Abstract
In this chapter, the concept of predication—borrowed from linguistics—is applied to film and theatre languages. The premise is that the rules that govern the establishment of predicative relationships in the sentence can be useful in identifying meaningful communicative segments of film and theatre discourses.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
On the surface level, all five film tracks participate in expressing the deep cognitive structure. Visual correlatives are only one aspect of this process.
- 2.
What could be regarded as proper film language units are technical units or film modalities (Bettetini 1973, p. 77); Lotman defines elements such as lighting, camera angle, montage, plan, or lenses as typical film devices. Unlike natural language, which operates with a finite inventory of units—phonemes, monemes, lexemes—possible objects of film image belong to an infinite inventory. Any object from reality might appear in a film image. Therefore, objects are not pertinent units of the film language (Lotman 1976, p. 31).
- 3.
P = Predication, a = Argument (Fillmore 1968, p. 2)
- 4.
Referring to Metz’s “five overlapping traits” developed later in Language in Cinema, Buckland emphasises that “some avant-garde films that do not employ mechanical duplication (for example, the films of Len Lye) and films that do not employ movement (…Chris Marker’s La Jeteée)” are left out (Buckland 2000, p. 8).
- 5.
The criterion of the shared theme in segments of film that do not have chronology could be likened to Metz’s bracket syntagma (p. 126). Metz elaborates that “in cinema, the order of temporal consecutiveness may be interrupted more than one way, (…for example, the parallel syntagma, or the descriptive syntagma) and that the bracket construction per se is not necessarily iterative” (p. 126). Metz defines this type of film syntagma as “a series of very brief scenes representing occurrences that the film gives as typical samples of a same order of reality, without in any way chronologically locating them in relation to each other” (p. 126). Metz points out that bracket syntagmas are often marked by “optical effects (dissolves, wipes, pan shots, and less commonly, fades),” which indicates the mirroring of the content plane on the plane of expression in aesthetic texts.
- 6.
The method of the distributionalist school in linguistics might be utilised in the study of film language to a certain degree. The method commences with a text to identify the units of various levels using the techniques of segmentation and substitution. The method searches for elementary units and the rules of their combination. In the process of identification, it is determined which units of the text are identical, being variants of one systemic unit—as allophones which are different realisations of the same phoneme. If such units appear in the same contexts, they are regarded as free variants or complementary distributions if they never appear in the same context (Apresjan 1973, p. 52).
- 7.
For instance, the phoneme “p” has its value in the phonemic system of certain languages for its quality of being voiceless as opposed to its pair “b” which is voiced. No matter how it is realised in a discourse, it always sustains its value in the system due to the opposition of voiced and voiceless sounds.
- 8.
In reference to Metz’s eight syntagmas, Buckland attempts to define semi-grammatical syntagmatic types in cognitive terms and, using Chomsky’s model, distinguishes between acceptability and grammaticalness. The relevant criterion is comprehensibility: spectators understand possible/potential syntagmas because they create associations between fully grammatical and semi-grammatical types. On the other hand, a nonlinear sequence shot is impossible, in other words, ungrammatical (2000, p. 212).
- 9.
Metz describes the sequence in which the protagonists escape from the Paris apartment “by sliding down a drain pipe” in Godard’s Pierre le fou as defying logic and as a “sort of potential sequence—an undetermined sequence that represents a new type of syntagma—a novel form of the ‘logic of montage,’ but that remains entirely a figure of narrativity” (Metz 1974, p. 219). The repetition of the basic parameters of predications—the two protagonists—allows for this sequence to be treated as a complex predication.
- 10.
“The internal contradiction in the modern Drama, therefore, arises from the fact that a dynamic transformation of subject and object into each other in dramatic form is confronted by a static separation of the two in content” (Szondi 1987, p. 46).
- 11.
“What separates the individual from destruction is empty time, time that can no longer be filled by an action, time that encompasses a pure space stretching out toward catastrophe and within which the individual is condemned to live” (Szondi, p.56).
- 12.
“Great epic writing gives form to the extensive totality of life, drama to the intensive totality of essence” (Lukács, Georg 1971, p. 46).
- 13.
Dramatis personae are defined as “an ensemble of figures in a dramatic text.” Above that, the author distinguishes between figure and character. The former is “the sum of the structural functions it fulfils in either changing or stabilising the dramatic situation,” while the latter is “the character of a figure as the sum of the contrasts and correspondences linking it with the other figures in the text” (Pfister, pp. 163–164).
- 14.
Hegel emphasises that the vital force of drama is “self-conscious and active personality.” Being so, “the event does not appear to proceed from external conditions, but rather from personal volition and character …” He points out the incessant interrelation between “the entire complexes of external condition to the inwardness itself of the self–realised and self–realizing individuality” (1975, p. 4; 5).
- 15.
John Luis Styan also points out the distinction between the deep and surface structure of drama. He is of the opinion that tempo does not belong to the surface structure, because it cannot be imposed externally, for instance, in the author’s stage directions. Tempo is “an intrinsic element in its whole structure … Tempo must reside in the author’s conception” (1960, p. 142).
- 16.
As mentioned earlier, some exceptions defy the media-specific approach and break the expectations related to theatrical conventions.
- 17.
“Various kinds of impersonal and hostile mechanisms have taken the place of God, Nature and History, found in the old tragedy. The notion of absurd mechanism is probably the last metaphysical concept remaining in the modern grotesque. But this absurd mechanism is not transcendental any more in relation to man, or at any rate to mankind. It is a trap set by man himself into which he has fallen” (Kott 1964, p. 191).
- 18.
Pfister states that the setting might “reflect the state of consciousness of a particular figure” (1988, p. 193).
- 19.
Kracauer remarks that film characters ought to be integrated with the environment depicted in film image, and by no means should they be a dominant element: “The film actor must seem to be his character in such a way that all his expressions, gestures and poses point beyond themselves to the diffuse contexts out of which they arise. They must breathe a certain casualness marking them as fragments of an inexhaustible texture.” On the other hand, the function of theatre actor “is determined by the fact that the theatre exhausts itself in representing interhuman relations […] The cinema in this sense is not exclusively human. Its subject matter is the infinite flux of visible phenomena—those ever-changing patterns of physical existence whose flow may include human manifestations but need not climax in them” (Kracauer 1960, p. 95).
Bibliography
Apresjan, Jurii Derenikovič. 1973. Principles and Methods of Contemporary Structural Linguistic. Translated by Dina B. Crockett. The Hague and Paris: Mouton.
Bettetini, Gianfranco. 1973. The Language and Technique of the Film. The Hague: Mouton.
Buckland, Warren. 2000. The Cognitive Semiotics of Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fillmore, Charles J. 1968. Lexical Entries for Verbs. In Working Papers in Linguistics, ed. Charles J. Fillmore and Ilse Lehiste, 1–15. Columbus: The Ohio State University.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1975. Hegel on Tragedy. Edited by Anne Paolucci and Henry Paolucci. New York; Evanston; San Francisco; London: Harper & Row Publishers.
Honzl, Jindřich. 1976. Dynamics of the Sign in the Theatre. In Semiotics of Art, ed. L. Matejka and I.R. Titunik, 74–93. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jarry, Alfred. 1968. Ubu Rex. In The Ubu Plays, trans. Cyril Connelly and Simon Watson Taylor. London: Methuen & CO Ltd.
Kott, Jan. 1964. Shakespeare, Our Contemporary. New York; London: W. W. Norton & Company.
Kracauer, Siegfried. 1960. Theory of Film. The Redemption of Physical Reality. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lotman, Jurij. 1976. Semiotics of Cinema. Translated by Mark E. Suino. Michigan Slavic Contributions. No. 5. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.
Lukács, Georg. 1971. The Theory of the Novel. Translated by Anna Bostock. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Mel’čuk, Igor Aleksandrovič. 1988. Dependency Syntax: Theory and Practice. New York: State University of New York Press.
Metz, Christian. 1974. Film Language A Semiotics of the Cinema. Translated by Michael Taylor. New York: Oxford University Press.
Monaco, James. 1977. How to Read a Film. The Art, Technology, Language, History and Theory of Film and Media. Oxford University Press.
Morris, Charles W. 1971. Writings on the General Theory of Signs. The Hague; Paris: Mouton.
Pfister, Manfred. 1988. The Theory and Analysis of Drama. Translated by John Halliday. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Propp, Vladímir Jakovlevič. 1968. Morphology of the Folktale. Translated by Laurence Scott. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Souriau, Étienne. 1950. Les deux cent mille situations dramatiques. Paris: Flamarion Editeur. 26, rue Racine.
Stam, Robert. 2000. Film Theory an Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Styan, John Luis. 1960. The Elements of Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Szondi, Peter. 1987. Theory of the Modern Drama. Translated by Michael Hays. Theory and History of Literature, Volume 29. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ubersfeld, Anne. 1999. Reading Theatre. Translated by Frank Collins. Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press.
Worth, Sol. 1981. The Development of a Semiotics of Film. Studying Visual Communication, 36–73. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Garić-Komnenić, S. (2024). Linguistics and Film and Theatre Practices. In: Bosnian Literary Adaptations on Stage and Screen. Adaptation in Theatre and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47134-6_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47134-6_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-47133-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-47134-6
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)