Pierce's Tripartite Classification of Signs:
- Symbol -arbitrary- analogous to Saussure's linguistic analysis
- Icon -likenees, resemblance - No analogy in Saussure's
- Index -'existentially linked' (eg. where there is smoke, there is fire) - No analogy in Saussure's
Boulevard du Temple by Louis Daguerre is believed to be the first photograph to feature humans as the exposure lengths at this time, 1838, was 10 minutes and nobody stayed put for that length of time to show up in a photograph. But in this scenic photo there is a man getting his shoes shined and a couple sat outside a cafe who stayed still and so unwittingly became the subjects in this seminal photograph.
Bill discussed how culture changed due to the creation and developments of photography. Artists found that with photography taking care of realism and perspective it freed them to be more creative and thus Dadism and Cubism and Modernism and a whole host of other 'isms' were born!
Andre Bazin, a French theorist and film critique argued that photography and cinematography are indexical, they are existentially linked to each other. Bill only mentioned his theories about film but i've found out that Bazin wrote a lot about physical modelling also:
If the plastic arts [painting and sculpture] were put under psychoanalysis, the practice of embalming the dead might turn out to be a fundamental factor in their creation. The process might reveal that at the origin of painting and sculpture there lies a mummy complex. The religion of ancient Egypt, aimed against death, saw survival as depending on the continued existence of the corporeal body. Thus, by providing a defence against the passage of time it satisfied a basic psychological need in man, for death is but the victory of time. To preserve, artificially, his bodily appearance is to snatch it from the flow of time, to stow it away neatly, so to speak, in the hold of life. It was natural, therefore, to keep up appearances in the face of the reality of death by preserving flesh and bone.Bazin is saying that physical models and paintings are a way of preserving life by representing life. However these only resemble the object of the work and in fact lean towards illusion as they represent the artist more than the object. Photography, on the other hand, he says is more iconic as it is more distanced from the artist's personality and "all the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence." Photography with it's scientific and technical method removes the artist's fingerprint so to speak and is more akin to our personal perception. However he does not take into account digital photography and cinematography with it's manipulations and distortions. Traditional photography is intimately linked to the moment whereas digital photography uses pixels and these can be manipulated.
Bill mentioned that physical models are double indexical as making a mould of a face is like a death mask and then filming the prosthetic face is a death mask of a death mask. I believe this is why digital effects do not have the same presence as physical effects, they are not as haunting and emotive as the physical.
Dobby in Harry Potter is a perfect example of this and we actually discussed this in our seminar. I've always thought Dobby looked silly because he's clearly CGI and Daniel Radcliffe is obviously talking to a tennis ball on a stick. The producers of the latest film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 must have realised this too as the house elf underwent a humanising process as this article explains: http://www.firedbydesign.com/rude-elf/. We respond more to human beings and as Dobby is a key emotional part of the story he was made to look more human-like. And thankfully they used a dummy for the poignant death scene but i think it would have been far more emotional and believable if they used physical effects throughout. We would be aware that it was a little guy in some amazing prosthetics and would connect to that far more than some obvious pixels.
Bill also mentioned right at the end something about genre. Apparently genre classifications are rarely exhaustive or exclusive. As a text/film cannot be genre-less but also does not belong to one genre.
We watched some Sci-fi films including The Thing and Forbidden Planet and discussed how they transverse genres, including horror and romance and comedy not just sci-fi. In our seminar we expanded upon the sci-fi genre and talked about how it is set in the future but is actually a reflection on the present. The Cybermen when they first appeared in Doctor Who in 1966 were just men with metal bits stuck on them reflecting the fear at the time of what would happen if we took prosthetics too far. In their recent revival they are full cyborgs in complete metal suits and are more of a reflection of our fear that technology we over take and ultimately destroy us. There has been a common theme in sci-fi to exaggerate and project the worse expectations on the future which in reality rarely occur.
In fact the future looks more like the past when you get there as is the case with the growing trend of Steampunk. We realised that old sci-fi was about getting away from nature whereas modern sci-fi is now trying to get back to nature. We have a nostalgia for the future.
PS. All this talk of death masks and the past made me think of L'inconnue de la Seine. It is the death mask of a girl found drowned in the Seine with a smile on her face which is very unusual in drowning cases. The story goes that a pathologist at the Paris morgue was so taken by her beauty that he had a moulder make a plaster cast death mask of her face. In the following years copies were made of the death mask and they became a fashionable fixture in Parisian homes. The face of the unknown woman was used for the head of the first aid mannequin Rescue Annie. It has, therefore, been called by some "the most kissed face" of all time.
Much has been written about her due to her famous enigmatic death mask including Emile Autumn's 306, a song about how 306 bodies were pulled out of the Seine river in Paris in under 6 years, the highest number in one day being 16. The bodies were kept behind Notre Dame cathedral so people could recognize the victims. L'Inconnue de la Seine was one of these but she was never identified and the unusual smile on her face never explained.
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