Making Films Mean

 

OUTLINE OF CHAPTER 1

I. Interpretation as Construction

II. Meaning Made

III. Interpretive Doctrines

I. Interpretation as Construction

Interpretation is a kind of explanation inserted between one text or agent and another. Originally, interpretation was conceived as wholly a verbal process. Now interpretation can be counterpoised to description or analysis; alternatively, criticism as a whole is sometimes identified with interpretation. Most critics distinguish between interpreting a film and comprehending it, though they would often disagree about where the boundary line is to drawn. This divisional line lies between the art of understanding and the art of explaining.

To speak of hidden meaning, levels of meaning, and revealing meaning evokes the dominant framework within which critics understand interpretation. Comprehending and interpreting a literary text, a painting, a play, or a film constitutes an activity in which the perceiver plays the central role. Thus, the meaning of a film, no matter the intent, can be different for each viewer. Understanding is mediated by transformative acts, both "bottom-up" mandatory, automatic psychological process and "top-down" conceptual, strategic ones. The sensory data of the film at hand furnish the materials out of which inferential processes of perception and cognition build meanings. Meanings are found not made.

Comprehension and interpretation thus involve the construction of meaning out of textual cues. In this respect, meaning-making is a psychological and social activity fundamentally akin to other cognitive processes. While critics build up meanings by applying institutional protocols and normalized psychological strategies, we shall see that they typically agree upon what textual cues are "there", even is they interpret the cues in differing ways. Both comprehension and interpretation, then , require the spectator to apply conceptual schemes to data picked out in the film.

CONCEPTUAL SCHEMES:

(1) Theory- A film theory consists of a system of propositions that claims to explain the nature and functions of cinema. Perhaps the critic's interpretation tests a theory. Criticism uses ordinary language, encourages metaphorical and punning redescription, emphasizes rhetorical appeals and refuses to set definite bounds on relevant data. Instead of posting an inductivist separation of theory and criticism, perhaps we should think of the critic's interpretation as deductively deriving from the theory.

So we might simply say that the critic's interpretation illustrates a theory. Perhaps, than a theory merely offers insight which can guide the critic's interpretation. "Insight" does not suffice as a criterion to guide critics' choice and use of theories

CRITICAL INTERPRETATION

Chiefly consists of a covert or tacit conventionality. In such cases people are chiefly unaware of the conventions they obey. The concept of tacit convention seeks to capture both psychological and social dimensions of the interpretive activity.

II. Meaning Made

Interpretation is a cognitive activity taking place within particular institutions. The following four categories of meaning-construction are functional and heuristic, not substantive. Used in the process of comprehension and interpretation, they constitute distinctions with which perceivers approach films; they are assumptions which can generate hypotheses about particular meanings.

(1)the perceiver may construct a concrete "world", be it avowedly fictional or putatively real. In making sense of a narrative film, the spectator builds up some version of the diegesis, or spatio-temporal world, and creates an ongoing story (fabula) occurring within it.

(2)the perceiver may assign a conceptual meaning or "point" to the fabula and diegesis.

(3)the perceiver may also construct covert, symbolic, or implicit meaning. The film is now assumed to speck indirectly. Units of implicit meaning are commonly called "themes", though they may also be identified as "problems", "issues" or "questions."

(4)the perceiver may also construct repressed or symptomatic meanings that the work divulges "involuntarily".

III. Interpretive Doctrines

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