The Language of Movies
Ashmead, John
John Ashmead: The Language of Movies and Kubrick's Clockwork Orange From talking to a good many audiences about linguistic analysis of films, I have concluded my best tactic is The Outflank. As...
...Even this art, in this kind of society, the Clockwork Orange warns us, becomes an art of masturbation...
...Hoorah for open-border plans of the peoples' democratic socialist republics...
...The code of the camera - long shot, middle shot, closeup, big closeup...
...When the Times lights my fire, I just don't know what I'm saying...
...a costume, decoration and makeup code along pop art lines...
...When I saw audiences at the Montreal Expo watch the then new split screen techniques - or codes - so far as I could tell not one person of the hundreds around me had any problem in learning these codes...
...Integration hits the spot even if it costs a lot...
...Uh-uh...
...And the actor...
...I love her because she is even-handed...
...And it is no accident that in my conversations with teachers and critics of the auteur persuasion, I find that they dislike the linguistic approach...
...Viddy well," says Alex to the bound and gagged husband - Watch well...
...But also the cameraman (or lighting cameraman...
...overhead diffused lighting and so-called natural, chiaroscuro lighting...
...Noam Chomsky has made it clear to us: we have badly underestimated the complexity of human linguistic codes...
...She'll be there, as she always is, with the wind blowing through her prejudices, waiting for me (played by Freddie Bartholomew or maybe even Jimmy Lydon...
...Clockwork Orange, a beautifully complex movie, adds to the five above the music, highly original, of Walter Carlos...
...East Germany and Poland are "open-border" countries and Brazil...well, Brazil is just awful...
...But here let's only mention some of the more obvious connotative codes whose axis intersects the axis of the denotative code...
...And even more, for this proposition, from the pioneering work of Christian Metz...
...Well Diary, 'nuff said for tonight...
...On page eight there are but two stories, a big one and a little one...
...camera angle snooting up, camera angle shooting down...
...Other films, such as those of Eisenstein or Chaplin, stress the connotative axis...
...Sorry, Diary, I got carried away...
...For instance...
...Are we perhaps being told of connotative code which interrelates homosexuality and gang violence...
...In Kubrick's Clockwork Orange, shooting up at Alex when he's about to rape the writer Alexander's wife, shooting down at Alex - between a nearly nude actress's bosoms (what panache...
...As Prop Two - each film has as one axis a denotative code, a succesive chain of about eight different kinds of Minimal Filmic Units (MFU...
...His next major crime will be the killing of the cat lady with a penis statue, as she tries to defend herself with a bust of Beethoven...
...Since language in English has several different senses, ranging from de Saussure's Language (langue) to Speech (parole) let's talk from now on about the code, or rather the codes of our movie, for we're dealing not with one code, but a plurality of codes in each film...
...And a second corollary to my first proposition, a corollary which I hope is self-evident...
...Hissss...
...Viddy well, my droogs...
...Integration for integration's sake...
...Curse you, Dick Nixon and your frivolous replies...
...As many outrangeous propositions as possible...
...Quite the opposite...
...Note the minor metonym of the damaged elevator, the damaged technology, of the new socialist state...
...The freighter could not be identified because of darkness...
...A repressed homosexuality which finds overt expression on the one hand in Playboy, on the other in Mylai...
...But the theatrical scenic quality of Clockwork Orange is not to be so easily accounted for...
...And my first proposition is that each film of any originality - let's take the Clockwork Orange - is in a unique language (I mean unique to itself) which for some mysterious and fascinating reason we are able to read almost instantly without any special difficulty...
...Can we speculate even further, that a good deal of the violence of America (and this is an American film for all its British dress - note the stress on blows to the crotch, four of them, as against one in the novel -) is rooted in this covert homosexuality...
...Cabaret stresses such parallel syntagmas to intercut decadent night-clubbing homosexuals with Nazi storm-troopers beating up Jews...
...There are a few ordinary sequences, MFU's in which dull or unnecessary bits of action are omitted, as in the hogs-of-the-road auto drive...
...In Clockwork Orange this takes place in the lobby of Alex's apartment...
...With a digression on indebtedness...
...There is no audio-visual filmic literacy, and no audio-visual illiteracy either and we don't need the aid of audiovisual fakirs, pedagogical or critical, as we chomp our popcorn at the flics...
...To some extent, I start from the linguistics, the glossematics of the Danish linguist, Hjelmslev...
...Perfect...
...And damn the torpedoes, Gridley...
...But linguistic analysis of movies is not going to support that theory...
...On to Prop Four...
...these are predominantly metaphorical, as in a Chaplin dissolve in Gold Rush in which his partner sees him as an edible bird...
...Even if it produces no educational gains...
...Are we to go further, in our decoding of Clockwork Orange and read this theatrical scene (as so often in Kubrick's scenes in this movie the camera occupies a fixed position, orchestra third row center) as role playing of a dangerous kind, on the surface highly masculine, under the surface homosexual and sadistic...
...I love her most of all because she's cute...
...She has one today in which the following sentence appears: "We believe that the integrated school, even if it produced no educational gains, must be the goal of a free society...
...In Welles's Magnificent Ambersons, shooting up and down their magnificient staircase...
...And the conclusion of the film shows the hero once more able to have an organsm while listening to...
...Alex has just come from a drug-orgy group grope or possibly rape, which followed his orgasm-masturbation to the music of Beethoven's Ninth, which in turn followed his rape-beating of the wife of the writer Alexander...
...Even the denotative code has its stylistics...
...Cease this nocturnal savagery...
...What kind of coding is this, where without any great bother to the audience, the meaning of the coding changes from film to film...
...The script writer...
...At once, metonymy - the part for the whole, one concept for another, the sceptre for the king - we recall the whole scene, in which - curious posture...
...In general, Sci-fi flicks, the basic genre of Clockwork Orange, have a lot to explain, and they rely on scenes...
...These eight MFU's serve to set forth the plot, what the French call the diegesis, the simplest narrative axis of the film...
...a sex code (stress on male and to a lesser extent female phallic symbols...
...A movie is usually the creation of at least five, sometimes six or more, often warring linguistic factions...
...There is then a theatrical, role-playing quality to this denotative code...
...AVEY (continued from page 7) planes on supply barges supplying a freighter...
...This music has a codal life of its own...
...deep focus, shallow focus...
...And the brassiere, reminder of a fleeting rape...
...We didn't defeat Helmut Dantine and all the rest of that crew by bombing defens-less freighters in the dark...
...Stop this terrible after-dark bombing...
...Why don't we have (I am speaking of the usual kinds of movies and not of short experimental films) more resistance than we do, of the kind that is still a major part of the anti-reception of a novel such as Joyce's Finnegan's Wake...
...Why is it so easy for audiences to understand these bundles of unique codes we call movies...
...Dim had held the writer Alexander's wife standing in front of him, so that Alex could penetrate and ravish her...
...The other headline tells a different tale: BRAZIL WILL RETAIN CURBS ON LIBERTIES...
...The camera angle shifts from up to down, following the psychological reversals of his relationship with his rebellious gang, they are against him because he disciplined Dim by hitting him in the crotch (that kind of blow is not in the novel, by the way...
...We have the Church of England code of the Anglican father...
...The big one carries this headline: POLISH-EAST GERMAN TOURISM BOOMING UNDER OPEN BORDER PLAN...
...But I don't care...
...John Ashrnead is a professor of English at Haverford...
...First, a non-proposition...
...Beethoven, and imagining violent public, homosexual sex...
...And to the accompaniment of great violence, which cripples the writer Alexander...
...Good night sweet-heart...
...an age code (the tramps) and a youth code (Alex and his droogs and teeny boppers...
...Goddam it, Errol Flynn didn't bomb in the dark...
...The dominant theory of movie making today is the auteur theory, that the director is the creator of the movie...
...Decode as - social superiority, aesthetic counterpoint to verbal battling, ravisher and ravished...
...At the decisive point in their argument, Alex sits on Dim's lap, his codpiece butting against that of Dim, in a strikingly homosexual posture...
...In Murnau's Last Laugh, shooting up at the doorman when he's still doorman, shooting down at the ex-doorman when he's cleaning urinals...
...a gang warfare code (Alex and Billyboy...
...When I talk of the language of movies, I don't mean that film is a language-one which we learn in much the same way we learn a foreign language...
...A tantalizing first corollary to my first proposition...
...And with Prop Three, in my view, we can perhaps see why potentially at least, Hjelmslevian linguistics is more attractive to the student of culture than either structural linguistics or transformational generative linguistics...
...The astonishing thing then, about movie codes of all kinds, is not their rapid growth in the short span of seventy-five years, but the comparative ease with which audiences all over the world have learned these codes...
...Take her editorials...
...To understand that point more deeply, we need a third proposition...
...Pro-American story, right...
...Note that to have our minimal flimic unit we have to have both cops and motorists - we read them as occupying simultaneous time slots...
...Get the picture...
...Here, a slight gearshift of terminology, please...
...Three of the scenes are set in theaters: the gang duel, the first conditioning of Alex, the demonstration that he is in fact conditioned against sex, violence and Beethoven...
...But before we come to those, how is it or what is it that enables us to connect the denotative axis with the connotative axis...
...the liberal code of the writer Alexander (which by the way doesn't keep him from driving Alex the gangster to an attempt at suicide, partly out of revenge, and partly to secure a political victory over the party in power...
...The director, yes...
...School integration, which most scholarly evidence shows can come about only through the use of force, is a "goal" for a "free society...
...I can't wait until I see her again tomorrow...
...Beautiful...
...They all tell me that I'm too young, that this is just a teen-age crush...
...Come back to one of our starting riddles...
...By way of rough hypothesis, let's conceive of a shifter, a metaphor metonym which links the two planes...
...No way, at least no be-haviorist way, by which we could have learned our linguistic code by the age of five or six, unless we assume innate ability, or imprinting which makes that almost infinite learning possible...
...And the damaged art, for the socialist realist wall painting of happy workers has been ballooned into significant phallic graffiti - If it moves, kiss it" - "Suck me and see...
...the tough policeman's code (the warder, and Alex's former companions turned cop...
...Intersecting our denotative code and its successive chain of MFU's we argue a series of connota-tive codes of various kinds...
...A Tom Mix film, on the other hand, uses alternating syntagmas in combination with descriptive syntagmas, panning shots of Tony the Wonder'Horse and his Rocky Mountains...
...But aren't movies, with their bundles of unique codes, in some ways even more complex...
...Film directors show a surprisingly individual use of these...
...More, much more, from the French periodical Communications and its principal editor Roland Barthes...
...And we have a surprising number of corridor scenes, again no mere mannerism, but a strong hint of entering a stage from the wings...
...Far more than the relatively trivial argument about freedom and conditioning, this is the musically encoded warning of Clockwork Orange...
...For the starting point of the gang rebellion and the crucial scene we analyzed above was an act of disrespect to Beethoven...
...To see a film is to discover the unique rules of its codes...
...Has anyone ever put it so neatly or so sweetly...
...Singing in the Rain was the contribution of Alex, the actor Malcolm McDowell) Is it perhaps the linguistic, the coding battle among these five or so which ensures that the code will have some possibility of being readily decodable...
...Often we have backlighted sequences, not just a stylistic trick, as some reviewers suggested, but as though we were actors looking across footlights...
...Such stress, as in the films of Griffith, gives a great emphasis to metonymy and relies on what I have called autonomous shots, that is inserted dreams and flashbacks...
...What kind of sex act is this, which must be performed before other men, and indeed towards one of one's own gang...
...On page five between ads for Bergdorf Goodman and Macys there is a poignant headline: VIETCONG ASSERT A SERIOUS REPLY BY NIXON COULD HAVE ENDED THE WAR...
...T o read Clockwork Orange we must then be keenly aware of metonyms...
...Clockwork Orange is predominantly scenic, that is, the majority of its MFU's are like stage scenes, with interspersed autonomous shots, shots which interrupt the narrative flow, to show dreams, flashbacks, recollections...
...The three gang members lounge in the broken furniture, codpieces conspicuously protruding...
...That's my girl...
...A Pabst film, Joyless Street is rich in parallel syntagmas, contrasting shots of the lives of poor people and wealthy people...
...Boo to liberty-curbing Brazil...
...A Mack Sen-nett comedy of the Keystone Cops variety often specializes in the MFU called an alternating syntagma, one in which the camera cuts back and forth from pursuing cops to fleeing husband-motorist...
...Such ordinary sequences, by the way, are a dominant part of almost any Douglas Fairbanks adventure - Robin Hood, The Mark of Zorro and the like - and give these films their breathless quality...
...Roman Jakobson was the first, I believe, to notice that some films stress what I have called the denotative code, the filmic diegesis or succession of MFU's...
...Beethoven is a metonym for classical art...
...Now for my second proposition...
...Much of my own recent work has been to try to impose a little more system on this chaos of connotative codes...
...Clockwork Orange is a good example...
...Put a halt...
...Once great art is perverted, in a drug and record culture, the perversion of freedom and education cannot be far behind...
...We might have hit a peace-loving Liberian freighter or even, gulp, a Chinese one, because we bomb in the dark...
...The most economical way to locate a dominant shifter is to go to a crucial scene, what the old school texts used to call a turning point...
...I love her because she's so blunt...
...Warning - we are about to have a substition of an R or restricted version of Clorkwork Orange in which several of the more obvious scenes will be toned down...
...Get it...
...when he's been psychologically raped into impotence...
...She just has a way of saying things that completely win my heart...
...The editor...
Vol. 6 • November 1972 • No. 2
