknowledging is that images can be accessed universally. You don’t need to understand a particular language to understand an image. In this way they can be effective in lessening the barriers between peoples.
Images are exact, efficient and concise. Take for example: the word tree. When I write tree, you may imagine a tree. But it’s not the dead tree in front of my house that I happen to be referring to. If I had a picture, the reference would be much clearer. It takes a lot of words to convey what an image can tell us. Words do not cunningly smile or vacantly stare.
While images are precise, they have difficulty conveying abstract meanings. Abstract concepts are often too big for the medium to convey. Think about a concept such as God: omnipotent, omnipresent and invisible. As difficult as it is for such an idea to be thought or even discussed, how would one draw a picture of it? How can a visual representation of something that is everywhere and nowhere be made? Letters are a better repository of an idea about a god who is everywhere than a hieroglyph, which may explain why the Hebrews, who recorded their ideas via phonetic writing, adopted monotheism at a time when the Egyptians could not. (Levinson 1997: 11-12)
One of the primary reasons images struggle to form a language comparable to verbal language is that they have a difficult time escaping the affirmative, the past, or present indicative. Images need to struggle to say no, or to ask why. They state much more effectively than they negate or speculate. Pictures are better with the concrete than the abstract, the particular rather than the general. In his essay Pictures Can’t Say Ain’t (1981), Sol Worth argued that an image cannot state the non-existence of what it represents. He wrote, “Since pictures do not have the formal capacity of expressing propositions of negation, it follows that pictures cannot be treated as meaningful on a dimension of truth and falsity.” (Worth 1981: 179)
Another problem is that images say too much, and convey more than one meaning at a time. Images are polysemous; implying an unlimited number of interpretations of which the viewer can select some and ignore the others. For this reason, Gombrich argues that statements cannot be translated into images. He says,
It is not only the degree of abstraction of language that eludes the visual medium; the sentence from the primer ‘The cat sits on the mat’ is certainly not abstract, but altogether the primer may show a picture of a cat sitting on a mat, a moment’s reflection will show that the picture is not the equivalent of the statement. We cannot express pictorially whether we mean ‘the’ cat (an individual) or ‘a cat’ (a member of a class); moreover, although the sentence may be one possible description of the picture, there are an infinite number of other true descriptive statements you could make such as ‘There is a cat seen from behind,’ or for that matter ‘There is no elephant on the mat,’ ‘The cat will sit on the mat…’ and so on ad infinitum, we see the word soaring away and leaving the picture behind. (Gombrich 1982: 138-9)
The ambiguity of visual language is even further advanced by its lack of grammar. With phonetic writing, words build upon words, sentence upon sentence, idea upon idea. But to give motion pictures a grammar and fix its structures risks rendering it static. This makes it much easier to write a visual language than it is to read it. So, to the extent that images are able to communicate the way words communicate, they always fail.
II. Motion Picture Communication
Perhaps the problem has less to do with motion pictures’ ability to communicate than it does with our assumptions about how language manifests itself, and what can be achieved with it. Film theorist Jean Mitry has campaigned to expand the definition of language so as to better allow for motion pictures. He pursued the question of language at the level of mental structures, arguing that thought begins not in words, but in concrete images. And for Mitry, the substitution of signs and symbols for things, and their arrangement in a system which allows for the purposeful signification, organization, development and communication of ideas, constitute a language, no matter what the specific mechanism of signification. (Mitry 2000: 24-25)
Mitry summarizes that with the moving image:
[W]e can believe and even confirm that, though we are unable to act on the world, on real objects (or with them) to express our thoughts, we can at least manipulate their images, arrange them in order, as we do our mental representations. Such that the structures of thought are no longer obliged to submit to a system of signs and significations: they reveal themselves, freely open up through a continuity which delivers unexpected connotations. Intuitive thought is shown to operate free of the domination of words. By formalizing in this way a judgment, a view point, a vision of the world, the film actually becomes like the image of consciousness, the reflection of a thought offered up to the eyes of a third party, the audience – for it to be understood, with no intermediary than the formalization itself. (Mitry 2000: 256-7)
The audience translates or decodes the motion picture into an interior language, a secondary film that participates in the construction and completion of the first. According to Mitry, the discourse of this interior language is not necessary linguistic or phonic, and may not refer to words. The fact that people generally think with words is a learned skill and habit, but not an obligation. He correlates this process with the way a child learns to read:
The child learning to read does not identify different words by referring to the objects named by them, and then discarding them. In everyday language, words are freed from the image of the objects; the thought has no need of them. Which is what we mean when we refer to “thinking with words”, and the reason why seeing images or objects is related to concepts which are absorbed into verbal structures. Yet, as the child discards the “associated image” as he starts to master language, so the viewer is able to forget the “associated word” as he finds it easier to decode the film language. (Mitry 2000: 155)
Mitry’s theoretical positions allow him to avoid the contradiction between motion pictures as a language of representations of concrete objects and motion pictures as a language derived from linguistics. He insists that we understand that the motion picture “first and foremost comprises images, images of something.” And that these images, unlike words, are “objects and concrete reality” which become symbols, whereby they take on meaning. (Mitry 2000: 25) He demonstrates motion picture language’s level of existence by insisting on the fact that, even while these images are a representation of the real, they are nonetheless not a simple copy of the world.
A methodological study of the rules used in constructing meaning with concrete images was conducted in the Kuleshov workshop during the early 1920s. Lev Kuleshov, the Soviet Union’s most influential instructor, began conducting experiments in motion picture editing, or what became known as montage. His goal was to discover the rules by which motion pictures communicate or signify meaning to an audience. In a well known experiment he took old footage of a famous Russian actor and spliced the same shot of his completely expressionless face next to three unrelated objects: a bowl of soup, a woman in a coffin, and a little girl playing with a teddy bear. The film strips were randomly shown to audiences. As his former student, filmmaker V.I. Pudovkin recounts, “The public raved about the acting of the artist. They pointed out the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead woman, and admired the light happy smile with which he surveyed the girl at play. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same.” Kuleshov deduced that the cinematic sign has two distinct values: one as an image of reality, and one which it acquires when combined with other shots. And it is the combinatory value that Kuleshov understood as overwhelmingly more important. He conceived of montage as an expressive process whereby empirically dissimilar images could be linked together to produce metaphors or clusters of thought. (Cook, 1981: 139-40)
The findings of what has become known as the “Kuleshov Effect” is that new meanings can be created through the juxtaposition of different shots. Sergei Eisenstein was one of the students who attended Kuleshov’s workshops. Eisenstein is famous as both a theorist and practitioner of motion pictures. In his book Film Form, he puts forth a theory of montage based on Kuleshov’s findings and the Marxist dialectic. Marx conceives of history as a perpetual conflict in which a force collides with a counterforce to produce a new phenomenon which is greater than and different from both. In the same way, Eisenstein does not describe montage as a linkage of shots, but rather as a collision in which new concepts arise. (Eisenstein, 1957: 37-8)
Eisenstein also claimed that montage was capable of communicating abstract thought and making intellectual statements. In his 1928 film October, about the Russian Revolution, Eisenstein wanted to make a brief critique of religion. He was able to achieve this critique without words. Eisenstein cut between unmoving statues of religious symbols: a baroque Christ, a ceramic Buddha, a golden animal deity, and a wooden Eskimo idol. This process of moving forward through these statues produces a unique form of montage where each image appears just once in succession, the accumulation of collisions form the meaning. Eisenstein wrote: “These shots were assembled on a descending intellectual scale and lead the notion of god back to a block of wood.” (Eisenstein 1988: 193-4) He equates this process of collisions with the workings of the engine: “If montage is to be compared with something, than a phalanx of montage pieces, of shots, could be compared to the series of explosions of an internal combustion engine, driving forward its automobile or tractor: for similarly, the dynamics of montage serve as impulses driving forward the total film.” (Eisenstein 1957: 38)
Eisenstein also compares montage to ideographic writing. He gives several examples of how characters in Chinese ideographic writing are the result of the combination of two “depictables,” which result in a new concept. For instance, the picture of a knife combined with the picture of a heart forms the ideogram for sorrow. Two ideograms fused together are “regarded not as their sum, but as their product, i.e. as the value of another dimension, another degree; each, separately, corresponds to an object, to a fact, but their combination corresponds to a concept.” (Eisenstein 1957: 29-30)
This connection between montage and writing was apparent to Eisenstein. He believed that James Joyce was in the process of bringing literature toward montage, saying, “It has been left up to James Joyce to develop in literature the depictive line of the Japanese hieroglyph.” (Eisenstein 1957: 35) Eisenstein felt that the stream of conscious in Ulysses was the most interesting phenomenon for motion pictures in Western literature. (Eisenstein 1988: 96) In 1930 Eisenstein met Joyce in Paris to discuss the stream of consciousness, which Joyce called “the inner monologue.” Joyce applied the inner monologue technique to the construction of Leopold Bloom’s character in a way that approximates the collisions of montage:
Smells of men. His gorge rose. Spat on sawdust, sweetish, warmish cigarette smoke, reek of plug, spilt beer, men’s beery piss, the stale of ferment. Couldn’t eat a morsel here. Fellow sharpening knife and fork, to eat all before him, old chap picking his toodles. Slight spasm, full, chewing the cud. Before and after. Grace after meals. Look on this picture then on that. Scoffing up stewgravy with sopping sippets of bread. Lick it off the plate man! Get out of this. (Joyce 1934: 167)
Eisenstein and Joyce discussed plans for making Ulysses into a film. Eisenstein felt that Joyce’s notion of stream of consciousness could find its fullest expression in motion pictures, where “quivering inner words correspond with visual images.” And Joyce, although his eyesight was failing, asked to see the experimental parts of October and Battleship Potemkin. (Eisenstein 1957: 104-6; 1988: 235) Eisenstein described Joyce to fellow filmmakers as “A great man! This fellow really does what all of you wanted to do, because you feel it but he knows it.” (Ellmann 1982: 654)
The term montage entered the lexicon through photography. In the 1920s photographers, such as the Hungarian born Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, started cutting up pieces of different photographs and re-assembling them together. These new collages were called “photomontage.” Photomontages were conceived as reflecting the disjuncture and fragmentation of modern, fast paced, dynamic urban life. In discussing this new kinetic style of photography, Moholy-Nagy said, “We must put in the place of the static principle of classic art the dynamic principle of universal life. The Renaissance painter constructed the scene to be painted from an unchangeable, fixed point following the rules of vanishing point perspective. But speeding on the roads and circling in the skies has given modern man the opportunity to see more than his Renaissance predecessor. The man at the wheel sees persons and objects in quick succession, in permanent motion.” (cited in Tomkins 1965: 156)
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, The Structure of the World, 1927
This interrelatedness of art and life was understood by Moholy-Nagy in dialectical terms, not dissimilar from Eisenstein’s theories of montage. In his book Vision in Motion, Moholy-Nagy writes:
The fixed viewpoint, the isolated handling of problems as a norm, is rejected and replaced by a flexible approach, by seeing matters in a constantly changing moving field of mutual relationships. This may start a new phase in the history of mankind, based on the universal principle of relationships. It is the clue to all the changes which took or will take place…in our whole civilization. (cited in Mansbach 1980: 44)
The perspectives of montage and collage have implications not only for disrupting our occularcentric vision of the world, but also for challenging the phonocentric bias engrained in our conceptions about communication.
III. Concrete Logic
The reassembling of symbolic objects into new wholes is not a modern pursuit. The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss put forth a theory of the existence of a timeless, “wild” mode of thought at work at the heart of human society. He called this thinking the pensee sauvage. It is a type of thinking that is both ancient and contemporary, spontaneous and coherent, and is steeped in the logic of concrete images. In order to explain this logic of the concrete, Levi-Strauss uses the analogy of the bricoleur. The word “bricoleur” has no precise equivalent in English, but essentially refers to a Jack of all trades or a do-it-yourself handyman. But, a bricoleur is different in that he “uses devious means compared to a craftsman.” (Levi-Strauss 1962: 17) Levi-Strauss describes the workings of the bricoleur as follows:
The bricoleur is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks; but unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project. His universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with whatever is at hand, that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions. (Levi-Strauss 1962: 17)
Like montage, bricolage is a type of combinatorial logic. The bricoleur is in possession of a stock of perceived objects, like the filmmaker who stockpiles images of objects. These possess meaning in as much as they are bound together by a set of possible relationships, one of which is concretized by the bricoleur’s choice, or the editor’s decisions. According to Levi-Strauss, it is this same combinatorial logic or “intellectual bricolage” which produces mythical thought. (Levi-Strauss 1962: 21) He says, “the characteristic feature of mythical thought, as of bricolage on the pictorial plane, is that it builds up structured sets, not directly with other structured sets but by using the remains and debris of events…fossilized evidence of the history of an individual or a society.” (Levi-Strauss 1962: 21-2) And this type of mythic thought, and indeed all of the pensee sauvage, is a system of concepts embedded in images. (Levi-Strauss 1962: 264)
Thus, concrete logic constructs organized systems out of visual sensory experience. It selects from the limitless possibilities of the world certain distinctive features which it then renders operative within a given system, similar to the way natural languages function. And, whereas Cartesian logic divides, the pensee sauvage, like the metaphorical thinking that characterizes poetry, brings together. It is a totalizing language concerned with establishing links, not explaining answers. It is language shaped by the relation of concrete objects, not words. And, as Mitry has pointed out, these concrete objects become symbols and take on meaning.
IV. Another Kind of Writing
From hieroglyphs to montage, and from the concrete logic of the bricoleur to the dynamics of collage, meaning can be understood as a complicated operation that comes about partially through representation, but also through the disruption of the image itself in the form of juxtaposition. So what then are these disrupted images? Jacques Derrida would certainly answer that they are “nothing but another kind of writing, a kind of graphic sign that dissembles itself as a transcript of that which it represents, or of the way things look, or of what they essentially are.” (cited in Mitchell1986: 30) Of Grammatology is Derrida’s attempt to investigate the possibility of establishing a positive science of writing. This writing removes speech from its place in the study of communication and replaces it with “gram,” the classical Greek term for “scratch.” Grammatology investigates Western systems of phonetic writing with their supposed one-to-one relationships between the inscribed mark and its phonetic realization. These relationships are in contrast to those of Eastern, ideogrammatic systems of writing wherein the primary relationship is between the inscribed mark or gram and the idea (rather than the sound) that it represents.
The Western bias toward the inscribed mark, letter or word and the sound it represents is signified by the term phonocentrism. This bias goes along with the idea of phonetic writing as the only form that can possibly approach the dignity of truth. Other kinds of non-phonetic or ideogrammatic systems of writing operate according to a completely different logic, one that goes from the idea to the graphic inscription. And, as Derrida shows, philosophers have treated these forms of writing with contempt, since it doesn’t pass by way of the vital link between articulate sound and intelligible sense. (Derrida 1976: 24-26, 32-34) He says, “We know how Saussure according to the traditional operation that was also Plato’s, Aristotle’s, Rousseau’s, Hegel’s, Husserl’s, etc. excludes writing from the field of linguistics – from language and speech – as a phenomenon of exterior representation, both useless and dangerous.” He goes on to pull several quotes from Saussure’s Course In General Linguistics: “The linguistic object is not defined by the combination of the written word and the spoken word, the latter alone constituting this object;” “writing is foreign to the internal system of language;” “writing veils our view of language: it does not clothe language, but travesties it;” “the tie of writing to language is superficial;” “writing is a trap, linguistics should put it under observation in a special compartment.” (Derrida 1981: 24-5).
Derrida claims, “The end of linear writing is the end of the book,” and what he considers the beginning of Writing. (Derrida 1976: 86) Derrida, according to W.J.T. Mitchell, “…reinstates the ancient figure of the world as text (a figure which, in Renaissance poetics, made nature itself a system of hieroglyphs), but with a new twist. Since the author of this text is no longer with us, or has lost his authority, there is no foundation for the sign, no way of stopping the endless chain of signification.” (Mitchell 1986: 29) But, rather than spiraling into “a nihilistic abandonment to free play and arbitrary will,” Mitchell believes Derrida’s grammatology leads “to a sense that our signs are a product of human action and understanding, that although our modes of knowledge and representation may be ‘arbitrary’ and ‘conventional,’ they are the constituents of the forms of life, the practices and traditions within which we must make epistemological, ethical, and political choices.” (Mitchell 1986: 29-30)
The motion picture can be conceived of as a new concept of nonphonetic writing based upon concrete and combinatory logic and Derrida’s notion of the gram. It is a text, built from relationships, that is “incompatible with the univocal notion of expression.” In this sense, motion pictures become not a vehicle of thought, but rather, a way of thinking. It “uproots the sign.” Yet, perhaps the most far reaching consequence this concept has for motion picture communication concerns the act of interpretation. For it is difficult to describe what a valid interpretation of a nonexpressive semiology of motion picture communication would look like.
V. The Open Work: A Collaboration
Artists, writers and filmmakers have long struggled to ensure that their work is observed or read in the only possible right way – the way the author intended. As viewers or readers, we have come to expect a correct interpretation. If we cannot find it ourselves, we can be sure that some critic or theorist has found it for us. This way of approaching art and literature reflects not only our expectation of those mediums, but also our perception of the cosmos as a fixed system of pre-ordained orders. But, in the last century, science has begun to describe our cosmos differently. It is now believed that we live in a world that is made up of indeterminates: things in flux and flux in things. In contemporary society, multiple interpretations are frequently preferred as opposed to either/or, true/false certainties. And this preference has begun to infiltrate the relationship of the artist to the viewer in the form of the open work.
The open work or “the work in movement” has been theorized by Umberto Eco. He writes, “The possibilities which the work’s openness makes available always work within a given field of relations. Like in the Einsteinian universe, in the work in movement we may well deny that there is a single prescribed point of view. But this does not mean complete chaos in its internal relations.” (Eco 1989: 19) This is because the author of the work offers the addressee a work to be completed, an invitation to make the work together. The open work is “organically completed…open to a continuous generation of internal relations which the addressee must uncover and select in his act of perceiving the totality of incoming stimuli.” (Eco 1989: 21)
The addressee cannot use the work as he or she desires, but only as the work, as a result of its preconceived structure, wants to be used. For the open work to operate, the reader’s response to it must be generated by the work itself. In other words, the interpretation of the work must be foreseen as part of the work’s generative process. (Eco 1979: 9-10) As such, the open work cannot be a communicative strategy unless the role of the addressee has been envisioned at the time of its creation.
James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake signals the birth of this process. Finnegans Wake is a book that is the continuous poetics of itself: its own making and the act of reading it. Joyce envisioned the ideal addressee of his open work as “a person suffering from an ideal insomnia.” (Ellmann: 1982) Eco succinctly describes the difference between Ulysses and Finnegans Wake: “It may seem that Ulysses violates the techniques of the novel beyond all limit, but Finnegans Wake passes even this limit. It may seem that Ulysses demonstrates all the possibilities of language, but Finnegans Wake takes language beyond any boundary of communicability.” (Eco 1982: 61) Finnegans Wake is Joyce’s final and most innovative work, written in a revolutionary narrative style that approximates the mutable nature of the nocturnal dream world. The characters of the Wake, as in a dream, appear in many guises and undergo numerous transmutations that range from mythological to geographic. In its bizarre, distorted language are lodged all of Joyce’s immense, but thoroughly familiar preoccupations: Dublin, familial relations, sexual obsessions, political and social histories, multitudes of literary works, fables, fairy tales, children’s games, riddles, over forty languages, etc. By liberating these materials from the old contexts, and re-arranging them into new wholes, Joyce creates the Wake in the fashion of a bricoleur.
The greatest critical mistake in approaching Finnegans Wake has been the assumption that we can be certain of everything in the Wake, if we only do enough research. But the answers are provided by the reader’s construction. Much debate has concerned the question of the identity of the Wake’s dreamer. I would suggest that it is Joyce and the reader together who dream the book and its meaning. In addition to self-reflexive strategies which say, “Hello, I’m the author and this is what I’m constructing;” Finnegans Wake, as an open work, asks in addition, “Who are you? And how will you complete my performance?”
After seventeen years of tedious work, Joyce commented that with Finnegans Wake: “I am at the end of English. I have put the language to sleep. In writing of the night, I really could not use words in their ordinary connections. Used that way they do not express how things are in the night, in the different stages – conscious, then semi-conscious, then unconscious. I found that it could not be done with words in their ordinary relations and connections. When morning comes of course everything will be clear again. I’ll give them back their English language. I’m not destroying it for good.” (Ellmann: 1982) This Derridian move, to destroy language (as speech), has its parallel in motion pictures with Antonin Artaud.
Artaud’s conception of the motion picture articulates a combination of the theories I have been discussing. Artaud writes, “The foundation of cinematic thought seems to be the utilization of existing objects and forms which can be made to say everything, for the patterns of nature are profound and truly infinite.” (Artaud 1976: 149) Artaud felt that the concrete use of “existing objects” as a physical language had the potential to involve the spectator in new and disorienting ways. Artaud theorized a means of motion picture communication which would go beyond the rational distortions of speech, a communication whose emphasis on the image could reveal the truths hidden by the abstraction of language. In Cinema and Reality, he complains that motion pictures rely on verbal language to assure precise meanings and that there should be greater attempts toward a true cinema: “We have yet to achieve a film with purely visual situations whose drama would come from a shock designed for the eyes, a shock drawn, so to speak, from the very substance of our vision and not from psychological circumlocutions of a discursive nature which are merely the visual equivalent of a text.” (Artaud 1976: 151)
The Seashell and the Clergyman is the only film Artaud produced. It was directed by the symbolist poet Germain Dulac. The problematic result of their collaboration has become one of the legends of Surrealist cinema. The scenario was inspired by a dream Artaud had been told. However, Artaud maintains that his scenario is not the reproduction of a dream and should not be treated as such: “Dreams have more than their logic. They have their life where nothing but a somber truth appears. This script searches for the somber truth of the mind in images which emerge exclusively from themselves, and do not draw their meaning from the situation in which they develop but from a sort of powerful inner necessity which projects them into the light of a merciless evidence.” (cited in Williams 1981: 22-23)
Dulac, however, enraged Artaud by releasing a statement before the opening that, among other things, the film is a “dream on the screen.” Dulac felt it was necessary to use this literal metaphor to explain the meaning of the film to the audience. Artaud believed that any verbal description would distort the reception of the scenario. As a surrealist, Artaud aimed to liberate the unconscious of the spectator, to go beyond language through ‘shock for the eyes’ and leave the viewer to question representations of meaning. As a symbolist, Dulac was interested in creating atmospheres through the harmony of words and images. (Flitterman-Lewis: 115) These contradictory aesthetics reveal two different approaches to how motion pictures are received by the viewer. As the film was projected on the opening night, Artaud and several other Surrealists in attendance disrupted the event, hurling insults at both the film and Dulac. (Williams 1981: 19, 31) Artaud would later write,
“The Seashell and the Clergyman manipulates created nature and tries to make it yield a little of the mystery of its most secret combinations. One must not, therefore, try and find a logic or a sequence that does not exist in things; one must interpret the images that follow one another in terms of their essential, intimate significance, an inner significance that goes from the outside to the inside. The Seashell and the Clergyman does not tell a story but develops a series of states of mind which are derived from one another without this thought reproducing the reasonable sequence of events. From a collision of objects and gestures are derived real psychic situations among which the cornered mind seeks some subtle means of escape.” (Artaud 1976: 149)
Joyce and Artaud aimed to engage the viewer in a co-creative process to generate meaning. They both attempted to disrupt speech in order to achieve this end. Motion pictures needs to adopt this approach by rejecting the notion of language to free itself to communicate by means of its signifying feature – the image. The repositioning of motion picture communication depends on rethinking the relationship between the artist and viewer. It must position itself within a model of communication which opposes the “post office model” - whereby the artist is the sender, the work is the message, and the viewer is the passive receiver - to which artists have subscribed for so long. And it needs to reposition itself within the realm of aesthetics so as to disassociate itself from its relegation to the plastic arts, and reassert itself as a new form of writing.
These repositions will certainly be met with difficulty. But difficult ideas cannot be reduced to simple formulas. Many works of film/video art fail because their works are unable to generate dialogue or contain little mystery. These artists must assume that viewers are unwilling to participate in the discovery of meaning. It is indeed pleasant to the viewer to have reality presented in a non-complex fashion, as traditional motion pictures or classical narratives pretend to do. But life and its currents are a difficult study. Jeremy Gilbert Rolfe, in his essay Difficulty in Contemporary Art and Criticism, urges the necessity of complex readings:
“…the work of art plays with the signifier in such a way as to create combinations which cannot…be returned to the signified which makes sense in terms of a theory of meaning founded, as left-wing thought hypothetically always is, in an analysis of the real world, in, that is to say, the economics of the real. And thus it is that the left always ends up being frustrated by ambitious works of art, and accuses them of mystification, of being elitist. In fact those who made them never sought to mystify anything, in the sense of adding confusion to something which was in the first place uncomplicated, simple and clear, but rather sought to pursue those possibilities inherent in signs which had not yet seen the light of day. In a word, to add to the world’s knowledge by stirring the system upon which that knowledge depends. (ed. Hertz 1993: 145)
By reevaluating their role in the communications process, motion picture artists can begin creating work that resists singular interpretations.
Until these repositions become the norm, motion pictures will remain a derivative art form.
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