Chapter 5 - Figuring (Out) Films: Figuration in Narrative Cinema

Summary

Writing about films involves choosing appropriate words. This is necessary both in order successfully to reduce confusion, where appropriate, as well as accurately to convey disorientation, where that is appropriate. This is, of course, not only a question of language; the distinctions between abstract and concrete, between literal and non-literal, and between implicit and explicit, may (strictly speaking) be intralinguistic, but they also have ontological and epistemological significance. In what follows I aim to make some remarks which will be both clarificatory and stimulating with regard to what (and how) films mean as well as what (and how) we can productively write or say about it. These are, of course, questions that might be raised by any film but that disorientating films can render unavoidable. In places this chapter is somewhat abstract because this seemed the most efficient and uncluttered way of presenting my ideas, but elsewhere (as well as in the chapters that follow) I have tried to present sufficient numbers of concrete examples as to tether any abstractions to the details of actual films.

This chapter takes, then, something of a step back in order to clarify and defend some theoretical positions that implicitly underlay Part 1 of this book, and that will come more to the fore in Part 2. The Cinema of Disorientation contends that confusion and disorientation are not merely the result of encountering shapelessness, but that different filmic forms may prompt different kinds of disorientation, all of which have their own shape; I attempt to trace some of these shapes in the chapters devoted to specific films. Another word for shape is figure. The concept of figuration can, I claim, contribute to this process of tracing, as well as to a critical approach to films which offers the possibility of tailoring one's methods and interpretations to the film in question and does not require one to either select a rigid methodology or succumb to eclecticism. Because of the concept's complexity and pervasiveness, I will not attempt to define figuration at the outset.