“Film is difficult to explain because it is easy to understand… somewhere between lies the genius of film.” (P191
If film is distinguishable by its adherence to technology and technicalities, it is equally distinguishable by its esthetics. Understanding the technical dimensions (the science of film) can make us better readers of the films esthetics, or symbols (interpretation of meaning). In his book, How To Read A Film, James Monaco spends the first nearly 200 pages on the science before moving into the necessary function of interpretation.
As Monaco suggests, “much of films meaning comes not from what we see (or hear) but from what we don’t see.” He goes on to describe this as the ongoing act of comparing what we see with what we don’t see. Here the practice of studying function and form become a foundation for asking what these signs are pointing towards. And for this we need symbol, or language. As Walter Percy so wonderfully expresses in his book The Message in the Bottle, signs and symbol are both integral to our ability to speak about this world, the world we observe and experience, with any sense of coherency. Science is but one way of knowing and gets us to a singular point- the basic constrcution of a film. For us to know what a film means we must ask what a film is saying.
Which of course means understanding the artists role and the role of the viewer. As Monaco noted earlier on, one of the outcomes of modernism and its indebtedness to a singular way of knowing (science) is the collapse of the art itself into the product of the viewers own making. There’s an irony to this, as the reason for this is the gradual deconstruction of arts sacredness along with the sacredness of the artist. Art becomes a mirror of societies true form of worship- progress, and thus it no longer mirrors the world it is imitating but remakes the world in its own image.
And yet, at its heart, beholden as it is to technology and as captive as it becomes to the modern project, film, has the power to bind us to something more eternal, and what sits behind this is the simple reality of how it is that we know anything at all
Signs will always need symbols.
“Very few films are strictly denotative; they can’t help but be connotative, for to speak film is partly to invent it.” p 190
To speak is to invent. Invent what? Language.
Monaco bridges the line between the peculiar nature of film as a form without a language, and the fact that it functions LIKE a langauge. It simply cannot be broken down into parts that are able to speak on their own. The parts will always be compared with the whole, the same way language, or symbol, is appealing to something external to itself. The part stands for the whole or the whole for a part (p188), and in both cases remain interconnected in an appeal to knowledge, or to the act of knowing.
We learn to read the image to understand the image, as Monaco puts it.
Language analyzes. Or as Monaco insists, the real value of language, or symbol, is the wealth of meaning we can attach to it. Further, what’s unique about film is that it is a continuum of meaning. Which cannot be broken down and explained by the science of its construction. It is moving us towards something transcendent, something true about the sign, which includes a signifier and the signified, which the symbol is seeking to interpret.
There is yet another important facet of this, which connects to the difference between the page and the screen. Monaco notes that “The reader of a page invents the image, the reader of a film does not.” Yet he insists, both… must work to interpret (sign and symbol). What does this mean? The langauge that we find in the written or spoken word is itself evoking the need to imagine the image the word is signifying. Words give meaning to that image we sense but cannot otherwise explain. Film by contrast is both word and invention. And yet the power is found in the simple fact that this becomes, in a sense, it’s own language, it’s own word that must be interpreted all the same. It would be a fallacy to state that the technology erases this need for interpretation, even if modernism has spent so long convincing us that this must be the case.
The same is true for our observation and experience of this world. If technological advancement mirrors scientific advancement, the temptation of modernism is to be convinced that we have arrived at the ultimate meaning and truth, when in fact we have simply arrived at an understanding of its function and form. We haven’t collapsed a once robust interest in knowledge of the whole into its parts, nor have we filled in what is often stated by some superficial readings to be the god of the gaps. Our world is much the same as it has always been- function and form that require language and interpretation to say something about it. To know something about it. Rather than having done away with the need for such an appeal to transcendence and meaning and truth, the real illusion is this idea that these things can either be reduced to function and form or created in its own image. Art, and film, remind us that such truth must exist in order to be appealed to. Signs and symbols must have that external force of presence for art to matter, and perhaps the most compelling evidence that it does is the simple fact that art, even when presently being consumed by the narrow confines of the modernist enterprise, still seems to matter.
Even further, it still seems necessary and essential to knowing anything about this world that it is analyzing at all.
The Stories of my Life 