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...
...What kind of coding is this, where without any great bother to the audience, the meaning of the coding changes from film to film...
...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...
...AVEY (continued from page 7) planes on supply barges supplying a freighter...
...Once great art is perverted, in a drug and record culture, the perversion of freedom and education cannot be far behind...
...I can't wait until I see her again tomorrow...
...Clockwork Orange, a beautifully complex movie, adds to the five above the music, highly original, of Walter Carlos...
...In Clockwork Orange this takes place in the lobby of Alex's apartment...
...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...
...A movie is usually the creation of at least five, sometimes six or more, often warring linguistic factions...
...Note that to have our minimal flimic unit we have to have both cops and motorists - we read them as occupying simultaneous time slots...
...The code of the camera - long shot, middle shot, closeup, big closeup...
...There is then a theatrical, role-playing quality to this denotative code...
...T o read Clockwork Orange we must then be keenly aware of metonyms...
...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...
...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...
...And even more, for this proposition, from the pioneering work of Christian Metz...
...an age code (the tramps) and a youth code (Alex and his droogs and teeny boppers...
...Hoorah for open-border plans of the peoples' democratic socialist republics...
...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...
...Clockwork Orange is a good example...
...Take her editorials...
...And to the accompaniment of great violence, which cripples the writer Alexander...
...a gang warfare code (Alex and Billyboy...
...We have the Church of England code of the Anglican father...
...John Ashrnead is a professor of English at Haverford...
...But also the cameraman (or lighting cameraman...
...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...
...By way of rough hypothesis, let's conceive of a shifter, a metaphor metonym which links the two planes...
...Curse you, Dick Nixon and your frivolous replies...
...On to Prop Four...
...And the brassiere, reminder of a fleeting rape...
...Beethoven, and imagining violent public, homosexual sex...
...That's my girl...
...Hissss...
...Other films, such as those of Eisenstein or Chaplin, stress the connotative axis...
...Get the picture...
...Here, a slight gearshift of terminology, please...
...Integration hits the spot even if it costs a lot...
...What kind of sex act is this, which must be performed before other men, and indeed towards one of one's own gang...
...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...
...For instance...
...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...
...Why is it so easy for audiences to understand these bundles of unique codes we call movies...
...We might have hit a peace-loving Liberian freighter or even, gulp, a Chinese one, because we bomb in the dark...
...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...
...Even this art, in this kind of society, the Clockwork Orange warns us, becomes an art of masturbation...
...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...
...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...
...We didn't defeat Helmut Dantine and all the rest of that crew by bombing defens-less freighters in the dark...
...Much of my own recent work has been to try to impose a little more system on this chaos of connotative codes...
...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...
...Even if it produces no educational gains...
...Film directors show a surprisingly individual use of these...
...With a digression on indebtedness...
...Viddy well, my droogs...
...But linguistic analysis of movies is not going to support that theory...
...Cabaret stresses such parallel syntagmas to intercut decadent night-clubbing homosexuals with Nazi storm-troopers beating up Jews...
...East Germany and Poland are "open-border" countries and Brazil...well, Brazil is just awful...
...The dominant theory of movie making today is the auteur theory, that the director is the creator of the movie...
...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...
...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...
...Quite the opposite...
...Are we perhaps being told of connotative code which interrelates homosexuality and gang violence...
...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...
...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 freighter could not be identified because of darkness...
...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...
...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...
...As many outrangeous propositions as possible...
...Integration for integration's sake...
...To see a film is to discover the unique rules of its codes...
...I love her most of all because she's cute...
...camera angle snooting up, camera angle shooting down...
...A tantalizing first corollary to my first proposition...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...these are predominantly metaphorical, as in a Chaplin dissolve in Gold Rush in which his partner sees him as an edible bird...
...Has anyone ever put it so neatly or so sweetly...
...To understand that point more deeply, we need a third proposition...
...Beethoven is a metonym for classical art...
...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...
...And a second corollary to my first proposition, a corollary which I hope is self-evident...
...Noam Chomsky has made it clear to us: we have badly underestimated the complexity of human linguistic codes...
...And damn the torpedoes, Gridley...
...Well Diary, 'nuff said for tonight...
...Now for my second proposition...
...Come back to one of our starting riddles...
...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...
...But I don't care...
...She just has a way of saying things that completely win my heart...
...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...
...And the conclusion of the film shows the hero once more able to have an organsm while listening to...
...the tough policeman's code (the warder, and Alex's former companions turned cop...
...Far more than the relatively trivial argument about freedom and conditioning, this is the musically encoded warning of Clockwork Orange...
...A repressed homosexuality which finds overt expression on the one hand in Playboy, on the other in Mylai...
...The three gang members lounge in the broken furniture, codpieces conspicuously protruding...
...deep focus, shallow focus...
...The script writer...
...Put a halt...
...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...
...Even the denotative code has its stylistics...
...But aren't movies, with their bundles of unique codes, in some ways even more complex...
...Dim had held the writer Alexander's wife standing in front of him, so that Alex could penetrate and ravish her...
...To some extent, I start from the linguistics, the glossematics of the Danish linguist, Hjelmslev...
...In general, Sci-fi flicks, the basic genre of Clockwork Orange, have a lot to explain, and they rely on scenes...
...overhead diffused lighting and so-called natural, chiaroscuro lighting...
...Boo to liberty-curbing Brazil...
...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...
...Beautiful...
...Goddam it, Errol Flynn didn't bomb in the dark...
...But the theatrical scenic quality of Clockwork Orange is not to be so easily accounted for...
...This music has a codal life of its own...
...The other headline tells a different tale: BRAZIL WILL RETAIN CURBS ON LIBERTIES...
...Viddy well," says Alex to the bound and gagged husband - Watch well...
...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...
...And the actor...
...Get it...
...Good night sweet-heart...
...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...
...I love her because she is even-handed...
...The director, yes...
...Note the minor metonym of the damaged elevator, the damaged technology, of the new socialist state...
...A Pabst film, Joyless Street is rich in parallel syntagmas, contrasting shots of the lives of poor people and wealthy people...
...And we have a surprising number of corridor scenes, again no mere mannerism, but a strong hint of entering a stage from the wings...
...More, much more, from the French periodical Communications and its principal editor Roland Barthes...
...Intersecting our denotative code and its successive chain of MFU's we argue a series of connota-tive codes of various kinds...
...a costume, decoration and makeup code along pop art lines...
...When the Times lights my fire, I just don't know what I'm saying...
...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...
...On page eight there are but two stories, a big one and a little one...
...when he's been psychologically raped into impotence...
...School integration, which most scholarly evidence shows can come about only through the use of force, is a "goal" for a "free society...
...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...
...But here let's only mention some of the more obvious connotative codes whose axis intersects the axis of the denotative code...
...Pro-American story, right...
...Decode as - social superiority, aesthetic counterpoint to verbal battling, ravisher and ravished...
...Perfect...
...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...
...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...
...Cease this nocturnal savagery...
...Uh-uh...
...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...
...Sorry, Diary, I got carried away...
...I love her because she's so blunt...
...The editor...
...They all tell me that I'm too young, that this is just a teen-age crush...
...The big one carries this headline: POLISH-EAST GERMAN TOURISM BOOMING UNDER OPEN BORDER PLAN...
...For the starting point of the gang rebellion and the crucial scene we analyzed above was an act of disrespect to 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...
...In Welles's Magnificent Ambersons, shooting up and down their magnificient staircase...
...Often we have backlighted sequences, not just a stylistic trick, as some reviewers suggested, but as though we were actors looking across footlights...
...First, a non-proposition...
...Stop this terrible after-dark bombing...
Vol. 6 • November 1972 • No. 2
