More Helpful Film Vocabulary
Three Definitions of Diegesis:
1. DIEGETIC, DIEGESIS (to narrate; dia` through; to lead): Having to do with
the actual world of the film and the story being told; as opposed to formal
elements which are part of the film, but not of the world depicted in the film.
Thus music played on an instrument by a character in the course of the film
is diegetic, while background music which affects our mood as we watch is not
diegetic.
2. Diegesis:
The best way to remember diegesis is to borrow a term from Star Trek. The diegesis
of a narrative is its entire created world, or its time-space continuum. The
dream of the Arab sequence in Book V of Wordsworth's Prelude is fascinating,
in part, since it includes different diegetic universes: the time-space continuum
of Wordsworth, who is telling his tale, that of his friend who is said to have
had the dream in the 1805 Prelude, that of Cervantes' Don Quixote, which his
friend is reading, that of the dream universe the friend creates when he falls
asleep, and, finally, that of the Ode foretelling apocalypse, which his friend
is offered in his dream.
3. Diegesis:
The narrative elements of a film that are shown or immediately inferred from
the content of a film. Though implication is not the primary focus, diegesis
is a methodological analysis for discerning the exact nature of the film including
all of the action and dialogue.
{"Diegetic" -- refers to things which exist within the "world"
of the film's narrative. Non-diegetic or extra-diegetic elements of a film do
not "exist" or "take place" in the same plane of reality
that the character's inhabit. For example, presumably the characters within
an action film do not "hear" the rousing theme music that accompanies
their exploits. that music is extra-diegetic, but still part of the film.
MISE-EN-SCENE: Those elements of the film which are present in the scenes
that the camera
shoots. This includes both the staging of the action and the way that it is
photographed: e.g.
settings, props, lighting, costumes, and framing, as well as the behavior and
movement of the
characters. (Contrast Montage)
MONTAGE:
In the production and editing of film this term has come to refer to a seemingly
unrelated series of frames combined so that one scene quickly dissolves into
the next, shifting categories, effects and settings in such a manner as to convey
a quick passage of time or an abstract unity through thematic devices such as
meter, rhythm, tonality, and intellectuality (viz Eisenstein). Continuity, if
it exists, is not captured in a frame by frame juxtaposition but rather through
an abstraction. (Also see "mise-en-scene".)
Related Terms:
DECENTERING
Jacques Lacan's theory of decentering:
1) Tries to argue that the self is based in language but keeps Freud alive at
the same time.
2) Children who cannot understand language can't tell the difference
between themselves and others; your sense of self comes about through
language.
3) Consciousness comes from outside, not inside, your head.
4) Lacan also contributes to the nature/nurture arguement; are our
individual eccentricities learned or inherited?
Lacan's theory decenters the self; he says the self is constructed in
language. Lacan decenters the source of knowledge and assumptions of
Western thought by destabilizing the self.
~~~~~~~~~~
DECONSTRUCTION
Deconstruction (Derrida's term) is the ideological opposite of structuralism
--
language is seen as 'chains of signifiers' with only unsatisfactory glimpses
of meaning.
Deconstruction contends that meaning, and hence the foundations of any knowledge,
is always unstable.
Deconstruction refers to ways of trying to 'undo, or deconstruct, many of
the big structures of structuralism, and break them down to an individual
level. Different intellectuals have applied the theory in different ways, e.g.,:
- Derrida deconstructs language.
- Foucault deconstructs history and culture, heading towards 'revisionism in
history.
DOMINANT CINEMA AND COUNTER CINEMA
When film theorists refer to the "dominant cinema," they have in mind
the kinds of construction which prevail in most narrative films. Such feature-length
movies are made and distributed along lines common to Hollywood productions
which are replicated throughout the world by other major film industries. (Take
the Ufa studio productions in Germany of the thirties and forties.) The classical
period of the dominant cinema was between 1930 and 1950, the period that marked
the heyday of the Hollywood studio system.
Crucial here is the concept of a classical model, a normative system of representation,
a codified way of making films, fixed conventions of film practice which one
repeatedly finds in most narrative films.
Central to the operations of the dominant cinema are:
1. Genres: formulas/patterns of recognition like gangster films, westerns, musicals,
adventure films, etc.
2. Stars: figures with a high recognition value, personalities with whom we
identify, people who enhance the cult value of cinema as an institution.
3. Producers/Studios: mass production along rationalized lines: filmmaking,
after all, is a business.
4. Directors: creative forces who provide a potential source of contradiction
and resistance within the workings of the dominant cinema. Their relationship
is not directly tied--at least not necessarily--to the commercialism of the
whole. However they are directly implicated in the system, for they work within
its constraints, financially and ideologically.
5. Mass audiences: film producers and studios seek to exponentialize their material
investment by appealing to as wide a spectatorship as possible; some films seek
more specialized markets by addressing specifically targeted audiences.
See Peter Wollen, "Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d'Est." Afterimage
4 (Autumn 1972): 6-17.
"More and more radically Godard has developed a counter-cinema whose values
are counterposed to those of orthodox cinema. I want simply to write some notes
about the main features of this counter-cinema. My approach is to take seven
of the values of the old cinema, Hollywood-Mosfilm, as Godard would put it,
and contrast these with their (revolutionary, materialist) counterparts and
contraries. In a sense, the seven deadly sins of the cinema against the seven
cardinal virtues. They can be set out schematically in a table as follows:
Narrative transitivity v. Narrative intransitivity
Identification v. Estrangement
Transparency v. Foregrounding
Single diegesis v. Multiple diegesis
Closure v. Aperture
Pleasure v. Un-pleasure
Fiction v. Reality
Elaboration:
1. Narrative straightforwardness (transitivity): one thing follows
another, the construction is clear, one event builds upon the one before it.
A causal chain: exposition, complication, resolution.
As opposed to: narrative intransitivity (gaps, elipses, digressions,
episodic constructions, disjuncture, excess). Instead of a clear sequence, Godard
provides intermittent flashes Later, he does away with story altogether and
lets rhetoric (rather than narrative) be the constructive principle of the film.
Reiteration, amplification, digression serve as crucial elements.
The hope is to disrupt the emotional spell of the narrative,
to refocus the spectator's attention and allow for thought and reflection.
2. Identification: an emotional involvement with characters/stars in which the
viewer finds psychological and emotional points of alignment in the onscreen
action.
As opposed to: estrangement/distanciation/alienation (direct address to the
spectator, multiple and contradictory characters, commentary). In Godard we
find non-matching of voice to character, introduction of 'real' people to the
fiction, characters who address the audience directly. In later films, the same
voice is used for different characters.
Identification becomes impossible without unified characters to elicit and guide
it. One cannot maintain motivational coherence when characters are incoherent,
fissured, fragmented, multiple, and self-critical. The question shifts from
"What happened?" to "What is this film for?"
3. Transparency: a seamless flow of images conceals the fact that the film is
a construction, a fictional product, someone else's fantasy. The spectator becomes
swept away and dragged into the narrative flow--and the dominant cinema employs
a number of techniques to make certain that films do not call attention to their
own workings in ways that might destroy the sense of illusion and the viewer's
visual and narrative pleasure.
As opposed to: foregrounding of meaning production (making the
work that goes into the production of a film apparent). In Godard's films, one
sees the production of meaning, e.g., a camera is shown onscreen.
The film is marked and scratched. Film becomes a process of writing in' images
(rather than a representation of the world); the image is given a semantic function
within a genuine iconic code.
4. A homogeneous world (=single diegesis): everything that the audience sees
belongs to the same world; even movements in time and space (such as flashbacks
or changes of setting) are carefully signalled and located. The beholder gains
access to a coherent and self-sustained world, one in which time and space have
a consistent order and logic to them. The audience is made to feel, in other
words, comfortable, at home in familiar surroundings.
As opposed to: multiple diegesis (heterogeneous worlds; the worlds we see on
the screen are not coherent and integrated; different characters seem to be
acting in different films). Godard often employs film-within- film devices in
his early work. In Weekend we see characters from different epochs and from
fiction come together; instead of a single narrative world, we have an interweaving
and plurality of worlds. Not only do different characters speak differently,
different parts of the film do as well.
5. Closure: dominant cinema means self-contained works of art, harmonized within
certain generic boundaries. The film world exists on the screen and ends with
the closing of the curtain.
As opposed to: aperture (intertextuality, allusion, quotation,
pastiche, parody, self-consciousness, self-reflexity). Godard is an avid recycler.
He quotes with zeal, not just as a sign of eclecticism, but indeed as a guiding
structural principle of his films. Polyphony is key here: Godard's own voice
is drowned out by that of the many other voices that he quotes. The film can
no longer be seen as the discourse of a single auteur; rather, it becomes a
multiplicity of speaking voices. The text/film becomes an arena, a marketplace
of competing discourses. The juxtaposition and recontextualization of discourses
leads to a confrontation (not a unifying) of meanings.
6. Pleasure: the dominant cinema entertains and provides escape. It does not
irritate; it is not meant to call the world into question. It seeks to satisfy
paying customers, to give people "their money's worth." In that sense
it is the function of a larger consumer culture, one drug among many which lulls,
occupies, and pacifies the masses.
As opposed to: displeasure, boredom, dead or empty time, provocation, irritation.
But a radical film praxis recognizes that one needs the pleasure principle as
well as the reality principle to create desire. A revolutionary cinema has to
operate at different levels: fantasy, ideology, science. Godard seems to be
suspicious of the need for fantasy at all, except perhaps in the sado-masochistic
form of provocation.
7. Fiction: actors wear make-up and act out a scripted story. They play roles
and embody fictional characters; they are not themselves.
As opposed to: reality and the breakdown of representation, the attempt to show
the true face of the world. Godard attacks fiction with a political motivation:
fiction = mystification = bourgeois ideology. He is also troubled by the misleading and dissembling nature of appearances, the
impossibility of reading an essence from a phenomenon's surface. He is obsessed
with the problem of true speech and false speech, of theatrical speech. He distrusts
actors who speak someone else's words. He shares the poststructural suspicious
of language: we do not speak, language speaks through us. The logic would seem
to be: fiction = acting = lying = deception = representation = illusion = mystification
= ideology. For Wollen this is specious reasoning, for many reasons. Above all,
the terms are not equivalent.