The outsider

Antonio Santangelo – University of Torino

Cultural models that influence contemporary cinema

Narration and conception of reality

In semiotics, we use to say narration is one of the main bases of our way to conceive reality.

Greimas, referring to Tesniere’s studies (1959), states that every text is narrative, no matter which genre it belongs to, because language is narrative.

Language, in fact, and the sentences we use to define what’s going on around us, are the theatre of the short story of a subject who makes or suffer actions, that have consequences; or the place for the description of a state of relations between the subject and objects or other subjects that surround him.

Some say that language is narrative, because we learn narrative codes before any other code. Even before learning to speak.

As far as language is one of the most important tools for our cognition of reality, narration is very important for a sociosemiotics, because it contributes to create our socially shared vision of reality.

Linking things and creating an order

The main way to link things and facts through a narrative pattern is declaring the existence of some cause – effect logics between them.

This definition of a narrative scheme is common to Propp’s model, Bremond’s, Chatman’s, Barthes’ and Greimas’ canonic model.

Lévi-Strauss goes beyond, adfirming that a narrative model can even work with different logics: analogy, opposition, transformation, disjunction.

Narration, to the french anthropologist, is simply a way to link signs in patterns, creating an order he defines as the “grammar” of a story.

A mirror of culture grammars

My hypothesis is that the semiosphere in which the movies get their meaning (expecially the commercial blockbuster movies), works like the the myths semiosphere, described by Lévi-Strauss.

As it happens in this semiosphere, the narrative grammars our culture uses to read reality and to create its pertinence are mirrored in the movies structures, so that people can watch from the outside their own way of thinking.

The sociosemiotics researcher has to find out the most important cultural models that give form and meaning to the movies, following the idea that those models don’t give birth only to movies, but also to many other texts, actions and convictions, that are the basis of our way to live together.

Semiotic structures behind narrative texts

Looking from a narrative point of view, the semiotic structures that are the basis of narrative texts like movies are not always visible on their surface.

Sometimes a way to shoot, to sonorize or to edit a movie is meaningful, because it transmits a precise idea of how the objects that stand in front of a camera have to be framed and linked.

Many other times (and the case of commercial blockbuster movies is often like this) the perceivable surface of a movie is not pertinent, for a sociosemiotics analysis of its cultural models.

Greimas describes this situation with the different layers of his sense generation model, when he says that everything begins with a configuration of values, that are connected step by step with narrative roles, themes and figures.

In his opinion, the manifestation layer of a narrative text is not part of its narrative structure, and the demonstration is that the same story can be told, without changing, through different media.

Today we know the intersemiotic translations create a lot of problems, because of the meaning the manifestation codes gain in a culture, but in my analysis I’ll mainly follow Greimas theories, because they well fit my analysis objects.

Finding the meaning of grammars

Text

Net of Texts

Semiotic models

Confirms from everyday life

Grammar and cultural models behind the pirates

vs

Propp’s model and initiation rites

Sanctioner role

OutsideInside Inside

++/--

Refusing your society values

Inside

-

Outside

+

The couple’s nest

vs

Inside

-

Inside

-

Outside

+

Outside

Stillness and lack of sense

Inside

-

Outside

+

No couple

Living together in a hostile world

Inside

-

Outside

-

Moving together

The distrust of the fathers

Road to Perdition

Inside

-

Outside

+

The individualistic outsider

Moving alone

Exploiting the institutions

Pure desire

Inside

OutsideHe knows the

logics of everyboy

The value of a pirate

Is it a pertinent cultural model?

Les passions tristes, 2003La costituzione ai tempi della democrazia autoritaria, La

Repubblica, 22/7/08