The Photogramme as Signifier

Abstract

This essay contributes to the debate following the revolutionary uprisings of May 1968 by addressing the entwined politics and semiotics of cinematography’s photogrammes, which, according to Ghuede, guarantee the impression of reality/movement, but always laced with dominant ideological discourse. Some space is dedicated to a discussion of Jean-Daniel Pollet’s 1963 film Méditerranée, for which Philippe Sollers wrote the script.

KEYWORDS:

• Michel Ghuede
• Roland Barthes
• Marcelin Pleynet
• Jean-Paul Fargier
• Philippe Sollers
• Louis Althusser
• Umberto Eco
• Noël Burch
• Jean-Daniel Pollet
• Tel Quel
• Cinéthique
• Méditerranée
• photogrammes
• cinematography
• semiotics

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Corrigendum

Notes

1. Recorded in Christian Metz, Language and Cinema (The Hague, Paris: Mouton, 1974 [1971]), 190.

2. Email correspondence between Gheude and myself (June 2014).

3. See: Sylvia Harvey, May ’68 and Film Culture (London: BFI, 1980).

4. Umberto Eco, “Sémiologie des messages visuels,” Communications 15 (1970): 11–51. This essay is quoted by Gheude.

5. Marcelin Pleynet in Gérard Leblanc, Marcelin Pleynet and Jean Thibaudeau, “Economic—Ideological—Formal,” in Sylvia Harvey, May ’68 and Film Culture (London: BFI, 1980): 155–6.

6. Albert Gauvin has assembled two online “dossiers” of statements about Méditerranée (from which one can follow further links): 〈http://www.pileface.com/sollers/spip.php?article1026#section6; and 〈http://www.pileface.com/sollers/spip.php?article1024 accessed 10 December 2015.

7. Roland Barthes, “Le troisième sens: Notes de recherche sur quelques photogrammes de S.M. Eisenstein,” Cahiers du Cinéma 222 (July 1970): 12–19 translated as “The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills,” in Roland Barthes, Image Music Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 52–68.

8. Joseph Stalin, Marxism and Problems of Linguistics (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954). Originally published in three parts in Pravda (June 20, July 4, and August 2 1950).

1. Translator's note: There is a longstanding debate about how best to translate signifiant. In recent decades “signifying element” has been favored by some over “signifier,” on the grounds that it is more faithful to the implication of active process in the gerundial form of the French term. But the addition of the nominative “element” considerably undermines this argument, and it also results in a rather unwieldy phrase. Accordingly, I have opted for “signifier” in this translation, but the reader should bear in mind that a literal rendering of the French terms signifié/significant would be “signified/signifying.”

2. See Louis Althusser, Pour Marx (Paris: François Maspero, 1965); and idem, “Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’état (Notes pour une recherché),” La Pensée 151 (June 1970): 3-38 [The English versions are Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1969); and Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation,” in idem, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971): 121-73.

3. Eliane Legrivès and Simon Luciani, “Naissance d’une théorie,” Cinéthique 5 (October 1969): 45-47.

4. Jean Paul Fargier, “La paranthèse et le détour,” Cinéthique 5 (October 1969). (October 1969): 15-21. [The English version is idem, “Parenthesis or Indirect Route,” Screen 12, no. 1 (Summer 1971): 131-4.]

5. See Roland Barthes, “Rhétorique de l’image,” Communications 4 (1964): 40–51 [English version: “Rhetoric of the Image,” in idem, Image Music Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 32–51]. Translator's note: Ghuede’s curious phrase “signifiés désarmorcés” (“inhibited,” “neutralized,” or “deactivated signifieds”) may reference Barthes’s analysis of the way that the text of an advertisement “directs” the reader through the “signifieds of the image” and “remote-controls him towards a meaning chosen in advance,” thereby foreclosing other of its potential meanings, an operation that prompts Barthes to attribute “a repressive value” to such texts (Heath [ed. and trans.], 156–7).

“Articulation.” With one exception, I have rendered this French term throughout with the English homonym, partly because this is how Helen Lane handled it in her translation of the book by Noël Burch (see below). As used by Ghuede (and Burch), it references the relation or connection between one thing and another—often interactive, as in the discussions below of the “word/image articulation” in advertisements and, in film, of the “articulation” or jointure of successive shots.

6. Umberto Eco, “Sémiologie des messages visuels,” Communications 15 (1970): 11-51; cited passage: 35.

7. Translator’s note: “Raccords.” I translate this as “shot transitions” in deference to the English lexicon of film technique, but the reader should note that the nature of the “cut” between film shots is abrupt in a way that runs counter to the gradualist implications of “transition.”

8. Translator's note: Noël Burch, Praxis du Cinéma (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). [English version (“somewhat revised”): idem, Theory of Film Practice, trans. Helen R. Lane (New York: Praeger, 1973).] On the revisions in the English edition, see pages xvi-xx of the author’s preface. The discussion summarized in Gheude’s “list” is in chapter 1, “Spatial and Temporal Articulations” (ibid., 3-16).

9. Christian Metz, “La grande syntagmatique du film narratif,” Communications 8, no. 1 (1966):  120–4. [English version: Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), chapter 3, “The Cinema: Language or Language System?”: 31-91.]

10. Translator’s note: The inserted comments are Gheude’s. Burch’s passage about “dialectical respiration” disappears in the English edition, either through excision or substantial revision. In his preface to the English edition, Burch writes (Lane [trans.], xviii): “[T]he above-mentioned ‘technical’ aspect of film […] was most often referred to in the original French as écriture or facture, words that have generally had to be rendered as ‘style’ and ‘texture.’ These words must be read as having more precise referents than is generally the case in English, always applying as they do to specifically material options of a ‘technical’ nature (facture means texture in the articulative sense, écriture is graphic inscription as much as ‘style’).”

11. Jean-Paul Fargier, “Vers le récit rouge,” Cinétique 7–8 (1970): 9–19.

12. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique général, ed. C. Bally and A. Sechehaye with A. Riedlinger (Lausanne and Paris: Payot, 1916) [English version: Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), where this passage is on 120 (translation altered)].

13. Translator’s note: “Destinateur.” In linguistic theory, the French tandem destinateur/destinataire are usually translated as “speaker/recipient.” That does not work here, since Ghuede, extrapolating from the more specific usage permitted by the French terms (which do not necessarily denote linguistic communication), employs them to designate, respectively, the maker(s) of a film and its viewers. Accordingly, I have opted for “sender” and “recipient.”

14. Christian Metz, “The Cinema: Language or Language System?,” in Taylor (trans.) Film Language, chapter 3, 31–91.

15. See Jean-Joseph Goux, “Marx et l’inscription du travail,” Tel Quel 33 (1968): 188-211.

16. Jacques Derrida, “La pharmacie de Platon,” Part I: Tel Quel no. 32 (1968): 3-48; Part II: Tel Quel no. 33 (1968): 18-59. [English version: “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 63–171, where the cited passage is on 63 (translation altered)]. Translator’s note: The laws and rules in question are those that govern a literary text’s composition and its “game.”