INFLUENCE OF LINGUISTICS

The influence of linguistics and structuralism in cinema



The influence of linguistics and structuralism in cinema

Beginning in the late 1960s a group of theorists led by Jacques Derrida began to challenge the very basic assumptions that had informed structuralist thought, starting with its cornerstone, Saussurean semiotics. These attacks followed once the initial enthusiasm for structuralism began to wane. Less a theory than an interpretive attitude, poststructuralism in its broadest sense refers to an attention towards those elements unexplained, excluded, or repressed by structuralism's tidy systems, as well as a general distrust in systematicity in general. There is debate among scholars as to whether poststructuralism should be seen as an extension of structuralism or whether it constitutes a negation, a kind of antistructuralism. (Massumi, Brian. 2002.)

Some argue it is not antistructural since many poststructuralists used the semiotic terminology that informed structuralist thought. In its most general sense, poststructuralism—linked to thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan, to Barthes's later work, and above all to Derrida—is characterized by a suspicion of totalizing systems and a radical skepticism towards theories which attempt to explain human activity, such as Marxism, Christianity, and even structuralism. If structuralism set out to erect systems of binary oppositions, for instance, poststructuralists concerned themselves with instances in which systems break down or are subverted.

For poststructuralists, a "text" was no longer a finished, self-contained object that could be "explained" by the analyst, thereby rejecting the assumption under which structuralists had operated. Rather, according to Derrida, the text—whether literature, film, advertisement, or any cultural form—is first produced in the act of "reading," or interpretation. Although poststructuralists still deployed semiological terminology (sign, signifier, signified), they did so to criticize notions of stable signifying systems (although many poststructuralists were in fact Marxists).

Poststructuralism took film studies in new and often disparate directions. Unlike literary studies, Derridean deconstruction did not typically exert an immediate influence; film scholars tended to apply Derrida's subversive spirit to their interpretations, rather than organize their thoughts around any of his ideas. One strain, found above all in French journals such as Cahiers du cinéma and Cinétique , latched onto structuralist-Marxist Louis Althusser's concept of ideology in an effort to "demythologize" or "denaturalize" film—that is, to reveal the hidden cultural and ideological codes which underpin cinematic (especially Hollywood) signification. One famous example is the 1972 collective Cahiers du cinéma on John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), which "read" or "rescanned" the film for moments where the director's "inscription" of a unique "writing" created spaces in the text which escaped the dominant ideology. This brand of analysis, sometimes referred to as a "deconstructive reading," essentially looked for what Derrida called "play"—the space in which structure is transformed and decentered—as an alternative approach to auteurist criticism. Another poststructuralist offshoot, Lacanian psychoanalysis, offered a further alternative to classic structuralist film analysis. Figures such as Christian Metz connected Lacan's reinterpretation of Sigmund Freud's theories to structural linguistics for the way in which both deal directly with ...