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SIGNS AND MEANING IN THE CINEMA BY PETER WOLLEN Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 1969; hardcover, $5.95; softcover, $1 .95; 168 pages, stills.
REVIEWED BY BRIAN HENDERSON
Peter Wollen has written a handbook of intellectual fashion. Signs and Meaning in the Cinema- that is certainly the direction of the future; but what of the present? Has Wollen transformed film-critical discourse? Has he, more modestly, applied structuralism and linguistics usefully to cinema? We know there has been considerable structuralist attention to cinema in recent years, including essays by Levi-Strauss and Barthes, but this body of work is not yet translated. Until it is, Wollen's book must stand on its own; and stand, for better or worse, as the only structuralist analysis of cinema available in English.
Aside from pictures, the book is 90-odd pages long, divided about equally into three chapters. Chapter 1 is a competent brief introduction to Eisenstein's art and thought. Chapter 3 is an interesting but inconclusive discussion of cinema as a system of signs. Chapter 2, a correlation of the auteur theory with structuralist methods, is the section with teeth and, by any estimate, the most ambitious and important.
The equation central to Chapter 2 is that between myth and cinema, or more precisely, between the proper analysis of myths and the proper analysis of films. It is a structuralist axiom that myth does not depend upon style or syntax. Wollen quotes Levi-Strauss: "Its substance does not lie in its style, its original music, or its syntax, but in the story which it tells. Myth is language, functioning on an especially high level where meaning succeeds practically at 'taking off from the linguistic ground on which it keeps rolling." (Structural Anthropology, page 206) Applying this formula to cinema, Wollen rejects style as the unifying element in a director's work, or as itself a repository of meaning. He proposes instead that a director's career be analyzed in terms of "a core of repeated motifs," as folk-tales and myths are analyzed; this means analysis in terms of story, or more specifically, the structures of stories. To illustrate his method, Wollen discusses the work of two directors, Howard Hawks and John Ford. This lengthy section, moreover, takes the Wollenian method beyond explication and into evaluation:...