2/2

However, such a setting didn't fit very good with the observation of physical
pehomena occurring within the communicational context. The first ones
recognising that, were anthropologists. As they were working with cultures and
concrete languages really far from the western ones, they realised that the
logic formal model of linguistics was unadequate to describe what they analysed
directly, and E.T. Hall firstly recognised that communication is not only a pure
verbal phenomenon [5]. This process goes from the 40's to the 60's. But the
first lucid critics to this formal setting came from the anthropologist
Birdwhistell who wrote:

"Thus the conception has been that the brain, by definition a naturally good
producer of logical thoughts composed of words with precise meanings, emit these
under proper stimulation. That is, good, clean, logical, rational, denotative,
semantically correct utterances are emitted out of the head if the membrane
between mind and body efficiently separates this area of the body from that
which produces the bad, dirty, illogical, irrational, connotative, and
semantically confusing adulterants. Good communication thus takes place if the
unadulterated message enters the ear of the receiver and goes through a clean
pipe into an aseptic brain...The focus upon communication and its measurement
from this perspective is dominated by such an atomistic and loaded conception
of man and his behavior that research or theory about communication becomes 
prescriptive rather than descriptive (Birdwhistell: 1973,  p.66)"

Birdwhistell, by recognising the role played by gesture within communication,
tried to inquire gesture as a system of communication. This was the first step
towards what we call _Non-Verbal Communication_. Yet Birdwhistell approached
gesture with the heuristic tools of linguistic. He spoke of a _Multichannel
Communication_ where different systems of communication (verbal and non-verbal
ones) co-occur in time and space. But the signification of those systems is
conceived of as being a separate one. Each system is seen as having own signs
corresponding to _meanings_.

The same setting is the one developed within semiotics (also stemming from the
encounter of semiotics with information theory; see in regard: Teobaldelli:
1998d; 1998e)

This setting is nowadays still mostly shared and used and it is one of the
biggest problems of any communication theory, inasmuch it has been so far 
acknowledged  that within face-to-face communication there is no system working
independently from the others, as Lotman cogently observes:

"The complex object was lead back to a sum of simple objects. [...]    
As we can see now, there are in reality no sign systems which work    
exactly, as isolated forms having functional precise senses, alone in    
itself. [...] They work only because they are bound in a semiotic    
continuum filled up by semiotic Objects of different types, belonging    
to different levels of organisation (1990, 288; translation mine [6])"

This fact sets hardly under question thus the traditional verbal-like notion of
language and of its synonima (sign system, semiotic system, code, medium etc.).

We can now turn our attention to film as language, starting with the 
recognition of filmic objects as texts [7] presenting a complex 
configuration which is not reducible to a single language. 


2. The filmic text and the lack of heuristic means

Aurand [8], by dealing with the tendency to analyse film as narration, 
argues that philosophy seems to avoid any reasoning on its formal aspects, 
that it to say any analysis of its signs and meaning. The question which 
Aurand underlines, is in my opinion a good one. Philosophy seems in fact 
still not to recognise the relevant role of non-verbal elements, preferring 
to focus the attention on language. The problem is that most of philosophical
works on signification are based upon a strong logic relation between (verbal)
sign and meaning, a pure and verifiable one. This setting cannot recognise the
role that non-verbal signs have within the signification process without at the
same time loosing its strong theoretical base; such a base in fact comes from
the conception of verbal language as an autonomous and self-sufficient sign
system. In this sense philosophical thinking  seems really not to have good
heuristic means to get close to the way signification is built within filmic
texts (as well as within any cultural texts which would not be purely verbal
ones).[9]

Yet, on the other side we have to say that also communication theory and
semiotics seems not to be on the right way, since it can be seen how their
conception of the sign-meaning association, as an association which could be
conceived of as a general one (i.e. without referring to a specific sign
system,), is rather strictly depending from more general (philosophical)
assumptions, which come from the perspective of knowledge and signification
centred on verbal language[10]. This fact seems to bring also semiotics and
communication theory not too much close to the way signification is built within
filmic objects (as well as within any texts which would not be purely verbal
ones).


3. A basic problem of languages within film: the notions of channel and medium.

In this sense most of terminology used in the field of Media studies and of
filmstudies as well is highly problematic. 
I have at this point to explain myself with a little example:

- it is often used the term _audiovisual_as filmic.

Rather this term, which stems from the confusion between the notion of _medium_
and the notion of _channel_ (which is the consequence of both the influence of
information theory on communication and media studies and the lack of a serious
reflection about the notion of _medium_) is really problematic. 

If we look deeply at the notion of _audiovisual_ we see in fact that it
presupposes that the nature of the medium is given by the channel with which we
perceive it, i.e. the auditory and visual ones. Yet it can be argued that there
are a lot of other textual types that are audio-visual (in the sense that their
being perceived is an audio-visual phenomenon), above all the 


(1)face-to-face communication: we see the other person while he is speaking, 
(2) theater. 

At the same time there are audiovisual events that although cannot be considered
texts, but they rather are audio-visual phenomena: for example if I see a car
running along the street I contemporary hear the sounds it emits. Thus I'm in
front of an audiovisual phenomenon [11]. 
Which one would be the theoretical cogent difference between the two type of
audiovisual phenomena, i.e. between a filmic text displaying a car running along
the street and a car running along the street? 

It seems to me consequently that the use of the term _audio-visual_ is quite a
problem, and mainly that it doesn't help in understanding the specificity of
filmic.

Another problem arising from the relatioship between verbal and non-verbal
elements within filmic texts is that regarding the notion of _medium_.

_Medium_ in fact, is used in many senses. Sometimes it is identified with the
channel (giving many problems to the analysis as I already suggested above),
some other times it is used as a synonimous of the semiotic notion of _sign
system_, some other times again it is used as the filmic itself when someone
speaks for example of the _filmic medium_ (this use stems from an attention to
specific technologies and get near to the sense of _means_: in this sense for
example the notion of _mass media_, as those technological means which permit a
wide broadcasting of a text). 

In regard of the last two uses, there is a basic problem, since the contemporary
presence of verbal language and of figural elements would not be considered as a
single medium, but rather it is often said that there are two _media_. Thus how
is possible to say that film is a _medium_ presenting two _media_? This fact has
many consequences: above all the tendency to divide the signification of each
system from that of the other one. This is caused by the fact that till now
there are no shared model which try to integrate the significant role of both as
an aggregate, rather to think of them as autonomous systems operating in a
self-sufficient way. 
The basic consequence of a mono-medial perspective is that signification is
thought as separated from the concrete communicative context, since it consists
simply in the static association between signs and contents within a sign
system. In the mono-medial perspective we have thus two types of separation:

- the separation of signification from communication;
- the separation of the signification belonging to a _system_ and that of
another possible system co-occurring in time and space in the same concrete
communicative context.

In this way the filmic text, that presents itself as a unique text, is thought
as it were separated; it seems to me  that, if Aurand has reason in saying that
philosophy conceives of film as a _narration_ underlining its _verbal_ elements
(the story, the plot etc.) on the other side one has also to underlines there is
an opposite tendency to identificate filmic essentially with its figural
elements (shots and frames). 
The central indication emerging from this situation is thus that instead of
separating the filmic we should rather dispose of an _integrated model of
communication_ able to furnish valuable heuristic tools[12].


4. From the mono-medial perspective to a multimedia semiotics.

Therefore it seems to me that we should start to think to some other possible
models of communication, by avoiding the general mono-medial perspective in its
multiple forms (and thus _semantics_, the notion of communication as
_transmitting of information_, terms like _sender_ and _receiver_ and so on).
I tried to build a new model as a proposal towards what can be defined as a
_multimedia semiotics_, a theory which I also call an _integrated theory of
human multimedia communication_.  The basic feature of this model stems from the
assumption that communication is a phenomenon presenting a high complexity which
is not to be reduced to the atomistic mono-medial view, or as Petöfi writes:

"since it is very seldom the case that all elements of a communication belong 
to one and the same class of signs, we should rather speak of multimedia
communications (Petöfi, 1989, 510-511)"

According to this assumption we have to consider communication as a construction
of signification with the help of one or more systems (where with the term
system I refer to a theoretical abstraction of a physical semiotical matter
[13]).
Thus _signification_ is not simply a static and mechanical association between
signs and contents, but rather is what emerges from a complex semiotic whole. It
can consequently be composed of more than a system, of more _semiotical
elements_.

However I will try now to explain this view by discussing directly filmic text.


5. Approaching signification of filmic.

The analogy (or metaphor) of film as language is really old, and I don't want to
summon up its history. I would like shortly to underline that at first it is a
methodological metaphor and that subsequently such a methodological assumption
becomes a theoretical one. This due to the mistakenly interpretation by
theorists of the first theoretical work [14], but it stems also from the
importance that linguistics and communication theory gradually assumes. Yet this
theoretical jump cristallises the _film as language_  metaphor, in a simmetrical
analogy. As the main theories of language conceive of language as a formal
static code, such a static view is applied also to filmic texts. These becomes
then a static object made by a chain of shots, that can be analysed as a static
object, i.e. in its physical surface as a succession of stills [15].

The problems arising from such a view are really difficult to solve. Such a view
in fact doesn't recognises in its theoretical assumptions the importance of main
factors due to the communicative concrete context as the factof being the
relationship between film and viewer (i.e. the dynamic movement of the filmic
space and the perception/understanding of it) a problematic one, nor it seems to
have good heuristic means to understand for example the a-symmetrical
co-presence of different and multiple semiotic elements (figures, spoken verbal
language, written verbal language, sounds, rumors etc.), inasmuch such a view is
centred on the mono-language communication. ù


However the main problem stemming from such a static view is in my humble
opinion the presupposed symmetrical association between the physical part of
sign and the one of meaning. In this sense the signification of a text seems to
be nothing but the succession of discrete units of contents transported by
physical means (the medium). In a previous work [16] I analysed a german strip
by Guido Sieber [17] where the succession of the verbal elements builds a text
dealing with how to seat educately at the table during lunch, while the figural
elements builds a text showing a grotesque serie of awful behaviour during
lunch. The contrast of these two (medial) elements builds a text where the
signification is an ironical view of education and of mankind. If we look at
this texts by using the traditional theories we won't ever get near to its real
significant function within the concrete communicative context.

This the same for what concerns filmic texts. The fact is that a semiotic
textual system (term I do prefer instead of sign system) bring into being a lot
of communicative strategies and procedures in order to build a semiotical
dimension, a semiotically based environment, which is something more that a
succession of sign expecially in a really complex textual system like film
[18]. 

The filmic text (as well as other types of text) construct a dynamic
signification, which is the result of the encounter between the physical
object(the text) and someone being in front of it. From this encounter the 
text takes its living feature. Signification is not something living per se, 
but always something arising from a communicative relationship. In this 
relationship the _signification_ of the filmic object is re-activated in its
high complexity. Such a _signification_ is in my opinion, not to be conceived 
as the bi-dimesional static decoding of meaning, but rather as the 
re-activation of a _semiotically-constructed world_ (which I call 
_interactional textual world_), i.e. a multidimensional environment, within 
a _relational space_, i.e. the space of the encounter between a text and human 
beings. In a wide sense by relational space I refer to the space of knowledge,
being it, in the sense of Peirce, always a tripartite relationship. I enriched
this assumption of Peirce's philosophy with the help of the notion _potential
space_ worked out by Winnicott (1971). He conceived of such a notion as the
intermediate zone between child and mother developing  due to the separation
from the mother's breast. In this sense I use the notion of _potential space_ as
the _tertium_ we are looking for in order to solve the question of the
subject/object relationship. In fact Winnicott's notion of potential space is 
a heuristic notion able to go beyond the opposition between these two terms,
being nothing but the space of the necessary mediating process between subject
and object. Winnicott's idea is that our experience is in reality neither an
internal state nor an external one, but in a way it is an experience of an
intermediate zone where we develop ourselves by playing, by creatively acting.
He writes:

"That play is in fact neither a matter of inner psychic reality nor a matter 
of external reality (Ibidem, 96)"


And further:  

"The baby's separating-out of the world of objects from the self is achieved
only through the absence of a space between, the potential space being filled in
the way that I am describing. 
It could be said that with human beings there can be no separation, only a
threat of separation; and the threat is maximally or minimally traumatic
according to the expericence of the first separatings.  
How one may ask, does separation of subject and object, of baby and mother, 
seem in fact to happen, and to happen with profit to all concerned, and in 
the vast majority of cases? And this in spite of the impossibility of
separation?  
[...] where there is trust and reliability is a potential space, one that 
can become an infinite area of separation, which the baby, child, adolescent,
adult may creatively fill with playing, which in time becomes the enjoyment 
of the cultural heritage.
The special feature of this place where play and cultural experience have a
position is that it depends for its existence on living experiences, not 
on inherited tendencies (ibidem, 108)"

This means that we have an emotional need bound up with it, and our
consciousness itself is due to it. 
Therefore it is the necessary ground of _signification_ as a continuous
processing of our reality. This lively acting within the potential space is for
me the semiotic acting, i.e. the construction of semiotic wholes; the creativity
develops itself as a semiotic process which practices by constructing such
objects.
The resulting notion is that of _semiotic space_ as the space where we
semiotically process our everyday life [19] by constructing semiotic wholes,
i.e. texts. 

The multidimensional environment of a text (such as a filmic one) is not
reducible to its physical surface, but rather is a complex communication-based
dynamic function of its many constructive elements, whose key lies in the human
cultural constant activity.

That means that signification is a creative dynamic process that cannot be
grasped with the poor bidimensionality of the traditional perspective based upon
a single _precise language_.  
Filmic texts are then a special complex type of semiotic constructing. They are
composed with a complex mixture of real matter (what is usually called
pro-filmic events i.e. people interacting), written verbal elements (titles,
didascalic scripts of silent films), special effects and lights, sounds and
rumors. All these elements compose a _special world_ which can enjoy, terrify or
even teach us, a world we experience during the interaction with that text.

Filmic texts are then a special complex type of semiotic constructing which is 
really far from the _logic model taken from verbal language_.

I think we have to take into serious consideration this fact.



Notes.

[1] I have been working out this analysis from 1992 in two phases. In the first
phase (from 1992 to 1994) I worked out an analysis mostly centred on
communication theory, linguistics and semiotics (see Teobaldelli 1998 a).  
In the second phase I enlarged the analysis to philosophy and psychology 
(see Teobaldelli: 1998b).

[2] The development of the model of the mathematical theory of communications
followed three basic steps: the publication of an essay by  Nyquist (1924)
dealing with the speed of transmission of messages in telegraphy; a research of
Hartley (1928) about the measure of the quantity of information and the
decreasing of  noise (Hartley: 1928) and the well know work by Shannon e Weaver
(1949).

[3] This measure stems from a basic postulate which links the concept of
information to that of _uncertainty_. It is assumed in fact that the
communication of a known or certain event have zero content of information.
Therefore information can be considered as a reduction of the initial
uncertainty. If we suppose to have a definite whole of possible symbols X, of
which S (i.e. the source) is on the point to transmit one to R (the recipient),
we can say that R considers all the symbols (and the signals corresponding to
them) as equally probable. Since, as said, the quantity of information is
expressed in terms of reduction of the initial uncertainty, and inasmuch are all
the symbols equally probable, consequently all the symbols will contain the same
quantity of information, i.e. I=log2 x; to each symbol we will thus assign the
probability of occurrence p=I/x ; therefore (by substituting the x ---> x= I/p)
the content of information will be log2I/p. 
Shortly speaking we can say that the content of information is proportionally
inverse to its probability of occurrence. The information theory offers to us
only a quantitative measure of information, by excluding any other level
(semantic, semiotic, cultural ones). It takes into account only the _formal
properties_ in the ambit of the technical level, i.e. the formal properties to
be transformed into electric pulse.

[4] In this sense is to be seen the referring De Saussure made to other types 
of code, which is not a consciousness of _non-verbal languages_. De Saussure 
in fact doesn't speak of kinesics or gesture, but of precise signalling 
systems as the road signalling, the death-and-thumb alphabet, etc., i.e. 
those systems where the correspondance between sign and content is 1 to 1. 

[5] He recognised the importance of the social living context, the use of space
within communication. He found thus the _proxemics_ as the discipline studying
such a communicative use of space within different cultures.

[6] "Das komplexe Objekt wird auf eine Summe einfacher Objekte zurückgeführt.
Der in den letzen zwanzig Jahren gefundene Weg semiotischer Untersuchungen
erlaubt es uns heute jedoch, vieles anders zu sehen. Wie man jetzt voraussetzen
kann, kommen in der Wirklichkeit keine Zeichensysteme vor, die völlig exakt und 
funktional eindeutig und in isolierter Form für sich allein funktionieren.[...]
Sie funktionieren nur, weil sie in ein bestimmtes semiotisches Kontinuum
eingebunden sind, das mit semiotischen Gebilden unterschiedlichen Typs, die 
sich auf unterschiedlichem Organisationsniveau befinden, angefüllt ist. 
(Lotman, 1990, 288)"

[7] I refer here to text not in the traditional meaning of verbal text, 
but rather to any  semiotic object (i.e. significant objects).

[8] Brian K. Aurand, 1998.

[9] Yet this can also be used to say that philosophy seems really not to have
good heuristic means to get close to the way signification is built at all. One
can in fact argues that the notion of _signification_ used by philosophy is very
far to be close to the real _signification_ occurring within concrete
communicational contexts, since it is really hard to isolate signification as a
pure verbal fact. .

[10] For a deeper analysis of this problem within semiotics and communication
theory see: Teobaldelli: 1993-94; 1995; 1998a.

[11] I discussed briefly this problem in: Teobaldelli, 1995.

[12] A personal proposal in this direction can be found in: Teobaldelli: 1998b.

[13] I mean, that since it is in reality hard to isolate a single system from
others co-occurring in time and space, we should think to a single sign system
_provisionally_ only as a theoretical device that helps us in analysing. Yet we
also should consequently start to think to some new terminology.

[14] As J.M. Carroll rightly underlines, see Carroll, J.M., 1980 pp.29-33.

[15] As unfortunately the same Carrol does.

[16] See Teobaldelli: 1993-94.

[17] See: Sieber, 1991.

[18] In this sense while I agree with Willemen's argument about the need to 
think to any cultural products in its communicative context as "essentially
dialectical" as well as I agree with his critical view of semiotics (see
Goldsmith: 1998), but I think ones have to avoid furhermore the use of any
verbal analogies in trying to understand how a cultural product, a text is
produced and then works within communicational contexts. His notion of _inner
speech_ in fact can flat the immaginative power of human symbolic activity on
the verbal constructing, while on the contrary when someone builds a filmic
text, he imagines a semiotical space where there are events, state-of-affairs
and objects, i.e. he conceives an environment which is made up among others by
figural and verbal elements. Therefore why to call such a symbolic activity
'speech'? (I prefer to call such a human faculty "connective ratio"; see
Teobaldelli: 1998b). 

[19] See in this regard: Teobaldelli: 1998b.

References.

Aurand, B. K., _Survey of a Field?_ , in "Film-Philosophy: Electronic
Salon", 31 May 1998,
<http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/film-philosophy/files/aurand.html>.

Birdwhistell, R.L., _Introduction to Kinesics_, Louisville, University of
Lousville Press, 1952.
- _Kinesics and Context_, Penguin, 1973	.

Carroll, J. M., _Toward a Structural Psychology of Cinema_, Mouton, The
Hague-Paris-New York, 1980.

Goldsmith, B., _To Be Outside and In-Between_, in "Film-Philosophy:
Electronic Salon", 2 October 1998 
<http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/film-philosophy/files/goldsmith.html>.

Hartley, R.V.L., _Transmission of Information_, in "Bell System Techn.", 7, 1928

Lotman, J., _Über die Semiosphäre_, in "Semiotik", Band 12, Heft 4,
Stauffenburg Verlag, Tübingen, pp. 287-305, 1990.

Petöfi, J. S., _Constitution and Meaning: A Semiotic Text-Theoretical
Approach_, in: Petöfi, Sözer & Conte, 1989, 507-542.

Petöfi, J. S.,  Sözer, E. & Conte, M. E., _Text and Discourse
Connectedness_, (eds.), John Benjamins, Amsterdam-Philadelphia, 1989.

Shannon, C. & Weaver, W., _The Mathematical Theory of Communication_,
University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1949.

Sieber, G., _Gutes Benehmen Bei Tisch_,  in "Kowalski", Nr.8, August 1991,
pp.41-44.

Teobaldelli, P., _For the Building of a Typology of Multimedia texts from
the perspective of semiotic textology_, degree's unpublished thesis,
University of Macerata, Dpt. of Philosophy and Humanities, 1993-94 (italian).
- _Aspects of multimedial communication_, 1995, in: Inkinen, S. (ed.),
_Mediapolis_, in press by De Gruyter, 1998.
- _Semiotica e Comunicazione_, in press by Baskerville, Bologna, 1998a
(italian).
- _The Semiotic Space.(critical thoughts for an integrated theory of human
communication)_, Ph.D. thesis, 1998b.

Willemen, P., _Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film
Theory_, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press; London:
British Film Institute, 1994.

Winnicott, D. W., _Playing and Reality_, Tavistock Publications, London, 1971.

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