Dear David,

>Firstly, (forgive me if I'm completely misreading you Martin, but) affect
>cinema  is probably the central pillar of most filmmaking, as typified by
>advertising and all propaganda rhetoric.

You raise a good point. Doesn't Eisenstein start Nonindifferent Nature by
asking how should one go about portraying grief on film? Yet this is not
really what I was aiming at. As far as I'm concerned, affect is a
spectatorial constant. We cannot watch a film without affective
involvement: enjoyment, boredom, intellectual stimulation, curiosity are
all related to affect. Feelings - and here I refer to the work of American
philosopher/semiotician Charles S. Peirce - are at the source of all our
semiotic activities. In that sense, I am not really interested in what the
film "intends" to make  one feel or understand, but in examining
"spectating" as a semiotic act: one where a viewer uses signs so as to
interface with a film and produce a representation of it. That's what we do
when we watch a film. From this perspective, signs are not so much IN the
film (as structuralist semiology saw it), as in our spectatorial relation
to it. There is no doubt that images affect us: this is why, among other
things, we write about them and also why others attack images (literally -
see D. Freedberg's fascinating _Power of Images_ esp. chap. 14). Affect
colors our understanding of films (as it does our understanding of the
world) and determines in part what we can do with images. It plays a part
in the way we "semiotize" the film - in our "mise-en-signe" of it. A good
example of this would seem to be your own reaction to "Feel-Bad films". A
thorough consideration of the viewer's semiotic activity (much beyond that
of story construction to which narratologists and cognitivists have reduced
it) does indeed warrant a change in epistemological perspective within film
studies: as viewers we don't communicate with films. The communication
model is a poor metaphor for investigating the spectator's use of signs. Of
course, we can still discuss genres from an institutional point of view -
in terms of an industrial practice, for example. My point, however, is that
from a spectatorial point of view genres simply don't have the same
"reality". We can talk about films from at least 3 perspectives: that of
production (industrial considerations; filmmaker's intent, etc.); that of
the text (Eco's "Intentio Operis"; this is what  structuralists like Metz
and others were interested in); that of the spectator. One cannot adopt the
latter and still behave as if nothing had changed - epistemologically
speaking. Truth conditions become different and reality acquires a
shifting/dynamic quality (as far as I'm concerned, this change is related
to Peirce's notion of a "dynamic object" and to his own brand of both
Idealism and Realism as found in his "Pragmaticism" and "Semeiotic"). At
first, it can be difficult NOT to see affect IN the film. Intuitively,
someone will say that this or that film or scene has made him/her laugh,
though in fact, we make ourselves laugh. The film merely gives us a support
on which to hang affect (as well as cognitive understanding and elaborate
symbolic forms...). Not everyone semiotizes a film in the same way.
Moreover, we can semiotize it differently at different moments in our
lives: films that moved me as a child now make sense to me through very
different semiotizations. In this sense the notion of affect cinema - if it
is understood from the perspective of the text - has little interest for
me...

I realize that I'm taking the debate in a different direction - but I just
wanted to clarify my position a little...


Yours,

Martin Lefebvre









___________________________
Martin Lefebvre


L'École de cinéma Mel Hoppenheim

Rédacteur en chef
Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry

FB-319, Université Concordia
1455, de Maisonneuve ouest
Montréal (Québec), H3G 1M8
tél.:514.848.4676; télec.: 514.848.4255





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