Film Text Analysis

Film Text Analysis
“The first collection to give an overview of the field of film text anal-
ysis including a wide variety of approaches, methodological advances
and in-depth analyses hinting at the possibilities of multimodality
studies for film.”
—Florian Mundhenke, University of Leipzig, Germany
This book examines film as a multimodal text and an audiovisual synthesis,

bringing together current work within the fields of narratology, philoso-
phy, multimodal analysis, sound as well as cultural studies in order to cover
a wide range of international academic interest. The book provides new
insights into current work and turns the discussion towards recent research
questions and analyses, representing and constituting in each contribution
new work in the discipline of film text analysis. With the help of various
example analyses, all showing the methodological applicability of the dis-
cussed issues, the collection provides novel ways of considering film as one
of the most complex and at the same time broadly comprehensible texts.
Janina Wildfeuer is a Researcher in Multimodal Linguistics in the Linguistics

Department of the University of Bremen, Germany, specializing in multi-
modal linguistics and media studies. Her recent publications include a
monograph on Film Discourse Interpretation from 2014 as well as an edited
collection of papers building bridges for multimodal research (2015).
John A. Bateman is a Full Professor of Applied Linguistics in the English and

Linguistics Departments of the University of Bremen, Germany, specializing
in functional, computational and multimodal linguistics. His recent publi-
cations include monographs on Multimodal Film Analysis (2012) as well as
on the Text and Image divide (2014).
Routledge Advances in Film Studies
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.
41 The Western in the Global South

Edited by MaryEllen Higgins, Rita Keresztesi, and Dayna Oscherwitz
42 Spaces of the Cinematic Home

Behind the Screen Door
Edited by Eleanor Andrews, Stella Hockenhull, and Fran
Pheasant-Kelly
43 Spectacle in “Classical” Cinemas

Musicality and Historicity in the 1930s
Tom Brown
44 Rashomon Effects
Kurosawa, Rashomon, and Their Legacies
Edited by Blair Davis, Robert Anderson and Jan Walls
45 Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art

Cinema Beyond Europe
Nilgün Bayraktar
46 The Other in Contemporary Migrant Cinema

Imagining a New Europe?
Guido Rings
47 Horror Film and Affect

Towards a Corporeal Model of Viewership
Xavier Aldana Reyes
48 India’s New Independent Cinema

Rise of the Hybrid
Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram
49 Early Race Filmmaking in America

Edited by Barbara Tepa Lupack
50 Film Text Analysis

New Perspectives on the Analysis of Filmic Meaning
Edited by Janina Wildfeuer and John A. Bateman
Film Text Analysis
New Perspectives on the Analysis
of Filmic Meaning
Edited by Janina Wildfeuer

and John A. Bateman
First published 2017
by Routledge
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material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

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registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wildfeuer, Janina, 1984– editor. | Bateman, John A., editor.

Title: Film text analysis: new perspectives on the analysis of filmic meaning /
edited by Janina Wildfeuer and John A. Bateman.
Description: New York: Routledge, [2016] | Series: Routledge advances in
film studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016022280
Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures—Philosophy. | Motion pictures—Semiotics.
Classification: LCC PN1995 .F4666 2016 | DDC 791.4301—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016022280
ISBN: 978-1-138-91138-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-69274-6 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
Contents
List of Table and Figures vii

Preface and Acknowledgments xi
1 Introduction: Bringing Together New Perspectives

of Film Text Analysis 1
J O H N A . BAT E MAN & JAN I NA WI L DF E UE R
2 Towards a Semiotics of Film Lighting 24

T H E O VA N L E E UWE N & MO RTE N B O E RI I S
3 Editing Space as an Audio-Visual Composition 46

M A RT I N E H U VE N N E
4 Movie Physics or Dynamic Patterns as the Skeleton of Movies 66

WO L F G A N G WI L DGE N
5 From Visual Narrative Grammar to Filmic Narrative

Grammar: The Narrative Structure of Static
and Moving Images 94
NEIL COHN
6 From Text to Recipient: Pragmatic Insights for Filmic

Meaning Construction 118
JA N I NA WI L D F E UE R
7 Intermediality in Film: A Blending-Based Perspective 141

J O H N A . BAT E MAN
8 Eat, Pray, LovE: Expanding Adaptations and Global Tourism 169

J OY C E GO G G IN
vi Contents
9 Conclusion: Film Text Analysis – A New Beginning? 187
JA N I NA WI L D F E UE R & JO H N A. BATE MAN
List of Contributors 199

Film Index 203
Name Index 205
Subject Index 207
List of Table and Figures
Table
5.1 Gross differences in dimensions between prototypical cases
of drawn and filmed narratives 112
Figures
1.1 A graphical rendition of the ‘crisis’ of textuality
and its disciplinary repercussions. 7
2.1 Emil Jannings in The Last Laugh (Murnau 1924). 26
2.2 Still from Suspicion (Hitchcock 1941). 28
2.3 Three-point lighting set up (Young/Petzold 1972: 107). 29
2.4 (a) Still from CSI Miami (left) and (b) screen grab from
CSI computer game (right). 30
2.5 (a) Still from Persona (Bergman 1966) and (b) Still from
Kiss me Deadly (Aldrich 1955). 37
2.6 The textual meaning potential of lighting. 38
2.7 The interpersonal meaning potential of lighting. 41
2.8 (a) Still from The Seventh Seal (Bergman 1957) and
(b) Still from The Magician (Bergman 1958). 42
2.9 The ideational meaning potential of lighting. 43
3.1 Graphical illustration of the ‘kinesphere of Ryan’. 58
3.2 Graphical illustration of the two universes combined in the
scene from Gravity. 61
4.1 Pendulums in a series of coupled pendulums and the light
trace of a double pendulum. 69
4.2 (a) Screenshot from Vertigo (Hitchcock 1958) and
(b) Screenshot from North by Northwest (Hitchcock 1959);
look into the abyss. 72
4.3 (a) Screenshot from Dogville and (b) Screenshot from
The Truman Show. 73
4.4 (a) Quasi-still in the final scene of Queen Christina with
Greta Garbo and (b) pendulum with rest position. 77
4.5 Screenshots from the final scene in Bonnie and Clyde
(Penn 1967), after many episodes of crime. 78
viii List of Table and Figures
4.6 (a) Belmondo in Breathless (1960) and Dustin Hoffman in
The Marathon Man (1976). The camera moves in front
of the actors in the street. 79
4.7 (a) Screenshots from Quantum of Solace: place of chase
are a road tunnel at Lake Garda and the marble quarries
of Carrara; (b) a schematic description of the chase and
the archetype of capture below (cf. Wildgen 1982). 84
4.8 Coupled pendulums (the two ropes) and double pendulums
(the arm on which the rope hangs also moves). 84
4.9 Screenshots from Quantum of Solace. First row: Fight in
the theater foyer (exchange of gunfire in the movie); fight
on stage in Bregenz (in the opera Tosca). Tosca stabs Scrapia,
the blackmailer. Second row: Parallel fighting in the exploding
hotel: Camille against the general – Bond against Greene. 86
5.1 A narrative sequence with two narrative constituents and one
subordinate modifying constituent with a Refiner. 98
5.2 Different types of narrative conjunction using the repetition
of a single narrative category (Initials) to show various
semantic information (actions, characters in a scene, parts of
an individual, or semantically associated elements),
which could also be framed by a single image. 99
5.3 Narrative grammar applied to a sequence from Star Wars
(12:00–12:27). 102
5.4 Paraphrase of the narrative grammar for the Star Wars
sequence (1977, 12:00–12:27) in Figure 5.3. 103
5.5 Polymorphic divisional panel of a bee flying. 110
6.1 The levels of filmic text and discourse (following a more
general description of text and discourse in Wildfeuer
forthcoming). 126
6.2 Inserts, title sequence, and cut to long shot in Gravity.
The inserts in the first shot read “At 600km above the planet
Earth the temperature fluctuates between +258 and –148
degrees Fahrenheit. There is nothing to carry sound.
No air pressure. No oxygen. Life in space is impossible.” 128
6.3 Two frames from the very long shot at the beginning of
Gravity, showing a white object becoming visible. 132
7.1 The classic blending example: the respective semantics of the
words ‘boathouse’ (left) and ‘houseboat’ (right) generated
by two contrasting blending diagrams operating over
the same ‘input spaces’. 146
7.2 Intermedial citation of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’
(shown right) in Robert Altman’s Mash (1970, shown left)
together with correspondence ‘mappings’ with the original. 147
List of Table and Figures ix
7.3 Running the blend to derive further interpretations of details
from the input spaces, such as a ‘lamp ~ halo’ association and
blended transfer of spiritual attributes. 149
7.4 A frame sequence from the ‘Robin Hood’ scene from
Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson’s Shrek (2001,
at approximately 0:50:00). 151
7.5 Representative frames from the opening sequence of Paul
Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (1997). 154
7.6 Frames from the congressional hearing scene from
Jon Fravreau’s Iron Man 2 (2010). 156
7.7 Representative frames from the opening sequence of Doug
Liman’s Edge Of Tomorrow (2014). 157
7.8 Representative frames from the production company logo
sequence at the beginning of Liman’s Edge Of
Tomorrow (2014). 158
7.9 Suggestive blend diagram involving the mediated
communicative situations of film and live broadcast news. 159
7.10 Opening sequence from Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon (2008). 161
8.1 Julia Roberts emotes in front of cardboard cut-out locals
in Eat, Pray, Love. 180
8.2 Julia Roberts with one of her squantos in Eat, Pray, Love. 181
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Preface and Acknowledgments
The original idea for this book emerged from a lecture series entitled
“Recent Paradigms of Film Studies”, which took place at the University of
Bremen, Germany, in summer 2014, organized by the Bremen Institute for
Transmedial Textuality Research (BItT). The BItT examines various forms
of cross-media textuality in its inter-, intra-, and transmedial instantiations
and is interested in the analysis, interpretation, and evaluation of factual
and fictional texts in various media. A particular interest lies in the analysis
of filmic texts as one of the most powerful audio-visual narratives, which
are today approached from a myriad of perspectives and research areas.
The lecture series was therefore intended to bring together a variety of
innovative research issues in the broad context of film studies, inviting con-
tributions from disciplines such as narratology, philosophy, multimodal
analysis, sound as well as cultural studies. By concentrating on film as a
particular class of text, we assume that this artifact has its own logical form
of meaning production that can and should be analyzed by capturing the
notion of textuality. For the lecture series, we particularly asked for new
developments and progress made in our own disciplines and those affiliated
to the institute as well as in other disciplines connected to the analysis of
filmic text. We thank all contributors to the lecture series for their interest in
our institutional work, their presentations in the lecture series, and the lively
conversations and discussions we had during the summer semester 2014.
We also thank the institute for the financial support of the lecture series,
which made it possible to bring distinguished film scholars to Bremen.
The book takes the intention of the lecture series as its main starting
point in order to make the talks in this lecture series, their theoretical, meth-
odological, and analytical approaches, as well as our own thoughts on this
topic available to a broader audience. It thus builds a shared context for the
existing diversity among film analytical approaches and at the same time
opens the field for new and innovative research. We thank all contributors
to this volume for their continuous cooperation and intellectual and creative
support during the processes of writing, editing, and revising the book. It
was a pleasure to work with all of you!
Janina Wildfeuer and John A. Bateman

Bremen, August 2016
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1 Introduction
Bringing Together New Perspectives
of Film Text Analysis
John A. Bateman & Janina Wildfeuer
1 Introduction to the Introduction

Just as the contributions to this collection were being put into their final
form, and the first versions of this introduction were being drafted, there
was a happy coincidence in the selection of topic in Richard Dyer’s 2016
contribution to the Kracauer Lectures in Film and Media Theory at the
Goethe-University Frankfurt (Dyer 2016; see also the reference in Wildfeuer
in this volume). Dyer’s discussion of “The Persistence of Textual Analysis”
articulated many of the points giving rise to and motivating the direction
that we pursue here. The idea of ‘text’ or ‘textual’ analysis in film is at the
same time one that is traditional, often to the point of being considered
old fashioned, and one that remains subject to ongoing critique. Several of
the themes taken up by Dyer resonate closely with the direction in which
we wish to suggest pushing film text analysis, both with respect to his con-
siderations of criticisms brought against the notion of ‘text’ in film and his
proposals for taking film text analysis further.
Dyer begins with the idea that film text analysis is “nothing special” – which
is a reoccurring motif among those talking of ‘textual analysis’ nowadays.
Under this view, it is simply a skill that is grounded in “looking and listening”
closely to what is actually (physically, manifestly) present in individual films and
film extracts. In terms reminiscent of a further discussion from David Bordwell,
such looking and listening must also be centrally reliant on ‘common sense’
(Bordwell 2011). Dyer’s view of ‘filmic text’ and its analysis then focuses on
starting from the image and sound in order to pull out the range of meanings,
affects, and emotions that a film or film extract ‘makes available’ for its audi-
ence or spectators. In many contexts such an approach is so naturalized as to be
indistinguishable from analyzing film as such – after all, each film analysis starts
with considering what the films and film segments analyzed may mean for their
spectators. Variations (and critiques) surface when the next step is taken, i.e.,
when it is asked just how such potentials for meanings might be found. Analytic
attention then turns to assessing the role and importance of the films’ contexts
of production, of their contexts of consumption (audience studies), and of the
contexts of cultural knowledge employed when engaging with any ‘text’.
Dyer wishes to argue that, regardless of any such extensions and
broadening of attention, engagement with actual film material should be
2 John A. Bateman & Janina Wildfeuer
maintained as a constitutive and definitional component of film studies. And,
as we shall see below, this is indeed a powerful strategy for avoiding and
defusing some of the problems that arise from many of the less restrained
notions of what might constitute a ‘text’ that have emerged over the past
half-century. The principal and inescapable question remaining is just how
that is to be done in a manner that is not only appropriate for film in all the
medium’s multimodal richness, but which is also systematic, precise, and
rigorous (to any of the standards applicable to ‘humanistic’ knowledge of
this kind). This emphasis places the search for suitable methodologies that
support more precise practices of film text analysis in a particularly central
position, in order to avoid more subjective, individual ‘readings’ where one
view is ‘as good’ as any other.
For reasons that we will summarize below, the predominant method-
ologies currently employed within film studies have come to draw over-
whelmingly on literary standards – and this despite one of the critiques of
the applicability of ‘text’ in film analysis that Dyer mentions, i.e., that ‘text’
is traditionally very closely bound to the products of (literary) writing. Any
such grounding of ‘text’ among the concerns of literature demands that the
inherent relationship arising as a consequence between ‘text’ and ‘film’ be
theoretically problematized. After all, it takes several steps in abstraction to
bring ‘written literature’ and ‘film’ together under a single analytic category
in any intelligible fashion; it is by no means considered obvious by all that
such steps are worthwhile, or even possible. The development of a path of
abstraction by which ‘written text’ and ‘film’ come to be closely related has
been supported by the increasingly flexible use made of the notion of ‘text’
itself in literary studies, in cultural studies, and in almost all branches of
semiotics. But this very generality brings its own raft of problems.
For many, Dyer included, ‘textual analysis’ and ‘analysis’ come to be
treated as more or less synonymous – a certain behavior or artifact, regard-
less of appropriateness, may be described as ‘text’, or ‘textual’, simply as a
by-product of conducting the analysis. For others, ‘text’ as such is a domain
of contention and struggle, marking both strong ideological orientations
and deep divisions within and across disciplinary discourses (cf. Mowitt
1992). Questions of the cultural and ideological specificity of ‘readings’ of
texts, of the ‘boundaries’ (if any) of texts, or of the extent to which ‘texts’
are defined as (and by virtue of) including their interpretations have been
discussed in detail. These issues have all worked against the achievement of
methodologies capable of supporting textual analysis in its ‘original’ (which
we will set out more below) sense of engaging closely with material manifes-
tations. Indeed, the notion of text has often become so diluted and general
that it is impossible for the specific textual qualities of individual types of
text (e.g., film) to be respected sufficiently for reliable analysis. Much of
what is specific to ‘texts’ and their ‘textuality’ then falls out of focus, leading
to justified critiques of the relevance and appropriateness of ‘text’ analytic
approaches tout court.
Introduction 3
This has proved particularly divisive in film studies, as reflected in the
carefully patrolled borders still being drawn between literary-culturally
inflected film studies, film aesthetics, and approaches building on, or with,
the psychology and neuroscience of film. The earlier, more analytic and
closely argued textual analyses of individual films that emerged primarily in
the 1960s and 1970s (see below) have, over the years, been reconfigured in
terms of more impressionistic, distanced readings of film as ‘cultural texts’,
what Bordwell (1989) has discussed in terms of ‘symptomatic interpreta-
tions’. Some notion of ‘text’ remains over the course of this transitioning,
but much of the methodology and precision of those earlier accounts, even
if quite limited or more prospective than actual, does not. Indeed, if they
appeared today, those very accounts might well face criticism as reduction-
ist, exhibiting insufficient sensitivity to the aesthetics of the medium, lacking
attention to historical context or conditions of production, and so on. On
the one hand, such critiques are appropriate and necessary because they
increase the self-critical reflexivity necessary for analysis of any kind; on
the other, they have equally often undermined much of what made those
earlier text analyses compelling – i.e., their search and reliance on patterns
in the material that is being examined. This aim, which we will take as the
hallmark of text analysis, requires far stronger methodological underpin-
nings to be pursued, methodological underpinnings that current disciplinary
borders have made it difficult to articulate.
Much of what we undertake in this collection of articles illustrating
different forms of textual analysis directly addresses this methodological
difficulty. Our claim is that the primary consequence of diluting the notion
of ‘text’ to serve a variety of disciplinary masters has been to compromise
precisely those benefits that accrue when more finely articulated notions of
‘textuality’ are allowed to serve as methodological guides for the theory and
practice of film analysis. This means that we will be working throughout
the book with a more restricted notion of ‘text’, one that is not only capable
of regaining the precision of the individual, detailed analysis of particu-
lars seen in early film text work, but which is also responsive to the many
advances that have been made since then concerning our understandings of
what texts are and how they work as mediators between material artifact
and interpretation/response.
To return, then, once more to Dyer’s assessment of the state of film text
analysis: we agree both that it is necessary to orient to the ‘text’, the concrete
film material supporting an analysis, and that, for this to be anything more
than a subjective (if informed) response to what strikes one as ‘significant’
(or not) in the work under study, a stronger methodological construction
of what constitutes ‘text’ and its study is essential. This is the ‘new perspec-
tives’ intended in our title: there are understandings of text and textuality
that have, as we shall see, moved on considerably from what is commonly
addressed in film studies. And these understandings undercut most of the
critiques still being brought against the idea of ‘text analysis’ when applied
to film. Developments of this kind open up an important area for both
discussion and practical work, particularly when we note that Dyer’s call
for methodological rigor in his lecture actually remained just that, a call.
Suitable methodologies for guiding film analysis beyond simply ‘looking
and listening’, even if done with considerable attentiveness, sensitivity, and
knowledge, were not forthcoming. This gap is then precisely what the pres-
ent edited collection of papers responds to.
To prepare the way for the illustrations of method that our contributions
present, however, it is necessary to remind ourselves of the long and com-
plex interaction between ‘text’ and film theory that has shaped, and which
continues to shape, the field. This background is important to our purpose
because presuppositions and judgments concerning both the nature of text
and its applicability to film have become as diverse as theories of ‘text’
itself – and these presuppositions and judgments are by no means always
supportive of analysis. A short review of the emergence of ‘film text analysis’
within film studies will consequently offer an appropriate contextualization,
assist in moving us towards the new perspective on ‘film as text’ that we pur-
sue, and finally, situate that view within a more contemporary constellation
of understandings of what ‘text’ can be. This will, in turn, let us approach
the diverse analyses offered in the following chapters in a way that brings
out more readily their many points of interconnections and common direc-
tions for the future, as well as showing their natural differences in orienta-
tion and questions posed.
2 The Notion of Filmic Text in Film Theory

Despite reoccurring criticisms, the broad notion of ‘film as text’ has of
course accompanied film since the medium’s emergence. Time and again
theoreticians and practitioners alike have proposed meaningful ‘text-like’
connections among filmic devices or have discussed similarities between film
and language directly. Pudovkin (1926), for example, considered analogies
between film images and words. Dziga Vertov, also in the early 1920s, talked
of ciné phrase (‘film sentence’) and ciné langue (‘film language-system’).
Eisenstein, again from that time, explicitly brought together film and litera-
ture, highlighting the ‘organic’ (Eisenstein 1949: 195) relationship across the
two by comparing montage structures in both forms. Eisenstein, in fact, drew
parallels and similarities in both directions. He argued that the work of the
nineteenth-century novelist Charles Dickens was already cinematographic
in its organization, while that of the early film-maker David Wark Griffith
was equally text-like by virtue of the many specific techniques Griffith intro-
duced for narrating extended stories in film (cf. Wees 1973). By highlighting
these narrative or textual functions carried by technical features, such as
the use of the close-up “to signify, to give meaning, to designate” as well
as montage’s general role as a “means of speaking, a means of communi-
cating ideas” (Eisenstein 1949: 238, 245; emphasis in original), Eisenstein
Introduction 5
did much to prepare the ground for the long and enduring discussion of the
relations between film and verbal text that followed.
This discussion has grown to be extremely complex, with sites of diver-
gence and contrast echoing not only diverse understandings of the nature
of text and language but also equally broad variation in attitudes towards
the appropriate methods and institutional role of film studies. We cannot
do more than scratch the surface of these debates here and there are, in
any case, several extensive and historically grounded characterizations
available (cf., e.g., Bordwell 1989). Our point will, therefore, be narrower
and oriented more to the future than to a review of the past, although the
trajectories set up and which we now attempt to push further are, of course,
inescapably products of historical development. This must always also be
borne in mind. Contributing to these trajectories are not only disciplinary
concerns, including the relative importance given to approaches and ques-
tions raised in literary studies, studies of narrative, semiotics, aesthetics,
and cognition, but also methodological concerns. These concerns include
diverging attitudes adopted to the nature and value of scientific method,
to the role of creativity and expressiveness in film and its description, as
well as to evaluative judgments concerning the aesthetic appropriateness
of filmic techniques – as, for example, with André Bazin’s much discussed
rejection of montage in favor of deep focus on the grounds of ‘realism’.
While the force of many of these debates has moderated with time, their
shaping influences remain, marking out ideological boundaries and disci-
plinary fracture lines still readily discernible in the paradigms practiced
today.
We begin by making two of the contributing lines of discussion introduced
above more explicit in their own right. The first, theoretically rather more
simple, revolved around the issue of whether film could sensibly be consid-
ered ‘a language’ at all. Since formulations such as ‘the language of film’
have appeared at least intuitively meaningful, as evidenced by their reoc-
currence over the years, it has been necessary to ask on a more theoretical
level whether this is just a turn of phrase, a more or less useful metaphor
of some kind, or whether it is indicative of a deeper connection between
‘language’ and ‘film’ as communicative practices and/or semiotic systems.
Pursuing this, earlier suggestions of more superficial connections, such as for
example Pudovkin’s proposals for treating film shots as analogous to words,
were made progressively more sophisticated, eventually ending up with the
extensive encounters between film theory and semiotics found in the work
of Christian Metz, Umberto Eco, Paolo Pasolini, and others (cf. Metz 1966,
1974a, 1974b; Eco 1976; Pasolini 1971). The second line of discussion,
considerably more complex, crystallized around the contested notion of
‘text’ itself. The understanding of ‘text’ underwent substantial upheavals in
the 1960s, particularly in the context of structuralism and reactions against
structuralism – evidenced, for example, in the changing positions of (partic-
ularly relevant for film) Roland Barthes (1977). What then might be meant
by taking a film to be a ‘text’ at all became a subject of heated debate. Again,
interactions concerning varied positions on this question can be observed
across film studies and developments in the traditionally ‘text’-oriented
disciplines of both semiotics and linguistics, although the three increasingly
went their own ways from the 1970s onwards.
Closely entwined and interacting with both lines of discussion have been
reoccurring considerations of the nature specifically of film analysis and
its appropriate methodologies. Debate, for example, has revolved around
whether film analysis should be pursued along the model of the natural sci-
ences, as an ‘empirical-rational’ activity – as already seen with the overtly
positivist arguments of filmologie in the 1940s (cf., e.g., Cohen-Séat 1948;
Souriau 1951) and now reconfigured in the form of cognitivism and its
strong foundations in psychology and the neurosciences (cf., e.g., Bordwell
1989, 2011) – or alternatively draw more on literary styles of interpreta-
tion. We see in this latter orientation the full force of approaching ‘text’
as an intrinsically ‘literary’ construct, where the influences exerted by the
changing conceptions of ‘text’ from the 1960s and 1970s have had consid-
erable and lasting impact. ‘Text’ then comes to be tracked across a predomi-
nantly literary and cultural landscape and constitutes a crucial destabilizing
moment which served the valuable task of pushing out the increasingly
untenable ‘positivist’ positions of the 1950s and before.
Earlier views, according to which texts were to be analyzed ‘scientifically’
for their objective properties so as to allow interpretation to be ‘calculated’,
were then replaced in favor of far more fluid views of texts as experienced
only in and through acts of ‘reading’. Barthes accordingly defined texts as
“methodological fields” (Barthes 1977: 157) for the interaction of diverse,
and always ideologically grounded, reading positions; reading thereby
becomes so active that it can just as well be portrayed as a form of ‘writing’
(an equally deeply contested term), or re-writing ‘the text’ anew. This ori-
entation is very much alive today and surfaces in discussions alleging texts’
lack/fluidity of boundaries (e.g., how much of a text’s context or, indeed,
‘other’ texts must one include?) as well as in the idea that each interpreta-
tion, or reading, creates its own ‘text’. Both positions raise valuable consid-
erations but can also hinder the construction of reliable methodologies if
not reined in appropriately.
Beneficial distance and perspective can be gained on this situation by
reassessing the impact of the upheavals in the understanding of ‘text’ not
within particular theoretical perspectives but across disciplines and disci-
plinary developments. Whereas discussions in individual disciplines are all
too easily couched as if they were the only ones to emerge re-configured
from their period of reappraisals of the nature of text, this is inaccurate
and readily gives rise to disciplinary myopia. In fact, all of the text-oriented
disciplines emerged changed from this engagement with the fundamental
nature of text, each proceeding onward with respect to a broadly similar
collection of lessons learned but in largely independent ways.
Introduction 7
Figure 1.1 A graphical rendition of the ‘crisis’ of textuality and its disciplinary
repercussions.
We suggest this graphically in Figure 1.1 in terms of an outwards flowing

reaction to the ‘crisis’ of textuality from the 1960s where distinct disci-
plinary developments traveled their largely separate trajectories. Despite the
tendency just identified of treating other disciplines as if they had not also
emerged from the central vortex, in fact, the position and understanding
of ‘text’ are now as different in semiotics and linguistics in comparison to
former times as it is, for example, in literary studies. All of the disciplines
have, therefore ‘moved on’ and yet, as we shall see, this is rarely given suf-
ficient weight in discipline-internal discussions. It is, of course, exceedingly
difficult to remain ‘up to date’ in disciplines not one’s own. When mak-
ing statements that explicitly aim to characterize other disciplines, such
restrictions or avoidance of necessary work are no longer justifiable. When
making comments concerning other disciplines, those disciplines must be
adequately engaged with in their present form, not as one may like to see
them for the sake of argument or how they were when one first came into
contact with them.
To return, however, to the principal starting points of the film text anal-
ysis paradigm, we need to pick up the story of the interaction between lan-
guage and film nearer the center of the vortex.
2.1 From Film as Language …

Two points of crystallization for what we will define more narrowly as
the beginning of film text analysis are given by the respective activities of
Christian Metz and Raymond Bellour; both were working in the highly
‘semiotically-charged’ atmosphere around Roland Barthes in the 1960s
where ideas, particularly from Louis Hjelmslev on linguistic method and
Roman Jakobson on linguistic poetics and style, were finding application
far beyond their original targets in language. Metz engaged directly with
an exploration of a broadly Hjelmslevian semiotics of film as such, while
Bellour undertook unprecedentedly detailed analyses of individual films
anchored in emerging structuralist analytic techniques. These then form
two essential poles for the film text analysis paradigm: attention to material
detail on the one hand, and considerations of appropriate methodological
and theoretical foundations on the other.
We begin with Metz. Hjelmslev’s (1961 [1943]) influential prolegom-
ena had focused specifically on method, on how to address the complex
semiotic products of language use, i.e., texts or performances. This was
couched in terms sufficiently general as to be picked up by several theorists
concerned with issues beyond the narrowly linguistic, including Barthes,
Algirdas Julien Greimas, and Metz. Metz consequently began, like many
before him, with one foot very much in the camp of objective analyses.
His thorough semiotic investigation of the old question as to whether film
could be considered a ‘language’ at all (1974a) led to a definition of film as
‘langage sans langue’, i.e., as a system of larger units, without grammatical
or syntactical rules (cf. Metz 1974a: 88). Thus, rather than considering
filmic organizations to be put together out of determinate and limited ‘syn-
tactic’ material, Metz saw the broader textual ordering of units as respon-
sible for film’s evident intelligibility.
As we shall see in a moment, this was already to run at the very edge
of semiotic and linguistic theorizing at that time, although not necessarily
seen in those terms then. By considering film more aligned with ‘rhetoric’
than ‘grammar’, exploration moved beyond areas for which established
methodology could be relied upon. Focusing on textual unfolding was still
at that time seen primarily to lie outside of Saussure’s notion of langue,
the language system, and so, almost by default, landed back in the realm
of performance (in Chomskian terms), parole, and ‘text’ as a unit of lan-
guage in use (for further discussion of the collapsing of important semiotic
distinctions inherent here, see Bateman/Schmidt 2012: 28–42). It was then
the textual ordering of material that made it possible, in Metz’s opinion, to
maintain space and time, and – consequently – a narrative structure, then
famously described in terms of his grande syntagmatique.
The grande syntagmatique articulated a model of how larger units of film
were manifested as meaningful combinations and sequences of shots, largely
independently of their individual (and freely variable) content (cf. Metz
1974a: 146). Thus, despite their profound theoretical differences, the
general structural composition of film already described by Pudovkin and
Eisenstein was seen as the primary source for a comparison with language
and was placed in the foreground of film’s ability to create coherence in time
and space – a criterion later addressed in terms of film’s narrative or textual
logic (cf. Bordwell 1989; Bordwell/Thompson 2001). The grande syntagma-
tique constituted the first, and most significant, filmic semiotic ‘code’ seen
by Metz as one of the ways in which an analyst could impose order on the
Introduction 9
material ensembles (following Hjelmslev) of actual films. The relationship
between such abstract analytic codes and the work done during production
and reception of a film by real film viewers and film makers remained unre-
solved, requiring as it does the further move from theoretical description
to empirical analysis as well as a far more deeply theorized understanding
of the relationship between langue and parole. Nevertheless, in subsequent
work, such as Metz (1974b), this search for filmic abstract codes was taken
considerably further.
Within film studies, then, the results of Metz’s explorations provided
an extensive theoretical foundation for strongly linguistically influenced
approaches to film analysis. In essence, this started both from Hjelmslev’s
conception of text as the primary object of study of linguistics (1961
[1943]: 16) and from Hjelmslev’s ‘top-down’ characterization of method as
division according to interrelated and interdependent parts. As with several
approaches to language, linguistics, and semiotics at that time, the notion of
‘text’ already had an established and central place in Hjelmslev’s thinking
and so this orientation was quite natural, although in the end not played
out as far as would be necessary to bring the notion of ‘filmic text’ under
control. Paying close attention to the ‘textual details’ of the artifacts under
investigation was central to this concern and, as we saw above, still reso-
nates strongly in Dyer’s lecture. Noteworthy, however, is that the focus on
‘text’ was maintained in several schools of linguistics and has since resulted
in substantial advances, many of which feed into a more contemporary
understandings of texts and their mechanisms that we draw on below. These
developments were not incorporated in further explorations of ‘filmic texts’,
however.
It is then reasonable to see Metz’s work as one initiator of systematic
textual film analysis (cf. Rhodie 1975), paving the way for its ‘golden
period’ in the 1970s and 1980s – as realized in detailed analyses by Bellour
(1971, 1974, 1975, 2000), Pasolini (1971), Ropars-Wuilleumier (e.g., 1978,
1981, 1982), Kuntzel (1978), Heath (1981), and Paech (1988), to name just
a few. Much of this work adopted the structuralist method handed down
from Saussure of seeking systems of contrasts and alternations that could
support insightful readings of the films as texts. Positions varied, however,
on the extent to which such alternations needed to be anchored in the mate-
rial distinctions drawn in a film. This methodological uncertainty echoes
through most semiotic work of the period, supported in part by similar
tendencies in earlier forms of analysis. Again, as Bordwell (1989: 80) for
example sets out in some detail, traditional characterizations of a genre such
as the Western as constructing alternations between good/evil, civilization/
wilderness and so on could just as well be found in the newly emerging semi-
otic descriptions. Whereas such work might consider itself ‘textual analysis’,
for us any distance opened up between alternations that can be anchored
in material distinctions – i.e., the physical ‘text’ – and alternations among
interpretations (Hjelmslev’s connotative semiotics) needs to be considered
more critically and, in fact, requires a far stronger methodological scaffold
than was available at that time.
Nevertheless, although immediately faced with challenges and boundar-
ies, as we shall take up in a moment, the application of the notion of text
analysis to film according to the foundation produced by Metz, and as illus-
trated in practice by Bellour and others by identifying paradigms expressed
in a film’s technical features – particularly at that time in patterns of cutting
and editing – was able to produce substantial results. Such analyses saw
films in terms of their “process of production of meanings” (Heath 1973: 105)
as affected by the ‘codes’ and structures of the filmic text that were posited.
It is largely as a result of the precision of these analyses that they can often
stand to this day – that is, regardless of any particular Freudian or other
narratives against which, or through which, the films might have been read,
the textual patterns identified remain and are, indeed, strongly suggestive of
the need for interpretation.
But the fledgling sets of methodological principles for guiding analyses
articulated in these accounts also raised substantial foundational ques-
tions, and it was unclear where sources for potential answers might be
found. Whereas the textual approach had taken much of its impetus from
conceptions of ‘text’ within semiotics and linguistics, the frameworks
available in those disciplines were still very limited – indeed, both disci-
plines were also only just beginning to emerge from the vortex depicted
in Figure 1.1 and to engage more centrally with the phenomenon of text
themselves. Basic theoretical constructs appealed to, such as ‘semiotic
codes’, were inherently problematic as these were still generally conceived
of within the Saussurean signifier-signified model along with its suggestion
of a coding-decoding perspective on signs. This gives rise to some inherent
contradictions. It is not possible, for example, to reconcile such a model
with Metz’s account because of the gap that Metz deliberately opened up
between physical manifestations, such as the particular content of shots,
and the ‘larger structures’ that were to be placed over such manifestations
by codes such as the grande syntagmatique. ‘Decoding’ in such a situa-
tion would be a strained metaphor at best, since the required ‘signifiers’
have no determinate form (and, even worse, no determinate signified).
Metz consequently insulated the notion of codes from actual processes of
coding-decoding on the part of film viewers and producers by anchoring
them to the labor of the analyst, not the viewer. This position makes it
difficult, however, to consider more empirically motivated investigations
and, indeed, also falls back more on a ‘reading’, literarily-inflected inter-
pretation model.
These issues were taken up in particular detail in the context of film
studies and its encounters with text analysis in Bordwell’s (1982) early
critique of Metz’s use of ‘semiotic codes’. Bordwell pointed out that, first,
Metz seeks only to talk of ‘sub-codes’ potentially relevant for film analysis
without defining just what ‘codes’ those sub-codes may be subordinate
Introduction 11
to and, second, that Metz appears to accept ‘established wisdom’ as suf-
ficient for their identification – we noted, for example, that discussions
of film dating from Pudovkin and Eisenstein had already long talked of
montage and shot scales; these were consequently accepted as relevant
sub-codes. These criticisms are all apposite: their foundation is not, how-
ever, a particular weakness of Metz’s discussion but rather goes back once
again to the lack of theoretical grasp at that time concerning how situated
socio-historical development and apparently a-temporal ‘codes’ could be
theorized at all. This situation held sway for a considerable period and is
very much in evidence in subsequent broad rejections of the relevance of
semiotic/textual accounts for film. As Bordwell expressed it in the mid-
1990s, for example:
“Despite three decades of work in film semiotics […], those who claim
that cinema is an ensemble of ‘codes’ or ‘discourse’ have not yet pro-
vided a defense of why we should consider the film medium […] as
plausibly analogous to language.”
(Bordwell 1996: 18)
This was part of a broader critique of what was characterized as a danger-

ously anti-empirical and anti-historical ‘Grand Theory’ of film made up not
only by structural linguistics, but also critical theory and psychoanalysis
(cf. Bordwell 1996, 2004), all seen as contributing to ‘Theory’-driven symp-
tomatic analyses of the kind problematized extensively in Bordwell (1989).
In the terms we are developing here, we can characterize symptomatic
analyses as making productive, some might then say too productive, use of
the gap between material alternations manifest in film texts and levels of
connotative interpretation. When there is no principled relationship between
‘codes’ (as langue) and the ‘texts’ manifested in use (parole), such gaps are
pre-programmed to raise methodological and theoretical problems. It is
now, therefore, time to return to the perspective offered by our graphic in
Figure 1.1 and the various trajectories disciplines have taken since the broad
reappraisal of the nature of text lying at its center. In particular, the disci-
plinary path followed within linguistics has addressed problems related to
questions of ‘code’ at many points. Nowadays any notion of ‘code’, regard-
less of how it is defined, will be considered temporally anchored in socio-
cultural, historical practice. Bordwell’s earlier critique, therefore, sketches
requirements that are now equally accepted and, indeed, constitutive of cur-
rent linguistic theorizing about the nature of ‘texts’ and their interpretation.
2.2 … to Film as Text …

This entire development played out within one of what have proved to be the
most challenging areas of linguistic theory: that concerned with establishing
the relation between Saussure’s langue and parole or between Hjelmslev’s
(1961 [1943]) system and process/text. Whereas the intrinsic dynamics
of textuality was seen in the 1960s and 1970s (and often still today) as a
feature distinguishing more literarily-inflected accounts from the allegedly
more static and ‘code-based’ models pursued within linguistics, more con-
temporary linguistic perspectives render arguments of this kind moot. The
problems inherent to a separation of langue (static, synchronic) and parole
(dynamic, usage-based) have been as clear within linguistics as in any other
text-oriented discipline – arguably more so since the topic is so central to
any understanding of the nature of ‘language’. As a consequence, it is now
far more common in linguistic theory to embrace Hjelmslev’s insistence on
the inseparability of system and process and to incorporate dynamics at the
heart of the disciplinary construction of language and its use. As Michael
Halliday describes it:
“I prefer to think of these as a single complex phenomenon: the system

only ‘exists’ as a potential for the process, and the process is the actual-
ization of that potential. Since this is a language potential the ‘process’
takes the form of what we call text.”
(Halliday in Martin 2013: 74)
This is in fact necessary in any linguistic treatment of ‘text’ and has now
received extensive theorization, even going back to reconfigure our read-
ings of Saussure (cf. Thibault 1997). Any account or critique of film text
analysis that is proposed today that makes reference to results in, for
example, linguistics must be seen against this state of affairs and not the
state of affairs back at the emergence of modern approaches to texts sit-
uated in the center of Figure 1.1. This then has important consequences
for how we will choose to circumscribe ‘film text analysis’ for the current
volume below.
A different, but interestingly parallel, set of disciplinary trajectories
unfolded within the more literary and culturally-inflected approaches
depicted in our graphic. The vortex depicted in the center picks out the his-
torical moment when ‘texts’ and notions of text entered their greatest state
of upheaval. With the move intrinsic to the discussion of Barthes and others
towards seeing texts as locations of cultural debate and divergent reading
positions, the understanding and determination of filmic text changed also.
Broader concepts of text were established drawing on and presupposing
mutual relationships of interdependence between text, context, and culture
(cf., e.g., Jahraus 2007). Accounts in film text analysis (e.g., particularly
Ropars-Wuilleumier, Kuntzel: cf. discussion in Mowitt 1992; Rodowick
2001) naturally then came to voice similar concerns to those of Bordwell
above, embarking on broad philosophical critiques of the relevance for film
of Saussurean ‘code-based’ models. The style of argumentation employed in
these critiques remained, however, in the largely metaphorical register opened
up by Barthes and other literarily-inflected approaches. Developments of
Introduction 13
this kind were important and valuable, but also prone to methodological
imprecision. Within this methodological trajectory, the material manifesta-
tions of film came to be engaged with only as far as was required to support
more abstract, symptomatic interpretations, as it is only those interpreta-
tions that were seen as determining the pertinence, or not, of any specific
filmic details taken into consideration for analysis.
One consequence of this trajectory was that the analysis of film
text-internal elements and meaningful units became less important; in their
place, cultural systems and ideology, gender patterns, or philosophical ques-
tions as replicated in film became the driving forces of much of film the-
ory and analysis. The filmic text could then be seen as a general source of
evidence for social, historical, and cultural structures, but increasingly no
longer underwent detailed textually or semiotically grounded analyses prior
to, or accompanying, analysis. A less constraining understanding of ‘film
as text’ thus spread across various disciplines and research areas, including
not only affine areas such as cognitively oriented narratology, but also the
broader contexts of media studies, cultural or postcolonial studies, philoso-
phy, and psychology. It was then this form of ‘film text analysis’ that became
predominantly associated with the term. Progressively distancing itself from
the close reliance on material distinctions, interpretations came to be sought
more in terms of psychoanalysis (Metz 1986) and, subsequently, social and
cultural configurations (cf. Bordwell 1989: 73).
Moves beyond the film text analysis of the 1960s and 1970s then again
drew on critiques of earlier linguistic positions. Here, we meet precisely the
same problematic of reoccurring calls within (not only) film text analysis
to escape inappropriate constraints imposed by an assumed ‘logocentric’
semiotic model based on a ‘speech model’ ascribed to Saussure. Many of the
discussions nearer the emergence from our vortex in Figure 1.1 (and unfor-
tunately in analyses of those discussions in more recent work) reiterate these
concerns and strive ‘instead’ to achieve dynamic models where the reading
of a text is not ‘univocal’ but variable, manifold, and employing expressive
resources beyond those provided ‘in language’ (cf. the theoretical discus-
sions of film text analysis from Barthes, Ropars-Wuilleumier, Kuntzel, and
others). In Ropars-Wuilleumier’s film text analysis, for example, re-orienting
in the direction of Barthes’ re-appropriation of ‘writing’, we are told that:
“The term ‘writing’, as always, requires comment: literally, it desig-

nates the graphic tracing of signs: linguistically, it is understood as
the transcription of spoken language; but theoretically it introduces
a critique of the model of signification involved in the linguistic and
phonetic model of the sign.”
(Ropars-Wuilleumier 1982: 147)
More recent discussions also allude to this development, as in, for example,
Rodowick’s (2001: 89) characterization of media change. Such concerns must
be read very differently from today’s perspectives, however, since they have
little relevance for more current models of signification, even within linguis-
tics. Far more promising, we suggest below and throughout the contributions
to this collection, is a realignment across the distinct trajectories suggested
in Figure 1.1 so as to re-invigorate film text analysis with the more power-
ful methods and theories now available concerning text – particularly those
pursued within the linguistics of text and discourse (cf., for discussion of this
point, Wildfeuer in this volume).
In the end, the style of discourse employed increasingly within film
textual analysis of the later semiotic persuasion was not able to provide
compelling accounts concerning the mechanisms of dynamic text interpre-
tation and it fell to work emerging in other fields – such as cognitive film
theory, for example – to focus on filmic narrative construction on the basis
of inferential strategies. This work no longer particularly prioritized the
role of the filmic text, however, and instead emphasized functions and sty-
listic conventions of filmic details working as cues for the recipient’s gen-
eral cognitive capacity to comprehend film (cf., e.g., Bordwell 1985, 2011).
It was then natural that the, in certain respects, broader understanding of
‘text’ that evolved in much film text analysis itself became a source of crit-
icism for those committed to pursuing more detailed analyses of the film
form. The increasing distance seen between the observable manifestations
of film form and the explanations proffered invited far freer interpretations
than could be motivated on empirical grounds – the situation particularly
critiqued throughout Bordwell (1989).
This state of affairs, together with the apparent claim that such analyses
were building on some relation between ‘language’, semiotics, and film,
also fed directly into Bordwell’s later rejection of the relevance of ‘codes’
and ‘discourse’ cited above. A textual analysis was then, somewhat ironi-
cally, rejected by exercising a mode of discourse that invited readings guilty
precisely of not engaging sufficiently with the motivating factors of film
and their organization, i.e., with their texts.
2.3 … to Dynamic Filmic Discourse

We can see, therefore, that literary approaches to ‘text’, linguistic approaches
to ‘text’, and even cognitive approaches to film have run up against some
rather parallel concerns along their discipline-internal trajectories. The treat-
ments of those concerns differ, but the recognition of the need to address
the issues raised often constitutes a feature held in common. There is then
certainly little to be gained by playing one off against the other – for example,
by rejecting linguistic approaches because of their assumed adherence to a
model of the sign sketched by Saussure but no longer found in any linguistic
work, or by rejecting approaches to ‘text’ on the grounds that linguistics
and semiotics require static codes in order to couch their model when ‘static
codes’ are almost a historical footnote.
Introduction 15
In contrast, binding system and process together in the manner assumed
in corresponding contemporary linguistic accounts makes treatments of text
inherently temporal at several different scales, or ‘time depths’, all equally
relevant and important for the treatment of film. The first unfolds within
each individual text: texts develop in time, both in terms of their production
and, even more significant, in terms of their reception – when participants
engage in text ‘interpretation’, of whatever kind, this is a temporal, dynamic
affair and can never be seen as static. The second scale relates to the system
as a whole: the temporal unfolding here makes it clear that any talk of a
system is always and irrevocably anchored in sociocultural time, it is never
ahistorical. A system only ‘exists’ as the breaking wave arising out of the
history of interactions and uses of the system up until that point.
It is then precisely the developments that followed within the trajectory of
linguistics and semiotics after their emergence from the ‘textual’ upheavals
of the 1960s and the dividing of the ways across disciplines that need to be
reactivated for film analysis. The contemporary situation for the trajectory
of text within semiotics and, even more, within linguistics is now so differ-
ent that it is important to be clear just how more recently developed views
of text and discourse engage with the concerns of the early film text anal-
yses, while also moving beyond much of the criticisms made both of those
accounts and of those accounts’ critiques of others. In contrast to those
earlier approaches, however, the current linguistically-inflected approaches
to ‘text’ bring with them empirical methodological commitments to close
analysis of material distinctions, of staying close to the text, as Dyer calls
for. It is in this sense then that we will be re-working film text analysis and
practice throughout all of the contributions of this book.
Under this view, film text analysis involves a notion of text that is already
radically multimodal (thus answering concerns of limitations to language
by, for example, Ropars-Wuilleumier as cited in Mowitt 1992: 167), that
is necessarily described in terms both of dynamic inferential process and at
varying levels of abstraction and time-depths (thus addressing Bordwell’s
concerns both of the need for inference and the historicity of codes), and that
is grounded fundamentally in materiality and embodied perception (thus
addressing concerns raised by Saussure’s lack of attention to non-arbitrary,
iconic signs: cf. Wollen 1976). In summary, we suggest that new approaches
in contemporary linguistics and multimodal analysis today make it possible
to readopt and revise the examination of filmic characteristics as long as the
locus of comparison between ‘film’ and ‘language’ is clearly placed at the
level of the ‘text’ or ‘discourse’. We see this as one means of taking Dyer’s
proposal further, while at the same time maintaining points of contact with
cognitive and ‘literary’ approaches to film.
In accounts of this kind, mechanisms for guiding and prompting the recip-
ient, thus affecting and constraining his/her inferences during interpretation,
are considered central (cf. Bateman/Schmidt 2012: 147; Bateman 2013; Tseng
2013; Wildfeuer 2014a: 14–17). Textuality is then of necessity concerned
with ‘cues’ for interpretation; providing mechanisms for characterizing how
such cues combine and guide interpretation is one of textuality’s main tasks.
Crucially, text is no longer seen as a mere juxtaposition of (linguistic) signs
in what is too often still assumed to be the ‘traditional’ semiotic sense of a
product that has to be decoded, but rather as a constellation of dynamic
interactions between recipients and the various textures in the artifact work-
ing as cues for guided and constrained interpretation. It is thus the com-
plexity of internal relationships within a text, its texture and structure, that
stands in the foreground of any description and which needs to be analyzed
for its role in the meaning-making process; this theoretical orientation is
taken up in its own right particularly by Wildfeuer in this volume. It is for
this reason that we now suggest and re-emphasize text as a fruitful interface
operating at various levels of description in film theory, a view which relies
on a more focused notion of text and textual methodology than has become
current.
As we shall now see, this is taken up in each of the contributions to this
collection. In the following, we briefly summarize each chapter with regard
to their particular contributions to the book and the perspective taken to
analyze an example film or filmic extract. This will suggest how a compre-
hensive and integrative approach to film text analysis makes it possible to
examine film in a more explicit and at the same time reliable fashion.
3 Recent Perspectives of Film Text Analysis

All the chapters in this book present recently developed methods for the
fine-grained and systematic examination of how films mean. Despite their
individual focus on particular aspects of filmic meaning construction, each
approach follows the general idea of analyzing film as text by providing
example analyses and demonstrations of how their frameworks can be
applied to the concrete filmic artifact and help uncover textual structures
and interpretative cues.
The ordering of the chapters is structured to exhibit a gradual increase in
the levels of abstraction considered, as well as in the breadth of the phenomena
addressed, all seen through the perspective of film text analysis. Thus, while
the first three chapters focus on less abstract and more fine-grained aspects of
particular semiotic resources and their material manifestations (i.e., lighting as
discussed by van Leeuwen/Boeriis; sound and space as analyzed by Huvenne;
embodied action and dynamics as set out by Wildgen), the following two
chapters move to discussions of larger patterns and some contrasting theoret-
ical stances (i.e., a notion of cognitively-motivated narrative grammar set out
by Cohn and an inferential, pragmatic perspective argued by Wildfeuer). The
final two chapters then consider aspects of mediality and intermediality as
such, again pointing to textual details as indicators of the interrelationships
explored (i.e., a treatment of intermedial references as blending by Bateman;
and various intertextual and intermedia viewpoints in Goggin’s discussion of
Introduction 17
the adaptation of a book into a film). Thus, by showing “transformative acts”
of film analysis that, in the beginning, work from “‘bottom-up’ – mandatory,
automatic psychological processes” on the basis of several resources on the
material level and that, in the next step, bring in structures coming from
“‘top-down’ – conceptual, strategic ones”, this arrangement exactly mirrors
the interpretation process as outlined by Bordwell (1989: 3). In all cases, it is
the “sensory data of the film at hand [that] furnish the materials out of which
inferential processes of perception and cognition build meanings” (Bordwell
1989: 3). Our questions, and those raised individually and collectively by the
chapters of the volume, are just how these components operate together and
with which kinds of interrelationships.
We now briefly point out in more detail the contributions of the chapters
individually, before summarizing how these combine in the service of the
kind of film text analysis we are motivating.
Theo van Leeuwen and Morten Boeriis track this interpretation process
in their discussion of lighting as a semiotic mode, suggesting a theoretical
approach on the basis of the social semiotics of Halliday (1978) and Kress/
van Leeuwen (2006 [1996]). Following a detailed description of the history
of film lighting as it moved from the experiments of pioneer cinematogra-
phers to more institutionalized and standardized practices and today’s light-
ing software, the authors set out a description framework for the various
kinds of meaning realized by film lighting. Starting from the social semiotic
principles developed in van Leeuwen (2005), they give a systematic overview
of the rich meaning potential of lighting in terms of a ‘system network’ that
classifies the potential at hand. This classification is itself organized with
respect to the metafunctional diversification commonly adopted in social
semiotic accounts, whereby meaning is characterized from the perspectives
of what is represented, what relationships are enacted between participants
in a communicative situation, and how the construction of these meanings
is orchestrated in textual wholes. The authors thereby synthesize a range of
approaches in multimodal film and media analysis that focus on descrip-
tions of semiotic modes and their meaning potential. By exemplifying a
variety of film lighting practices and illustrating each of these practices by
a short example from a broad choice of excerpts from the whole history of
film, van Leeuwen and Boeriis illustrate the applicability of linguistic and
semiotic theories to the analysis of filmic technical details.
Also focusing on very specific semiotic resources of film, Martine
Huvenne addresses the concepts of sound and space. She investigates, in
particular, the notions of spatial montage and the editing of spaces by ana-
lyzing sound as a key factor in the communication between film and recipi-
ent. By highlighting the important functions of sound and the auditory level
of film, Huvenne goes back to and re-invigorates Eisenstein’s concept of film
as an audio-visual composition, i.e. the explicit interaction of music, sound,
and images as a unified form, while also highlighting the complex multi-
modal interplay of the various semiotic resources. This then aligns well with
recent work in multimodal film analysis (cf., e.g., Wildfeuer 2012, 2014b;
Siefkes 2015). For her account, she provides a phenomenological approach
to sound and listening on the basis of Merleau-Ponty (2002), placing a focus
on the auditory space within audio-visual perception as a starting point for
detailed analysis of several scenes from the film Gravity (Cuarón 2013).
In the next chapter, Wolfgang Wildgen focuses on the reproduction of
events and actions in filmic text as central points for an embodied under-
standing of a film’s (fictional or fantastic) story. By discussing the realistic
physical grounding of these events and actions in the film’s material, i.e.
its psychico-chemical production of the photo or photo frame, the author
suggests the notion of movie physics as a foundational level of film anal-
ysis, going back to basic notions of the ‘mechanics of film’ by Hitchcock
on the one hand and the concept of semiophysics (Thom 1990) on the
other. Wildgen relates these concepts to the kinematics and dynamics of
embodied action by analyzing example scenes from the James Bond movies
Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, and Skyfall. With this approach,
he describes several levels of dynamism in filmic text, ranging from rigid
frames and simple movements to the amalgamation of several movements
and corresponding situations of catastrophe and chaos (used in their tech-
nical senses), thereby articulating some central patterns of filmic meaning
construction based on the film’s material and technical details.
Moving up the ladder of abstraction, Neil Cohn addresses the broad
question of how people understand communicative sequential images,
opening up the field of discussion to range across several types of media
so as to add a comparative perspective between the dynamic artifact film
and static visual narratives such as comics. By applying the concepts and
framework of his Visual Narrative Grammar (VNG; Cohn 2013) to several
scenes from the film Star Wars, Cohn argues that certain general princi-
ples of both form and grammatical narrative structures hold for both visual
and audio-visual narratives. At the same time, differences in fundamental
properties of the media themselves (i.e., static vs. moving) create differ-
ent affordances and therefore also lead to significant differences in their
analysis. By these results and with regard to general cognitive mechanisms
of narrative comprehension, Cohn concludes that it is useful to apply
the Narrative Grammar framework further to cognitive accounts of film
comprehension.
Building further on the notion of narrative structure and a more
discourse-oriented perspective on the filmic text, Janina Wildfeuer’s chapter
then gives an overview of how multimodal, linguistic, and in particular
discourse semantic approaches can be effectively brought together to gain
more traction on the process of meaning construction. In particular, the
author considers in detail how the recipient can construct meaning from
the textual information given in the audio-visual material as well as on the
basis of inferences drawn out of this material. Developments in more recent
film semiotic and multimodal discourse analytical accounts are drawn upon
Introduction 19
to provide detailed definitions for the concepts of filmic text and filmic
discourse, according to which the author distinguishes generally between
semantic and pragmatic levels of description. She then illustrates with an
example analysis of a scene from Gravity how these different levels of anal-
ysis support the description of the film’s materiality on the one hand, and
the necessary interpretation steps in terms of abductive inferences on the
other, in order to shed further light on film’s ability to guide and constrain
recipients’ interpretations.
John Bateman’s blending-based perspective on intermediality considers
cases of media combinations in film. The chapter examines various con-
trasting film scenes relying on intermedial references in order to explore
to what extent a formalized notion of blending offers a suitable analytical
tool for revealing and motivating media references as aesthetic and design
choices. By discussing example sequences all using blending as a mecha-
nism for discourse integration, Bateman proposes a model of transferring
and combining information and understandings across ‘domains’ cued
by explicit textual indicators, including cases where the domains blended
involve media-related information. This suggests a new contribution to the
processes of inferential meaning-making during film interpretation. Exam-
ple analyses of scenes from The Matrix, Shrek, Frost/Nixon, and others
are discussed to show how the structural configurations and characteris-
tics revealed by a formalization of blending can offer more discriminating
descriptions of intertextual and intermedial relationships in filmic text.
In the final analytical chapter, Joyce Goggin offers a case study of Elizabeth
Gilbert’s novel ‘Eat Pray Love’ (2006) and its filmic adaption with the same
title (Murphy 2010). Goggin analyzes this in terms of ‘expanded adapta-
tions’, i.e. adaptations that go beyond the typical dyad of novel and film and
that bring in further plot elements and texts from the surrounding context.
By working out several thematic expansions of the book’s and film’s narra-
tive in terms of current trends in self-help books and travel guides, as well as
synthesized versions of Eastern religions, Goggin shows a basic intertextual-
ity of both media texts at work. The interpretation of this intertextuality is
highly dependent on several distinct knowledge sources based not only on
the content of the original text and other book genres, such as travel guides,
but also on various aspects of globalization and the appropriation of cul-
tures and religions. With her discussion, Goggin highlights the importance
of information that is in general not inherent to the filmic text, but has to be
activated by certain narrative and intertextual structures.
4 Conclusion
As has now been clarified, all chapters as summarized address issues currently
of interest in international film studies on the one hand and the broad con-
text of text studies on the other. With these case studies and example anal-
yses, the book contributes to current discussions of film and text theory by
providing insight into further new integrative approaches and tools for the
analysis of filmic text. By explicitly focusing on the idea of film text anal-
ysis and its ability to provide a strong foundation for any examination of
filmic understanding, we see the notion of film as text as a valuable interface
for film theory in general. Such an interface is capable of bridging the gap
between several disciplines and research areas all dealing with the question
of how the detailed analysis of the meaning-making structures in filmic text
can help us learn more about film, one of the most powerful audio-visual
artifacts developed to date, as well as about its understanding by actual
recipients.
The book, therefore, brings together analyses at several levels of descrip-
tion, starting with basic semiotic patterns of individual filmic aspects, such
as lighting or sound, and grammatical/cognitive as well as dynamic narra-
tive structures. A more pragmatically oriented discussion of the film as a
textual artifact then broadens the perspective towards discourse analytical
questions such as blending and the film’s ability to adopt and reshape con-
cepts and ideas from other media, as in adaptation. By combining these
different approaches and their individual research foci under the label of
film text analysis, the main idea of this collection is to combine descriptions
of the technical devices on a lower level of analysis with broader interpreta-
tions of societal patterns of the film on higher levels. The detailed analyses
in almost all chapters, as well as their theoretical points and accompanying
frameworks, shed light on how this combination can offer a useful launch-
ing point for further work in this area.
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Introduction 21
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Filmography
Casino Royale (2006). Martin Campbell. Columbia Pictures. USA/UK.
Eat, Pray, Love (2010). Ryan Murphy. Columbia Pictures Industries. Italy/India/
Indonesia/USA.
Frost/Nixon (2008). Ron Howard. Universal Pictures/Imagine Entertainment/
Working Title Films/StudioCanal and others. USA/UK/France.
Gravity (2013). Alfonso Cuarón. Warner Brothers. UK/USA.
Matrix, The (1999). Lana Wachowski/Lilly Wachowski. Warner Bros. USA/
Australia.
Introduction 23
Quantum of Solace (2008). Marc Forster. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Columbia
Pictures. UK/USA.
Shrek (2001). Andrew Adamson/Vicky Jenson. Dreamworks Animation. USA.
Skyfall (2012). Sam Mendes. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Sony Pictures. USA/UK.
Star Wars (1977). George Lucas. Lucasfilm. USA.
References
1 Introduction: Bringing Together New

Perspectives of Film Text Analysis
Barthes, R. (1977). “From Work to Text”. In: Heath, S.

(ed.). Image – Music – Text. London: Fontana, pp. 155–164.
Bateman, J. A. (2013). “Dynamische Diskurssemantik als

allgemeines Modell der Semiose. Überlegungen am Beispiel
des Films”. Zeitschrift für Semiotik 35(3–4), pp. 249–284.
Bateman, J.A./Schmidt, K.-H. (2012). Multimodal Film

Analysis. How Films Mean. London/New York: Routledge.
Bellour, R. (1971). “Entretien sur la Semiologie du

Cinéma”. Semiotica 4(1), pp. 1–30.
Bellour, R. (1974). “The Obvious and the Code”. Screen

15(4), pp. 7–17.
Bellour, R. (1975). “The Unattainable Text”. Screen 16(3),

pp. 19–27.
Bellour, R. (2000). The Analysis of Film. Edited by

Constance Penley. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Bordwell, D. (1982). “Textual Analysis, etc.”. Enclitic

6(1), pp. 125–136.
Bordwell, D. (1985). Narration in the Fiction Film.

Bordwell, D. (1989). Making Meaning. Inference and Rhetoric

in the Interpretation of Cinema. Cambridge/London: Harvard
University Press.
Bordwell, D. (1996). “Contemporary Film Studies and the

Vicissitudes of Grand Theory”. In: Bordwell, D./Carroll,
N. (eds.). Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 3–36.
Bordwell, D. (2004). “Neo-Structuralist Narratology and the

Functions of Filmic Storytelling”. In: Ryan, M.-L. (ed.).
Narrative Across Media. The Languages of Storytelling.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 203–219.
Bordwell, D. (2011). “Common Sense + Film Theory =

Common-Sense Film Theory?”. David Bordwell’s Website on
Cinema: Essays. May 2011. Online:
http://www.davidbordwell.net/essays/commonsense.php [last
accessed: 1 March 2016].
Bordwell, D./Thompson, K. (2001). Film Art: An

Introduction. 9 th Edition. New York: McGraw Hill.
Cohen-Séat, G. (1948). “Le discourse �lmique”. Revue

Internationale de Filmologie 5, pp. 37–48.
Cohn, N. (2013). The Visual Language of Comics:

Introduction to the Structure and Cognition of Sequential
Images. London: Bloomsbury.
Dyer, R. (2016). “The Persistence of Textual Analysis”.

Talk given as part of the Kracauer Lectures in Film and
Media Theory at Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany, 26
January 2016. Video Online:
http://www.kracauer-lectures.de/de/
winter-2015-2016/richard-dyer/ [last accessed: 01 March
2016].
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Nichols, B. (ed.). Movies and Methods: An Anthology.
Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 592–607.
Eisenstein, S. (1949). Film Form. Essays in Film Theory.

Edited and translated by Jay Leyda. New York: Harvest
Book.
Gilbert, E. (2006). Eat, Pray, Love. One Woman’s Search for

Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. New York:
Riverhead Books.
Halliday, M.A.K. (1978). Language as Social Semiotic: The

Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. London:
Arnold.
Heath, S. (1973). “Film/Cinetext/Text”. Screen 14, pp.

102–127.
Heath, S. (1981). Questions of Cinema. Basingstoke:

Palgrave Macmillan.
Hjelmslev, L. (1961 [1943]). Prolegomena to a Theory of

Language. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Jahraus, O. (2007). “Text, Context, Culture”. Journal of

Literary Theory 1(1), pp. 19–44.
Kress, G./van Leeuwen, T. (2006 [1996]): Reading Images.

The Grammar of Visual Design. 2 nd Edition. London:
Routledge.
Kuntzel, T. (1978). “The Film Work”. Enclitic 2(1), pp.

38–61.
Martin, J. R. (ed.). (2013). Interviews with M.A.K.

Halliday: Language Turned Back on Himself. London/New
York: Bloomsbury.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002). Phenomenology of Perception.

Metz, C. (1966). “La Grande Syntagmatique du Film

Narratif”. Communications 8, pp. 120–124.
Metz, C. (1974a). Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Metz, C. (1974b). Language and Cinema. The Hague: Mouton.
Metz, C. (1986). The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis

and the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Mowitt, J. (1992). Text: The Genealogy of an

Antidisciplinary Object. Durham/ London: Duke University
Press.
Paech, J. (1988). Literatur und Film. Stuttgart: Metzler.
Pasolini, P.P. (1971). “Die Sprache des Films”. In: Knilli,

F. (ed.). Semiotik des Films. Mit Analysen kommerzieller
Pornos und revolutionärer Agitationsfilme. München: Carl
Hanser Verlag, pp. 38–55.
Pudovkin, V.I. (1926). Film Technique and Film Acting: The

Cinema Writings of V. I. Pudovkin. New York: Bonanza
Books.
Rhodie, S. (1975). “Metz and Semiotics: Opening the Field”.

Jump Cut 7, pp. 22–24.
Rodowick, D. N. (2001). Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy

after the New Media. Durham/London: Duke University Press.
Ropars, M.-C. (1982). “The Graphic in Filmic Writing: A

bout de souffle, or the Erratic Alphabet”. Enclitic 6(1),
pp. 147–161.
Ropars-Wuilleumier, M.-C. (1978). “Muriel as Text”. Film

Reader 3, 262.
Ropars-Wuilleumier, M.-C. (1981). Le texte divisé: Essai

sur l’écriture filmique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France.
Siefkes, M. (2015). “How Semiotic Modes Work Together in

Multimodal Texts: De�ning and Representing Intermodal
Relations”. 10plus1: Living Linguistics 1, pp. 113–131.
Souriau, É. (1951). “La structure de l’univers �lmique et

le vocabulaire de la �lmologie” Revue Internationale de
Filmologie 7/8, 231–240.
Thibault, P. J. (1997). Re-Reading Saussure: The Dynamics

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Thom, R. (1990): Semio Physics. A Sketch. Redwood City:

Addison-Wesley.
Tseng, C. (2013). Cohesion in Film. Tracking Film Elements.

Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
van Leeuwen, T. (2005). Introducing Social Semiotics.

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and Image in Literature and Film”. The Humanities
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Towards a New Paradigm of Multimodal Film Analysis.
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Logical Form of Multimodal Narrative Discourse”. In:
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Epistemologies: Towards an Integrated Framework. London/New
York: Routledge, pp. 260–274.
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481–492.
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USA/UK.
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Industries. Italy/India/ Indonesia/USA.
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Entertainment/ Working Title Films/StudioCanal and others.
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Matrix, The (1999). Lana Wachowski/Lilly Wachowski. Warner

Bros. USA/ Australia.
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Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Columbia Pictures. UK/USA.
Shrek (2001). Andrew Adamson/Vicky Jenson. Dreamworks

Animation. USA.
Skyfall (2012). Sam Mendes. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Sony

Pictures. USA/UK.
Star Wars (1977). George Lucas. Lucas�lm. USA.

2 Towards a Semiotics of Film lighting
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3 Editing Space as an Audio-Visual
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Film Text Analysis

This book examines film as a multimodal text and an audiovisual synthesis,

Janina Wildfeuer is a Researcher in Multimodal Linguistics in the Linguistics

John A. Bateman is a Full Professor of Applied Linguistics in the English and

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.

41 The Western in the Global South

42 Spaces of the Cinematic Home

43 Spectacle in “Classical” Cinemas

45 Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art

46 The Other in Contemporary Migrant Cinema

47 Horror Film and Affect

48 India’s New Independent Cinema

49 Early Race Filmmaking in America

50 Film Text Analysis

Edited by Janina Wildfeuer

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2017 Taylor & Francis

The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wildfeuer, Janina, 1984– editor. | Bateman, John A., editor.

ISBN: 978-1-138-91138-3 (hbk)

List of Table and Figures vii

1 Introduction: Bringing Together New Perspectives

2 Towards a Semiotics of Film Lighting 24

3 Editing Space as an Audio-Visual Composition 46

4 Movie Physics or Dynamic Patterns as the Skeleton of Movies 66

5 From Visual Narrative Grammar to Filmic Narrative

6 From Text to Recipient: Pragmatic Insights for Filmic

7 Intermediality in Film: A Blending-Based Perspective 141

8 Eat, Pray, LovE: Expanding Adaptations and Global Tourism 169

List of Contributors 199

Janina Wildfeuer and John A. Bateman

1 Introduction to the Introduction

2 The Notion of Filmic Text in Film Theory

We suggest this graphically in Figure 1.1 in terms of an outwards flowing

2.1 From Film as Language …

This was part of a broader critique of what was characterized as a danger-

2.2 … to Film as Text …

“I prefer to think of these as a single complex phenomenon: the system

“The term ‘writing’, as always, requires comment: literally, it desig-

2.3 … to Dynamic Filmic Discourse

3 Recent Perspectives of Film Text Analysis

1 Introduction: Bringing Together New

Barthes, R. (1977). “From Work to Text”. In: Heath, S.

Bateman, J. A. (2013). “Dynamische Diskurssemantik als

Bateman, J.A./Schmidt, K.-H. (2012). Multimodal Film

Bellour, R. (1971). “Entretien sur la Semiologie du

Bellour, R. (1974). “The Obvious and the Code”. Screen

Bellour, R. (1975). “The Unattainable Text”. Screen 16(3),

Bellour, R. (2000). The Analysis of Film. Edited by

Bordwell, D. (1982). “Textual Analysis, etc.”. Enclitic

Bordwell, D. (1985). Narration in the Fiction Film.

Bordwell, D. (1989). Making Meaning. Inference and Rhetoric

Bordwell, D. (1996). “Contemporary Film Studies and the

Bordwell, D. (2004). “Neo-Structuralist Narratology and the

Bordwell, D. (2011). “Common Sense + Film Theory =

Bordwell, D./Thompson, K. (2001). Film Art: An

Cohen-Séat, G. (1948). “Le discourse �lmique”. Revue