Annie Hall and the Issue of Modernism

There is an essential paradox in the historical development of the commercial cinema: as the medium's technological evolution has enhanced its capacity for representation, its narrative and thematic evolution has been toward codification, convention, and artifice. While, on the one hand, the modem spectator recognizes the close affinity between his perception of images on the screen and of their represented objects in reality, there is a strong perceptual countercurrent caused by the cumulative effect of the cinema's narrative conventions. The spectator generally has learned to negotiate the film story and its ideology only indirectly in terms of his own experience; essentially, he negotiates the story in terms of his previous experience of the form itself. Thus, the modernist (or "post-realist") would contend that the inherent photographic realism of the indexical imagery ultimately is negated-or at least severely qualified-by the symbolic, iconographie codification of those images within the conventions of narrative cinema.

Structuralist analysts (identified, significantly, as either theorists or critics) propose, in the tradition of de Saussure, to glean the myriad "systems of signification" in which any act of narrative discourse participates. The term modernist generally is assigned to any narrative which manifests a certain degree of self-awareness-or in more fashionable parlance, or self reflexivity-regarding the narrative, thematic, or formal conventions at work in the circuit of discourse in which it is communicated. Modernism is opposed to one of several terms-traditional, classical, realist, conventional-which designates a narrative system whose function is to conceal its codes (its formal and narrrative conventions) and sustain a hermetically closed, logically consistent formally transparent fictional world. The modernist text, in its self-reflexive stance, is said to subvert the codes of both classical narrative discourse and the production-consumption modes which sustain it. But I should affirm that this opposition is not absolute-the two represent conceptual, functional parameters. The difference between the classical and modernist text is essentially one of degree and not of kind, in that the qualities of modernism are latent in all narratives.

Roland Barthes, perhaps the most articulate proponent of narrative structural analysis, has confronted this issue by suggestion that narrative fiction is dominated in both its creation and apprehension by two antithetical but related qualties: the Usable and the scriptable. It is significant that these French terms...