Film Connotation and the Signified Subject

Abstract

This chapter analyzes how cinema organizes sets of relations that produce and reflect “orders of meaning” in ways that might coincide with philosophical activity. It turns to the notions of Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes, and Pier Paolo Pasolini in order to understand the principles of cinematic coding and how they might apply to subject-object relations. These theorists helped to develop an understanding of how film codes rely on the repetition of subject-object configurations, an approach that returns to Gilles Deleuze's “sémiotique”, which views the moving image as a plane of immanence in which the organization of relations gives birth to particular configurations of signification, flowing in an act of perpetual becoming. The chapter synthesizes these notions to describe film as a condition of enunciation and an immanent field that can be organized according to structured relationships between the content and image.