"Signs and Meaning in the Cinema", Peter Wollen

Peter Wollen (1938-2019) was a theorist, screenwriter (he co-wrote Antonioni’s The Passenger), film critic (in addition to Screen magazine, where he developed his film theories, he wrote for the New Left Review under the pseudonym Lee Russell) and filmmaker. His most famous films were co-signed with his wife Laura Mulvey. His most remembered work is the seminal book Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, which discussed, in a captivating and accessible way, the semiotic and structuralist approach in the cinematographic context. The book is divided into three parts: the first deals with the theoretical and filmic work of Eisenstein. The second, about the auteur theory, investigates the recurrence of themes and images in some directors' careers, namely Hawks and Ford. And the third one develops how a film should be seen as a system of signs and codes, a bearer of a personal language to which the viewer has to adapt himself, referencing also the aesthetic innovations of Jean-Luc Godard.

The edition we put avaliable here also contains some of his work as a film critic in New Left Review and a interview he imagined with his pseudonym Lee Russell.

“For Hawks the highest human emotion is the camaraderie of the exclusive, self-sufficient, all-male group. Hawks’s heroes are cattlemen, marlin-fishermen, racing-drivers, pilots, big-game hunters, habituated to danger and living apart from society, actually cut off from it physically by dense forest, sea, snow or desert. Their aerodromes are fog-bound; the radio has cracked up; the next mail-coach or packet-boat does not leave for a week. The élite group strictly preserves its exclu sivity. It is necessary to pass a test of ability and courage to win admittance. The group’s only internal tensions come when one member lets the others down (the drunk deputy in Rio Bravo, the panicky pilot in Only Angels Have Wings) and must redeem himself by some act of exceptional bravery, or occasionally when too much ‘individualism’ threatens to disrupt the close-knit circle (the rivalry between drivers in Red Line 7000, the fighter pilot among the bomber crew in Air Force). The group’s security is the first commandment: ‘You get a stunt team in acrobatics in the air – if one of them is no good, then they’re all in trouble.”

“Finally, he [Godard] began to conceive of making a film, not as communicating at all, but as producing a text in which the problems of film-making were themselves raised. This is as political an aspect of Godard’s cinema as the overtly political debate and quotation which also take place in it. For it is precisely by making things ‘difficult’ for the spectator in this way, by breaking up the flow of his films, that Godard compels the spectator to question himself about how he looks at films, whether as a passive consumer and judge outside the work, accepting the code chosen by the director, or whether within the work as a participant in a dialogue.”

“A valuable work, a powerful work at least, is one which challenges codes, overthrows established ways of reading or looking, not simply to establish new ones, but to compel an unending dialogue, not at random but productively.”

“I think film is plainly a polymorphous art. There is a limited sense in which film is a visual art, but it is also a narrative art, a dramatic art, a kinetic art, an auditory art, a performance art and so on. It operates on multiple sensory bands – optical, auditory, even tactile – and with multiple sign systems. That is its great strength as a form.”

Link to the complete book in PDF:
https://mega.nz/#!sG4UXSxQ!W6K7deG4kHF59xTNuDXGsaIzvIdL4Z0HNi6cPZQGuXs