Realization of Meaning:
Research in progress, June 16, 2024
The central obsession of film art is the search for the production and location of meaning.
A process of dynamic interaction-communication between reader-viewer and text-film.
The process by which the reader realizes an overall situation.
Meaning derived from a text-film is conditioned by everything that has been said or written before that text.
Ads, trailers, interviews, reviews, other texts by the same diretor, or same actors, stars, genre.
Reader-oriented literary/film criticism
The text can never be grasped as a whole, only as a series of changing viewpoints, each one retracted in itsef and necessary for further perspectives.
Jauss, 1982:
Horizon of expectations, aesthetic value is not the result o f the reader’s state of mind, but is determined by socio-cultural/historical elements, such as knowledge of genres, , antecedents of art forms and themes, distinctive but poetic ordinary language.
Peter Wollen has observed that cinema cannot show the truth, or reveal the truth, because the truth is not out there in the real world, waiting to be photographed.
What cinema can do is produce meanings, and meanings can only be plotted, not in relation to some abstract criterion of truth, but in relation to other meanings.
A classic artist in stable society can find it in the structure of that society, rituals, and values.
An artist in decadent society can locate it in the individual and his/her internalized structures of values, alienated from the context.
Modern, self-conscious artist creates its lack of meaning, thus validating the quest for meaning, while denying its existence.
