Cinema and communication: 'cinelogic' and 'cinaesthesis'

Abstract

The article explores the various ways in which cinema “communicates” meaning, making use of the five materials of film, namely three of an auditory nature and two of a visual nature: dialogue, soundtrack (music) and noise on the one hand, and images and graphic elements on the other. This is not all there is to it, because all these materials are unavoidably appropriated by filmmakers in the guise of various signifiers, each with its own signified, along the trajectories of two signifying axes of meaning, to wit, the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic, respectively, on both of which certain codes are audiovisually inscribed. But even a thorough overview of these elements of meaning-generation is not sufficient to understand the way that film communicates – one has to follow Deleuze in his radical philosophy of the cinema, and scrutinise the difference between the cinema of the movement-image, and the cinema of the time-image. This article claims that this complex intertwinement of signifying elements is the way that film communicates. Relevant films will be discussed to demonstrate how this happens.