Fiction as Challenge to Text-Oriented Film Studies

EUROPEAN ACADEMIC RESEARCH , 2013

Literature has strongly shaped the way we think and behave. Over the last hundred years film has become a progressively more powerful and dominant form and we have sufficient evidence to suggest that the visual has now significantly replaced the written form as the leading mode of communication in contemporary society. Since film is a fairly recent phenomenon, it has rented a great deal from other forms of expression particularly from literature. The present paper focuses on the relation between film and literature and discusses film as a cinematic novel with the help of film Gandhi, directed by Richard Attenborough. This film is a multi award winning biopic film about the life of Mahatma Gandhi who was a leader of nonviolent resistance movement against British colonial rule in India during the first half of the 20th century. The reason to take Gandhi as a case study is because his teachings and ideology have influenced people of all over the world and many have attempted to portray Mahatma Gandhi's life through different creative avenues such as prose, poetry, drama and theatre.

2017

In my doctoral dissertation I explore the narrative function of cinema in twentyfirst century fiction. In this study literary representations of films are regarded as a narrative strategy through which literary texts accentuate, reflect, and give rise to their principal themes and questions. Since filmic insertions have a noticeable impact upon the narrative construction and hence turn out to be pivotal in the reader’s inferential process, I also investigate this narrative phenomenon in the context of reader’s meaning-making. I have chosen four novels for my study, namely The Book of Illusions (2002) by Paul Auster, Point Omega (2010) by Don DeLillo, The Understudy (2005) by David Nicholls, and The Ice Cream Man by Katri Lipson, published in Finnish in 2012 as Jäätelökauppias and translated into English in 2014. In these works the dominant meanings are closely linked to the representations of cinema, and films appear both at the discourse level and within the fictional world. Owing ...

Mind, 2016

Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2020

Once one has distinguished, as one does the entire philosophical tradition, between truth and reality, it immediately follows that the truth "declares itself in a structure of fiction. -Jacques Derrida Some documentaries make strong use of practices such as scripting, staging, reenactment, rehearsal, and performance that we associate with fiction. Some adopt familiar conventions such as the individual hero who undergoes a challenge or embarks on a quest, building suspense, emotional crescendos, and climactic resolutions. Some fiction makes strong use of conventions that we typically associate with nonfiction or documentary such as location shooting, nonactors, hand-held cameras, improvisation, found footage, voice-over commentary, and natural lighting. The boundary between the two realms is highly fluid but, in most cases, still perceptible. -Bill Nichols Michel Renov in Theorizing Documentary suggests that the growing attention of reality-driven representations shows that perhaps the "marginalization of the documentary film as subject of serious inquiry is at an end" (1). Renov deconstructs the hierarchy of fiction/nonfiction as "fictional and nonfictional forms are enmeshed in one another -particularly regarding semiotics, narrativity, and questions of performance" (Theorizing Documentary 2). The ontological status of the image and the epistemological stakes of representation are key issues of nonfiction film. Unlike traditional narrative cinema, there is an epistaphilic i drive to see and to therefore have witnessed the Truth (or at least a truth) ii in documentary spectators. While fiction is assumed to explore the realm of the imaginary, nonfiction is limited to documenting reality. Yet semioticians note how an image is just a relative combination of the signifier and signified and are just a form of substitution or simulacra for an image already past. This alludes to the subjectivity of how images are seen and decoded. So the glittering flashes of light edited together and combined with sound in a documentary are inherently representational. According to

2018

Here the authors discuss the role of fiction in screenwriting practice research. The screenplays included in the 'Screenplays as Research Artefacts' special issue of TEXT present a range of stories, worlds, characters, visual scenarios and dialogue exchanges that function as vessels for theories and ideas. These eleven screenplays all use creative practice approaches to research across a wide variety of discourses. All of the works embrace fiction as an important method to convey their respective critical concerns, which, the authors argue, evidences an emerging hallmark of screenwriting (as) research when compared with associated forms in the creative writing and screen production disciplines: fiction as a staple of its storytelling, creative practice and research methodology. The authors suggest that the use of fiction to perform research and present findings illuminates the ways that knowledge can be affective, not merely textual or verbal, something that is exemplified in the selected screenplays.

Nora Alter begins her thorough exploration of the essay film, an elusive genre of nonfiction filmmaking, by noting that when she began its exploration two decades ago few people knew what she was talking about. The book's introduction lays out the ambitious scope of the project: the history and theory behind a type of film that is neither "purely fiction, nor documentary, nor art film, but incorporates aspects of all these modes" (p. 4). As recent English-language books show, the essay film has gained wide recognition as a specific, if eminently plastic, mode of film practice.

Semiotica, 1988

Toward a socio-logic of the film text* LENA JAYYUSI I would like in this paper to propose a set of methods and resources for the analysis of filmic texts, and to put forth some initial analytic observations. In doing so, I hope to elucidate some aspects of the intimate ties between the organization of various features of culture and social life on the one hand, and the organization of filmic texts as cultural forms on the other. For over a decade, work within film structuralism and cine-semiotics has addressed itself to the analysis of film texts. The main body of such work, however, has been concerned with advancing a formal program or a taxonomic system for film-textual studies (Metz 1974a and b; Eco 1976a and b), or with excavating a 'semantic deep structure' for specific films or film genres (for example, Wright 1977). My concern will not lie there, nor will it lie with treating the film text as a document of substantive social or cultural values-although both sorts of enterprise have their legitimate interest. Rather, my concern will be with the analysis of the particulars and properties of filmic organization and intelligibility. Central to this concern is the treatment of the film text as a produced account-a narrative that consists in an artful organization of cultural practices and resources, and in turn reveals some of the formal properties of our culture and our methods of sense production and assembly. 1 The filmic narrative, whether fictional or documentary, is a form of communicative practice, as are the narratives and accounts produced within the social corpus of written texts; it must therefore be amenable to the same kind of analytic investigation, albeit one that must attend to its own specificities of form and structure. This article will be organized in three general sections. Specifically, I will attempt to (1) discuss some of the properties of cultural and social organization that are deeply and particularly relevant to filmic practice and the filmic enterprise; (2) develop some initial analytic observations on the organization of the film text that will reveal both its deep embeddedness in cultural forms and practices and some aspects of its own specific narrative and communicative character; and (3) draw some conclusions from this for the general area of 'visual' studies and cine-semiotics.

2015

Choice Reviews Online, 1999

In an introduction that is now, sadly, doubly touching, Christian Metz pays tribute to Francesco Casetti's work by situating it at the intersection of psychoanalytic and linguistic approaches to the cinema. Of course this is just where Metz would situate himself; indeed, as he notes, Casetti's effort points in a direction Metz assumed he would need to follow, and that resulted in his final book, bearing the most apt of titles: VEnonciation impersonnelle ou le site du film. In effect Casetti helped bring Metz back to his home in semiotics and linguistics, after the Freudian excursions of The Imaginary Signifier and the unpublished opus on jokes. Metz's career likewise served as a model for Casetti, in its legendary generosity and amplitude first of all, and in the topics and method of investigation. One can only admire in these scholars the disciplined way they traverse in both directions the partly imaginary boundary of the screen. Anglo-Americans will sense a different context than the rather purely "scientific" one that Metz details where positions are staked out, attacked, defended, and altered by newer ideas, seemingly outside the larger social environment that buys into them. Our film scholarship, tied rather explicitly to a constantly debated pedagogical mission, has been sensitive to the social consequences, as much as to the arguments, of ideas about films and how to study them. Thus the path for the study of cinematic enunciation in England and the USA was opened not so much by the fascinating claims of narratology (as laid out by Genette, Eco, and the others whom Metz mentions) as by the academic climate (admittedly floating over from the continent) that promoted the study of systems over individuals, and thus of enunciative mechanisms over authors. Enunciation theory helped bring about the death of the author by locating a film's principle of organization and address within the text rather than in the mind of an artist. When it came to studying the spectator, we see the same difference in tone. Metz's trenchantly Freudian essay a The Fiction Film and Its Spectator" is characteristic in