Beyond Meaning

I had purchased a used copy of David Bordwell's Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema a while ago and it sat on my bookshelf unread as I waited for an opportunity to actually see a few Ozu films. One could not ask for much more than the 25-film Ozu Yasujiro retrospective currently in progress at the Film Center, so I cracked open the Bordwell book -- and it is a revelation. Beyond offering vivid, eye-opening analyses of Ozu's formal strategies, Bordwell provides some cogent arguments against prevailing modes of art criticism. If I had to boil his argument down to a single sentence, it would be: Art criticism should be less concerned with what a work means, and more about what it does.

Bordwell defends his historical poetics model by arguing that a film should not be treated as a "text" to be "read," but as

an artifact to be used by the spectator to produce certain effects, of which 'meaning' in its most elevated sense (themes, implicit messages) is only one. The work prompts a range of perceptual, emotional, and cognitive effects -- guidance of attention, establishment of expectations, thwarting of hypotheses, retroactive reconsideration of information -- which are essential to the work's uniqueness.

Bordwell's approach contrasts with critical models based in semiotic or thematic analysis, hermeneutical models which attempt to reveal a work's message or meaning. Such models, he astutely observes, take an "atomistic and vague approach to style" and thereby "refuse the art work its full range of stylistic novelty and power." In other words, in the endless process of interpretation and exegesis, the experience(s) of encountering and engaging with the art work is overlooked.

Of course the preoccupation with meaning is not confined to film or art criticism. It's symptomatic of antiquated religionist ideologies, of a world in which texts written centuries ago are still valued despite their irrelevance to contemporary understandings of the world and its various phenomena. Many keep trying to find ways of reconstructing and refurbishing the House of Meaning instead of razing it and enjoying the unobstructed view.

"I don't think we're here for anything, we're just products of evolution. You can say, 'Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don't think there's a purpose,' but I'm anticipating a good lunch."
-- James D. Watson

"People say that what we are all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive...."
-- Joseph Campbell

For Susan Sontag (1933-2004).

"The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means."
-- Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation" (1964)