Yamustafa!

Final Part Meshes Of the Afternoon This film was produced in 1943 by Maya Deren and Alexander Hamid in Hollywood. It was described as trance film, with both subjective and dreamlike qualities. Unlike The Sky Over Berlin , it seems difficult to provide a short summary about the film, since it has no standard story line to be told. However, we can identify some patterns and movements in the film that are based on small fragmented tales . One is that of a young woman, played by Deren herself, who is looking from a window at a figure in dark dress with its face replaced by a mirror. The young woman, however, can see also herself following the figure, and once more herself following the two! The second fragment is of a man who opens the door of the same flat, finds the young woman and takes her up the stairs. These two fragmented pieces of minimal story elements are broken with similar sub-fragments. All these pieces seem to evolve around each other while the identity of each actor ...

Part Three "Strangers on A Train" Notes on the Opening Scene     We suggested earlier in this study that language could influence the modes of signification in films. This case study of a scene from Hitchcok’s film Strangers on A Train aims to illuminate this issue.    There have been some considerable discussions on.how cinema can work, as a language of signification, on the expression of emotions and feeling. Hitchcock's cinematic style was particularly linked to this idea of "pure cinema." This idea is quite important for this study, because of the implied suggestion that cinema can have independent faculties which qualify it to speak purely in its own language.  As we suggested earlier, our stand is that this is not possible. Here we will give a textual example of how, in fact, this particular cinematic language is heavily influenced by natural language.   On examining Hitchcock's cinematic tools for delivering an inside look into...

      Part One cont'd The Cinematic Signifier: A History The study of signs and the developments in the field semiotics has given the critique of cinema a big leap ahead, although after more than seventy years of cinema’s birth, film studies as a discipline moved from the mere feature-like reviews of the journalist to the systematic study of film as a form of expression that needed fundamental understanding, as well as studying individual texts. The strong consistent flow of American genre cinema seemed to give the impression that cinema is indeed approachable through the systematic methods of text analysis driven from structural linguistics. “Semiotics promised to track down the units of representation in the aesthetic system [of the genre conventions, and structuralism] to account for the specific narrative shape of the values represented.” However, it seems that the disciplined approaches of linguistics to the study of sign in cinema proved to be t...

  Through its century-long history of existence, cinematic expression has continued to reside, at least in its mainstream manifestations, in the domain of prose . The many possibilities for the articulation of meaning, with which the new medium was born, have lent themselves to the rationalistic nature of a particular kind of prose, namely that of narrative. What came to be known as Narrative cinema dominated the new medium and, influenced by the long history of literature and the novel, has assigned itself to a certain relationship with reality .[1]   It is indeed a legitimate question to investigate why cinema, and its language , has been deemed, since the early beginnings, as  a  narrator rather than a poet, while there are no innate proprieties that force such  a  characteristic upon the new medium. In the contrary, cinema in essence, we will argue, is rather a close relative to the traditions of poetry than those of prose. ...