Making Meaning

This book's basic assumption is that through interpretation, meaning is arrived as an interplay of conceptual schemes and perceived cues.

I. Mapping as Making

In Chapter 2, according to how an interpreter achieves the goal of producing a persuasive and novel interpretation they must use four elements. Two of the four deal with semantic fields and mapping. They are; make salient one or more semantic fields, and secondly, map the semantic fields onto the film at several levels by correlating textual units with semantic features.(p.41)

With this an interpreter can say that they have accounted for the most important or puzzling or unusual features of the film. This leads us to the conclusion that interpretation of a film is never complete. Each viewer can bring something to the film that others can not. If you want more information on this refer to Chapter 1 meaning Made section.

Bordwell goes on to explain that a critic must learn to recognize appropriate textual cues for constructing interpretations. For semantic fields, of themselves, provide no indications of what may properly bear them. Something else must mediate, helping the critic assign semantic fields to a proper range of textual features. The mediators are reasoning processes-assumptions, hypotheses, organized bodies of knowledge, and well-practiced routines.

There are four problems that a critic faces with Interpretation;

• Appropriateness
• Recalcitrant data(Adjusting elements of the film to match reigning notions of what ought to be interpreted)
• Novelty
• Plausibility

However, an interpreter is governed by normalized traditions when searching for cues. These normalized traditions are

(a) presumably effective in spectators' responses. This is the basic interpretation of film that anyone can make( the film's point, moral, or message).

(b) traditionally capable of bearing meanings. This point relies upon his or her training, study of exemplars, disputes with other critics, and other prior experiences to determine what cues should be selected.

It is risky to be innovative in picking out cues. The risk arises when the cues that an interpretation has picked out are off base, or not plausible. Cues illustrate how institutionally grounded assumptions necessarily shape the process of mapping semantic fields. There is also an inductive process, and it is guided by socially implanted hypotheses. There are two that Bordwell find to be most pertinent to film interpretation.

• the hypotheses that textual units cohere
• the hypotheses that the text bears some relation to an external world

 The hypotheses of unity is in force until it is knocked down; the text is presumed coherent until proven otherwise. In the second hypotheses, the ordinary perceiver brings into play real-world assumptions about space, time,causality, identity, and so forth.

This second hypotheses is something that I personally have been using while studying the war film. For example, when watching the Nazi Propaganda films I know that the space is Germany and Poland, the time is 1933 until 1944, the cause was that Hitler was going to cleanse the world of the Jews and eventually all ethnic groups that were not White, Christians. The identity is that the Jews were been persecuted and killed by the millions. So as I watched the films on Nazi propaganda I was appauled that such films could ever be believed. The movie protray's the world to be one way, when in fact the reality of the situation is not as it has been protrayed.

At this point we, as interpreters, must realize that it is necessary to draw upon schemata and procedures built up in the context of situations outside a film.

II. Knowledge Structures and Routines

 Knowledge Structures and Routines

This section talks about the process of interpretative inference. This puts the assumptions and hypothese to work in the mapping process.

Cognitive Activity

Schematic structure is "basic" in that one starts with it under default assumptions and then adapts it to the concrete situation. This structure mediates our cognitive activity.

In interpretative problem solving, schemata are typically employed in what psychologists call a "top-down" manner: guided by more or less explicit goals, the critic tests abstract schemata against the empirical case. The routines or procedures in question consist mostly of heuristics, rules of thumb that have proven useful in meeting the interpretive institution's demands for novelty and plausibility.

Two different types of Heuristics

(1) Representative: problem solving tends to reduce all inferential tasks to judgments of similarity.

(2) Availability: whereby solutions are sought among what is most readily accessed in memory.

An example of this is if you and a friend have the same standards, and typically enjoy the same movies, and if you then give her a review of a movie she is more likely to accept your take on a movie than on what a movie critic will say. Her actions will thus be reflective of what your review was, typically.

III. Mapping as Modeling

In mapping semantic fields onto the film, guided by schemata and heuristics, the critic produces approximations of the film at hand-mental models of it. Unlike schemata, which are stable, persistent, and general application, mental models are "transient, dynamic representations of particular unique situations."(p.142) Using various schemata(such as those of genre and textual structure) and skills of analogical inference, the critic may build up several versions of the film before finding an acceptable fit. The one that fits solves the interpretive problem, yielding sufficient particularity and "coverage"-be- comes the model, the final "output" of the mapping process. The output is not just some semantic fields plus certain aspects of the film. In constructing an interpretation, the critic has in a sense reconstructed the text. Because of the selectivity and "perspectivism" involved in the proces, the model film is inevitably an approximation

The Order of Interpretation

• The fields are mapped selectively
• Frame hypotheses about what may count as acceptable vehicles for such fields
• Hypothese about unity and the relation of the text to the world
• Use particular problem-solving heuristics, such as drawing analogies, deriving puns, and overlapping associations, and build mental models

 Note that no mastery of theory need play a part in this process. A critic trained in the proper assumptions, hypotheses, schemata, and routines should be able to produce an acceptable interpretation.

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