In his essay “The Third Meaning” (1970), Roland Barthes, a French philosopher/linguist/film critic, gives an example of what can be called a vertical reading of a film, outlining three specific levels of meaning, which can coexist within a single image. He uses examples of some stills from Sergei Eisenstein Ivan the Terrible to distinguish these three levels. The first is Informational (he also calls it “obvious” or “narrative” ), the second meaning is Symbolic, pointing at some concept, an abstract idea, or an emotion the image signifies. The symbolic is grounded in political, religious, historical, psychological references – what Barthes calls “the sciences of the symbol). The third meaning, which Barthes calls the obtuse meaning constitutes a surplus of meaning, that cannot be exhausted by the other two. That third, obtuse level of meaning, the level of “excess, is the hardest to describe… Yet, it is perhaps the most interesting one from the point of view of a cinematic poet.
In another essay, Barthes wrote: “As for cinema, I have the impression that it’s a lot better prepared (than theatre or literature is) for a certain responsibility for forms that I’ve called the technique of suspended meaning. I think cinema has trouble supplying clear meanings and that, in its present state, this shouldn’t be done. The best films (for me) are those that suspend meaning the most, an extremely difficult operation, requiring at once great technique and total intellectual honesty. For that means disentangling oneself from all the parasite meanings.
As a prime example of what he meant, Barthes cited Luis Buñuel’s recent THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL—a brilliant comic horror film about wealthy guests who inexplicably find themselves scalable of leaving a dinner party.
Barthes continues to say that meaning (the obvious and symbolic) was deliberately suspended without becoming nonsensical or absurd, in a film that jolted one “profoundly, beyond dogmatism, beyond doctrine. In the vulgar but accurate sense, it was a film that “made one think.”
QUESTIONS:
1) Do you agree with Barthes – why or why not?
2) Choose a still from the film and conduct the vertical analysis, identifying the three levels of meaning (informative, symbolic, and obtuse).
What does this analysis reveal to us about the film – about the filmmaker’s relationship with reality it portrays. Specifically, what does the third, obtuse, meaning tell us about the camera’s “hidden point of view”? How does it shape your perception of the film?
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