Toward a Semiotics of Poetry and Film: Meaning-Making and Extra-Linguistic

Signification
Author(s): Bill R. Scalia
Source: Literature/Film Quarterly , 2012, Vol. 40, No. 1 (2012), pp. 46-53
Published by: Salisbury University

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43798813

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Pier Paolo Pasolini attempted to define a "Cinema of Poetry" in 1965, in part as a
response to Christian Metz s and other critics' work in defining a film language. Some
critics, such as Jean Mitry and Metz himself, had already referred to poetics, either
in a strictly linguistic sense (Metz) or an aesthetic sense (Mitry). Yet they generally
failed to determine a cinema of poetics adequate for critically evaluating films that
in a real, critical sense may be said to be "poetic" (as opposed to, for example, mere
sentimentality casually termed "poetic"). This critical poetic sense escapes qualitative
analysis and is beyond the limits of structural linguistics. Metzs structuralist
linguistic models of film criticism make interesting connections between structures
of filmic and verbal texts, and other semioticians, Pasolini in particular, have worked
toward this end. But, as I have said, a critical reliance on linguistic models for the
purposes of film analysis betrays an inevitable failing to assess the poetic quality of
not only an essentially visual medium, but also the specific formal possibilities of
that medium. However, I hope to suggest a specific model of poetic semiotics to
demonstrate the visual signification of iconic images and to show how these images,
and their accompanying narratives, through repetition, pacing, juxtaposition, and
framing, signify through an aesthetic more closely aligned with poetry (discovered
meaning) than with theory (made meaning).
Semiotics seems to be an effective way to approach this question, but is it
sufficient? By "language" of cinema do we mean its signifying possibilities or its
narrative structure? In this study I would like to consider these two expressions
as a way to examine the relationship between image and (verbal) language. Also,
drawing on a semiotics of poetry suggested by Michael Riffaterre, I will examine this
relationship as it functions in Krzysztof Kieślowski s film La double vie de Véronique .
Since Metz s important essay "Le Cinéma: langue ou langage" in 1964, critics have
been trying to define a language of film for the purposes of understanding film as an
ordered system of signification. However, it remains that the essential distinction
between film and language - that film is fundamentally visual and concrete, while
language is a system of representation - is at the heart of the question. Semiotic
models of film of linguistic origin suffer the fate of not according film its most unique
quality: a model of the world and the motion of the world without the mediation
of language. Thus, the ambiguity of most film is lost in filmic analysis that, at its
Metzian extreme, tends toward a rationalistic, quasi-scientific account of cinema.
Because film allows a direct (as opposed to a language-mediated) perception of the
world dictated by the means of its production, an analysis of film more aligned with

46

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 Toward a Semiotics of Poetry and Film/47

poetic models seems to offer a better chance of advancing a model of signification

that relies not specifically on language or linguistic models, but on form.
I am using the term "ambiguity" to describe one way that poetry signifies; that
is, in terms of the semiotic sign, slippage between signifier and signified. Poetic
language, in this sense, reawakens our engagement with the world by diverting
our expectations of the normative understanding of the sign. We expect a sign to
have a certain discursive identification and function (as we certainly encounter
normal experience more in terms of discursive prose than poetic language); poetic
language radically realigns the sign. The poetic "sign," in this case, misaligns signifier
and signified, and thus creates either a new sign, an absurd (or surreal) sign, or
renders the sign as null. In the same way that André Bazin claims that the subject of
photography is the photograph itself, the subject of poetry is the poem itself, as well
as its constituent elements: that is, words (signs). And, if we agree that words are the
material of poetry, the production of words (the signifier/signified tension) is the
means of its production. In cinema, the image is the signifying agent, and the camera
is the means of production; in cinema, the camera does this for us.
Mitry, in his seminal work Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma (Vol I, 1963; Vol
II, 1965) agreed with Ferdinand de Saussures idea that "Verbal language, the most
complex and most widespread system of expression, is also the most characteristic;
thus, linguistics can become the general guide for all semiotics" (Lewis 61-62); in
1965 Pasolini wrote "I believe that it is no longer possible to begin to discuss cinema
as an expressive language without at least taking into consideration the terminology
of semiotics" (167). However, Mitry also followed the work of philosopher Mikel
Dufrenne in making an important distinction between discursive and poetic
language. Poetry, according to Dufrenne, is an

instrument of an original communication between man and the world ... the first
form of language, the language in which a significance that is still preconceptual is
totally immanent in the flesh and blood of words and immediately experienced by
feeling. ... For the poets ... return to the sources of language, the place from which
metaphors spring. (Lewis 63)

This distinction is significant in qualifying rational/prose language and poetic

language.
Metz s structural linguistics of cinema in Film Language (1974) describes filmic
"signs" as linguistic structures. According to his model, semiosis occurs in the space
between the sign and the signifier of the on-screen image in a single shot. He equates
the film shot not with the word , but with the statement as the cinemas smallest
single unit of meaning. Metz s example is that a shot of a revolver does not equate
with the word "revolver," but with the statement "this is a revolver." Metz insists
that "the strictly linguist laws cease when nothing is any longer obligatory, when
ordering becomes Tree/ But that is the point where film begins; it is immediately and
automatically situated on the plane of rhetoric and poetics" (81). However, Metz
continues his analytic approach without accounting for the "spring of metaphors" of
poetic language. For Metz, the shot provides a temporal and spatial location that a

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48/Toward a Semiotics of Poetry and Film

word cannot, but the shot still resides inside a rationally determined schema. Shots
(or even the sequence shot) begin to constitute chains of meaning, which evolve
into syntagmas that are, for Metz, comprised of self-contained units of meaning. The
twofold failure of Metz s system is that it pretends toward a scientific analysis with
quantitative results, and the inability of the system to successfully apply to all forms
of cinematic discourse, as Metz had hoped.
These weaknesses open the field for further exploration of Pasolini s film semiotics.
Though sometimes confusing and contradictory, Pasolini makes interesting claims
for the "cinema of poetry," though his hope for its actualization is pessimistic. He
writes,

one [should] think that the language of cinema is fundamentally a "language of

poetry." Instead, historically, in practice, after a few attempts which were immediately
cut short, the cinematographic tradition which has developed seems to be that of a
"language of prose," or at least that of a "language of prose narrative." (172)

Pasolini argues that cinema sought expression as escapist performance, and thus

it immediately underwent a rather foreseeable and unavoidable rape. In other words,

all its irrational, oneiric, elementary, and barbaric elements were forced below the
level of consciousness. ... That narrative convention which has furnished the material
for useless and pseudocritical comparisons with the theater and the novel was built
on this hypnotic monstrum that a film always is. (172)

Pasolini regards as the "mythical and infantile subtext" the rationality of prose
language, "this narrative convention deprived of expressive, impressionistic, and
expressionistic highlights" (172). Pasolini solves this dilemma by suggesting a
cinematic correspondence to literatures first-person narrative. He suggests a
"technique of a free indirect discourse," which he defines as "the immersion of the
filmmaker in the mind of his character and then the adoption on the part of the
filmmaker not only of the psychology of his character but also of his language" (175).
Since, for Pasolini, "cinematic direct discourse corresponds to the point-of-view
shot," he maintains that a "free indirect point-of-view shot," that is, one "in which
the entire story is told through the character, through an absolute internalization
of his inner system of allusions," is the only possibility for the cinema of poetry
(177). Pasolini asserts changing a fundamental aesthetic of film itself, an important
contribution in terms of classifying the signifying process of film as poetic. Thus, it
may be said that structuralism is still an effective means by which to examine the way
films create meaning through visual narrative; but, I believe the need is for revised
methodologies, not the use of those appropriated from prose narrative (as has often
been the practice), as though filmic discourse somehow approximates narrative
literary discourse.
The principle failing of attempts to arrive at a systematic model for the workings
of cinema is reliance on theories appropriated from theories of verbal texts. Though
varying definitions of "film language" attempt to compensate for this problem,
the fact remains that film is an essentially visual medium. Since the advent of

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 Toward a Semiotics of Poetry and Film/49

structuralism into film critique, a satisfactory separation of verbal language and

visual aesthetics has proved difficult.
Mitry is correct in recognizing the difference in discursive prose language and the
emotional possibilities of poetic language, but he still relies on language as mediation
in his theory of meaning in the cinema. Metz, too, is aware of this as problematic.
Certainly it is true that critics must use language to talk about film; however, Mitry s
and, to a degree, Metz s criticism seems to use language to talk about the "language"
of film, without directly confronting film on the terms of its own fundamental
orders.
Stanley Cavell, however, in The World Viewed (197 1), makes the important point
that the photograph must be understood as the basis of film, as a means of presenting
a world to an audience, before film can be assessed aesthetically. According to
Cavell, a film is not a semiotic system itself, but the intradiegetic space within a film
approximates a semiotic system; the images become signifiers. The "film language" in
the discourse of many structuralist theorists does not constitute a fidelity to se miotics
of strictly profilmic elements; the meaning-making power of a film, the locus of its
significance, lies within the frame and the spatial and temporal aspects the frame
implies. These are not the temporal and spatial aspects of the corresponding "word"
that Metz imagines. The cinematic frame is expandable and can instantaneously
change its locus spatially and temporally. Also, Cavell disengages the identification
of the viewer from the camera; we are screened from the world of the film: it is
present to us, but we are not present to it. But while the photograph provides the
basis for realizing the unique quality of film, the movie camera extends the frame of
the film, unlike the fixed frame of a painting or a photograph.
Once the possibility of extending, or changing, the spatial parameters of the
frame is realized, the significance of the frame is sublimated to the images contained
in the frame. That is, since the frame can relocate itself, significance shifts to the
image that is, if only for a moment, "caught" inside the frame. Thus, the image and
the possibilities of the frame are dual components in the semiotic process.
Signification "happens" in language in the slippage between the word and the
thing (the ambiguity of the sign). In film, the image is the signifying agent, and
images are iconic; that is, they are what they are and are nothing else (a picture of
a whale is a picture of a whale; if it is anything else, the association is a trope, not
a condition of the image itself). The image is, in the end, a direct sign, "where the
signifier is coextensive with the signified" (Mitry 30). Thus, there is no slippage
in the image; no slippage between signifier and signified. So how can an image
"signify?" The image can signify only in terms of tropes; that is, in relations between
images, in the frame and across time ( mise-en-scene and editing). These tropes are the
currency of narrative (which film shares with literature). Poetic language signifies in
a different way, in a distinction not only in the sign, but between signs. Thus, film
signifies in a way closely related to poetry; if we are to talk about signification in film,
we have to talk about film as poetry, and a productive way to do this is to talk about
the semiotics of poetry.
The filmic image, then, takes on a new significance in the narrative: the image is
always iconic, but in the intradiegetic space of the film it is the signifier as well. Metz

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50/Toward a Semiotics of Poetry and Film

does recognize diegesis as the sum of the films denotation; it is narration, but it is
also all of the "profilmic" elements; that is, whatever is placed in front of the camera,
or whatever one shoots with a camera, and everything implied by the narrative. The
signifier and signified of the sign collapse, since they, signifier and signified, are the
same thing (meaning in language "happens" in the tension between signifier and
signified; in a photographed image, the signifier is exactly what it signifies, and thus
a collapsed sign). In this way filmic images are always iconic. Thus, the poetic cinema
is not the agency of language, but of an aesthetic tied to the unique possibilities of
the camera and editing. The camera is the meaning-making agent of film, through
mise-en-scène , camera movement, composition, aspect ratio, deep focus, and editing,
techniques which may be called the "tropes" of the cinema.
Bazin earlier recognized, significantly, the separation of the artist from the
subject in photography. The object of the photographic image is photography itself.
In fact, Cavell follows Bazin in his definition of the ontology of the photograph: it
is present to the subject, and absent at the same time, a condition Cavell terms "the
ontological paradox of the cinema," a condition also recognized by Mitry and Metz.
The photograph does more than imitate its subject; it imitates the artist. Bazin notes
that the cinema emerged as the technology became available and as the desire to
represent reality more faithfully became a condition of late nineteenth-century
thinking. The significance of this for film semiotics is that once we realize that filmed
images are always iconic, Bazin s "realism" reenters the discussion as a potent critical
methodology. He writes, "Realism can only occupy art in a dialectical position - it
is more a reaction than a truth" (48). Bazin defines "realist" as "all narrative means
tending to bring an added measure of reality to the screen ... Neorealism gives back
to the cinema a sense of the ambiguity of reality" (27). This "ambiguity of reality" is
the sublime quality of nature, that which Ralph Waldo Emerson praised and poetry
embraces. Bazin writes, "facts take on meaning, but not like a tool whose function
has predetermined its form" (36), just as, similarly, Emerson wrote in Nature , "nature
is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design" (3), and later, "As
we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it
is all poetry; or all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols" (14). Likewise,
the filmic "fact" determines its own aesthetic, a form allowed expression through the
possibilities of the film mechanics, and through a framing mechanism that is similar
to the function of poetic form.
For example, the pacing of a film, dictated usually by shot/reverse shot patterns,
scene and/or sequence length, and camera movement, gives film an aesthetic whole
that resembles the rhythmic and imagistic sense of poetry. It may, then, be of some
value to consider scenes and sequences as roughly analogous to the poetic line or
stanza. To be sure, this proposition is general, but it may serve functionally to realize
the signifying potential of cinematic form(s).
Riffaterres Semiotics of Poetry (1978) proposes two readings for a poem,
the heuristic and the hermeneutic; this is necessary for the reader to "hurdle the
mimesis" of the poem and decode its meanings. But in a film, these two "readings"
occur at the same time; the filmic image, I believe, may be said to be hypermimetic.

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 Toward a Semiotics of Poetry and Film/ 51

That is, film presents a real, factual world without the mediation of language. But
the world that is presented, while its images do realize their own forms, is contained
inside an expandable frame, which extends the representational quality to a level
of perception beyond mimesis, but also demonstrates the factual presentation
characteristic of photography. Thus, as Metz determined in Language and Cinema ,
the most unique aspect of the cinema is motion. The decoding of the cinematic text -
the manifestation of semiosis - comes through recognition of the way the images
are presented through mise-en-scene : framing (the area framed by the camera) and
composition (the arrangement and movement of objects within the frame). RifFaterre
describes the poem as a single unit of signification, comparable to Metzs syntagma'
he uses three distinct terms to distinguish a poems matrix (its field of significance),
hypogram (a words indexical field), and kernal word (the center of the hypogram).
Semiosis in the cinema may be generally thought of as image (filmic fact) considered
relative to framing (matrix) and composition (hypogram). The hypograms kernal
word is the films kernal image. According to RifFaterre, displacement from the
kernal word (or image) results in signification; here, semiosis takes place. I believe it
is possible to read semiosis in film as intradiegetic, constituting the image as a part
of a continuing visual narrative more closely aligned with poetry, and more capable
of reclaiming the ambiguity of films lost in strictly linguistic interpretive models.
In Kieślowski s La double vie de Véronique , such a reading is helpful to recover the
ambiguity of the film (Bazins "ambiguity of reality"). The films narrative concerns
two young women, both singers, Veronika in Poland and Véronique in France (both
played by Irène Jacob), who, though unknown to each other, share very similar lives.
Yet when Veronika dies suddenly in Poland, Véronique in France becomes aware of
an indefinable emptiness in her own life. Véronique s emptiness manifests itself in an
almost random search for what has been lost, and it is the sense of loss, and the sense
of wandering, displacement, and alienation, that Kieślowski communicates visually,
rather than through a conventional narrative.
The emptiness Véronique experiences is set up in a short but important sequence
early in the film. Veronika has decided to visit her ailing aunt in Krakow. Kieślowski
gives us a POV shot from the bus window of the slowly passing landscape, filling
the frame, distorted slightly by a ripple in the window glass. He then cuts to a shot
of Veronika, from the front and slightly above; Veronika makes eye contact with
the camera, and thus the audience; this act of cinematic self-consciousness confirms
our participation in her storv. Kieślowski then cuts to Veronika in a medium shot:
she takes a small glass ball, holds it to the
window, and watches the view through it.
Here Kieślowski completes the scene with
a POV shot of the landscape again passing
by, this time through the glass ball, and
we see buildings pass by distended and
inverted. Kieślowski moves the camera
closer, blocking out everything in the
frame but the images through the ball
(which we may read as a metaphor for

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52/Toward a Semiotics of Poetry and Film

the camera) and Veronikas thumb, and

ends the scene with a close up not of the
distorted images, but of Veronikas thumb.
This shot, while obviously preparing us
for the symbolic inversions to come in
Véronique s story, also establishes the focus
of the films first third: the physicality of
the thumb, rather than the illusory images
of the buildings.
This sequence, isolated in this way, is
a visual poem. A film may be comprised
of many such sequences, complete within
themselves and self-sustaining in terms of meaning, generating cognitive and emotive
purport. While Riffaterre claims a complete poem as a single unit of significance,
and Metz claims the shot as films smallest complete unit of significance, a middle
ground seems possible. While a long poem may have many stanzas and many matrices
with corresponding kernal words, so the film s complete unit of significance may
be completed scenes or sequences, "meaning units" of film that complete an idea
contained in a shot or arrangement of shots and move the film from one sequence
to the next. In the bus sequence described above, the scene takes place within the
confines of our view of Veronikas seat on the bus, next to the window. Here, the
matrix of the scene is the bus window, which "frames" the images, and the hypogram
is the image as first seen through the window, full size, and only slightly distorted.
The kernal image, however, is the tracking of the passing landscape through the
ball; these images compound the significance of the earlier, comparable view, and
demonstrate a semiotic space between the image we expect to see and the image that
serves as a perceptual sign, which may be said, in Dufrenne s words, to come from
"the source of language" (in this instance image), "the place from where metaphors
spring." Signification occurs within the matrix of the scene, through the composition
of filmic elements within the frame. Again, semiosis is intradiegetic; meaning takes
place through the resonance of the discordant hypogram and kernal image.
The second half of La double vie de Véronique follows Véronique s life in France.
This second part of the film is a kind of "shadow film" of the first part, opposing
Veronika s story by highlighting an ambiguity of which Véronique is especially aware.
The only tangible connection between Veronika and Véronique is, significantly, a
single photograph of Veronika in Krakow, taken by Véronique from a bus early in
the film. The photograph shows Veronika in full shot, standing still and looking
at the camera, against a background of blurred images of people running. It is
especially significant that a photograph ties the two characters together if we recall
Cavells assertion that photography imitates the artist, not the subject, and that we
are present to the image and screened from it at the same; indeed, an ontological
paradox. Late in the film, when Véronique s acquaintance Alexandre finds the
proof sheet containing the image, he points out the resemblance of the two women
to Véronique, who denies the resemblance and crumples the proof sheet, crying.
Something in that moment of discovery, perhaps Véronique s only moment of clarity

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 Toward a Semiotics of Poetry and Film/53

in the film, seems to have confirmed

something of her "absent" self. Kieślowski
uses a photograph - again, the basis for
film - to express Véroniques emotional
turbulence, and (thus) her ambiguity.
A film such as Kieślowski s La double
vie de Véronique benefits from a semiotic
reading derived from poetic models. The
"language" of film is no discursive model
of language, but compositions of movable
images set inside an expandable frame. Limiting the critical possibilities cinema
offers threatens to deny cinema critical methodologies devoted both to its own
ontological examinations and those derived from the bases of its own production.

Bill R. Scalia
St. Mary s Seminary & University

Works Cited

Bazin, André. What is Cinemaì Vol. II. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: U of California P, 1971. Print.

Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed : Toward an Ontology of the Cinema. Enlarged Edition. Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1979. Print.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Nature." Selected Prose and Poetry. Ed. Reginald Cook. New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1969. Print.

Lewis, Brian .Jean Mitry and the Aesthetics of the Cinema. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1984. Print.

Metz, Christian. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema . Trans. Michael Taylor. New York: Oxford UP,
1974. Print.

Mitry, Jean. Semiotics and the Analysis of Film. Trans. Christopher King. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000.
Print.

Pasolini, Pier Paolo. Heretical Empiricism. Ed. Louise K. Barnett. Trans. Ben Lawton and
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988. Print.

RifFaterre, Michael. Semiotics of Poetry. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978. Print.

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