Back to ‘cinema is filmed theatre’
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Eli Rozik
Abstract
Following its invention, cinema was initially conceived and approached as photographed theatre. After a reasonable period of self-establishment, however, it has become commonplace that cinema essentially differs from theatre, and is thus a new and independent dramatic art form. Eventually, while the advent of performance art created the illusion of a basic affinity to theatre, on the grounds of spectators actually experiencing real bodies on a stage, there has been a broadening of the alleged gap between theatre and cinema, in which the spectator’s experience is mediated by images of actors projected on a screen. I reconsider here both the initial and eventual approaches, reflecting my own intuition that, without ignoring fundamental differences, a feature film is a recording of a fictional world formulated in the medium of theatre. It has to be decoded and interpreted, therefore, as a theatrical text, since a recording does not change the nature of the recorded text. Consequently, differences between cinema and theatre are fundamentally the result of technical constraints and advantages. I support these theses by a thorough analysis and critic of Roland Barthes’ seminal article ‘Rhetoric of the image’ on still photography.
Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG
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Articles in the same Issue
- Semiotic systems of works of visual art: Signs, connotations, signals
- Art — depression — fiction: A variation on René Thom’s three important kinds of human activity
- Formes narratives de l’action et dangers de dérives en narratologie
- Crossing borders: Towards a cognitive aesthetic approach to Caravaggio and Beckett
- Iconicity, Ratosh’s lexical innovations, and beyond
- What you should know to survive in knowledge societies: On a semiotic understanding of ‘knowledge’
- Vers une théorie générale de la fiction
- Back to ‘cinema is filmed theatre’
- The dimensionality of notation
- Learning by abduction: A geometrical interpretation
- Political representation within the libidinal economy of a pictorial space: A political-semiotic reading of three propaganda posters of the Chinese Cultural Revolution
- The semiotic stance
- A semiotic study on the Transworld Skateboarding magazine
- Serial form as entertainment and interpretative framework: Probability and the ‘black box’ of past experience
- It took Spinoza and structuralism to teach Deleuze that meaning is not necessarily attributed to the cinematic sign
- Making sense of the visual — is Google the seventh language?
- Theatrical fictional worlds, counterfactuals, and scientific thought experiments
- PTSD: A situated look at the semiotic process and role of individual umwelts in human existence/function
- The semiotics of intercultural exchange: Ostensive definition and digital reason
- De l’esprit, de la culture, et des signes
- Le statut de la pulsion dans la sémiotique narrative morphodynamique
- Une typologie des relations
- Biology, semiotics, complexity: An experiment in interdisciplinarity
- Sign values in processes of distinction: The concept of luxury
- Analyse sémiotique de la webpublicite
- On signing translation
- Giambattista Vico’s open agenda of modernity
