MondaysAugust 01, 2005Monday Night 08.01.05 -- Discussion/Talk -- Olga SolovievaMonday Night 08.01.05 -- Discussion/Talk -- Olga Solovieva "The Scene of Christ, or Contents: 1. About this Monday Night _________________________________________ What: Presentation / Discussion This Monday night, film scholar Olga Solovieva
Olga Solovieva is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department Olga teaches courses and writes articles on cinema, Her writing on Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra This summer Olga is teaching a course called "Quentin _________________________________________ Abstract This paper will discuss Pier Paolo Pasolini’s semiotic theory and his film The Gospel According to Saint Matthew in relation to then-recent modern research on the sign language of the deaf, inaugurated by the book of the American linguist William C. Stokoe (1960) entitled Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual Communication of the American Deaf. Pasolini’s cinematic translation of St. Matthew’s gospel into the cinematic language of his film (1964) operates like a ‘transliteration’ of a verbal text into a bodily sign language of the deaf with its system of gesticulations and mimicry realized in time and space. The Gospel According to St. Matthew figured as a practical point of departure for Pasolini’s theorizing about the poetic language of cinema, whose mode of expression he saw as analogous to the expressive ‘language’ of reality itself. Sing language offers us a lucid model for such a ‘language of reality’ existing in a system of movements, natural but codified. Its notation systems are images and signs at the same time. Pasolini’s technique of adaptation of the gospel can be understood in terms of such notations, which were attempted by means of primitive cinema and photography already by the end of the nineteenth century. Characteristically, the director concentrates on the visualization of the dialogue or monologue passages of the gospel, which can be represented as tableaux. Words pronounced in monotonous, declamatory style maintain the material deafness of the written language, but are transliterated into the hieroglyphically sculptured landscapes and pictorially transfigured in the space by arrangement of the characters in the mise-en-scène. Pasolini transcribes the natural expressivity of the profilmic in a way that recalls paper notations of the bodily language. Narrative passages of the gospel are totally replaced by the movement of the camera and motion of the characters on the screen and are most often accompanied by a moaning, sighing, crying soundtrack. The emphasis on motion functions analogously to the syntax of sign language, which is conveyed through turns of the torso in relation to a certain point in space. Similarly, the panning movements of Pasolini’s camera often follow the bodily movements of the character: for example, the camera’s pan following Joseph’s body when he lies down to sleep. I will attempt to show how the semiotic logic of the sign system of the deaf allows us to account for Pasolini’s synthesis of linguistic sign with cinematic image, of the notated sign’s flatness with its concrete realization by movement in three-dimensional space by means of the insertion of the concept of the body as an organic medium and carrier of the linguistically codified expressivity imitated by the camera. _________________________________________ Olga V. Solovieva At the opening of the gallery of Modern Art in Bologna in March of 1975, the Italian performance artist Fabio Mauri organized a happening in which Pasolini’s film ‚The Gospel According to St. Matthew‘ was projected onto the director‘s own body. The logic of this event drives home, and this quite literally, the essential moment of Pasolini’s aesthetics of cinema, its rootedness in a ritualized, meaningful body, the body of the camera, which figures as an extension of the body of its human operator, in a broader sense, of the film-maker himself. Fabio Mauri‘s projection returns Pasolini’s film back where it originated, in the three- dimensional space once occupied by the camera’s body-work. The German critic Karsten Witte wrote about bodily geography in Pasolini’s films, of bodies as locations and locations as bodies. He called his essay‚Körperorte,‘ fusing both words Körper ‚body‘ and Orte ‚locations‘ in one, as the body and the location fuse on Pasolini’s screen. The camera-work conceived of in bodily terms is central to Pasolini’s theorizing about the poetic language of cinema, for which his work on the gospel-film was a practical point of departure. Pasolini sees the poetic language of cinema as participating in the expressive ‚language‘ of reality itself. The poetry consists in those creative deviations which the film-maker‘s camera wrings from the natural expressivity of the pro-filmic. And the film-making is a mediation by means of the camera between the language-system of reality, as Pasolini calls the natural expressivity of pro-filmic landscapes and faces, and the imaginary of the film-maker, who shapes them through his idiosyncratic individual usage of the camera into pictorial icons. This mediation is conceived of by Pasolini in linguistic and bodily terms of a mute dialogue of gestures, movements, and visual signs. This language of reality is thought by Pasolini as analogous to the system of the sign-language of the deaf and mute. In his essay ‚The Cinema of Poetry‘ he writes about this sign-language as follows: „This system of signs by gestures which, in practice, accomponies the system of linguistic signs as its complement, can be isolated as an autonomous system and become the object of a study. One can even suppose, by abstract hypothesis, the existence of a unique system of signs by gestures as unique instrument of communication for man (in sum: deaf and dumb Neapolitans): it is from such a hypothetical system of visual signs that language derives the foundation of its existence and the possibility of allowing the formation of a series of naturally communicative archetypes.“ Pasolini’s speculations about the sign-language as an equivalent to the language of reality is reminiscent of the characterization of the sign-language as the language of natural signs once given to it by the French priest l’abbé de l’Épée who started studying the sign-language systematically in the eighteenth century. The sign-language was, indeed, traditionally perceived as a ‚language of reality‘. Pasolini writes: „The fact of walking alone in the street, even with our ears stopped up, constitutes a continual dialog between ourselves and an environment which expresses itself by the meditation of the images which compose it: the physiognomy of the passers-by, their gestures, their signs, their actions, their silences, their expressions, their collective reactions (people waiting at red lights , a crowd around a street-accident or around a monument); besides, traffic signs, indicators, counterclockwise rotaries are in sum objects charged with meanings and which utter a brute ‚speech‘ by their very presence.“ The objects, enumerated by Pasolini, signify by movement, as the bodies do in the process of gesticulation so that their expressivity appears as natural and codified at once. The sign-language of reality given in this description is akin to sign-language of the deaf and mute, insofar as in both cases the medium of the signification and the signifiers metonymically overlap. More than a decade before Pasolini, Alexander Astruc insisted on the unique language-like expressivity of cinema and coined his famous metaphor of the camera-stylo, in order to emphasize the expressive capacities of the camera-work instead of the representational ones. In Pasolini’s similarly articulated call for the cinema of poetry, the camera is conceptualized as a signing body of a deaf. He entrusts the camera-movement with semiotic potential in the same degree as the reality itself is conceived of by him as semiotically codified system of communication. It is out of the complex process of interaction between the two that the poetic language of the cinema emerges. In 1960, only four years before Pasolini speculated about the potentially linguistic nature of gestural expressivity and experimented with its exploitation in cinema, the American linguist William C. Stokoe inaugurated the systematic linguistic study of sign language and developed the first comprehensive system of its notation by showing the triple nature of a sign-unit in sign-language of the deaf and mute. The sign in the sign-language has a complex structure which indeed corresponds to Pasolini’s camera-work in the gospel-film. It consists of the tabula, the designator, and the signation. The tabula is the upper part of the body against which the movement of the hand is positioned. It can be, for example, an upper or a lower arm, a left or a right shoulder, chest or different parts of the head. The designator is a configuration of the hand. There are twenty-six such configurations which usually correspond to the letters of the alphabet. And the signation is the actual sign whose meaning depends on the particular movement of the designator in relation to the tabula. The hand can be positioned at a distance to the body, or it can touch it. It can move in circular movements or go up and down, or to the left or right. The syntax in the sign language is conveyed through turns of the torso in relation to a certain point in space as well as through facial expression. This model, indeed, seems to be apt to describe Pasolini’s linguistics of gesticulation as a prototype of the language of reality and of camera-movement which in their colaboration signate in the image-signs the visual counterpart to the verbal content of the gospel. Characteristically, the director concentrates on the visualization of the dialogue and monologue passages of the gospel, which are represented as tableaux accompanied by the monotonous voice-over. Words pronounced in declamatory style maintain the material deafness of the written language. They appear to be transliterated into the hieroglyfically sculptured landscapes or pictorially transfigured in space by arrangement of the characters in the mise-en-scene. Narrative passages of the gospel are totally replaced by the movement of the camera and motion of the characters on the screen and are most often accompanied by a moaning, sighing, crying soundtrack. What appears on the film strip, thus acquires a character of a notation of this mute language of the image-signs of the camera. Of course, this notation is to be understood not as a contemporary notation system of sign-language where each part of the sign is recorded through a written mark, but is rather comparable to the very early cinematic attemtps to record the sign-language through the long shots of the moving images. The specific aesthetic of such image-notations of the camera-movement that Pasolini develops in his gospel-film and raises to the level of theorerical reflection in his essay ‚Cinema of Poetry,‘ can be called the aesthtetic of deafness. I would like to demonstrate its features in the self-reflexive opening sequence of the film. In the case of Pasolini’s gospel, the images are still pregnant with the history of their physical making in three-dimensional space of the embodied camera and its sign-language. The movement is often inscribed here in the prolonged static shots reminiscent of the one-shot movies of the early cinema, which similarly contained the movement, the movement of the pro-filmic. (Mary moving towards the camera.) The movements of Pasolini’s camera often closely follow the characters and reenact their bodily movements. (Joseph walking and falling asleep.) Sometimes, the camera-movement is recorded as an actor on its own. (Jubilation of the camera swinging upwards after the angel’s message.) The rhythmical organization of this opening sequence through the repetition of shots, settings, and camera-movements, such as the close-up of the faces, or the shot of the entrance of the house, of the inner yard of the house, and of the road in the arid landscape etc., the elegic tracking shot contemplating mountains, the emphatically elated high-angle shot of Mary’s house after the angel’s message, the jerking movements of Joseph‘s rapid steps over the stony dirt road represent the poetic usage of the language of reality, which Pasolini conceptualized as the sign-language of gestures. And indeed, Pasolini’s cinema of poetry appears to be congenial to the sign-language poetry studied in the American context by Clayton Valli. Valli „has defined such techniques as ‚lines’ and ‚rhymes‘ in Sign poetry, which are applicable to Pasolini’s camera-work. Valli explains how a sign language poet creates signed ‚lines‘ through visual rhyme patterns. A signed rhyme is made through a repetition of particular handshapes, movement paths, sign locations, or nonmanual markers such as facial expressions or body postures. For example, in his poem, ‚Snowflake,‘ Valli employs visual rhyme by repeating the same ‚five‘ handshape (palm open, all fingers extended) to sign TREE, then to draw the outline of the leaves on the tree, and then to show the leaves falling to the ground.“ (Dirksen L. Bauman, 322) „As a visual performance art, Sign poetry bears more similarity to painting, dance, drama, film, and video than to poetry and fiction. A ‚line‘ in Sign poetry, for example, is more accurately modelled after the concept of the ‚line‘ in painting or a choreographed ‚phrase‘ in dance. Instead of moving from left to right, the Sign poet draws lines through space in all directions.“ This signed poetry calls to mind Pasolini’s filming of Christ’s preaching when we have a long sequence of close-ups rhythmically zooming on Christ’s face again and again, showing it in different aspects and in different lighting. The camera’s zoom punctuates the spoken text. The stop of the zoom marks the period. The specialists speak today of the cinematic nature of sign language, as Pasolini spoke about the gestural nature of the language of cinema. In both cases, we deal with the same phenomenon of codified expressivity of movement in space. The idea of the cinema of poetry is as old as cinema itself. The recent research by Christophe Wall-Romana has shown that Mallarmé’s late project Le Livre of 1893 was inspired by the very first screenings by Lumière brothers and conceived as a multi-faceted performance combining cinematographic projections with dance and pantomime. Mallarmé wanted his poetry to become cinema, to be reenacted by the light-rhythms of cinematic projection emphasizing the materiality of the linguistic medium; the organization of poetic language by rhythm rather than by syntactical logic. He articulates his intentions programmatically:
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