Semiotics of the gazes and metalevels in filmic enunciation as an interpretative problem

Abstract

That of filmic enunciation is an open and never entirely closed problem. Film as a specific does not lend itself to the tendency of the classic semiotic theory of enunciation based on a glottocentric matrix. Furthermore, the film, as a syncretic and constitutively multi-authorial and multi-level text, is an act of parole far more complex than a verbal text. The aim of this paper is therefore to explore the varied mix of issues related to the filmic enunciation, starting from the impasse of classical glottocentrism, already widely criticized by the traditional semiotics of cinema, engaging the debate in the context of a foundational “metalinguisticity” of cinema, intended as a system of articulation first of all of gazes, and finally attempting to propose a theoretical framework for which filmic enunciation is not an exclusively textual problem, but also an interpretative one, to be approached from the side of the viewer.