Two Basic Schemata

Category Schemata

A critic cannot treat a text as absolutely unique, but must instead find the larger class with which it belongs. The idea of genre, such as a War or a Western, is the most common grouping mobilized in film interpretation, although no strict definition of a single genre has won widespread acceptance. Since genre boundaries vary and overlap, no strictly deductive set of principles can explain genre groupings. Therefore, interpreters no more have strict definitions of genre than speakers of English have definitions of game, but instead have open concepts of genres. "Central" members of a category create a prototype effect. Platoon can serve as a prototypical war film whereas Dr. Strangelove could not since it also falls under the category of comedy that not all war films do. Critics often identify the genre only to aid in interpreting a particular work.

A variety of categories at work in film criticism- grouping by (for example):

-period or country (American films vs. European films)

-director, star, producer, writer, or studio

-style (German Expressionism)

-structure (narrative vs. silent)

-subject or theme (Holocaust , Nazi propaganda films)

This diversity serves as the mark of an institution that offers the interpreter many tools for making meaning. These categories allow the critic to establish referential or explicit meaning as a point of departure, and can be revised and offer fruitful points of difference and dispute. In this respect, Dr. Strangelove can be discussed as a war film, a comedy, or as a Cold War film.

New category schemata can be derived from other arts or media, and the critic can also acquire some individuality by creating his or her own genre.

No thought starts from scratch, and no interpretation can do without category schemata.

Person-Based Schemata

As humans, it is natural for us to project our human like properties onto many domains of activity, including in film criticism, since it helps us to make sense of the external world. The notion of a person is treated as a social and psychological schema, and this schema (in contemporary Western cultures) includes the following folk-psychological features:

1. A human body, presumed to be singular and unified.

2. Perceptual activity, including self-awareness.

3. Thoughts, including beliefs.

4. Feelings or emotions.

5. Traits, or persisting dispositional qualities.

6. The capacity for self-impelled actions, such as communication.

The commonsense prototype of a person is a putatively sane, mentally active and uncoerced human adult. The critic uses the schema to build up "personified" agents all around the text such that once these agents have been endowed with thoughts, feelings, actions, traits, and bodies, they can then carry semantic fields.

Characters as Persons

Characters are any agents, fictional or not, that inhabit the film's world. For example, George C. Scott or Oskar Schindler are characters in certain films. The person schema allows the critic to ascribe several features to represented human agents in a film and any description of their personal qualities can be changed so as to bear semantic fields. Special attention can, as a result, be paid to such qualities as gesture, comportment or dialogue. Verbal language, supplemented by facial expression and narrative role, forms the most important cue for critical interpretation of narrative film. Visual activity also offers a valuable interpretive cue for critics in terms of character's glances, shifts in points of view, and gazes, such as the psychotic look of Lawrence ("Gomer Pyle") in Full Metal Jacket which closely resembled the look (particularly the eyes) in the following picture of the director himself, Stanley Kubrick.

While the critic can treat characters as different aspects of a single personality, the critic can also make two persons out of the same body as with Mark Lewis in Peeping Tom.

In mapping semantic fields onto the film, a critic assigns different units of meaning to different characters. A strong tendency to align semantic fields with relations among characters can occur. In Platoon, a struggle ensues between Elias, representing a Christlike figure, and Barnes, representing savagery and ruthlessness.

It is important to remember that the critic does not believe that the film presents "real people," and while all of this is just theory, in contemporary practice, "person perception" still provides a point of departure.

Characters as Persons cont.

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This page was last updated July 28,1999 by Alexia Thomas