Film and Meaning

Abstract

There are many ways in which we might approach the idea of meaning in film. However the main concern here is not what films mean, but how they come to be seen as meaningful, how there is a generation of signs which take on the appearance of sense and hermeneutic value, how our perception of them is arrested so that we feel, as spectators, that meaning is to be found, or needs to be worked at. To this end, the chapter is divided into three parts: the first section will be concerned with mapping out a particular approach to how meaning appears in films; the second section will take up this issue from two different perspectives, shifting away from the point of the film’s reception, to issues concerned with the cultural production of meaning; the final section will take up some points from Derrida, examining how meaning ‘frames’ are generated in order to make interpretative gestures. Each of these positions is used to illustrate the volatility of meaning, and how ultimately we need to look to the mechanisms which declare something to be meaningful in order to understand the relationship of cinema to meaning. The following chapter will consider in more detail the challenge to, and even collapse of, such relationships.