terça-feira, 18 de julho de 2017

Poetics of Cinema: The Collaborative Authorship


Among the most common problems found in movie making, are the mistakes during the course during the production of a movie, the loss of harmony of the parts and elements that make up the film, the loss, therefore, of its signic unity. In fact, Cinema is an art made by various professionals, each one with a specific function. That mixture, which is inherent to it, given its intersemiotic nature, depends on a tuning that leads them all toward the same target to the extent that that which is targeted as concept, idea, aesthetics, theme and argument of the film, is externalized in each part, producing a whole, a unity.
The theory of the author, debated in the Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1960 decade, brought some contribution to that question, but unfortunately reserved to the director or the movie maker the laurels of the analogy with the poet, the painter, the sculptor, the writer, etc., leaving aside the authorial co-participation of the other components in the realization of the work. The confrontation is between the movie director, as the thinking agent, on the one hand, and the scriptwriter, the director of photography, the director of art, musical composer, etc., on the other hand, as agents of technical profile.
The fact that the movie director has to make the crucial decisions in the making of the film does not eliminate the co-authorship of the other agents, nor the poetical character of their functions regarding the making of the filmic sign. Following this perspective, what one realizes is that the intersemioses of the filmic unity configures itself as systemic, that is, there is a set of semiotic agents with specific abilities that interact and integrate themselves in the making of the work. This ontological complexity, made up of creators working together, in a clear dialogic exchange between their functions and specializations, and supports the adoption of the general theory of systems and its main theoreticians – Mário Bunge, Edgar Morin and Jorge Vieira –, in an articulation with Peircean semiotics, with the aim of understanding the collective authorship leading to intersemiotic unity.
According to Vieira (2008: 89), there are three fundamental classification parameters to observe the system: its capacity of permanence, its environment, and its autonomy. Still within this perspective, for a system to consolidate itself as such, there are so called hierarchical or evolving parameters outlined as such: composition, connectivity, structure, integrality, functionality and organization, all of them pervaded by a parameter that can appear from the first stage: complexity. Thus, a system is characterized by its temporal process and its capacity to grow. The complexity of such movement occurs through the diversity of connections that are brought about toward the survival of the system.
In the case of Cinema, a similar process can be seen in the realization and production of the filmic sign. Given the need for specialized agents, who are grouped together so as to work toward the making of a film, what there is in this environment is a temporal process that demands one to evolve through each hierarchical parameter indicated above, which reflects in the capacity of permanence, that is, in the capacity to reach a regularity in filmic construction, which can be seen in the finished film. For, after all, the film has to present an autonomy, wherein everything connects cohesively and coherently:  art direction, direction of photography, costumes, script, direction, shots, montage, etc.
By the way, the parameters of cohesion and coherence are also parameters of consolidation of a system. Cohesion deals with the syntax between elements, their articulation and effectiveness. Coherence, like semantics, evolves in an intersemiotic diology of its elements for the construction of meaning between themselves, into an integrated, complex, and meaningful whole.
There is still another pertinent issue regarding the systemic complexity which is important for an ontological cinematographic analysis, that is, nucleation. According to Vieira (2007: 109), nucleation is a kind of process that is more common in psychosocial relations, where the figure of a leader interposes itself over a group. In Cinema this nucleation is brought about by the figure of the director and his responsibility falls upon the orchestration of those specialized agents, many times from dissimilar areas, integrating them, though each one keeps his/her functions.
What one observes is that such signic unity, which is necessary for the construction of the parts into a whole, will reflect itself both in the process of the realization of the film and in the process of its interpretation. There is, to a large or minor degree, the risk of that combination between agents and specialties to enter into a process of dissipation, losing thus its synthetic cohesion and its semantic coherence, jeopardizing the interfaces and intersemiotic interchanges between its various layers of meaning. Such layers of meaning are coined and entwined by the integrality and organization of the scriptwriter, director of photography, production designer, art director, music composer, director, etc., within a whole, the film. The result of an intersemiotic untimeliness, if it indeed occurs, seems to affect the potentiality of interpretation and communication of a work.
In this context, what one ought to observe are the organizational principles operating within such heterogeneity marked by specific and dissimilar areas, but which operate together within the cinematographic art in a kind of synergy, a diology amid the parts in both intersemiotic and systemic levels.
The filmic unity, therefore, has to be seen as an organizing parameter of the ontological and signic complexity of the language of the Cinema.
References
Vieira, Jorge de Albuquerque. (2007), Science – Means of Knowledge: Art and Science – A Vision From Complexity. Fortaleza: Gráfica e Editora.
__________________________ (2008), Theory of Knowledge and Art – Forms of Knowledge: Art and Science – A Vision From Complexity. 2nd edition. Fortaleza: Gráfica e Editora.

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