ove/hate. Attraction/repulsion. Admiration/scorn.
Those terms are uneasy partners, but collectively they convey much about cinema's
relationship with the written word. Filmmakers agree that words are necessary, praiseworthy,
even indispensable. But motion pictures are . . . well, motion pictures. The image
comes first, or so logic would appear to dictate.
In reality, the situation has been considerably more complicated. Critics who blame visual
media for producing "postliterate" or even "postverbal" generations overlook a long history of
popular film that has consistently placed language in the foreground,
from the prolix
intertitles of D.W. Griffith's
silent epics to the script-centered entertainment directed by George Cukor and
other giants of the studio system. Avant-gardists like Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton have gone further
still, blurring the boundaries between language and image by filling the screen with written
words.
True, a parallel tradition has pushed language into a subsidiarystatus, raising the danger that
visually saturated culture-consumers might let their verbal abilities atrophy. But this very
audience could point the way to a more word-savvy future, since a thirst for novelty fuels
developments in aesthetics and communications. If visual media are as hungry for new
image-ingredients as many observers claim, might a new explosion of word-consciousness now
await us, merging the capacities of language with new forms of presentation that enhance
rather than dilute its energy?
Cinema's ambivalence toward language has roots in the medium's earliest days, when the
difficulties of synchronizing image and sound led the film industry to proclaim silence a virtue
rather than a liability. Adding dialogue would turn movies into imitation
stage plays,
silent-film advocates like Sergei
Eisenstein and Charles
Chaplin argued. Better to nurture cinema as a unique art form--the only one capable of
stirring spectators through moving images alone.
This bias met a setback when talkies took over in the late 1920s, turning many movies into
"photographs of people talking," in Alfred Hitchcock's withering phrase.
Some directors insisted that montage and mise-en-scène must take
precedence over less cinematic components. But others learned to treasure well-written
dialogue as much as imaginatively placed cameras and crisply timed cuts. The pendulum
swung again in the '60s and '70s, when maverick filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman joined the spirit
of that era by privileging visual stylistics over verbal niceties. The debut of music video carried
this to extremes, convincing some observers that meaningful uses of language might vanish
from the motion-picture scene.
Reactions to this prospect have ranged from celebration to alarm, but both responses are
premature, since language has shown a knack for reasserting its relevance in the domain of
moving images. Just when visually aggressive artists were challenging the primacy of
word-based culture in the 1960s, for instance, French theorist Christian Metz
turned the tools of semiology--the science of signs and symbols--to the study of film, arguing
that cinematic significance can be understood via principles derived from modern linguistics.
More recently, Hollywood studios have rediscovered the merits of classic literary works by Jane Austen, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf.
Clues to the future of film and language are provided by a less lofty but currently inescapable
figure, Quentin Tarantino. Like
him or loathe him, he is indisputably a natural-born writer who compensates for shortages of
experience with a facility for blending offbeat camera-choreography with vital dialogue. His
models are not the great wordsmiths of old-the title "Pulp Fiction" sums up his aesthetic as
well as his appeal-- but like them, he has a healthy respect for the verbal dimensions of
cinema. He and other young innovators (Todd
Haynes, Whit
Stillman, Richard Linklater) still
recognize the value of carefully crafted words. So does the theater-trained David Mamet, whose
filmography includes such verbally adept works as the 1991 drama "Homicide" and this year's "The Spanish
Prisoner," a foray into labyrinthine wordplay.
Perhaps the most imposing sign of language's ability to renew itself in the Age of Images is the
attention being paid to the work of Jean-Luc
Godard, a founding member of France's revolutionary Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) movement in the 1950s. Godard's exploration of the
relationships among word, image, and sociopolitical meaning range from the improvisatory
poetics of "Breathless" and the scorched-earth provocations of "Weekend" to the metaphysical
musings of "Hail Mary" and the poststructuralist historiography of his "Histoire(s) du
cinéma" video series.
Godard's fascination with language has taken various forms, which I have explored through
research for two books on his work, a collection of interviews and a book of my own analytical
readings. In his early films he disrupted the flow of words in order to expose their complicity
with sociopolitical forces; during his most radical periods he foregrounded words in order to
undermine the tyranny of commercially seductive images; he has recently woven language,
picture, and music into dense collages that crack through conventional modes of signification.
Linking his works, critics have noted, is a determination to make language out of images, by
merging them into unprecedented combinations with undreamed-of meanings, and to make
images out of language, by subjecting written and spoken words to cinematic transformations
(novel graphics, superimpositions, and the like) that tease out the physical and metaphysical
substructures of verbality itself.
Given such ambitious goals, it is not surprising that Godard has slipped from public attention
as audiences show decreasing interest in what used to be called the art of cinema. Yet the past
year has seen international distribution of his most recent feature ("For Ever Mozart")
and a critically lauded reissue of his 1963 masterpiece "Contempt," a profoundly
language-conscious drama with roots in storytelling traditions as diverse as the Homeric epic
and the 20th century novel. The massive "Histoire(s) du
cinéma" is expected to bring another wave of attention when completed in
the near future.
Godard has a growing corps of admirers within the filmmaking world, moreover, from
postmodern video-art collagists to experimental storytellers
like Jon Jost in the United States
and Takeshi Kitano in Japan, who put
Godardian techniques to a wide variety of uses. Among these apostles is Hal Hartley, whose new comedy-drama
"Henry Fool"--about a self-taught author with an incendiary manuscript--takes a Godardian
view of the written word as a soul-shaking interface between the material depths and spiritual
heights of the human condition.
"Language is the house man lives in," said a character in Godard's seminal 1966 feature "Two
or Three Things I Know About Her," invoking one of Wittgenstein's key concepts; two
years later "Le Gai savoir" more somberly analyzed "the prison-house of language," in Nietzsche's phrase.
Recognizing language as both a comforting home and a confining jail, Godard and his
followers see cinema as an ideal tool for celebrating its expressive riches and subverting its
ability to limit us by perpetuating ingrained habits of thought and perception. The most
invigorating works of these filmmakers remind us that words and images are intricately linked,
as inseparable from each other as from the exhilarating possibilities of cinema itself.
Related links:
The Internet Movie Database
SCREENsite Reference
Shelf
Iris: A
Journal of Theory on Image and Sound
Millennium Film Journal, School of
Visual Arts
Cinema
History: Films from the Silent Era
The Film 100 (100 most influential people in
film history)
contempt.productions: Jean-Luc
Godard
Film Feature
Forum (English-language bibliography of European film journals)
Anthology Film Archives
National Film Preservation Board
DAVID
STERRITT, Ph.D., teaches film studies in Columbia's School of the Arts; he is
also film critic of the Christian Science
Monitor and a film professor at Long Island
University. He recently finished editing Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews, due later
this year from University Press of Mississippi,
and is now completing The Films of Jean-Luc Godard for the Cambridge Film
Classics series of Cambridge University Press. His other
books include Mad to Be Saved: The Beats, the '50s, and Film, coming this fall from
Southern Illinois University Press.
