Visions of Linguistic Displacement

Download or read book Visions of Linguistic Displacement written by Tijana Mamula and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis explores the problematic relationship between language loss and visuality in European exile and emigre filmmaking, from the 1940s until the present. The basic theoretical premise adopts Freud's theory of aphasia and its Kristevan interpretation to define the psychic effects of linguistic displacement as the scission of the word-presentation from the thing-presentation and the consequent denial of the symbolic signifier. This depletion of language is compensated or overcompensated for through recourse to the indexical (semiotic) signification of photography, whose psychological significance resides both in its eschewal of the arbitrariness of the signifier, and in its revindication of the semiotic materiality that is indispensable to a meaningful relation to language. At the same time, the overreliance on vision/indexicality risks a hallucinatory excess against which no signification is possible, thus positing an irremediable paradox at the heart of the relationship between linguistic displacement and cinematic visuality. In enacting this relationship, both formally and thematically, the films discussed here attest not only to the crucial, and underexplored, impact of language loss on the development of Western cinema, but also to its theoretical implications for the medium as such. -- Following the introduction, the thesis proceeds through four thematically organized chapters, whose films were selected both for their manifest links to linguistic displacement and for their widespread influence.