Cinematic Texts Research Articles

Biographical Moments in the Written and Cinematic Text: Deconstructing the Legends of Joe Hill and Buffalo Bill

Biographical Moments in the Written and Cinematic Text: Deconstructing the Legends of Joe Hill and Buffalo Bill

Impressionism and Ideology: The State of Recent Genre Film Criticism

Carlos Clarens, Crime Movies. New York : Norton, 1980.351 pp. Stephen Neale. Genre. London : British Film Institute. 1980.74 pp. Eugene Rosow. Born to Lose: The Gangster Film in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. 422 + xv pp. Thomas Schatz. Hollywood Genres: Formulas. Filmmaking, and the Studio System. New York: Random House, 1981.297 + xiv pp. When film study began to mature in the mid-seventies, interest in the narrative film, which had been nurtured a decade earlier by auteurism's enthusiasm for popular film, waned in favor of more formal concerns. Critical interest shifted from the signified of films to the practice of signification, from what a film means to how it produces meaning. Structural film was particularly amenable to such an approach. No longer was film assumed to have an inviol- able meaning ; rather, meaning was now understood to arise from the con- junction of various discursive codes at work in the cinematic text. Auteurs no longer existed apart from such contexts, nor could they acceptably be studied in this manner again; as Roland Barthes had shown, writing degree zero was impossible.1

Communication and ‘real’ confusion: The film Babel

This article focuses on the film, Babel, with a view to teasing out its various semiotic strands, which converge on the question of communication and its diverse perversions. At one level, viewers can identify with its characters without the ‘benefit’ of sophisticated theoretical or hermeneutic horizons. Yet, although the narrative of the film makes ‘perfect’ sense at the level of everyday experience, it is also the case that a theoretically informed, or philosophical, interpretation of this rich cinematic text yields an equally rich harvest of meaning. This could take the form of insight into the paradoxical conditions of inter-human, intercultural communication in a world that has been subjected to the flows as well as the barriers of globalisation. The article aims to uncover some of these conditions through the theoretical lenses of poststructuralist thought, ranging from the work of Derrida on communication and hospitality, and of Lacan on the ‘real’, to that of Ulrich Beck on ‘cosmopolitanism’.