Film Studies and Cognitive Science
Cognitive Science, Humaniities, and the Arts
Language and Film
Currie argues that "cinematic representation... is not linguistic, quasi-linguistic or even remotely linguistic." (p. 114) This means that he rejects "the semiotic assumption" so common in contemporary film studies: that film is a language. While there may be some informal comparisons that permit us to discuss the language of film, as of other arts, Currie considers a more formal comparison to be impossible.
The "semiotic assumption" is a tenet of structuralism. Currie explains it as stemming from Tzvetan Todorov's program of a universal grammar which has a psychological reality. But such a view assumes a view of mind as "a highly unified or at least highly interconnected mechanism." Currie argues that this view of mind is wrong and has shown to be wrong by cognitive science, which shows mind to be "a complex, less than fully integrated institution with relatively autonomous departments dedicated to specific functions." (See Fodor, The Modularity of Mind)
SEMIOTICS: See also Metz, Barthes
Psychoanalysis
It is worth noting that not only have the structuralists and post-structuralists adopted the semiotic assumption. Another target of Currie's book is psychoanalysis, which also has a view of mind that it relies upon in formulating hypotheses of all sorts about film: why we enjoy film, what our relation is to the screen, why women are depicted in certain ways in film, why film narratives are constructed in specific ways, and so on. Currie notes that in Lacan's version of psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis as a theory of mind comes together with the semiotic assumption about film as a language, because Lacan's version of psychoanalysis is itself semiotic: that is, it is a fundamental thesis of Lacanian psychoanalysis that the unconscious is "structured like a language."Cinema Language and Natural Language
If cinema language were a language, Currie argues, this language would have to be "startlingly different" from any natural languages with which we are familiar. For one thing, this "language" would use only one medium, sight, whereas natural languages like English can be seen, heard, and even touched (in Braille).
Although it is difficult to define an essence of "language," Currie thinks we can describe enough about natural languages through linguistics to talk about what their characteristics are, and to inquire whether cinema has these characteristics. We should keep in mind that although he does not accept cinema as a language, Currie does agree that it is a form of communication (and also, as we shall see, that it is representational and not purely natural).
Key Features of Natural Languages
Key features of natural languages as Currie describes them are the following:
- A. Conventionality: the language has elements of arbitrariness to it, adopted as a matter of social conventions; it is not innate but must be learned.
- B. Productivity: the language is "creative" -- you can produce infinitely many new kinds of meaning in it.
A and B, according to Currie, imply that there are other characteristics, as follows:
- C. meanings have to be learned recursively (sentence by sentence);
- D. language is molecular (built out of meaning atoms, i.e. words);
- E. meaning in a language is acontextual. (This last point contradicts the structuralist claim that linguistic meaning is wholly a matter of signs' relation to other signs.)
Now, Currie says, proponents of the cinema-as-language view would say that A and B do apply, but this means that C, D, and E ought to follow. And they do not. There are no molecular units of meaning in a "language" of cinema that have a meaning of their own acontextually.
"Context" is somewhat troubling here, that is, it may seem that words in a natural language like English do require context. "Bank" is an example Currie himself gives. However, he says that he is not committed to the determinacy or constancy of literal meaning. Context involves the use of a word, not its literal meaning. (He disagrees with literary critics like Stanley FIsh who think we should and can just do without literal meaning.)
Utterance Meaning and Linguistic Meaning
So Currie discusses "utterance meaning." To understand utterances, we apply both conventions of the languge and rules of rationality; we attribute specific kinds of (normally rational) intentions to the speaker or writer. Here it is important that conventions alone will not tell us meaning; and he thinks proponents of cinema-as- language "were too optimistic in assessing what could be achieved for interpretation by way of convention alone." (p. 127) Even if you understand a language, you still have to do a lot of interpretintg to get at someone's meaning.What might be the "literal meaning" of a unit of cinema language (a word-analog in an image)? Perhaps we could know such literal meanings and then see how the units get put together by a user (a filmmaker) in a context? Currie says no. "There is no set of conventions that function to confer meaning on cinematic images in anything like the way conventions confer (literal) meanings in language (p. 130). "...the meaning of a cinematic image is nonatomic and so nonrecursive. There are no atoms of meaning for cinematic images..." In a sense, there ARE no atoms in visual images. Nothing is a smallest possible bit of potentially meaningful information, until we get below the thresshold of what is visually discriminable.
Conventional Meaning and Natural Meaning
So, visual images of cinema just are not conventional. The kind of meaning they have is "natural meaning." "With images, productivity is natural generativity, and we explain that in terms of natural recognitional capacities." We are using our ordinary natural visual capacities to recognize the entities depicted in cinema. (Here he refers back to his treatment of such capacities, in relation to the topic of realism, in chapter 3.1, and to Scheier.) Things in an image might have elements of convention or be influenced by convention, like the way clothes or automobiles look, but the image itself isn't conventional.Currie responds to an objector who might say he is just winning the argument here by stipulating a narrow meaning of "conventional." He denies this and says that he is focusing in on a target concept, whatever sense of conventional applies to meanings in a lanaguage like English--roughly, that conventional here means "determined by coordinated practice based on mutual expectations."
What if the cinema-as-language defender shifts ground to argue that images themselves are not a language but rather their relations with one another in a film contstitute a language? Again, Currie would say no. Images cannot be compounded into sentence-like meaningful structures because they do not have a grammar; they do not differentially function like names, predicates, or other parts of speech. And film lacks basic sentential operators like "if" "and" or "but."
True, there are "connecting devices" between images that one might point to as conventional links putting two images together, but Currie thinks these add to an already meaningful structure rather than creating the structure, as the various constitutents and functional parts (operators) of language do.
A Language of Vision?
In a very brief closing section of the chapter, Currie takes up the question whether there is a language of vision. Some scientistis do hypothesize such a thing, he says, citing Biederman. There might be so-called "geons" that are some sort of fundamental components of visual recognition. We "parse" these components to constitute a visual world. BUT, Currie notes, as theorized, these are not like words in a language. He says that "the mind's stock of geons is not like lexical knowledge." "The geons are not representational devices conventionally connected with what they represent." There is nothing conventional about them, and no grammar to them.