ABSTRACT
Against mainstream film semiology which valorizes “meanings” and “multiple meanings” for their own sake, called “polysemic discourses,” Annette Kuhn has written on the radical import of semioticity-denying possibilities in avant-garde film. Such positions are as rare as they are useful: “… the opposition between movement and stasis is realized in the relentless return to photographs as objects of representation and the constant and apparently random movement of the camera over these objects. The possibility of contemplation offered by photographs is recouped and even radically undercut by the continually moving picture. At those moments in the film when meaning does seem about to emerge — when the camera zooms back to offer a larger and more unified perspective — the solution to the riddle of the profilmic space is immediately displaced by the denial of such space implied in the revelation that the film image is not ‘reality’ reproduced, but another image reproduced. This posing of a puzzle and refusal of a solution provides a recurring structure for the film, and a repeated denial of the spectator's efforts to impose meaning.
