Muscio y Zemignan (1991) - Francesco Casetti and Italian Film Semiotics. Cinema Journal, 30.

University of Texas Press
Society for Cinema & Media Studies
Francesco Casetti and Italian Film Semiotics

Author(s): Giuliana Muscio and Roberto Zemignan
Source: Cinema Journal, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Winter, 1991), pp. 23-46
Published by: University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies
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Francesco Casetti and ItalianFilmSemiotics
by Giuliana Muscio and Roberto Zemignan
On the American film studies scene, Italian film theory is not as well-known and
as discussed as are, for example, theoretical contributionsfrom France. Due to
the lack of timely and systematic translations of Italian theoretical work, and
also to the particular circumstances in which film theory is produced in Italy
(differentdisciplinaryapproachesto film, a long historyof culturalfragmentation,
and so on), the American film scholar would have a very hard time developing
a profile of Italian film theory, unless the profile were restricted to the aesthetic
issues articulated in the neorealist debate. Apart from Umberto Eco, truly an
"international"-though all the same very Italian-scholar, and with the ex-
ception of Teresa de Lauretis'spioneering presentationof Italian semiotics, what
little of Italian film theory does penetrate into America comes filtered through
French references and reactions.1
This is the case also for whatever interest has been shown toward Francesco
Casetti's work, stimulated by a detailed review, by Roger Odin, of Casetti'sbook
Dentro lo sguardo, that appearedin the French bilingual magazine IRIS-though
an article based on the book did get published in English in the journal Sub-
Stance.2 Casetti holds a position in the forefront of contemporary international
film theory,representingthe position reached by the latest theoreticaland semiotic
post-structuralistwork in Italy today. In Dentro lo sguardo: II film e il suo
spettatore (literally, Within the Look: The Film and Its Spectator)3he has laid
out the foundations of a theoretical model for film enunciation-an ambitious
intellectual project that has been particularly appreciated by his French col-
leagues.
In the context of Italian semiotics, Casetti is someone who has taken up and
continued certain trends; but he is also someone who has brought into play an
innovative thrust, especially on account of the familiarity he has with other
disciplinary areas, such as sociology and mass media, which, in turn, has led to
a whole series of cultural crossovers.
Italian Semiotics. Structuralistand semiotic studies in Italy have been char-

acterized by a productive interchange between film semiotics and semiotic studies
in general to such a degree that it would be difficult to establish their respective
contributionsaside from this interrelationship.Italian semiotics, in fact, has (with
GiulianaMuscioteachesfilmat the Universityof Padua.Her mostrecentbook,on film

and the New Deal, is forthcomingin Italianthis year.RobertoZemignanteachesat the
Universityof Padua.
? 1991 Boardof Trusteesof the Universityof Illinois
Cinema Journal 30, No. 2, Winter 1991 23

the obvious exception of literary semiotics) a general inclination to deal with
nonverbal systems of communication.
As Teresa de Lauretis has underlined in her essay, Italian semiotic studies
have, furthermore,been characterized by a deep interest in the cultural, ideo-
logical, and political implications of the study of communication.
We could perhaps distinguish the divergent processes of growth within the
discipline overall, the presence of which seems itself to be a peculiar Italian trait:
while literarysemiotics developed mostly within the disciplinaryfield of "History
of Languages,"and is thus distinguished by a sophisticatedphilological tradition
and by a historical approach, film semiotics seems to have had the most diverse
origins, developing out of such different fields as media studies and aesthetics,
and offering a rich landscape of individual (and remarkably personal) contri-
butions, without producing "schools"or group work.4
From 1965 onward, the New Cinema Festival at Pesaro has proven to be
the platform assigned the role of receiving and launching the contributions of
those cinema critics and historiansinterested in developing, on new bases, the-
oretical debates about cinema and its possible linguistic status, in the wake of,
and in response to, suggestions arising from recent French research in this field,
as exemplified in the seminal essay by Christian Metz, "Le cinema: langue ou
langage" (1964).
The Pesaro festival is, in fact, the site and the founding moment of Italian
film semiotics. Indeed, it was at the first Pesaro Round Table that Pier Paolo
Pasolini began the famous series of his "semiotic essays" on cinema, with his
paper entitled "II cinema di poesia."5It is not hard to see that it is a fascinating
semiotic terminology-rather than the theory of semiotics proper-that is taken
up in these essays, in what turns out to be, more or less, "yet another suggestive
declaration of a poetics," decked out in "new" clothes.6
Devising neologisms such as "cinemes," by analogy with "phonemes," in
order to indicate the minimal constitutive elements of the "im-signs" (or "sig-
nificant images," in turn likened to the "monemes"of language), Pasolini is able
to assert the existence of a "language of cinematic poetry" that would be con-
stituted on the basis of "free indirect discourse." Through this element, once
again of a linguistic nature, the filmmaker'ssubjectivitywould directly be given
shape in the cinematic work: "the visual communication which is at the basis
of cinematic language is... brute in the extreme, more or less animal-like.
Gestures and brute reality, as much as dreams and the mechanisms of memory,
are of a virtually pre-human order, or at least at the limits of humanness-in
any case pre-grammaticaland even premorphological ... The linguistic instru-
ment on which cinema is based is therefore of a more or less irrational type.
This explains the profoundly oneiric nature of cinema, as well as its absolute
and inescapable, as it were objectual concreteness" (169). And, shortly after, he
adds that "the cinema author possesses no dictionary, but draws on an infinity
of possibilities:the signs (im-signs) that he or she uses are not taken from some
store, bank, or stockpile, but from chaos, where they exist only as mere possibilities
24 Cinema Journal 30, No. 2, Winter 1991

or foreshadowingsof mechanical or dreamlike communication"(170). "In short,"
concludes Pasolini, "cinema, or the language of im-signs, is of a dual nature: it
is extremely subjective and extremely objective at one and the same time.... The
two aspects coexist closely bound together and cannot be separated even for the
purposes of analysis" (174).
These positions are taken up once again, and furtherradicalized,in Pasolini's
Pesaro paper of the following year, "La lingua della realta" ("The Language of
Reality"), which stands in net contrast to what Metz was saying about the same
themes at the time. The concept of a cinematic "language,"and of its "natural"
double articulation-into "cinemes" and "im-signs"-leads Pasolini, in fact, to
propose that from this "is inevitably derived the idea-generated precisely by
cinema, or rather from the ways cinema has of reproducingreality-that reality
is, in the end, nothing but cinema in nature" (199). "The whole of life," declares
Pasolini, "the actions that compose it taken all together, is a living and natural
cinema" (206).
Criticisms were immediately made, by Eco and Emilio Garroni, of the
"semiotic ingenuity" of Pasolini'sassimilating "culturalfacts" to "natural"phe-
nomena.7 These critiques, however, leave intact the "ideological" and poetic
value of the author's discourse;above all, the critiques do nothing to lessen the
rupturing, and at the same time innovating, role of these writings-and of
Pasolini's work in general-within Italian culture and society. Pasolini stirs up
a sector already in a state of turbulence: theoretical studies of cinema.
In Italy, as on the international scene, the objective of film theory at the
beginning of the sixties had been that of building a methodology of study that
could be more "scientific" and "intersubjective,"and that could go beyond
impressionistic criticism. Its aim was to put itself forward as a more "objective"
form of knowledge, and semiology in particularseemed to offer a way of meeting
this demand. At the same time, the prevailing theoretical approach to film was
aesthetic. The key question of this approach was still "What is film art?" The
semioticians proposed instead to analyze film language. In Italy, in fact, film
semiotics received a strong initial impetus from within the traditionaldiscipline
of Aesthetics: the problem of the film sign and of its linguistic nature ("langue"
or "langage" as Metz had put it) was soon tied to the aesthetic question of the
work of art and to the related question of the semiotic constitution of artistic
languages. Among these artistic languages, a privileged position was immediately
assigned to film, on account of the specific interest by the semioticians in the
problematicof iconism. These questions inevitably meant incursionsinto the ter-
ritoryof aesthetics-a territoryuntil that time the exclusive domain of the idealist
philosophy propounded by Benedetto Croce.8
In 1968 three key bookswere published:UmbertoEco's La strutturaassente,
Emilio Garroni'sSemiotica ed estetica, and GianfrancoBettetini'sCinema: lingua
e scrittura. These addressed the questions left unresolved by Metz's "Cinema:
langue ou langage?,"taking the position that, as all the other languages (langues)
are constituted by a set of codes, and therefore consist of languages (langages)

of a more or less formalized nature, so it is with film, which must be studied as
a set of different codes, with the focus on the central question of iconism.
In La struttura assente (lit. The Absent Structure), in response to Pasolini's
articulation "cinemi"/"im-segni," Eco argued against the supposed double ar-
ticulation of film signs. He also criticised the notion of iconism, where this is
taken, unproblematically,to depend on the image as analogon of reality. Eco's
position, which he says was also suggested in Metz's contributionsto the Pesaro
discussions, develops from the fact that the notion of iconism requires, apart
from appropriatecodes belonging to the anthropological/culturalsphere, another
series of more complex codes governing the combination of the images.9He has
in mind iconographic codes, shot-framing grammars, editing rules, codes of
narrative functions, and so on, upon which "a semiology of film discourse" is
premised (151).10
The starting point of Garroni'sdiscourse on semiotics, from the publication
of Semiotica ed estetica (lit. Semiotics and Aesthetics) in 1968 onwards, was the
project of constructing "a properly semiotic (i.e., formal) approach to the work
of art and to the artistic message, the latter being seen, first of all, as an example
of a message in general" (7). This implied that, from the beginning, his approach
on one side elevated the aesthetic object to the rank of semiotic object, while
on the other side it underlined the constitutional heterogeneity of the artistic
object. (As Garroniobserved, "we can usefully posit this heterogeneity to be the
salient and intentional, characteristicof the artistic message" [7].) In Garroni's
work the widening of the theoretical horizon of semiotics was thus circumscribed
by the limits of the domain of nonverbal languages, and in particular those
employed in the visual arts.
In Garroni'sview, then, the question posed by Metz, as to whether cinema
was to be conceived as "langue" or as "langage,"was not a productive one once
the different level of formalizationin question was recognized and attention was
shifted onto the study of its various codes.
With Progetto di semiotica (lit. Project of Semiotics), in 1972, Garroni
attempted to supersede the frameworkput forward in his previous work, though
this superseding did not imply a denial of the aesthetic question so much as a
deeper investigation of the issues involved, this time in more general-but not
more totalizing-theoretical terms, and extended "on the basis of a somewhat
detailed discussion of Louis Hjelmslev's theory" (6). In the same place, the
"Introduction,"he explains his intention: "to justify, first of all, the legitimacy
and usefulness of a semiotic approach to the problems of art and aesthetics
particularlyfrom a cultural point of view, within the specific sphere of contem-
porary aesthetic (and non-aesthetic) culture" (6). The danger to be avoided was
that of veering toward a sort of "pansemioticism." "General," in fact, never
meant "totalizing,"in Garroni'sview of the role of semiotics.1
Another key figure in Italian semiotics is Gianfranco Bettetini. In his case
we enter the field of specialized semiotic studies,and of film semioticsin particular.
Bettetini has the merit of always having been, on the one hand, an attentive

scholar and interpreter of the theoretical work carried out in film theory, and
in semiotics, on the foreign scene, in particular in France, and, on the other
hand, of having applied his theoreticaland epistemologicalendeavorsto questions
left open in the context of Italian film culture (for example, the question of
"realism"). Cinema: lingua e scrittura (lit. Cinema: Language and Writing),
published in 1968, investigated the questions of iconism and of the film sign,
identifying in the "iconeme" the privileged unit of film language, even if the
film sign was found to be already "syntagmatized"to a great extent: "The iconeme
is... a unitary fragment of the film discourse directed by the author:its unitary
nature has to be seen in relation to its power of signification, which, in the case
of cinema, involves a relational evaluation of the different component parts of
this unity" (55).
L'indice del realismo (lit. The Index of Realism), of 1971, took up Peirce's
index-sign-symbol typology in order to define three different types of cinema,
characterized by three different discursive practices, as had also been proposed
by Peter Wollen in Signs and Meaning in the Cinema.l2 Bettetini's argument
in this book was that the aesthetic richness of cinema derives from the fact that
it includes all three dimensions of the sign: the indexical, the iconic, and the
symbolic. In this sense, therefore, he concurred with Garroni and Eco in iden-
tifying in the cinematic sign an entity endowed, in particular,with a plurisemantic
dimension.
An interesting personality,who occupies a position in the wings of Italian
semiotics, is Gian Piero Brunetta.His approachis the productof the crossbreeding
of semantics with structuralism, under the influence of the Soviet school, of
Roman Jakobson,and of Louis Hjelmslev,along with that of the traditionstypical
of the Italian discipline of History of Language (as represented by scholarssuch
as Gianfranco Contini or Gianfranco Folena).
His book Formae parola nelfilm (lit. Formand Wordin Film) was concerned
with the models of transcodification,stimulatedby Emile Benveniste'scontention
concerning the difficulty of converting one semiotic system into another.Brunetta
went on to deal with literary adaptations,questions of language-such as titles
for silent movies and the use of dialect in Pasolini'sfilms, the process of "rhe-
torization" of film images (studying, for instance, Soviet montage as a verbal
image that expresses the rhetoric of antithesis), and other matters.'3In a more
recent article he analyzed the pictorial and literary codes that come into play
in Jean Renoir's film Partie de campagne.'4
Brunetta has also made use of genetic models of film narrative, analyzing
D. W. Griffith'spre-Biograph pictures, in his 1974 book, Nascita del racconto
cinematografico (lit. Birth of the Cinematic Tale). On this subject he wrote:
"From film to film, the attention moves more and more from the plot to the
context and a rigorous principle for the arrangement of the elements, which
makes the paradigmatic axis operative, comes into play, in a series of definite
and functional choices" (240-41).
Of interest is the way that Brunettahas widened the field of semiotic inquiry

to include the study of the paratext, meaning that which is around the film text,
setting the patternsof its consumption(film posters,credits,popularfilm literature,
and so forth). He has moved toward the writing of a "historyof popular vision,"
in which the theme of film spectatorship has been absorbed into a larger per-
spective that includes cultural and visual experiences in the longue duree, from
the magic lantern to traveling shows and other phenomena.'5 His most recent
work has been governed, in fact, by a notion of film historiographyas theoretical
model, and not just as analytical and descriptive tool.
Returning now to our survey of the landscape of Italian film semiotics,
account must be taken of how, from the late sixties and up to the mid-seventies,
the international discourse of semiotics underwent a broadening. This occurred
both as a consequence of the need to provide a "practical"outlet for theoretical
studies (which meant through establishing a closer relationship with the texts),
so as to be able to explain some aspects typical of film, as well as to account for
the complexity of this medium and for its ideological functions. The approach
to film became "hyphenated":it became a matter of semiotics and some other
discourse, whether that of ideology, of psychoanalysis, or of feminism. It is in
this phase that Italian semiotics met with French and Anglo-American theory,
and in particular with the work of Charles Sanders Peirce.
Bettetini'sProduzione del senso e messa in scena (lit. Productionof Meaning
and Mise-en-Scene, 1975) began by stating that the concept of sign was undergo-
ing a crisis, and had a first section entitled "Audiovisual Semiotics, Systems,
Ideologies: The Hidden Representation,"as if to underline the political and
ideological implications of the movement away from structuralismtowards semi-
otics. Bettetini defined this shift as the "third Copernican revolution,"and em-
phasized the role of ideology in "overdeterminingnot only the communication
models used in intersocial exchanges, especially in the area of mass communi-
cation, but even the instrumentsused to analyze their structuresand their effects."
Semiotics could no longer be considered a neutral, "objective"form of research,
nor as a sort of expanded linguisticsapplied to both verbal and nonverbalsystems.
It has to occupy the area of sign production, the semantic field. According to
Bettetini, this move was not only motivated by "the internal difficultiesthat the
object analyzed kept posing to a structuralistmethodology, but [was] urged by
external events which in turn provoked the rethinking of the problematic of
ideology" (an allusion to the events of May 1968).
This book marked the passage, in Italy, from the classificatorystage of film
codes, typical of early semiotics, to the study of their dynamics, the analysis of
the production of the film meaning, with evident consideration of the question
of ideology and the relation between material production and the production of
meaning.
But the crucial step in the direction of refounding semiotics was the pub-
lication of Eco's Trattatodi semiotica generale in 1975. This work, "retranslated"
by the author from his own English version (which, however, appeared a couple
of years later in the United States, with the title A Theory of Semiotics), inves-

tigated more directly and more deeply than previous studies, "the nature of
semiotic communication." Eco reconsidered the dichotomy of signification and
communication, analyzing their respective fields of influence and the dialectical
relationship between them. While semiology had dealt mostly with signification,
that is, with the dialectic of langue and parole, and thereforewith the constitution
of codes, semiotics was interested in analyzing communication in its social func-
tion. "It is possible, even if not perhaps particularly desirable," says Eco, "to
establish a semiotics of signification independently of a semiotics of communi-
cation: but it is impossible to establish a semiotics of communication without a
semiotics of signification"(Theory,9). The relationshipbetween signs and mean-
ings is historically and socially-i.e., culturally-determined and it functions
through a system of codes. These codes are diachronicallydynamic; they change,
assigning new or different contents to sign-vehicles, or they produce new signs,
establishing a new cultural unit within the "semantic space" of that society.
Semiotics is therefore concerned "with signs as social forces."
The "open" issues that Eco had broached in Opera aperta (lit. Open Work),
in 1962, are, then, developed in A Theory of Semiotics, this time within the
horizon of a general theory.16The ground was prepared in this way for the
recovery of the subjective element, through the work of interpretation.
The great turnaround of the seventies was in fact this tendency to reac-
commodate the subjective element; with Eco this shows up in the central im-
portance that interpretation began to assume in his work (from Lector in fabula
on), and in Bettetini in the work on enunciation (and on the subjectof enunciation)
in Tempo del senso.
Lector in fabula (lit. Reader in the Tale), which appeared as a book in 1979
in Italy, constituted a veritable turning point in semiotic studies, and not only
in Italy-a turning point as regards texts, the exploration of their nature, and
the process of their interpretation."7After a long period of exclusion from the
field of semiotics and theoreticalstudies-on account of the "subjective"elements
present in this act-the concept of interpretation is here reintroduced by Eco
by way of the possibility of semiotic interpretation:"I am attempting," wrote
Eco, "to join textual semiotics with the semantics of categories, and I reduce the
object that interests me to the processesof interpretivecooperationalone, leaving
in the shade (or taking it up and dealing with it only in this connection) the
whole generative issue" (associatedwith Greimas'sdistinctionbetween the semio-
narrative and the semio-discursive levels) (9).18
In Tempo del senso (lit. Time of the Meaning), also from 1979, Bettetini
inaugurated the enlisting of the issue of enunciation, as developed by Emile
Benveniste and Tzvetan Todorovin linguistics, into the more restricted camp of
film theory.l9 Tempo del senso dealt with the concept of time in audiovisual
media, i.e., with how time is represented, and, most of all, with the "temporal
articulation of the signifying material. The latter, more specific, interest implies
that most of the theoretical discourse and subsequent analyses concentrate on
the problems of enunciation, privileging these issues instead of dealing with the

enunciated" (5). Generically defined as "the phase of the accomplishmentof the
discursive potentialitiesof an enunciated,"enunciation was discussedby Bettetini
in the terrain of audiovisual communication. Enunciation took the form of an
active project, present in each individual text-a project that cannot be reduced
to "samples"in the enunciated; on the contraryit is embodied "in the signifying
materiality of the text, in the zones occupied and formed by the audiovisual
material, that, dynamically, produces there a series of acts of signification. To
this signifying materiality, textually structured, [Bettetini intended to] give the
name of diegesis" (6). Bettetini distinguishedhis definition of diegesis from those
put forwardby Gerard Genette in literary analysis and by Metz in film semiotics
in so far as diegesis, in his understanding of it, also comprised the fact of
enunciation.20
With La conversazioneaudiovisiva (lit. The AudiovisualConversation,1984),
Bettetini moved away from the interest in enunciation to investigate the enun-
ciator, the enunciating subject, "understoodas that symbolic apparatuswhich is
the ordering principle of all the semiotic processes of a text, and which regulates
also the modality of any approachto the text by the spectator:an absentapparatus,
producer and product of the text, whose organizing passage leaves its traces on
the signifying materials" (7). This symbolic figure and the traces of its interlo-
cutor-the enunciatee-are at the center of this "textualconversation,"in which
new objects are identified in the semiotic inquiry,with the aim of moving toward
"the elaboration of a model of textual conversation" (10). With the opening of
film semiotics onto the pragmatic dimension of the text ("the fundamental issue
of this book is precisely the relation between the spectator and the text and its
immanent model in the text itself" [10]),21Bettetini moved towardother directions
within the field of media studies, stating that "The theories, the models and
analytical verificationsof the semiotic perspectives must often come to terms ...
with the social context in which the audiovisual-basedinteraction is located" (9).
He has consequently adopted a more sociological approach to the media, and
has published a book on cybernetics, analyzing the new languages developed in
computer science.
Francesco Casetti and His Work. With this backgroundin mind, we can see
how Francesco Casetti takes his place really as one of the second generation of
Italian film semioticians whose attention has been concentratedon the discursive
practices of film.
Casetti declares himself to be "a semiotician who has neither turned himself
over nor turned away."22Having come to maturity within the specific context
of Italiansemiotics,Casettibegan to assumea particularposition,halfway between
the interpretive Italian school (Eco) and that of A. J. Greimas, making extensive
use of their theoretical apparatuses while inserting in them, interstitially, the
apparatusof pragmatics.23
Exposed to the asperities of the discipline by Gianfranco Bettetini, he has
followed the path drawn by his master, as is shown, for example, in the way

that he too deals with both film and television. This connection-given the
semiological and mass-mediologicalapproaches active in this second field--has
prevented him from being tied to fossilizing, abstract,and ahistoricalmodels, or
to purely speculative theoretical work. He develops his theoreticalmodels through
a patient and passionateinvolvement with film texts, a continuousand dialectical
itinerary from analysis to the theoretical synthesis. There is also in his work a
deeper set of intentions regarding history, namely the project of proposing the-
oretical formulations that would rewrite the history of film theory and of film
historiography.He has been metatheoreticalin writing the historyof film theories
(in Teorie del cinema dal dopoguerra ad oggi) and historical in his theoretical
elaboration of a model of analysis of film enunciation, writing the history of film
vision and spectatorship in Dentro lo sguardo. Essays and books by Casetti are
characterized by an elegantly informative style, marked by a clarity of exposi-
tion-unlike those of his French counterparts-which does not, however, imply
a loss of theoretical precision.4 At the same time, his style is not linear, and
pleasurablymoves from analytical descriptionsto theoretical modelizationswhile
following the turns of an absorbing path.
From his very firstarticle, "Discussionesull'iconismo"(1972), Casettistressed
that "the specific aspect of iconism, more radically than in any other symbolic
practice, consists of the privileging of the level of discourse,"and he argued for
"the necessity of establishing a starting point... in the analysis of discourse."25
This position was developed in an appropriatetheoreticaland semiotic framework,
and was applied to film analysis, in the long essay "'Nuova' semiotica, 'nuovo'
cinema," published in Ikon in 1974.26
In Teorie del cinema dal dopoguerra ad oggi (lit. Theories of the Cinema
from the Postwar Period to Today), published in 1978, Casetti tried to account
for the theoretical debates that developed within film studies after World War
II. Theoretical discourse had become metacommunicative and metatheoretical.
The key distinction which runs through the book is that between "teorie" (the-
ories) and "teoriche" (theorizing, postulating):
we can distinguishtwo sidesof the question:one that couldbe calledthat of
teoriche[theorizing],in which we proceedmostlythrough"essentialist" def-
initions,.. .trying to identify the investigatedphenomena"in themselves,"
with the convictionthat,by the very natureof them,they offerthemselvesto
the gaze, as long as we makeourselvesresponsiveand systematic;and another
side,whichwe coulddescribeas beingmoreproperlythatof teorie[theories],
wherewe proceedthrough"methodological" definitions,convincedthat what
we see is determinedby the pointof view and that the choiceof the viewing
positionwe may adoptaltersthe looked-atreality(16).
This book, besides possessing an elegantly informative style and a precision in
its use of terminology,had the merit of having investigated not only the different
theoretical positions that endeavored to explain the contemporaneousfilm prac-
tices, but also of having described through them the different modes of film
vision and spectatorship, in a diachronic movement.

Casetti has worked on television too, specifically in three books: Un'altra
volta ancora (lit. Again, One More Time, 1984), which dealt with "the strategies
of communicationand forms of knowledge" in the AmericanTV series broadcast
in Italy; L'immagine al plurale (lit. The Image in the Plural, also 1984), which
analyzed the "postmodern"compulsion to repeat, as manifestedin the inclination
toward seriality demonstratedby the media in recent years; and lastly, in a book
edited by him and publishedby the RAI (the Italianstate-runTV/radio company),
Tra me e te. Strategie di coinvolgimento dello spettatore nei programmi della
neotelevisione (lit. Between You and I: Strategies for Actively Involving the
Spectator, in the Programs of the New Television), where he develops his work
on the film spectator in this area of audience involvement.
He deals with television with the same semiotic approach and theoretical
apparatushe mobilizes when writing about film. For instance, in L'immagine al
plurale, he discusses seriality and repetition both in the format of television
programmingand in the tendency towardfollow-upsin film production,analyzing
the implications of this process in terms of and as a result of the modes of
productionof the two media. The sociological implicationsof this discourseabout
the socio-economic context in which the media operate and are consumed, are
more evident here than in his work on films, but this is a matter of degree only,
and these aspects maintain their basis in semiotics.
In Un'altra volta ancora he studies television series in their general com-
municative mechanism, in their textual key-elements, in the worlds represented,
in their memory structures. The resulting model allows him to correlate the
"cognitive economy" of this type of programwith the kind of audience activated
by the system, revealing a "specialized" spectator,one especially competent in
grasping generic codes.
Another significant theoretical contribution of Casetti's was the definition
of "film text" put forward in "Le texte du film" (1980):27"The film text is a
discursivewhole, coherent and complete, throughwhich communicativestrategies
are realized." The film text was assumed then to be the specific object of the
semiotic inquiry: "a new theoretical model to be assumed as the explicative
mechanism." Besides the discursive dimension, the notion of the film text com-
prehended therefore also the more articulatedand wider dimension of the "strat-
egy" that operated within the horizon of a text, interpreted as "coherent and
complete"-i.e., within a certain self-sufficiencyof the text, with which the film
spectator had to come to terms in order to become part of it and to be able to
enter into dialogue with it. This characterizationof the spectator foreshadows
that elaboratedin Dentro lo sguardo, the work that best representsCasetti'slatest
contributions to theory.
Dentro lo sguardo. The theoretical questions posed by Casetti in Dentro lo

sguardo are those crucial to contemporary film theory-specifically, they are
those dealing with film spectatorship. His interrogationsconcern three issues:
How does the film take into account the spectator? How does it "anticipate"

him/her? How does it direct him/her? The book develops three fundamental
principles: that the film signals the presence of the spectator; that it assigns a
position to him/her; that it makes him/her follow an itinerary. The analytical
and theoretical work is then developed around these three questions. The aim
is to establish the relationshipbetween the role of the spectatorand his/her body,
through the theory of enunciation.28This work uses, not simply in a supporting
role but as a methodologicalchoice of crucial importance,a series of film analyses,
studying such different films as Bitter Rice, Fury, Citizen Kane, Stage Fright,
The Best Yearsof Our Lives, Ffor Fake, The Kid from Spain, and others. Casetti
thereforeintegratesthe theoreticaldiscoursewith the analytical,combining theory
with practicaldemonstrationsin a dialectical interrelationship.He in fact proceeds
by analyzing first a fragment of a film, then he puts together a possible theoretical
interpretation and tests it, or counterposes another variant of the problem as
exemplified in another film segment, which in turn calls for another theoretical
model, only to be abandonedimmediately for a new analysisor a new formulation.
In a sense, therefore, to try to summarize the book's theoretical formulationsis
a sort of violence since this will involve imposing a linear simplification on its
inner workings. For the sake of clarity, however, this is what is nevertheless to
be attempted. Let us now analyze the book from a closer vantage point, taking
into account also its historiographicalproject, that is, its attempt to rediscussfilm
history and the history of film theory.
According to Casetti, the structuralisttheory of the sixties identified the
spectator with a decoding agency, a "precise though marginal presence." The
text in fact dominated the scene and the spectator was seen as limiting his/her
function to "reapplying codes already decided in order to understandwhat was
sent to him." This image was later "corrected"by the concept that "to read is
to rewrite" or "to read is to interpret,"and by the figure of the implicit reader
(Seymour Chatman) or by the idea that a text presents an image of its audience
(YurijLotman). In this theoretical debate the spectatoras interlocutorthen enters
the scene, coming from textualist semiotics. The spectator takes on a more active
role, that of "a conscious partner who knows and who sees the task assigned to
him." He is not competent only in a certain number of codes and he does not
follow an obligatory itinerary,but moves according to an "open knowledge."The
text is no longer "an architecture accomplished in itself" but "an organism that
at the same time influences and is influenced by the environment,"not a structure
but a "game, a strategic action." The distance between screen and audience is
only apparent, because the film gives itself to be seen, while the spectator is
there in order to recomposethe networkof the plot. The film makesitself available
as the spectator is available to work on it. Casetti takes into account, therefore,
both approachesdeveloped by the discipline in this area:the generative (Greimas),
according to which "a text defines its own conditions of existence," i.e., the
spectator as constructedby the text; and the interpretive (Hans RobertJaussand,
with more mediations, Eco), where "the interlocutorconstructsand reconstructs
his own text," i.e., the concrete spectator.But Casetti does not effect an eclectic

synthesis. He keeps the two approaches separate, privileging the Greimasian
without ignoring the other; preserving the systematicityof each and using prag-
matics, as already noted, as an "interstitialdiscipline."
As was said earlier, Casetti analyzes (1) the presence of the spectator as
instituted by the film; (2) his or her position; and (3) the itinerary he or she has
to follow. The film in fact not only gives itself to be seen, but it also assigns the
viewer a point from which to see it and "ways in which it forces him/her to go
on a reconnaissance, engaging him/her into acknowledging the terms of the
proposal and at the same time acknowledging himself/herself as its actual ad-
dressee." He states, "To see oneself seeing, the geographic and affective dispo-
sitions of the spectator, and the complicities that the film entertains with its
potential users, as they are drawn on the screen-these will become the three
themes around which the analysis will concentrate"(23). The project is informed
by "the perception of an 'inside' and of an 'outside'of the film, that are constantly
interacting and ready to dissolve into each other,"and which is what prevents
"reductions of the field" (24).
This "montage" of quotations and concepts from the first section of the
book gives an idea of the ground covered by Casetti. But it seems necessary at
this point to discuss his theory of enunciation in a more systematic way, because
this is his nodal theoretical contribution, and a significant attempt to construct
a systematic theory of filmic enunciation.
The debate about the notion of enunciation developed within linguistics
and literary semiotics. Indeed, the theory of enunciation played a fundamental
role in the transition from structural semiotics to textualist semiotics in the
seventies. While early semiotics was involved with the discussion of the relation
langue-parole, in the linguistic traditionestablishedby Saussure,textual semiotics
devoted its attention to the relation language-discourse. Within this approach
attention moved away from the analysisof the micro-structuresof the text, toward
an attempt to work on all the elements functioning in a text, which is to say, it
moved toward defining and analyzing discourse. In this discussion, the concept
of enunciation was crucial, in that it allowed for the analysis of both the "self-
construction" [farsi] and the "self-offering"[darsi] of discourse. It provoked a
complex debate, which brought about a redefinitionof the subject as a linguistic
category. The subject envisaged by this theory did not correspond to the socio-
logical and psychological entity defined as such traditionally,but incorporated
the notions elaborated in this area by logics and epistemology derived from
linguistics. The subject is therefore seen as a category that configuratesitself in
the process of enunciation: a plan, a logic, may be plural.29It is the discursive
strategy, the way the text offers itself to the addressee, the play and the com-
munication, present in the text. The uniqueness of the text lies in how these
discursive strategies are carried out, and in the fact that every text has its own
"communication,"i.e., its own relation between itself and the addressee, that is,
in the process of enunciation.
Structuralisttheory had encouraged semioticians to move away from the

study of the "work of an author,"in order to analyze instead the inner workings
of a text, in this way abandoning "impressionistic"criticism in order to adopt
a more "scientific" approach that rejected the socio-psychological definition of
the subject. In a later phase, textualist semiotics, without returning to traditional
models of criticism, recovered, in a sense, the notion of authorship,in the analysis
of the internal architecture of a text, defining the subject as a linguistic category
with the theory of enunciation, whether the subject is identified with the author,
with the camera, with the logic of the text, or with the constructionof visibility,
as happens in Casetti's work.
The object of study of the linguistic theory of enunciation is, according to
Benveniste, "the formal framework of the mise en discours of the language."
Film semiotics appropriatedthese debates, trying to translatethem into the
study of film discourse, but it faced peculiar problems in adapting the theory of
enunciation to film, because of the difficultyof defining the subjectof enunciation
and of articulating the modes of enunciation in film discourse.
Furthermore, film grammars have often anchored the act of seeing to an
explicit bearer of the look, either the camera or the character. The point was
that there was no theoretical model that formalized and defined the process of
film enunciation. Communications (issue no. 38) dealt with the discussion of
film enunciation, from different angles and with different approaches,but it did
not include a general theoretical formulation or theoretical model of film enun-
ciation. ChristianMetz, since developing his psychoanalyticalangle on the subject,
has also been working on a theory of film enunciation.30
In order to elaborate his model of film enunciation, Casetti returned to a
strong model, derived from the semio-linguistictheory of enunciation. According
to him, filmic enunciation is the conversion of a langue into a discourse, that is,
the passage from a set of mere virtualities into a concrete and positioned object.
This passage implies that there is an instance governing it. The subject of enun-
ciation is in fact the principle that guides the text. This gesture (the appropriation
of the expressive possibilities) establishes the coordinates of the filmic discourse,
making them commensurate directly with itself: the enunciation constitutes the
basis from which to articulate persons, places, and tenses of the film, assigning
the roles of addresser,addressee, and of object of the discourse from the very
moment of its birth.
But "enunciation,together with what can be designated as its subject, never
present themselves as such" (28). Whether we consider it, with Greimas, as "the
instance of mediation, which ensuresthe passage from a virtualityto a realization"
or "a linguistic act, which ensures the production of a discourse,"enunciation
can be seen only in the enunciated of which it is the presupposition. Whether
we consider the subject of enunciation: (a) "a simple operation-the fact that
the process gets started";(b) "an empirical entity-whatever starts the process,
it can be recognized only from traces, only from a series of emergent features
within the film" (28). Casetti's position is that the subject of enunciation is both
the operation and the process. There is, however, indeed always an element that

sends us back to enunciation and to the enunciator:it can be traced in the gaze
that institutes and organizes what is shown. It is in the point of view (p.o.v.), in
the hinge around which images and sounds rotate, and which determines their
coordinates and profiles. This p.o.v. is not simply the optical and acoustic p.o.v.
By p.o.v., Casetti means the mark of a linguistic operation: somebody or some-
thing-an element in the text or the text itself as a whole?-has looked in a
certain way, and by looking, (s)he-it has delimited a certain image: the image
we have in front of us.
In regard to p.o.v., three specifications are proposed by Casetti: first, as
simple attestation of the affirmationof a subject of enunciation, the p.o.v. has
two aspects: (a) the position given to the camera while shooting; (b) the ideal
position of the spectator looking at that shot on the screen. This twofold activity
begins at the moment in which the enunciation takes the enunciated as object
to be transferred, sending it toward a point that is different from the one in
which it has constituted it, that is, embodying both an actualization (an appro-
priating of the resources of film language) and a destination, which is both the
act of showing and the act of seeing. From the very beginning there is a double
activity, a bipolarity, by which the subject of enunciation divides itself up into
enunciator and enunciatee. (An analogous bipolar division of the subject is that
of the Lacanian schizia, the "splitting,"the acquisition of the self together with
that of the Other, in the mirror phase.)
Second specification:as with other writers,for Casettip.o.v. has three aspects:
the perceptive (to show/to see); the cognitive (to inform/to observe);the epistemic
(to believe). There are then four textual configurationsof the gaze, which indicate
the four possible relations between enunciator and enunciatee and enunciated:
the p.o.v. shot, the objective shot, the "unreal"objective shot, the interpellation.
Casetti analyzes several examples of these shots which representa sort of "strong
moment"of film language, in orderto redefinehis theoreticalmodel. He considers,
for example, the close up of the bandit at the beginning (or at the end) of The
Great Train Robberyas an instance of interpellation,the theatricaldepth of field
of William Wyler's "objective shots,"the "false" objective shot of Scarlet in the
midst of her barren lands in Gone with the Wind, the p.o.v. shots in Vertigo,
and so on. From the analyses of these film segments he elaborates his interpre-
tations and possible theoretical definitions.
Third specification:the p.o.v. is the place where the role finds a body. While
the role is constructedby enunciation, the body is concrete and historical (though
not reducible to the empirical body). The body is, for Casetti, both the support,
the place of biological and affective reactions,and a reservoir,the place of cultural
and historical experience. (Feminist theoretician Isabella Pezzini has emphasized
that this representation of the spectator allows one to discuss sexual difference
in film spectatorship in new terms, in that the spectator is not only a role,
positioned by film language, nor a real body, but both a role and a body.)
Having considered these three problems of the p.o.v., let us return to the
problems posed by Casetti.

The presence of the spectator is articulated in its figurativizations-a term
that Casetti takes from A. J. Greimas.3'Once it has been recognized, thanks to
the role taken by the p.o.v., the dual positioning of the subject of enunciation
in the figures of the enunciator and the enunciatee-the first, which is located
more on the "authorial"side, being the site in which a destination is assigned,
and the second, on the more strictly spectatorial side, the site of a reception-
is concretized. These abstract instances are figurativized at the surface of the
text in the figures of the narratorand the narratee(the addresseeof the narration),
but, once again, at a double level.
At the first level, which is stronger in that it is anchored in the process of
enunciation, the narrator and the narratee cover the roles of informer and of
observerinasmuch as they are directly delegated, so to speak, by the enunciator/
enunciatee couple to represent them inside the enunciated discourse. Their
autonomyas charactersis thus superimposedon the discursiveprojectthat informs
the enunciated discourse, so that they become addressees of the narration in
progress.
At the second level, on the other hand, the narratorand the narratee carry
out a task that is, as it were, autonomous, presenting themselves purely as
characters, no longer as representatives of whoever stands behind them but as
simple moments of the diegesis. In short, they are modeled on the original couple
distinguished and analyzed by narratology.
But if these two couples, at first sight, appear to be based on the distinction
incorporated in Benveniste's histoire/discours couple-at work in narratological
studies-closer examinationreveals that Casetti has taken up, from Harald Wein-
rich (as, for that matter,did Bettetini) the linguistically wider pair, commentary/
narrative [Besprechung/Erzihlung].32In this way he represents the opposition
between "a speaking that offers up its own parametersof reference, making plain
the who, the where and the when of its opening move, and a speaking that acts
as if it were outside any precise positioning, in a space disconnected from the
coordinates of enunciation" (31).3
Next the positioning of the spectatoris analyzed, following Greimas'sconcept
of aspectualization, which refers to the modeling of space and time.34Casetti
considers in this case the hidden spectator of the objective shot, the mobile
spectatorof the unreal objective shot, the marginalspectatorof the interpellation,
and the spectator-in-the-shotin p.o.v. shots. In this way, after having carefully
traced out the profiles of the place and role assigned to the spectator within the
film text, Casetti delineates the itinerary that the spectator-or, the spectatorial
instance-is required to complete in order "to recognize the terms of the proposal
and, at the same time, to recognize himself or herself as its actual addressee"
(23).
But, in making this occur, the author in the text confirms the existence,
prior to the produced text, of a modal structure that defines the conditions of
actualization both of the spectatorial itinerary and of the very possibility of the
text's constituting itself and making an offer of itself: "There is in fact a having

to, a wanting to, a being able to and a knowing how to do, without which
whatever one is engaged in cannot be carried through" (109).
The itinerary, or path, of every appropriationis divided, therefore, into a
succession of four "distinct phases: that of the assigning of a spectatorial task
(mandate), that of the predisposition to carry it out (competence), that of its
actual execution (performance), and that of evaluating the results (sanction)"
(140). As a consequence, the figure of the spectator becomes more complex at
every turn, both of the theoretical discourse and of the analytical practice.
At the end of his book, Casetti evokes a spectator who is still a role, but
who is on the verge of finding a body. The "you" called up on the screen is
where the subject can see him- or herself seeing: the interpretive instance. This
"you" anticipates the presence of an individual of flesh and bones who will
respond to images and sounds, as was previously noted. Casetti's complex study
closes on this image of the spectator as interface, but he opens up the way to
interpretation.5 The notion of the interface, whose "function... is to ensure an
open passage in both directions" (147), Casetti argues, "reminds us that every
text, in offering itself, takes on a precise obligation; it orients itself towards its
interlocutor; it opens itself towards the future," as well as "positioning itself
between the enunciated and the act of communication, between the figuration
of roles and the intervention of bodies" (146). Interpretationwill become, then,
"a reappropriationof the text that refuses either to disintegrate it or to over-
elaborate it-as when a text is excavated in search of some mythical center, or
when meanings are projected into otherwise unloaded signals... -and which
knows how to cross-fertilize the self-reflexivity of discourse with the world of
life, to couple concrete action, in all its specificity, with strategies of a purely
symbolic kind" (147).
An obvious corollary to this final indication is the proposition of writing a
history of cinematic vision. Just as Dentro lo sguardo can be read as an account
of the historicalprogressof the theory of film enunciation,because of its insistence
on the gaze it is also a history of vision, of how we have been looking at the
magical screen of "classical cinema."
From one angle, then, we have a book of film theory solidly built on a series
of close analyses, with a profound integration of theory and practice.36And from
the other, we have a book of theory which is also truly a historical project, the
rewriting of the history of vision in the cinema. These two aspects of Casetti's
work, that is, its pragmatic and its historical dimensions, together with his in-
clination toward instructing-his ability to be precise without being abstractor
arid, to discuss complex theoretical matters without forgetting the need to com-
municate to his reader-all of these, in our opinion, make Casetti a representative
figure of film theory Italian-style.
Notes
Thisarticle,as a whole,was the fruitof a collaborative
endeavor,thoughthe firstsection
wasactuallywrittenby RobertoZemignan,thesecondby GiulianaMuscio.Thetranslation
was revisedby JonathanBenison.

1. The interest for Italian film theory in the United States has been demonstrated, inter
alia, by the publication of articles such as Teresa de Lauretis, "Semiotics, Theory
and Social Practice: A Critical History of Italian Semiotics," Cine-Tracts 2, no. 1
(1978): 1-14, and Silvio Gaggi, "Semiology, Marxism, and the Movies," Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 36 (1978): 461-70; by the translationof most of Umberto
Eco's books and the republication, in Film Theory and Criticism, eds. G. Mast and
M. Cohen (New York, 1974), of Eco's paper "On the Contribution of Film to
Semiotics," originally published in Quarterly Review of Film Studies 2, no. 1 (Feb.
1977); by the appearance of Gianfranco Bettetini, The Language and Technique of
the Film, and by the presence of papers on Italian theory at the SCS Conferences
of 1985 (in the panel on "The Theorization of Film History," chaired by Annette
Michelson) and of 1987 (in the panel on "Italian Film Theory," chaired by Peter
Brunette).
One could have the impression that Metz, in some sense, reacts to the Italian
semiotics of Pasolini, Eco, and Garroni, in that he makes reference to their positions
in his Essais sur la signification au cinema, published in 1968. It must be remem-
bered, however, that Metz, in this book, actually went back to an article of his that
pre-dated this debate, namely his noted essay "Le cinema: langue ou langage"
(originally in Communications 4 [1964]).
2. Roger Odin, "Le spectateur sous le scalpel," IRIS no. 7 (1986): 136-39 (review of
Francesco Casetti'sDentro lo sguardo);Francesco Casetti, "Antonioniand Hitchcock:
Two Strategies of Narrative Investment" (1986).
3. At the end of the present article there is a selected bibliography of Italian film
semiotics. In the text we also give a literal translation of the titles, though this may
differ from the titles adopted in actual translationsof the works. Within the text of
the article, we quote extensively from the books and articles cited in the bibliography;
this is signaled by the use of quotation marks and by page references in brackets at
the end of the quotation.
4. The hypothesis concerning the historical approach was expressed in Guiliana Muscio,
"The Historicity of the Sign," a paper given at the SCS Conference, 1985.
5. These essays are collected in Pier Paolo Pasolini,Empirismo eretico (Milan:Garzanti,
1972). Further references to this volume are given directly after quotations in the
text. (Translator'snote: I have consulted the translation [from the French] of this
essay, "The Cinema of Poetry," in Movies and Methods, ed. B. Nichols [Berkeley,
1976], 542-58; the recently appeared English translation,Heretical Empiricism, ed.
Louise K. Barnett, trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett [Indiana: Indiana
University Press, 1988], was unavailable.)
6. This, in general, has been the position taken in Italy by those who have had anything
to do with Pasolini's semiotics. See, for example, the special issue of the journal
Cinema & Cinema, no. 43 (May 1985), dedicated to him; in particular, A Coste,
"Dal realismo al nominalismo. Nota sulla semiologia di Pasolini,"and E. Dagrada,
"Sulla suggestiva libera indiretta" (from which the phrase given in the text has been
taken).
7. See Eco's La struttura assente, 152-54 and Garroni'sSemiotica ed estetica, 43-45.
8. De Lauretis gave an insightful account of the development of structuraliststudies in
Italy in her Cine-Tracts essay, which deserves quoting at length:
When 1968happeneduponthe sceneof Europe,mostof Italyhad not been readingFreud
or the phenomenologists forlongbut hada solidacquaintance withMarxandHegel.Instead
of Bachelard,Batailleand Breton,Italianshad been debatingGramsci,Lukacsand Vitto-
rini.... At the time whenstructuralismtook hold,in the early-to-mid60's,primarilyin the
workof linguistsandmedievalists,arthistoriansandestheticians, Italywasalsore-examining
its culturalhistorywithina frameworkthatwasmorepoliticalthanphilosophical. Marxwas
not readas a philosopherbut as a revolutionaryand a politicalthinker,his wordsrendered

tangible in the praxis of two large Marxistparties. After the bankruptcyof Crocean idealism
the influence of new philosophies like existentialism and neopositivism had not significantly
affected the area of literary studies. In a stifling intellectual climate, structuralismmeant first
of all a rigorous textual method, a scientific habit of thought and a new practice of criticism,
all the more appealing since Italy had had no experience comparable to New Criticism or
to Russian Formalism. Understandably then, structuralismseemed to be exempt from the
teleological overtones of either Croceanism or deterministic Marxism. Moreover its interdis-
ciplinary thrust and sound basis in the social sciences made it possible, theoretically and
methodologically, to revise concepts of high and popular culture and to relate art to the
sphere of the mass production and consumption of cultural objects.
It is important to understand the role of structuralismin Italian research because it was
the generative force from which and against which, dialectically, semiotics developed: in the
first instance, whereas structuralismwas developed mainly as an analytical tool for the study
of literary textual systems, early semiological studies (as they were called after Saussureand
French usage) were mostly concerned with non-literary and pluricodic systems for which no
methodological and critical instrumentsexisted-comic strips, folklore, architecture,cinema,
television and mass media.... In the second instance, early semiotic theory and practice
were directly involved in the neo-Marxist critique of structuralism.... Very briefly stated,
the neo-Marxist objections to the 'structuralmethod' were: (1) its idealist premise: positing
an a priori structure as immanent in the text, (2) the tautological fallacy of a criticism solely
directed at verifying the existence of formal structuresalready assumed to be in the object,
and (3) the ideological stance behind the structuralistapproach to the text as a system or
totality unrelated to other socioculturalformations.These crucial questions acted as a critical
goad for those who . .. had realized the valuable aspects of structuralismtoward a renovation
and de-provincializationof Italian culture. In the changing historicalsituation that culminated
in the political events of 1968, structuralismcame to denote a reactionary and narrow view
of the critical activity, while its early innovative charge and conceptual tools were assumed,
developed, and sharpened by semiotics." (4-5)
9. The anthropological/cultural codes in question are: "the perception code, the rec-
ognition codes and iconic codes with their rules for the graphic transcription of the
data of experience" (La struttura assente, 151). C.f. A Theory of Semiotics, 206-8
(tr.).
10. With La struttura assente, Eco had moved gradually away from the positions taken
in 1962 in Opera aperta: forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee
(lit. Open Work:Form and Indeterminacy in Contemporary Poetics), in a way that
parallels the movement of the discipline from semiology to semiotics. "Semiology"-
with its linguistic formation-was relegated, by Eco, to the role of a method of
analysis, considered insufficient for working, for example, on artistic languages, on
account of the multiplicity of their codes. In contrast, "semiotics" was favored in
that it allowed for "the study of all cultural phenomena as if they were systems of
signs-moving from the hypothesis that actually all cultural phenomena are systems
of communication" (15). The term "semiology" was proposed by Saussure and pre-
vailed in the first phase of the history of the discipline, implying an emphasis on the
structuralist contribution and representing mostly the work done in this area in
France and in Italy. This term was gradually substituted by "semiotics," a term of
Anglo-American derivation, used to connote Peirce's contribution in particular, which
represented the second phase of the discipline, more involved in the study of discourse.
11. "Let's take note right away of the fact that the construction of semiotic theory so
general-of a pansemioticist kind-that it would include in itself every possible
model, undoubtedly constitutes a great and maybe dangerous temptation for the
researcher of today, provoked both by a sort of deformation of the profession, if the
scholar is actually involved in semiotics, as well as by deep and far-reaching cultural
reasons" (159). (In 1984 Eco was to take up this question again, but for opposed
reasons; see note 18.) In 1977 Garroni published Ricognizione della semiotica (lit.
Reconnaissance of semiotics) which presented itself as a re-visiting of the field of

semiotic inquiry, as well as a redefining of its principles;here too the issue of "general
semiotics" as opposed to "specific semiotics" was raised.
12. See Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1969). C.f. Francesco Casetti, Teorie del cinema dal dopoguerra a oggi,
89: "on the side of the index we could situate all the realisticresearch-from Feuillade
to Flaherty, from Von Stroheim to Murnau, from Renoir to Rossellini-in which it
is firmly believed that there exists a direct, immediate, spontaneousrelation with the
world; on the side of the symbol the films of Eyzenstejn .. .; on the side of the icon,
lastly, the work of Von Sternberg, which systematically re-invent[s] the reality to be
shot... transforming it into a phantasm of life."
13. See his "Dall'antitesi come scoperta del montaggio all'universoretorico del cinema,"
Attualita della retorica 6 (1975): 201-11. In "Pour une semiotique integree des signes
cinematographiques,"in A Semiotic Landscape: Proceedings of the First Congress
of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, Milan, June 1974, eds. Sey-
mour Chatman, Umberto Eco, and Jean-MarieKlinkenberg(The Hague/Paris/New
York:Mouton, 1979). Brunettahad proposed for analysis:"(a) the processesof semiotic
translation of literary texts into film texts; (b) the rhetorical procedures .. (c) the
specific linguistic uses ... that lend themselves to interdisciplinary research.... The
study of the relations of the specific linguistic uses, such as subtitles, voice-off and
visual signs, would fall into this domain; (d) the transcodificationof theatrical signs
and the processes of gradual substitution of all the theatrical codes, assumed by the
cinema of the earliest period as privileged codes of representation; (e) the trans-
codification carried out from the visual arts and photography" (847).
14. See Gian Piero Brunetta,"Codificazionepittorica e letterariain Partie de Campagne,"
Cinema & Cinema 14, no. 4 (1987): 57-63.
15. This historiographical project has been influenced by the models of the "nouvelle
histoire." This is dealt with in Gian Piero Brunetta, "Cosmographie, cartographie,
cardiologie," Hors cadre 4 (1986): 93-102.
16. Eco wrote: "Seeing again the work done in the years after Opera aperta, from a
distance,... I realize that the problem of interpretation, of its freedoms and of its
aberrations, has always crossed my discourse.... In a sense... all my studies from
1963 to 1975 aimed (if not exclusively, then at least in good part) at searching for
the semiotic foundations of those experiences of 'openness' of which I had written,
but the rules of which I had not given, in Opera aperta"-Lector in fabula, 8. C.f.
Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979): 3-4; the firstchapter of Opera aperta,
"The Poetics of the Open Work,"is included in The Role of the Reader (tr.). It is
precisely this type of normativity that Eco tries to articulatein A Theory of Semiotics.
17. Translator'snote: Lector in fabula has no exactly equivalent English translation. It
includes, from The Role of the Reader, a much more developed version of the
"Introduction,"along with Chapters7 and 8 (the latter being the one entitled "Lector
in fabula: Pragmatic Strategy in a MetanarrativeText" in the English version).
18. In 1984, Eco published Semiotica e filosofia del linguaggio, in which he attempted
to establish, in addition to the acknowledged domain of specific semiotics, the phil-
osophical foundations of a general semiotic. We might say that the most recent trend
in theoretical work seems to be toward an integrated attention toward semiotics,
philosophy, and hermeneutics.
19. Emile Benveniste, Problemes de linguistique generale (Paris: Gallimard, 1966-74)
and Tzvetan Todorov, "Problemes de l'enonciation," Langages 17 (1979): 3-11.
20. Gerard Genette, Figures III (Paris:Editions du Seuil, 1972); Christian Metz, Essais
sur la signification au cinema and Le signifiant imaginaire (Paris:UGE, 1977) [The
Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1977) (tr.).] For Bettetini, in Tempo del senso, "the genesis of an

audiovisual text includes all its signifying articulation, and therefore also the entire
project of enunciation, which is revealed through indexes and traces" (6). The tem-
poral dimension of an audiovisual text became the privileged category for the study
of enunciation, because enunciation was defined as the "unfolding of the signifying
virtualities of the text in the rigid temporality of its manifestation in an indefinitely
repeatable form" (6).
21. What is meant here is not American pragmatic philosophy, but linguistic/enuncia-
tional pragmatics; for more details see note 23.
22. That is, "non pentito ne dissociato." These terms are familiar to all Italians from
their use in the trialsof political terrorists."Pentiti,"for example, can refer to members
of the Red Brigades who collaborate with the state. By using these terms, Casetti
connotes the political implications of semiotics, as well perhaps, as a nostalgia for
the times-the sixties-when the discipline affirmed its "revolutionary"role in the
culture. (De Lauretis's essay argued for the ideological and political implications of
Italian semiotics.)
23. Casetti writes: "to ask oneself in what manner the film sets up its own spectator,
establishing its presence and organizing its action-in a word, how it says you-
means bringing into focus precisely what pragmatics is involved with, namely the
relations between text and context; it means discovering which framework the text
is inscribed in, what destination it assigns itself [per quale destino si pensa], what
conditions it sets on its own use, what developments [esercizi] it allows, and so forth.
But, although this is a matter of pragmatics, the aim is neither to reduce it to
semantics pure and simple (what the text says-to which is added what is done with
it), nor to a simple description of the impact it has and its possible effects (what is
done with the text-to which is added what the text is). In other words, the perception
of an 'inside' the film and an 'outside' the film, constantly interacting and ready to
dissolve one into the other, will prevent overhasty reductions of the field.
An interstitial discipline, possibly problematical at its borders, but full of pos-
sibilities of its own and open to suggestionsfrom elsewhere, this pragmatics will then
reveal itself to be an effective terrain for research" (24). In a note, Casetti indicates
which form of pragmatics he means, referring the reader to: G. Leech, Principles
of Pragmatics (New York:Longman, 1983); B. Schlieben Lange, Linguistische Prag-
matik (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1975), for a reconstruction of the historical debate
about pragmatics; P. Pugliatti, Lo sguardo nel racconto (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1985),
for "an essential basic distinction between illocutionary pragmaticsand enunciational
pragmatics," the latter being the one within which Casetti locates his work; and
lastly, A. J. Greimas and E. Landowski, "Pragmatique et semiotique," Documents
[sic] 5, no. 50 (1983).
24. De Lauretis, describing Italian semiotics in 1978, wrote: "the obvious differences
between French and Italian semiotics [lie] in what may be called their politics of
enunciation: the discursive practice of Italian semiotics is much less flamboyant or
self-reflexive than that of the French heirs of Artaud and Mallarme; terminology
tends to be more stable, its use much less fetishistic. Many Italian semioticians, like
Eco, seek wide reception through the newspapers and the media; they analyze mass
cultural phenomena and do not disdain the low prestige roles of popularizer and
textbook writer. This is, of course, in line with the Italian left's traditional populist
commitment to pedagogy, and has its roots in Gramsci's original analysis of the
political importance of cultural hegemony" (5).
25. "Discussione sull'iconismo,"47. It is interesting to note how Casetti too took his first
steps precisely in the area of iconism, which had been the central arena for Italian
semiotics at the start.
26. In this essay he indicated his intention to analyze "a conjuncturein which two distinct
and related infractions are, concretely, at work. On one side, to the paradoxicality

already demonstrated in certain critical schemes or to the attempts to readjust the
others, we oppose a different mode of reading the films and of constructing the
history of cinema: it is an area in which the study of texts as facts of discourse
establishes new pertinences, new objects of analysis, new issues. On the other side,
to the pure and simple instrumentality to which most films adapt themselves, we
oppose a different kind of cinema: it is an area in which the filmsacquire consciousness
of being, first of all, facts of discourse, and take advantage of this, in order to adopt
new stylistic modes, new themes, new dimensions in which to move." In other words,
continues Casetti, "Discourse/'new' criticism/'new' films: this contemporary con-
juncture will be examined in relation to a series of texts (theoretical, critical, and
filmic, in this order) that appeared at the end of the sixties in France. This in order
to acknowledge, to reconsider, and perhaps to clarify, a debate which is still pro-
ductive" (280) [Trans. G. M.].
27. The preliminary version of this essay appeared in Italian as "I1 testo del film,"
Comunicazioni sociali 3 (1979): 23-39.
28. This is not, to be sure, the body in an empirical sense, as will be made clear in what
follows.
29. "What is generally meant by 'subject',"writes Casetti, "if not what lies beneath the
act of utterance-a 'source'-and at the same time what is subjected to observation
and reflection-a 'theme'?" (Dentro lo sguardo, 20).
30. Christian Metz, "L'enonciationimpersonelle ou le site du film," Vertigo:Le cinema
au miroir 1 (1987).
31. See the entry for figurativization in A. J. Greimas and Joseph Courtes, Semiotics
and Language: An Analytical Dictionary, trans. Larry Crist and Daniel Patte (In-
diana: Indiana University Press, 1982); Casetti refers in many places to the French
edition, Semiotique: Dictionnaire raisonne de la theorie du langage (Paris:Hachette,
1979)-in this case, "figurativisation,"147-48. [translator'snote]
32. See Harald Weinrich, Tempus: Besprochene und erzihlte Welt (Stuttgart:Kohlham-
mer, 1964). There is an updated French version, Le temps: le recit et le commentaire,
trans. Michele Lacoste (Paris:Editions du Seuil, 1973) and a helpful summary of this
in English in Maureen O'Meara, "From Linguistics to Literature:The Un-time-liness
of Tense," Diacritics 6, no. 2 (Summer 1976): 62-68. (tr.)
33. Casetti offers the following diagram as a synthesis of these matters:
commentary
narrator-informer narrator-observer
enunciatee enunciator
diegetic narrator diegetic narratee
narration [racconto]
34. "We have, then, what is known as a process of aspectualization: an ideal eye,
functioning at reception point, reworks, in accordance with its own habits or its own
ends, everything it is called upon to go back over; startingout from itself, it organizes
what it has before it in line with a certain perspective" (78).
35. Odin's review in IRIS offered this account: the spectator "works on the limits of two
borders: that which separates the presupposed from the given, the enunciation from
the enunciated, . .. and that which separatesa de jure reality from a de facto reality,
a 'role' from a 'body,' enunciation from communication. Casetti's spectator is an
interface: inasmuch as it is manifested by some traces in the enunciated, it is tied
to the textual structures, internal to the film, which regulate its construction and
functioning; inasmuch as a 'you' turned towards the outside, it is in search of a body
capable of serving it as support, but also of feeding it with all its already stored-up
experiences and of inciting it to adopt this or that position in function of the context
within which it is located (so that the same figure, for example the look into the

camera, will have very different effects, according to the type of context in which
it may appear)" (138).
36. The peculiar relation of theory to practice in Italian cultural work has been discussed
by Giuliana Bruno in her paper "'Differance' in Italian Theoretical Thought," pre-
sented at the SCS Conference of 1987 in the already mentioned panel on "Italian
Film Theory."
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Francesco Casetti and Italian Film Semiotics

Italian Semiotics. Structuralistand semiotic studies in Italy have been char-

GiulianaMuscioteachesfilmat the Universityof Padua.Her mostrecentbook,on film

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Dentro lo sguardo. The theoretical questions posed by Casetti in Dentro lo

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Un'Altra Volta Ancora. Strategie di Comunicazione e Forme di Sapere nel Telefilm

"Racconto e antiracconto nel cinema contemporaneo." Ikon, 81, 1972, co-authored by

Cinema Journal 30, No. 2, Winter 1991 45

46 Cinema Journal 30, No. 2, Winter 1991

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