camera movements in hollywood’s westering genre - a functional semiotic approach

8/4/2019 Camera Movements in Hollywoods Westering Genre - A Functional Semiotic Approach

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Camera Movements in Hollywood's Westering Genre: A Functional

Semiotic Approach

O'Leary, Brian.

Criticism, Volume 45, Number 2, Spring 2003, pp. 197-222 (Article)

Published by Wayne State University Press

DOI: 10.1353/crt.2004.0002

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B R I A N O L E A R Y

Camera Movements in HollywoodsWestering Genre: A Functional

Semiotic Approach

Ce qui, par rapport au probleme du panoramique, confirmerait lhy-

pothese vectorialization de gauche a droit, ce serait la plus grande fre-

quence des panoramiques de gauche a droit. Il semble bien que cette

predominance existe. . . . Sans mesestimer ces raisons technique qui

ont pu amener les techniciens a opter pour telle form pluto t que telle

autre, il ne semble pas quelles suffisent a expliquer le phenomene.

With respect to panning, what would confirm the left-to-right vectori-

alization hypothesis would be a greater frequency of left-to-right pans.

Indeed, it seems that such a preponderance does exist. . . . Without

slighting the technical reasons that could have caused cinematogra-

phers to choose one form over the other, they do not seem to be suffi-

cient to explain the phenomenon.

Michel Colin, Langue, film, discours:

Prolegomenes a une semiologie generative du film1

IN RE-EVALUATING NEGLECTED AREAS offilm theory, one of the most obvious places

to begin is in the once-prominent area of linguistic approaches. Film as lan-

guage was a frequent metaphor in the pre-theoretical phase of film studies: the

shot as a word, the scene as a sentence, the sequence as a paragraph, and so

forth. When theory emerged in the discipline, specifically in the early work of

Christian Metz, linguistic ideas again were at the fore, this time in the form of

structural linguistics (which, however, was already an obsolete form of linguis-

tics at the time Metz was writing, having been supplanted by generative gram-

mar). When post-structuralist high theory arrived around 1975, Metz (in his

imaginary signifier phase) abandoned the language paradigm, as did the rest

of mainstream film studies, or so it would seem. Thus matters stood for about

two decades, until the rise of cognitivism promised to offer renewed openings

for a film theory based on a newly emerging cognitive linguistics.2

Criticism, Spring 2003, Vol. 45, No. 2, pp. 197222

Copyright 2003 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201

197


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198 Brian OLeary

However, this is not the whole picture. In the intervening years there con-

tinued to be some little-known underground film-as-linguistics activity, in-

cluding work published by John M. Carroll, Michel Colin, and Theo van

Leeuwen (often writing with Gunther Kress). Carroll attempted to create a

generative theory of film, thus tapping into the dominant mode of linguistic

thought. His work was also exemplary in devising psycholinguistic experi-

ments to test his theories; however, they remained largely unknown, perhaps

because he was something of an outsider in the field.3 Space precludes a cri-

tique of Metzs and Carrolls linguistic contributions, which would serve to

justify my dismissal of their current utility; similarly, I will not address why

cognitivism has yet to produce a recognized linguistic film theory. However,

the other two writers mentioned above, Colin and van Leeuwen, have pointed

the way to just such a theory.Coexisting with the widely accepted forms of generative and cognitive lin-

guistics has been a minority strain called functionalism, most notably in the

Prague School and the UK/Australia-oriented systemic functional grammar

of Michael Halliday. The possible relevance of functional linguistics to film and

visual narrative art was recognized by Colin and van Leeuwen, both coinci-

dentally formally trained in linguistics and film studies. Beginning in the

1980s they independently published visual semiotic theories (judging from a

lack of cross-references, they were unaware of each other s work). MichelColin ambitiously combined ideas from Halliday and the Prague School, plus

French linguistic concepts, to develop a system he called (somewhat inaccu-

rately) generative semiotics.4 His death in a cycling accident left his theory in

a rudimentary state. Two of his colleagues, Odile Bachler and Dominique Cha-

teau, published a few supportive articles at about the same time, but the over-

all project seems to be in a hiatus.5 Theo van Leeuwen used ideas from

Halliday extensively, but combined them with metaphoric (i.e., non-linguistic)

concepts, to develop a visual semiotics that he called (somewhat vaguely, Ifeel) social semiotics.6 His work is largely compatible with Colins and at a sim-

ilar stage of development.

I am proposing the term functional semiotics to designate this approach

to film studies based on functional linguistics, and I suggest that it can be car-

ried much further than the two founders did.7 Functionalism as a linguistic

approach is different from generative and cognitive approaches in that it

makes no claim as to the cognitive reality of the mechanisms it proposes that

matter is irrelevant to its usefulness. Various competing functionalisms havedevised formulations that seem to explain real-world discourse well, and they

invite others to adopt their terminology and join their conversations. It is not

incumbent upon supporters of rival and ultimately incompatible functional-

isms to prove the other wrongthey can coexist. So the question of whether

to choose London or Prague is unimportant: it is equally possible to create a


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Camera Movements 199

visual semiotics based solely on the pronouncements of either, or on a differ-

ent system for that matter. I previously critiqued Colin s eclectic approach,8

but I now feel he unnecessarily complicated his theory, so in my continuing

work I am staying with Hallidays basic ideas. By the same token, I think that

the non-linguistic aspects of van Leeuwens theory could have been better han-

dled within Hallidays formulations. In this article I will only have space to lay

out a few ideas from functional semiotics because I want to save room for a

demonstration of practical criticism: an application to genre studies, specifi-

cally to what I call the westering subgenre.

A Few Concepts from Hallidays Grammar

Are there identifiable regularities in the way visual discourse is con-structed and interpreted (that is, written and read)? Colin and van Leeuwen

think so (and for simplicity I will only refer to Colin s ideas in the balance

of this article). These regularities may seem to have arisen unconsciously or

instinctively, and they tend to become codified into what Colin calls an indig-

enous theory of filmthat is, rules of thumb that have been passed around

as the right or best way to construct shots and sequences. But on close

examination, Colin claims, these regularities conform to the linguistic princi-

ples of the written language of the culture in which the image makers andusers have achieved their linguistic competence. The cognitive assumption be-

hind this approach is that at some mental level linguistic and auditory/visual

data is coded in a complementary way; it is assumed that there are only a lim-

ited number of ways the mind can work, and these mechanisms can act across

multiple sensory modalities. So one could attempt to study linguistics using

the concepts of visual discourse as a heuristic, or (as is done here) use linguis-

tics as a heuristic for studying visual discourse, more specifically the time-

based version of such discourse, film.9

The most important visual organizing principle that comes from linguis-

tics is the vectorialization of narratives according to a left-to-right reading.

This generalization is culture-based, of course, applying to the West and areas

heavily influenced by Western language and culture. Note that this is not a

claim about retinal scanning, a seemingly chaotic process: rather reading

here means consciously coming to understand a discourse in a sequential

sense. Others have made this same generalization: what Colin sought to do

was construct an entire linguistic theory of film that could be used heuristi-cally to explain those indigenous theories he already knew about and any

other unconscious or instinctive spatial organizational tendencies that could

be demonstrated to exist in the visual narrative arts. To do so, he drew increas-

ingly on Halliday as his project evolved.

Since my treatment of Hallidays grammar must of necessity be extremely


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200 Brian OLeary

brief, I will concentrate on what is to me its most attractive feature, the meta-

functional concept of discourse.10 Discourseconnected speech above the

sentence levelsimultaneously fulfills three metafunctions. The first (ide-

ational) metafunction consists of an underlying semantic structure or logical

form describing relations between actants (e.g., agent, object) fulfilling roles

in a process (verb or predicate). I prefer to call it the logical structure. In any

case, it is the objective informational content of the message. Since classical

Hollywood films are said to favor transparent, uncomplicated narratives, we

might expect them to privilege this metafunction.

The second (interpersonal) metafunction of discourse involves the lin-

guistic concept of modality, as expressed through modal auxiliary verbs, like

might and could. It refers to the attitude of the producer of the message

towards the proposition being expressed: its truth, likelihood, importance.Even though there is obviously no interpersonal contact between producers

and consumers of filmand for that reason, I prefer to speak of this as a

modal structurefilmmakers can still be assumed to want to encode attitudi-

nal information in their films. We might expect to find this metafunction more

important in highly authorial or post-modern works, where transparency of

purpose is not of the essence.

The final (textual) metafunction of language concerns the surface man-

ner in which a stretch of discourse is structured. It is structured as a series ofmessages consisting of what Halliday calls themes and rhemes. The theme is

the psychological subject that the speaker chooses to talk about, the depar-

ture point of the message, while the rheme is what the speaker has to say about

that entity, the destination of the message. This structure reflects what is most

important to the speaker, and in Hallidays system it always comes first, or on

the leftand the rheme is second, or on the right (and here he acknowledges

that his work is especially at home in the English language).11 Upon this in-

variable theme/rheme (left/right) structure the whole textual edifice is erectedusing the well-established linguistic concept of markedness. For instance,

within textuality there is also an informational structure of given versus new

information. Under normal (or unmarked) conditions, given information

appears in the theme, new information in the rheme, but under extraordinary

(or marked) circumstances the order can be reversed. Colin describes a

number of ways of varying the textual structure (creating marked discourses),

and such variations, it follows, can enhance or detract from the logical and/

or modal structures. Skillfully constructed or instinctively correct discourseswould have all three metafunctions working in harmony.

Still, Colin did not get much further than the textual metafunction. While

I consider the logical and modal structures to be equally important, space dic-

tates that I also limit this article to the textual structure, and really to just one

aspect of textuality: the use of camera movements to aid in the development


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(forward progress) offilmic discourse. There remain, however, a few more lin-

guistic terms that must be defined and illustrated in order to support the argu-

ment on camera movement:

1. Recursivity: a general feature of language is that the same rules can

apply at different levels of organization. In connection with the textual meta-

function of film, the theme/rheme message structure applies at various levels:

first at the level of elements at the left and at the right within a single framing

(the microstructure); secondly, at the level where successive framings can be

thought of as having a theme/rheme relationship to one another (the macro-

structure). One could carry this principle upward to the scene and sequence

levels, and beyondall these higher levels would also be considered macro-

structural. Similarly, microstructural analysis could be carried to lower levels,

looking at sub-elements making up the elements in a framing.2. Thematic Development through Expansion or Concatenation: these

are two methods by which the discourse moves ahead in theme/rheme se-

quences. Under expansion the theme stays the same in successive messages

(and may or may not actually appearsee the alternative interpretations at the

right side of Figure 1), while different rhemes are introduced. On the other

hand, with concatenation there is a change of themes: the first rheme becomes

the second theme, to which a rheme 2 is then related; this rheme 2 can next

become theme 3, in a chaining fashion. Expansion and concatenation can be(and usually are) combined to form various complex patterns as the discourse

develops.

Th1 Rh1 Th1 Rh1

Th1

Th1

Th1Th2

Th3

Rh2

Rh3 Rh3

Rh2 Rh2

Rh1

Rh3

or

concatenation expansion

I went to town, and I

parked my car; soon

I got a parking ticket.

I went to town,

parked my car,

and got a ticket.

I went to town: it (town) was

crowded; this (crowding) led

to my getting a parking ticket.

Fig. 1. Thematic Development, Two Types.

3. Branching and Embedding: in its most limited sense branching refers

to adding relative clauses to a sentence. English is a right-branching language,and we add such clauses after the noun modified; in a left-branching language

like Japanese they are added before the noun. In a more general sense, it is

always easiest for English speakers to understand sentences that add various

modifiers to the right, in a run-on fashion, than the equivalent sentence with

the add-ons accumulating at the left. Embedding involves adding new clauses


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202 Brian OLeary

in the middle of a sentence, usually in the sense of separating a noun from its

verb. Such sentences can be even harder to comprehend that left-branching

sentences. Typical examples will make these distinctions clear:

1. Right branching: I spotted the man by the booth near the exit tothe parking garage.

2. Left branching: Her mothers brothers friends son died.

3. Center embedding: The child that the woman that the man hated

loved kissed the doll.

Creating a Test Sample

To test the validity of Colins semiotics, I will make quantitative evalua-

tions of some of his predictions. Rather than test all the possible limit casesinvolving various national cinemas and avant-garde filmmaking practices, I

envision an unmarked form offilmmaking, some set of conventions that can

lay claim to being the default norm for the entire industry. The obvious choice

is the output of Hollywoods classical (or studio) era. Colin himself authorizes

this orientation in noting that his predictions most prominently apply to hol-

lywoodien films.12

To delimitate this era I will adopt Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson s

range of 19171960, which is based on both aesthetic and industrialgrounds.13 But for purposes of investigating camera movement, I think it wise

to further narrow the range of years to 1925 28 and 193253/4 (i.e., pre-

widescreen). I do not want to exclude films from the late silent era, on the

grounds that the basic camera movements and continuity editing practices ap-

parent in the 1930s through the 1950s were well established by that point.

Setting an absolute beginning date for the late silent era would be problem-

atic, but in this case it proved unnecessary because the films chosen by ran-

dom methods included none from before 1925, and 1925 seems safely withinthe late silent era. Second, I want to eliminate films from the transition period

(here considered to be 19291931) between silent and sound, since most

films became notably static at that time.14 Finally I want to exclude widescreen

films (which were phased in in 1953 and 1954), on the theory that they ini-

tially reduced the perceived need for panning and dollying.15 More impor-

tantly, viewing these films on video can lead to the misrecognition of the pan-

and-scan movements sometimes used in the video transfer process, mistaking

them as part of the original film.For their own purposes in presenting a credible account of classical Holly-

wood style, Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson constructed what they called an

unbiased samplethe UnSof such films. They began with as complete

a listing as possible of the some 30,000 films released in the United States dur-

ing the era; from this list, 841 American-made films were selected using a table


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of random numbers, this being the group from which they were able to locate

100 viewable prints surviving in archivesthese 100 films became the UnS.

They viewed these, recording certain physical parameters and other details

that led to the statistics and examples that form the basis of their book, The

Classical Hollywood Cinema.16 I believe the UnS is the best starting point avail-

able for students of classical film style.

However, 100 is quite an arbitrary number. A much smaller population of

films should produce reasonably reliable results, if we take into account the

central limit theorem of statistics. Various writers on this topic suggest that

a randomly chosen sample of 1525 or 2030 items should suffice to create

a corpus within which random properties should display a normal curve dis-

tribution.17 Twenty, then, is a consensus minimum sample size. George Cus-

tens Bio/Pics is an example of a book-length genre study that productively

adopted this standard. He began with a population of all sound biopics from

the studio era, 291, and created from these a purposive, or stratificational,

sample of 100. After making some analyses at both of the higher levels, he

based his full treatment on a random sample of 20 of the 100.18 The present

study involves a corpus of 20 films, a sub-sample of the UnSnamely those

available on video and restricted to the reduced range of years speci fied above.

I call this corpus the low bias sampleLBSto acknowledge that there is an

additional level of residual bias in this procedure: the elimination of films that

have not been released on video. The operational procedure used to create this

sample was simple: the first 20 video copies that I was able to acquire of films

in the UnS became my LBS (Table 1).

Is video-availability bias a serious problem with this procedure? There ap-

pear to be three areas where such bias is apparent. The best-known, award-

winning films (if they make it into the UnS at all) are sure to be available:

Wuthering Heights, Shall We Dance, From Here to Eternity. The popularity ofcomedy, particularly in a nostalgic video vein, may result in some over-repre-

sentation: Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, Bob Hope, Martin and Lewis. Horror/

sci-fi, often no doubt in the public domain, is also likely to be popular: The

Devil Bat, White Zombie, King of the Zombies. It may seem strange, given the

vast range of Hollywood directors, that the one duplicated name is Jean Yar-

brough. In defense, I would rather establish what seems like a reasonable op-

erational procedure and then live with the results, rather than tamper with the

parameters after the fact so as to eliminate anyembarrassments.

On the plus

side, although no attempt was made to stratify the list, it turns out to be sym-

metrical in terms of years of release: three films each from the 1920s and

1950spartial decades in the overall rangeand seven films each from the

1930s and 1940s. Also, the sample is fairly representative of distribution com-

panies: four of the five majors and two of the three minors are present; there


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204 Brian OLeary

Table 1. Low Bias Sample of American Films, 192528 and 193253

Title Distribution Director Year

Show People MGM King Vidor 1928

Speedy Paramount Ted Wilde 1928Steamboat Bill, Jr. United Art. Charles Reisner 1928

White Zombie United Art. Victor Halperin 1932His Double Life Atlantic Arthur Hopkins 1933

Case of the Lucky Legs, The Warner Bros. Archie L. Mayo 1935

One Frightened Night Mascot Christy Cabanne 1935Saratoga MGM Jack Conway 1937

Shall We Dance RKO Mark Sandrich 1937

Wuthering Heights United Art. William Wyler 1939

Devil Bat, The PRC Jean Yarbrough 1940

King of the Zombies Monogram Jean Yarbrough 1941Canterville Ghost, The MGM Jules Dassin 1944

Mr. Skeffington Warner Bros. Vincent Sherman 1944

Sin of Harold Diddlebock Cal. Pictures Preston Sturges 1946My Favorite Brunette Paramount Elliott Nugent 1947

Monsieur Beaucaire Paramount George Marshall 1948

At Swords Point RKO Lewis Allen 1952Caddy, The Paramount Norman Taurog 1953

From Here to Eternity Columbia Fred Zinnemann 1953

are two from poverty row (PRC and Monogram) and three independently dis-

tributed films. Perhaps independently produced films are over-represented,

considering that United Artists films and independently distributed films both

fall into that category. Despite all these qualifications, I believe that this

method of arriving at a corpus of films for stylistic testing is more valid than

the unsystematic procedures we usually encounter in the selection of canoni-

cal works. Still, the second part of this essay discusses quite a different way

of constructing a corpus for the analysis of westering films.

Predictions on Camera Movement

I will first list Colins three general predictions on camera movements,

leaving until later the actual definitions of these camera movements. I find that

it simplifies terminology greatly to exclusively use the one-word terms pan,

tilt, and zoom, with the proviso that these axial rotation terms also in-clude the semiotically equivalent moving camera terms: lateral tracking

shots, vertical crane shots, and dolly in/out shots, respectively.

1. Due to the horizontal vectorialization of the image, pans will

occur more often than tilts.


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2. Due to the simplicity of concatenation over expansion (or, in lin-

guistic terms, branching over embedding), pans (which create

branching) will occur more often than zoom outs (which create

embedding).

3. Due to the organization of discourse according to the principles

of functional grammar, pans to the right will outnumber pans to

the left (see the epigraph at the beginning of this article).

To elaborate on the third prediction, panning to the right for new infor-

mation is exactly equivalent to the unmarked form of thematic development

by concatenation (see the left side of Figure 1): as one pans to the right, the

first rheme (originally new information) appears to move leftward until it

reaches the left side of the frame and has therefore become a second theme(and is now considered given); at the same time, newer information has ap-

peared at the right, becoming the second rheme, and so forth.19 Colin calls the

types of pans referenced in these predictions as descriptive pans, used to add

new information to the frame (new elements to the discourse), and these must

be distinguished from pans of accompaniment (which follow along with the

same moving element). Descriptive pans are complete messages in themselves,

combining (in a microstructure) a theme and a rheme; pans of accompaniment

are not complete messages in themselves and require an adjacent framing tocomplete the message (in other words, they require a macrostructural inter-

pretation).

The first two predictions are not controversial: I assume that most experi-

enced observers would affirm them (that pans exceed either tilts or zoom

outs). They are still interesting, though, because they are important parts of

the overall linguistic interpretation of camera movements. But the third pre-

diction (that pans to the right exceed pans to the left) is not intuitively obvi-

ous, so it is of by far the greatest interest, and it becomes the test for thisapproach.

Before continuing, let us consider another type of camera movement dis-

cussed by Colin, but one that did not figure in any of his predictions: the zoom

in (or dolly in). The term he uses to describe the function of this movement is

focalization (a general linguistic term for techniques that make one element of

the discourse stand out), but by analogy with the opposite zoom-out move-

ment (which produces embedding through expansion) it could be called con-

traction (or disembedding). To make this study of camera movement completeI will also quantify the presence of this trope.

A thorough examination of camera movements will inevitably move be-

yond the few predictions, definitions, and examples given by Colin. His work

presents some fundamental principles that open the door into a comprehen-

sive theory of camera movement based on the message structure of discourse;


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206 Brian OLeary

what I attempt to do here is organize the concepts and fill in some of the gaps.

The necessary first step is to create workable operational definitions of camera

movements, so that any application work can be replicated.

Defining Camera Movements

General. Distinguishing the various camera moves is anything but simple

when working with a real-world film corpus like the LBS. Various individual

movements are sometimes combined in a simultaneous movement, or a se-

quence shot cycles through several directional changes. Still, classifications

can be simplified by using linguistic equivalents for definitional purposes, as

opposed to more common-sense definitions: for instance, a movement that

creates right branching will be treated as a pan right, even if accompanied bysome zooming; a movement that creates embedding will be treated as a zoom

out, even if some panning is involved.

Zoom Ins. I already noted how zoom ins function to disembed a process.

Still, it is unrealistic to ignore the traditional interpretation of pure focaliza-

tion, even in cases where the number of message elements in the frame re-

mains constant. The original message may not at first be interpretable, but

then it is disambiguated through a zoom in. But it is not always easy to say

when the zoom in adds significantly to our understanding of a message; wemay just get a slightly closer view of some detail that was completely discern-

ible in the previous framinga kind of gratuitous zoom that should not be

counted. Such judgments are clearly more subjective than the others to be dis-

cussed here, but since none of Colins predictions turns on the number of

zoom ins, an acknowledgement of uncertainty in this area should not compro-

mise the usefulness of the overall scheme.

Pans vs. Tilts. Distinguishing these two movements might seem problem-

atic at times, since a movement along any diagonal vector is a possibility. Inthe classical era this is seldom much of a problem: vertical tilt movements may

wobble slightly off-axis, and horizontal pan movements may rise or dip

slightly, but usually it is not difficult to distinguish the two. Still, true diagno-

nals are always a possibility, and they should be counted simultaneously as a

tilt and a pan. The test to adopt a dual interpretation is whether it is possible

to accomplish the effect of the movement in question by means of a tilt or pan

alone. If not, count it as both.

Tilts. Colin offers no linguistic interpretation for this movement: he sim-ply suggests that the horizontal vectorialization of the image makes it a more

marginal form of camera movement. At first glance a tilt seems to work like a

pan: information slides off one side of the screen while new information ac-

crues on the other side. One might be tempted to reason by analogy with

Western written languages that forward progress accompanies movement


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downward as well as from left to right, leading to the conclusion that tilting

down creates right branching and tilting up creates left branching. This analy-

sis quickly fails under the example of diagonal movements. A forty-five degree

tilt and pan upward to the right would have to be regarded as simultaneously

equivalent to left branching and right branching, an impossible situation. An-

other approach to tilting is to reason by analogy with zooming out, which may

add significant new information entering at the top and/or the bottom of the

frame, whereas the pan, operating alone, does not. Could adding new infor-

mation vertically be inherently an embedding process, even when it is unidi-

rectional? In fact, there is a linguistic analog: the use of carets, superscripts,

and footnotesall vertical operationsto embed new information in a fin-

ished text. This view suggests a new definition of embedding: instead of desig-

nating the addition of new information in two directions at once about acenter, it can be seen as the addition of information in any manner other than

unidirectional horizontal branching. We can now propose a hierarchy of the

movement discussed so far in terms of ease of interpretation, frequency of oc-

currence, and markedness. A single horizontal vector (pan) is the unmarked

form of thematic development: branching. A vertical vector (tilt) is more

marked, since it is inherently embedding. A diagonal combination of the two

is more marked yet since it requires a dual interpretation.20 Finally, zoom outs

also require interpretation of two (or more) vectors, so they are equal to thediagonal vector in markedness.

Pans of Accompaniment vs. Descriptive Pans. Sometimes a pan of accompa-

niment follows an object but then keeps going when the object stops, coming

to rest on something else. This is really two different operations: the second

part of the movement, after the subject comes to a halt, is a descriptive pan

and should be counted: a theme has been tied to a rheme. Another problem

of interpretation arises because some filmmakers seem to have an aversion to

unmotivated descriptive pans and will disguise such a pan as a pan of ac-companiment. Rather than simply pan from one relevant element to another,

they contrive to have an extra walk by and move the camera with the extra.

This gratuitous accompanying gesture should still be treated as a descriptive

pan. On the other hand, panning on extras per se does not disqualify such a

shot as a pan of accompaniment. Establishing shots appearing when a scene

changes are sometimes handled this way: some typical activity within the

scene (say, panning with some extras) helps to characterize it. Since such pans

do not involve tying a theme to a rheme, they are not disguised descriptivepans. Finally, a pan of accompaniment need not always involve a person: an

example of an ephemeral object being followed is the beam of a spotlight

searching for someone or something.

Trucking Shots. This terminology designates a shot that represents some-

ones implied point of view from a moving vehicle. If the camera is pointed


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208 Brian OLeary

ahead or behind, it is indistinguishable from a dolly in or out, and should be

so counted. But a lateral trucking shot, where the camera aims out a side win-

dow showing whatever scenery happens to pass by, should be treated as a pan

of accompaniment (actually, the reverse angle of such a pan) and should not

be counted. The side view itself does not have a microstructure: no elements

in the view are being linked together. Rather, the message is that this is the

view obtained from what has been previously established as a moving vehicle.

Reframings. These also usually turn out to be pans of accompaniment, and

should not be counted. Newly salient characters are typically reframed in two

ways. Most of the characters body may have already been in the frame when

the shot began; later a camera movement occurs for better framing. Or the

character walks into the frame to join another character, followed by a some-

times pronounced reframing to arrive at a two-shot. Clearly in both cases thebranching preceded rather than resulted from the camera movement. Even if

the camera operator telegraphs the reframing before the new party enters, it

should be fairly easy to determine when branching results from camera move-

ment as opposed to character movement: the former is a pan, the latter is not.

The exception is the kind of pan which begins on an unknown bodily extrem-

ity or which follows upon the entry of an unknown bodily extremity into the

frame; this is a case of a descriptive panning camera movement serving to dis-

ambiguate some new narrative element.Other Pans. There is a third kind of pan that Colin does not discuss, the

pan that surveys an establishing shot by scanning over it (often as a point of

view shot)without accompanying any extras or moving objects. It does de-

scribe the scene in the common sense manner that the term descriptive pan

suggests. I would submit that while it may not seem to link elements of a mes-

sage in an obvious way, a finer examination would reveal that that is what is

going on. The purpose of scanning a scene in this manner is to pick out details

and their relations to one another (themes and rhemes). Sometimes the veryabsence of salient details in the surveyed scene is the message. These forms of

camera movements should be counted in some way, so they are best treated

as descriptive pans.

Sequence Shots. This term designates a long, continuous tracking shot that

starts and stops and may change direction. A careful analysis could reveal the

existence of intermediate distinct framings (perhaps marked by pauses in cam-

era movement). But for statistics on panning it would be problematic to try to

account for successive framings as individual pansthere are bound to be var-ious minor framings as well. It is better to treat the whole thing as a single

pan, as long as it remains unidirectional. If it reverses itself once, it should

be counted as two pans, but if it changes again and again it is still a two-pan

structurethe overall meaning being that there are an unspecified number of

elements being added on all sides. Similarly, one sometimes encounters a


14/27


rapid sequence of back and forth pans that link two people in a situation that

is usually handled as a shot-countershot structure. Should it be treated as only

two pans, by analogy with the sequence shot? I would say no in the context

of classical films, because in these films it is usually only a case of one or two

reversals that function to show a contrasting reaction with each reversal. One

can imagine other situations where an extensive series of movements should

be given a reduced interpretation, by analogy with the sequence shotsay an

elaborate montage sequence that features moving cameras. Here I think it de-

pends: some montages are integral to the story line and advance the discourse

in steps (the breakfast table montage in Citizen Kane). Others (in a more Vor-

kapichian mode) have a logic of their own and do not represent a commitment

to the usual linguistic procedures of discourse development; some of these

adopt a camera movement regime based on uniformity for its own sake (inmore recent practice, variety may be adopted for its own sake). Such move-

ments would skew the results if they were given full weight. Hence for this

article I did not count camera moves in the musical prologue-montage at the

opening ofCalifornia.

Results

To briefly recap the foregoing section, the operational decisions are de-signed to constrain the counting of gratuitous movements. A few studio-era

films feature a fluid camera style resulting in innumerable, usually unnoticed

camera movements, whereas others have only a few camera movements, but

they are very distinctive. The first group would skew the results if every small

movement were counted. So, keeping linguistic ideas in mind, pans and tilts

must add new information in one direction only: reframings will not be

counted; zoom outs must add information in two directions: usually left and

right, but also in such combinations as top and right. Slight zoom outs thatfunction as reframings, opening up neutral space where additional elements

will enter later under their own motivation, will not be counted. Zoom ins that

do not create any significant disembedding or disambiguation will also not be

counted. Based on this terminology, Table 2 shows the results of the LBS

study.21

On the basis of the raw data alone, only one true counter-example to Co-

lins predictions occurs: in Steamboat Bill, Jr., three pans to the left outnumber

two pans to the right. Otherwise, as predicted, pans outnumbered tilts 189 to63. Note that tilt ups outnumber tilt downs 38 to 25: space above is relatively

available whereas downward motion in the typical studio film is constrained

by the floor: only some special requirement to show something at or near

ground level motivates a tilt down, while many motivations can be imagined

for tilt ups. As to the second prediction, pans outnumber zoom outs 189 to


15/27

210 Brian OLeary

Table 2. Camera Movements

Tilt Tilt Zoom Zoom Pan PanTitle Up Down In Out Left Right

Show People 1 1 0 0 1 4Speedy 0 1 0 0 4 5

Steamboat Bill, Jr. 3 2 0 0 3 2 White Zombie 5 1 2 1 4 6

His Double Life 0 0 1 2 2 2

Case of the Lucky Legs, The 0 2 1 1 5 8One Frightened Night 1 0 2 0 9 10

Saratoga 2 1 2 2 2 5

Shall We Dance 0 3 4 7 6 6

Wuthering Heights 5 2 6 3 4 9

Devil Bat, The 0 0 8 1 3 6King of the Zombies 1 0 3 1 2 3

Canterville Ghost, The 3 2 6 3 6 10

Mr. Skeffington 6 0 13 11 5 11Sin of Harold Diddlebock 3 4 0 0 5 8

My Favorite Brunette 1 2 2 0 4 4

Monsieur Beaucaire 1 0 4 2 2 3At Swords Point 2 1 2 3 1 2

Caddy, The 2 0 1 0 3 4

From Here to Eternity 2 3 0 2 3 7Totals 38 25 57 39 74 115

Notes: Pans include lateral tracking shots; tilts include vertical crane shots; and zooms includedolly in/out shots.

39, clear evidence for the economy of branching over embedding. Due to the

lopsidedness of these statistics, two of the predictions can be affirmed without

need of further analysis: the dominance of panning over tilting and zooming

out. It can be noted in passing that zoom ins outnumber zoom outs, 57 to 39:unlike the latter, zoom ins were counted as functioning two ways, as disem-

bedding and as strong focalization. Counting the more weakly focalizing zoom

ins would have made the margin even greater.

Finally, coming to the third prediction, pans from left to right outnumber

pans from right to left by a margin of 115 to 74. The unit of analysis was the

percentage of pans to the right in each film. This unit was chosen to prevent

films with many pans from skewing the data. The null nypothesis was that the

average would be 50 percent. This proved not to be the case in a statisticallysignificant finding: a one-sample t-test yields t(19)5.1, p.0001. The null

hypothesis (leftward and rightward panning occur equally in the population)

can therefore be rejected, and we can accept the alternative hypothesis, that

the apparent dominance of rightward panning is not a chance effect. That this

should be the case is not in any way self-evident, nor is it an idea that I have


16/27


encountered outside Colins writings. Thus the previously mentioned cogni-

tive assumption gains evidence: that the intuitive way of creating and reading

film images is influenced by the same mental processes involved in writing

and reading language.

The Westering Genre Study

Le panoramique de droite a gauche releve dune structure marquee:

il permet dintroduire a gauche un element nouveau en position de

theme. Cette fonction du panoramique de droite a gauche est relative-

ment frequente. Ainsi, dans le film policier ou dans le western, ce pa-

noramique est frequemment utilise pour produire un effet de

suspense. Dans un western, par exemple, il nest pas rare de voir les

indiens qui menacent dattaquer le convoi intorduits par lintermediare

dun panoramique de droite a gauche.

The pan from right to left creates a marked structure; it allows the

introduction on the left of a new element in the position of the theme.

This function of the right-to-left pan is relatively common. Thus, in de-

tective films or westerns, this pan is frequently used to create suspense.

In the western, for example, it is not unusual to see the Indians who

threaten to attack the wagon train introduced through the intermedi-

ary of a right-to-left pan.

Michel Colin, Langue, film, discours:Prolegomenes a une semiologie generative du film22

A facilitative impact on practical criticism is necessary for the health and

survival of a film theory. Consider that a great deal of movie criticism, both in

the popular and academic presses, falls into two classes: genre and auteur criti-

cism. As long as categorization remains one of the most basic of all human

cognitive processes, and as long as movie buffs continue to regard the objects

of their enthusiasm as intentionally crafted works of art, these two forms of

criticism will maintain their appeal. The statistical/critical approach based onfunctional semiotics that I am about to demonstrate here is partly inspired by

Lane Roths Film Semiotics, Metz, and Leones Trilogy. That work made very lim-

ited claims about three of Sergio Leones films, yet it was easy to see how

Roths methodology (based on Metzs grande syntagmatique, not camera move-

ment) could have been extended to genre and auterist studies in general.23 My

work now seeks to fulfill that promise, but through the mechanism of post-

Metzian linguistics.

A secondary group of camera movement predictions that Colin makes(see the epigraph at the beginning of this section) are genre-specific and will

require a different approach to evaluate. I will refrain from testing his predic-

tion about the policier (detective) movie, although I have doubts about it. With

respect to westerns, it seems to me that the emotion involved is more fear than

suspense. Indians in westerns terrify the whites, who fear imminent death. If


17/27

212 Brian OLeary

indeed it is fear that left panning stimulates, then Colin may have missed the

most obvious generic application of all: left panning to reveal the monster in

horror movies. The LBS itself contains several examples of this trope. White

Zombie has three leftward pans to close-ups of zombie faces. King of the Zom-

bies has one such shot, though it is extended over several zombie faces, culmi-nating in the final shock of seeing one of the co-stars apparently on his way to

becoming a zombie. In One Frightened Night the heroine finds herself in a bi-

zarre trophy room; first one shock pan to the left reveals a human skull; then

a left-panning sequence shot highlights a series of weird artifacts, including

what looks like a human head collection. None of these films uses right pan-

ning in this manner.

Nevertheless, I will only test Colins theory with respect to the western. It

will be useful to describe the method here for assembling a corpus of suitablewesterns since the technique can be adapted to many other applications. It is

a highly objective methodology that is radically different from the one used to

assemble the LBS, and yet can serve as an alternative to it.

The project that originally interested me was a case study of a phase of

American history as mythologically and ideologically interpreted for us by the

classical Hollywood cinema: the westward incursion of pioneers into Indian

territory, a phenomenon sometimes referred to by historians as westering.

To assemble a corpus of westeringfi

lms, the procedure I used was to ignorethe definitions of conventional genresthose psychologically real genres that

everyone knows, such as westerns, biopics, and history films, and to create

instead a contingent genrea grouping assembled for the purpose of asking

and answering specific questions (the larger questions suggested at the begin-

ning of this paragraph). The second step was to determine the required sample

size (twenty, for reasons already given). The third step was to set up some con-

tent tests that can be applied objectivelytests designed to make certain that

the chosen movies directly address the questions that called the contingent

genre into existence in the first place. The final stage is quite tricky: it is to

manipulate the content tests in such a way as to ideally result in the creation

of a corpus of the requisite sample size, so that the entire corpus can be used

in the study, instead of some arbitrarily devised, picked-over canon.

The contingent genre I wanted to delimitate would obviously draw upon

cowboys-versus-Indians films of the western genre proper and colonist-

versus-Indians films of what are sometimes called eastern westerns. I initially

set up two content tests: first, there must be shown literal incursion into the

Westeither human in the form of settlers or technological in the form of pio-neers creating permanent lines of communicationsboth interpretable as eco-

logical intrusions compromising something of value in the Indian way of life;

second, there must be overt resistance on the part of the indigenous popula-

tion in order to create the need for some form of ideological maneuver to jus-

tify the suppression of this resistance.


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Applying these tests to candidate films culled from standard reference

works in the field,24 I initially came up with 18 qualifying films available on

video, which was a fairly close approximation to the desired end result. At this

point in the process the entry conditions can be modified to arrive at the re-

quired sample size. Had the initial corpus been larger than desirable or practi-

cal, it could have been reduced in one of two ways. The first would be through

random sampling, as Custen did in reducing his biopic sample from 100 to

20. Alternatively, it could be reduced by instituting tighter quali ficational

teststests that at the same time are designed to increase the likelihood that

the surviving films will more specifically address the issue at hand. In the pres-

ent case, however, the sample was too small. It could be increased by loosen-

ing the entry requirements, if no real harm is thereby done to their speci ficity

in ferreting out the desired answers. I had originally required Indian resistanceto be shown; subsequently I modified this requirement to admit films that

clearly indicate within the diegesis that Indians are resisting westering incur-

sions in the surroundings area and that such resistance is expected and will be

counteracted by force. The ideological significance of the conflict remains in-

tact in this new iteration. This change allowed the inclusion of two more films,

California ( John Farrow, 1946) and Rails into Laramie ( Jesse Hibbs, 1954)

thus completing the corpus. Table 3 shows the final constitution of the wester-

ing corpus for this study (note: the two 1954 films were confirmed to be non-widescreen). This sample was initially used to retest Colins camera movement

predictions, as previously tested with the LBS. While it is possible that generic

peculiarities may cause the results to differ, such differences should be ex-

plainable in terms of generic conventions and conditions and may thus prove

indirectly confirmative of functional semiotic ideas. On the other hand, any

truly substantial discrepancy might point out the need for a corollary to the

overall theory. The results of the camera movement retest are shown in

Table 4.Recalling Colins three relevant predictions, the raw data from this test

supports them all, just as was the case with the LBS. But there are some nota-

ble differences between the two tests that should be addressed. Beginning with

the prediction that pans should exceed tilts, this test revealed a ratio of 212 to

74. What is interesting here, in comparison with the LBS, is the increased fre-

quency of tilt downs as compared to tilt ups: tilt downs made up 40 percent

of the tilts in the LBS, but they make up 50 percent of the tilts in the present

sample. I would attribute this to the inevitable mountainous terrain of thesewestering films, which consist mostly of exteriors. Mountain locations as op-

posed to the studio-constructed interiors characteristic of the LBS inevitably

facilitate deployment of elements in the vertical dimension. Also, various ge-

neric conventionsdropping guns, a rattlesnake on the trail, burying peo-

plereadily generate tilt downs.


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214 Brian OLeary

Table 3. Westering Films by Year of Release

Title Distribution Director Year

Pony Express, The Paramount James Cruze 1925

Wagon Wheels Paramount Charles Barton 1934Daniel Boone RKO David Howard 1936

Wells Fargo Paramount Frank Lloyd 1937Union Pacific Paramount C. B. De Mille 1939

Drums along the Mohawk 20th C. Fox John Ford 1939

Brigham YoungFrontiersman 20th C. Fox Henry Hathaway 1940Northwest Passage MGM King Vidor 1940

Western Union 20th C. Fox Fritz Lang 1941

Omaha Trail, The MGM Edward Buzzell 1942

California Paramount John Farrow 1946

Unconquered Paramount C. B. De Mille 1947Red River United Art. Howard Hawks 1948

Wagon Master RKO John Ford 1950

Westward the Women MGM William Wellman 1951Big Sky, The RKO Howard Hawks 1952

Bend of the River Universal Anthony Mann 1952

Pony Express, The Paramount Jerry Hopper 1953 Jubilee Trail Republic Joseph Kane 1954

Rails into Laramie Universal Jesse Hibbs 1954

Colins second prediction was that pans would exceed zoom outs, and

this was supported at the ratio of 212 to 30. What differs here from the LBS

is the relatively smaller number of zoom outs: they made up 41 percent of the

zooms in the LBS but only 34 percent of the zooms in the present sample. I

can only speculate that exterior locations discourage this camera movement,

since in practice it is usually accomplished by dollying out, which is easier to

do on studio floors but would always require laying tracks in an exterior.Zoom ins, however, which I believe are more likely to be accomplished with

the lens alone, are not constrained in this way.

Finally we come to the most important prediction, that pans to the right

will exceed pans to the left. In this test the overall ratio was 55 percent to 45

percent, whereas in the LBS it was 61 percent to 39 percent. When the unit of

analysis was the percentage of pans to the right in each film (as before), the

dominance of rightward panning does not achieve statistical significance at the

95 percent confidence level [t(19)2.03, p.05]; the null hypothesis, thatrightward panning does not significantly exceed 50 percent on average, cannot

be rejected. Although the tendency was the same in both cases, a difference of

this magnitude requires an explanation.

I believe that three factors operating together can readily account for this

difference. First, shooting exteriors in the mountains means that peculiarities


20/27


Table 4. Camera Movements: Retest

Tilt Tilt Zoom Zoom Pan PanTitle Up Down In Out Left Right

Pony Express, The (1925) 0 0 0 0 0 0 Wagon Wheels 1 1 0 2 2 4

Daniel Boone 1 0 0 0 2 2 Wells Fargo 3 5 6 0 7 10

Union Pacific 2 2 3 3 4 5

Drums along the Mohawk 2 2 1 2 4 1Brigham YoungFrontiersman 3 0 3 1 5 5

Northwest Passage 2 3 0 2 12 11

Western Union 4 2 12 2 7 10

Omaha Trail, The 2 4 2 6 7 8

California 1 2 6 4 7 8Unconquered 8 3 5 3 8 12

Red River 1 1 0 2 4 6

Wagon Master 1 0 0 0 0 2 Westward the Women 0 5 2 0 8 10

Big Sky, The 1 0 3 1 4 5

Bend of the River 2 4 0 0 7 8Pony Express, The (1953) 0 0 2 0 3 3

Jubilee Trail 2 2 10 2 4 5

Rails into Laramie 1 1 2 0 0 2Totals 37 37 57 30 95 117

Notes: Pans include lateral tracking shots; tilts include vertical crane shots; and zooms includedolly in/out shots.

of terrain and the position of the sun will often dictate camera set-ups, with

their attendant possibilities for camera movements. Nature, being unaware of

the constraints of Western written languages, would tend to offer up opportu-

nities biased for panning to the left and to the right on an equal basis, thustending to level out the effects of cultural predilections.

Secondly, it has already been suggested that this genre favors a trope of

panning to the left to create the shock of an Indian threat. In The Omaha Trail,

the Indian attack is preceded by a high-angle view of the train entering a can-

yon; a pan to the left reveals Indian fighters poised on the canyon rim for the

attack. Several other examples of this trope, the one specifically noted by Colin

in the preceding epigraph, occur in the sample. Furthermore, a left placement

for Indians in general is suggested in the formal opening moments of three ofthe films: in both The Pony Express (1953 version) and Daniel Boone a lone

warrior standing on a mountain at the left precedes the titles. In Unconquered

an historical prologue depicts an Indian in the woods coming from the left;

the voice-over states that the Indian considered any intrusion by the whites

(shown coming from the right) to be a hostile act.


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216 Brian OLeary

The third reason is vastly more complex, and will require an excursion

into new areas, reserved for the next section. This effort is worthwhile, because

it leads to what I believe to be a necessary corollary to Colin s theory of vectori-

alization.

Semantic Constraints on Syntactic Image Organization

When viewing the films of the westering sample, it is impossible to over-

look one strong generic regularity: the films tend to show the westering proc-

ess as proceeding from right to left. To address this issue, consider first an

iconographic convention. When depicting a journey the clearest method is to

have the action always proceed in the same screen direction, preserving direc-

tional continuity; but (outside of Colinian considerations) nothing particularly

dictates whether it should be left to right or right to left. However, it seems

that when we are dealing with the known compass directions of west and east,

there is a strong motivation to adopt a map analogy: that is, we face north, and

east is to the right and west is to the left. Apparently this map analogy was

consciously or unconsciously employed in making these films: nineteen of

them consistently depict the westward journey as taking place from right to

left, pioneers coming from the right, often clashing with Indians coming from

the left. Some of the films rigorously apply this directionality to every scene,

while others allow some variability while maintaining directionality on the

crucial scenes of white intrusion into Indian territory. The counter-example is

not an exception, strictly speaking. Daniel Boone shows a journey from North

Carolina to Kentucky, from Yadkin County to Boonesboro, a journey obvi-

ously requiring northerly as much as westerly movement, since the two states

are not on the same parallel.

In order to study and quantify directional tendencies, I chose as the unit

of analysis the camera set-up. Each camera set-up represents a commitment to

depict the journey as going in a certain screen direction. Shots wouold not be

a meaningful unit of analysis, since a given sequence normally freely inter-

mixes a large number of shots taken from a smaller number of camera set-ups.

Counting camera set-ups is not particularly easy, in that one has to remember

what has already been seen in a particular sequence, or spend a lot of time

fast-forwarding and reversing the video. For this reason, the precision of the

numbers given is subject to some error. I deemed this to be unobjectionablebecause the statistics are so overwhelmingly one-sided.

As always, certain operational decisions must be specified. I did not count

scenes within towns at the starting point of the westering movement or at its

terminus, on the grounds that street layouts might require an indirect route

out of town. Nor did I count scenes where wagons were forming or unforming


22/27


a circle for the night. I stopped counting when there was an Indian attack (ex-

cept in the case of attacks on railroad trains), on the assumption that the pio-

neers would normally head for the nearest practical cover, whichever direction

it was. Of course direct head-on or tail-on shots were not counted. Portions of

journeys identified as backtracking were counted as opposite to actual screen

direction: if backtracking is depicted as going from left to right, then it was

logged in the right-to-left column, since what is being counted are indications

of which way is west (a backtracker going to the right is indirectly confirming

that west lies to the left). Table 5 presents the result of this count.

Having already discussed the counter-example, a few words should also

be said about some of the other films that are somewhat anomalous. For in-

stance, how can a directionality be established for a film that only has two set-

ups (Northwest Passage)? The justification is in fact very clearly stated withinthe diegesis. This was originally supposed to be a two-part film, with part one

involving a punitive expedition northward into Canada against the French and

Indians by Rogers Rangers. Part two was to consist of the Rangers quest for a

westward passage to the Pacific. The concluding two set-ups of the film depict

this change in direction, and were intended to segue smoothly into part two

Table 5. Camera Set-ups in Westering FilmsWest Indicated by Movement from

Title Right to Left Left to Right

Pony Express, The (1925) 24 0

Wagon Wheels 47 3Daniel Boone 9 12

Wells Fargo 14 1

Union Pacific 46 1

Drums along the Mohawk 8 2Brigham YoungFrontiersman 48 3

Northwest Passage 2 0

Western Union 14 2Omaha Trail, The 23 0

California 11 1

Unconquered 4 0Red River 7 0

Wagon Master 40 31

Westward the Women 41 19

Big Sky, The 53 0Bend of the River 8 0

Pony Express, The (1953) 17 1 Jubilee Trail 13 0

Rails into Laramie 16 2

Totals 445 78


23/27

218 Brian OLeary

(which was never made). Two other films have relatively high numbers

(though not a majority) of incorrect screen direction shots. In the case of

Westward the Women these almost exclusively come out of two sequences. One

involved lowering wagons by winch down into a canyon with a rock wall on

one side of the route: the terrain and sun direction obviously determined the

camera set-up. The other sequence involved a mad rush to a water hole, re-

sembling the kind of dynamic shots typically used in an Indian attack, which

freely mix shots of both directionalities.

The most interesting anomalous film of all is John Fords Wagon Master.

Ford, like Hitchcock, had a reputation for ensuring control over the final

release product by cutting in the camerathat is filming only the scenes

that he knew would be needed.25 This is in contrast to the usual Hollywood

technique of beginning with a master shot, and then going in and shootingall manner of inserts and close shots, ultimately delivering to the editor a

wide range of material to experiment with. In using the master-shot technique

it is essential to maintain directional continuity within a sequence; by exten-

sion, adjoining master shots should also observe directional continuity. Ford

rather freely mixed screen directions within sequences, only making sure to

maintain a right-to-left orientation on the crucial shots of departure, arrival,

and the passage of major barriers, such as rivers. What is so instructive about

Wagon Master is that it works: there is nothing confusing about the film to me.This suggests that the whole edifice of directional continuity, so evident in

these classical Hollywood films, is a mytha convenience for editors, not

viewers. The message of this example for students of functional semiotics is

to beware of becoming too wedded to rigid formulas: there are bound to be

idiosyncratic departures from expectationsperhaps often associated with

auteurist directors.

What Table 5 reveals, with a full 85 percent of the set-ups that show di-

rectionality in agreement with each other, is that there are in certain genres offilms strong semantic constraints that can limit the applicability of certain con-

cepts of syntactic organization, such as those proposed by Colin. These se-

mantic constraints, in the present case, may have suppressed somewhat the

natural, linguistically determined tendency to favor left-to-right panning. To

be more specific, it can be imagined that a film that overwhelmingly depicts

screen direction as going from right to left sets up a regime of leftward pan-

ning. There will be many leftward pans of accompaniment, and a surfeit of

these can work to naturalize leftward descriptive pans, making them seem lessmarked. While the two types of pans, accompaniment and descriptive, have

different message structures, a viewer may not always make these distinctions

on the fly, as it werehence the notion of naturalization.

Additionally, leftward screen direction sets up many specific opportuni-

ties for leftward descriptive pans; several examples can be identified within the


24/27


present sample. Brigham YoungFrontiersman has a scene where the pioneers

dismount their wagons, proceed up a rise, and then survey their future home

(This is the place), naturally accomplished with a pan continuing westward.

Less happily, Westward the Women has a scene where the train stops at the edge

of the desert and everyone forlornly surveys (with a leftward pan) what lies

ahead. Sometimes the camera also makes a noticeable pan ahead of a moving

wagon train, to give a general idea of what is coming up nextwe are always

interested in what comes next, not in what we have already seen. A very inter-

esting sequence shot built around left panning occurs in Western Union; three

company men seek to quell an Indian threat by riding out to the end of the line

(from right to left) to meet with massed Sioux warriors (at the left, of course).

The shot begins in accompaniment with their wagon, moves up to the telegraph

line, comes to the last pole and follows the wire down to where a war lance isstuck in the ground; the leftward pan then continues, to reveal the mounted

warriors and their chief. Finally there is a shot in Unconquered that pans left

across a map indicating the route over the Alleghenies; a leftward-rolling

wagon is superimposed over the map, making it a simultaneous descriptive

and accompanying pan.

In sum, I am suggesting that semantic conditions in genres can overrule

the unmarked syntax of the image as proposed in Colins writings. There may

be similar local semantic conditions in individual films that would have thesame effect. These semantic causes, plus the two causes mentioned in the last

section (use of mountainous outdoor locations and the need to create shock

effects with Indians), should be more than enough to account for the lack of

a statistically significant dominance of rightward panning in the westering

genre.

Before concluding, it might be instructive to pursue questions of direc-

tionality in a more qualitative way. What follows is a functional semiotic analy-

sis that counter-intuitively suggests that linguistic considerations (the conflictbetween syntactic and semantic elements) can affect the development of stan-

dard plot lines, thus coloring an entire genre.

Given that westering genre films were made by whites and are told from

the white perspective, we would expect the dominant syntax of the image to

take the following unmarked form (a straightforward account of what wester-

ing was all about):

1. Pioneers drive the Indians off the land.

And yet it is possible that compelling semantic considerations can over-

rule this unmarked syntactic construction, which deploys the givens, pioneers,

on the left side of the screen, in the position of the theme (and in a traditional

position of agencythe active voice), encountering the new, Indians, on the

right side, in the position of the rheme. Such seems to be the case here, due


25/27

220 Brian OLeary

to the map analogy. To remedy this situation we might now imagine a new

dominant syntactic structure:

2. The Indians are driven off the land by pioneers.

But there is a problem with this now-marked form of syntax, the passive

voice. Sentences 1 and 2 are logically equivalent but not functionally equiva-

lent. The passive construction makes the recipient of the action thematic, and

furthermore seems to reduce the dynamism of the verb. These changes will

not do for studio-era genre pictures, which seek to emphasize the strength and

dynamism of the pioneers. A simple solution to this semantic/syntactic bind

seems to have been adopted over and over again: the dislocation of the true

conflict to the east, or back behind (to the right of) the pioneers.

3. Pioneers defeat villains from back East, who incidentally may be

using the Indians to achieve their goals.26

The creation of these white villains from the East makes it unnecessary to

expend much (or any) screen time in grappling with the morality of driving

the Indians from their land; that conflict is now off center-stage, reduced to

an optional clause.

Thus these films, for the most part, dodge the issue of the usurpation of

land rights from the Indians by the pioneers. The analysis presented here sug-gests that this strategy of dislocation allowed a genre of westward intrusion to

flourish, one that concentrated on pioneers and their heroic leaders, fighting

natural hardships, it is true, but also (white) human venality. Battles with Indi-

ans became just one of the many hardships, not the contentional center of the

westward movement.27

In this way the functional semiotic approach lends itself to various re-

gimes of practical criticism without, I hope, erecting an extreme terminologi-

cal barrier. The terms may be a little unfamiliar, but the ideas, I think,ultimately seem to make good intuitive sense. Thus a long-neglected film the-

ory can take on a new life in contempoary film studies.

Pennsylvania State University

Notes

1. Michel Colin, Langue, film, discours: Prolegomenes a une semiologie generative du film

(Paris: Klincksieck, 1985), 202.2. Jan Simons, Enunciation: From Code to Interpretation, in The Film Spectator:

From Sign to Mind, ed. Warren Buckland (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University

Press, 1995), 192206.

3. John M. Carroll, Toward a Structural Psychology of Cinema (The Hague: Mouton,1980).

4. Michel Colins ideas are best explained in Langue, film, discours. The problem with


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calling it generative semiotics is that even though Colin started with that idea in

mind, the generative concepts became a minority in his last version of the theory.

5. Odile Bachler, La semiologie generative au cinema, CinemAction 47 (1985)

4451; Dominique Chateau, Le cinema comme langage (Paris: Editions AISS-IASPA,

1986), and Towards a Generative Model of Filmic Discourse, in Buckland,

3544.

6. Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual De-

sign (London: Routledge, 1996); Theo Van Leeuwen, Moving English: The Visual

Language of Film, in Redesigning English: New Texts, New Identities, ed. Sharon

Goodman and David Graddol (London: Routledge, 1996), 81105.

7. The comprehensive but unwieldy term functional social semiotics is used by

Susan Yell to describe Hallidays work in Paul Bouissac, ed., Encyclopedia of Semiot-

ics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 303.

8. Brian OLeary, Michel Colins Generative Semiology: A Post-Metzian Phase of Lin-

guistics in Film Theory (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Dallas, 1999).9. For linguistic approaches to time-based art in general, I recommend the work of

Ray Jackendoff. His A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, written with Fred Lerdahl

(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), since updated, provides a practical demonstration

of the ideas outlined in his more theoretical Semantics and Cognition (Cambridge:

MIT Press, 1983). For his most recent relevant ideas see Foundations of Language:

Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002),

8081.

10. M. A. K. Halliday, An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 2d ed. (London: Edward

Arnold, 1994), 3536.

11. Ibid., xxxiiiiv.

12. Colin, 140.

13. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cin-

ema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1985), 910.

14. Ibid., 305.

15. Ibid., 36162.

16. Ibid., 388. Barry Salt has written on Hollywood film style in a manner similar to

Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson; however, unlike them he gives little detail about

his methods. Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis, 2nd ex-panded ed. (London: Starwood, 1992), i, iii.

17. Robert B. McCall and Jerome Kagan, Fundamental Statistics for Behavioral Science

(Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 174. Gary Smith, Statistical Reasoning (Boston:

Allyn and Bacon, 1991), 24344; Leonard J. Tashman and Kathleen R. Lamborn,

The Ways and Means of Statistics (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1979), 26061.

18. George Custen, Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (New Bruns-

wick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 23536.

19. Colin, 199202.

20. The English language does not have a way to identify a diagonal vector with a sin-gle word, requiring instead such circumlocutions as upward to the right. Cogni-

tive evidence for the markedness of diagonal perception in comparison to the

horizontal and vertical is referenced in my New Critical Methods and the Films

of the First Avant-Garde: Symphonie Diagonale and Entracte, Film Criticism 23, no.

3 (1998), 2930.

21. This table originally appeared in my dissertation (see note 8) as Table 6. There was


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222 Brian OLeary

a typographical error in the body, although the totals and conclusions were not

affected; a similar error occurred in Table 12, equivalent to Table 5 here. These are

corrected versions.

22. Colin, 205.23. Lane Roth, Film Semiotics, Metz, and Leones Trilogy (New York: Garland Publishing,

1983).

24. Edward Buscomb, ed. The BFI Companion to the Western (New York: Da CapoPress, 1988); Ralphe and Natasha Friar, The Only Good Indian . . . The Hollywood

Gospel (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1972); Phil Hardy, The Western, 2nd

edition (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1995); Michael Hilger, The American In-dian in Film (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1986).

25. For Fords methods see Tag Gallagher, John Ford: The Man and His Films (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1986), 46364. Unlike Hitchcock, Ford did notwork with storyboards: his films were constructed almost entirely in his head.

26. The villains in Wagon Master are not iconographically identifiable as easterners,nor is the locus of villainy back East; in Red River, a true psychological western,

the main villains are within, although eastern villains (Missouri border gangs) arefeared in the diegesis. Otherwise the generalization holds: the westering hero goes

as far west as the pioneering spirit allows; the crucial opponents of this move-

mentwho are not the Indians in these filmsare at the pioneers back, resistingthe forward march.

27. The western wagon train movies are also characterized by another very literal dis-

location. History tells us that the true territorial clash of that era was played outon the Pacific coast, where relatively small tribes were forced off good farming

lands onto small reservations to make room for approaching white settlers. Theplains Indians, by contrast, generally let the wagon trains pass unmolested. Indianattacks were actually quite rare and way down on the list of causes of pioneer mor-

tality. In these movies we see the opposite: Indians inevitably attack the wagon

trains on the plains or in the mountains, but when the pioneers finally reach Cali-

fornia, Oregon, or Washington the fertile valleys are remarkably Indian-free. Thusthese films present a double dislocation: both the site of territorial conflict and the

locus of villainy are displaced eastward, to allow the pioneers to break through

and arrive victorious in the extreme western part of the continent (the extreme

left), fulfi

lling manifest destiny in an uncomplicated way.

camera movements in hollywood’s westering genre - a functional semiotic approach

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