[...] Austin was supposed to be the place to make the music happen, but instead I was caught up with great passion in the intellectual life of the university, and equally so in the spirited cinephilic culture of student film societies and repertory theatres. At first, I thought that these two intensely experienced sides of student life were separate strands of my existence, running parallel to one another without ever touching. I also found it difficult to settle on a field of study. I seemed to be drawn haphazardly to courses in philosophy, linguistics, the history of art, comparative literature and cultural anthropology. Although initially an English major studying world drama, I found myself increasingly drawn not to literature, but rather to a series of figures whose work seemed to fit within no given cognate field: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson and especially, Roland Barthes, who in turn led me to Freud, Marx, Saussure and Lacan. This is why Signs and Meaning made such a stunning impact on me: not only were my two passions brought together, suddenly they seemed inseparable.

Falling upon Signs and Meaning in the Cinema at the time I did was something like a miracle. The book gave focus to my otherwise scattered interests, and in turn demonstrated, in an astonishingly foresighted way, that I belonged to a field. What this field should be called was then in doubt; perhaps it still is. At the time, film studies hardly existed, at least to my limited knowledge. Nor am I now certain that anyone then spoke of ‘theory’ in the humanities, much less film theory, as a coherent practice or activity. In this lies the second reason for the impact of Signs and Meaning: it began the pioneering process of laying out, for decades to come, a set of common concerns and questions for this still somewhat indefinable field, and it suggested something like a first canon for revisiting and renewing the place of the moving image in the broader contexts of aesthetics, culture and political theory. With its erudite examination of questions of aesthetics and politics, ideas of authorship, and questions of meaning and representation in language and in art, your own 1969 introduction reads as if it could have been written today. Signs and Meaning was one of the first books to make the case seriously for the importance of film for aesthetics, and as importantly, film’s potential transformation of aesthetics as it then stood. You cleared the path towards understanding what it might mean to refer to the language of film, and in turn asked whether film is a language at all. [...]

In the 1940s the Realist tradition reasserted itself, though divided between two different currents. The first of these was inaugurated by Citizen Kane and continued in the later films of Welles and Wyler. Its characteristic feature was the use of deep focus. By this means, the spatial unity of scenes could be maintained, episodes could be presented in their physical entirety. The second current was that of Italian Neo-realism, whose cause Bazin espoused with especial fervour. Above all, he admired Rossellini. In Neo-realism Bazin recognised fidelity to nature, to things as they were. Fiction was reduced to a minimum. Acting, location, incident: all were as natural as possible. Of Bicycle Thieves Bazin wrote that it was the first example of pure cinema. No more actors, no more plot, no more mise en scène: the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality. In fact, no more cinema. Thus the film could obtain radical purity only through its own annihilation. The mystical tone of this kind of argument reflects, of course, the curious admixture of Catholicism and Existentialism which had formed Bazin. Yet it also develops logically from an aesthetic which stresses the passivity of the natural world rather than the agency of the human mind.

The ideological effects of such a recasting of the semiological foundations of art would be of the utmost importance. It would situate the consciousness of the reader or spectator no longer outside the work as receiver, consumer and judge, but force him to put his consciousness at risk within the text itself, so that he is forced to interrogate his own codes, his own method of interpretation, in the course of reading, and thus to produce fissures and gaps in the space of his own consciousness (fissures and gaps which exist in reality but which are repressed by an ideology, characteristic of bourgeois society, which insists on the ‘wholeness’ and integrity of each individual consciousness). All previous aesthetics have accepted the universality of art founded either in the universality of ‘truth’ or of ‘reality’ or of ‘God’. The modern movement for the first time broke this universality into pieces and insisted on the singularity of every act of reading a text, a process of multiple decodings, in which a shift of code meant going back over signals previously ‘deciphered’ and vice versa, so that each reading was an open process, existing in a topological rather than a flat space, controlled yet inconclusive.

The question of good and evil is not for Boetticher a question of abstract and eternal moral principles; it is a question of individual choice in a given situation. The important thing, moreover, is the value which resides in action of a certain kind; not action to values of a certain kind. Evidently, this is a kind of existentialist ethic, which by its nature is impure and imperfect, but which recognises this. Hence the irony which marks Boetticher’s films and particularly his attitude to his heroes. The characters played by Randolph Scott are always fallible and vulnerable; they make their way inch by inch, not at all with the sublime confidence of crusaders. Yet it is possible for Andrew Sarris to talk of the ‘moral certitude ‘ of Boetticher’s heroes; in fact, he is confusing the philosophical integrity which structures the films with what he takes to be the absolute moral endorsement of the hero. Boetticher sympathises with almost all of his characters; they are all in the same predicament in which the prime faults are inauthenticity and self-deception, rather than infringement of any collectively recognised code. The fact that some end up dead and some alive does not necessarily indicate any moral judgment, but an underlying tragedy which Boetticher prefers to treat with irony.

For if, as seems evident enough, Godard is radically dissatisfied with society, then it is the absence of politics which condemns him to rootlessness and despair. To be dissatisfied, after all, is to want change. Politics is the principle of change in history; when we abandon it nothing remains except the scattered, expendable efforts of artists and romantics. In this sense, as Godard has said, art is always left wing. Tradition is the enemy. The tradition of our society, it would be hard to deny, is violence, vandalism, oppression and its developing sanctions, the advertiser’s copy and the carabinier’s gun.

Signs and meaning in the digital age?

The ultimate aftermath of 1968 – the final disintegration of the ‘Public Sphere’, perhaps. The triumph of the ‘Society of the Spectacle’. The Situationists vindicated! Well, vindicated negatively. 1968 was an emblematic moment which spectacularised the idea of change itself, but, as always, history plays strange tricks and the change which came wasn’t the one that had been expected. It was the end of Fordism, the end of Keynesianism, the end of classic social democracy, the beginning of a new world order, constructed around a string of world cities linked by a lattice of electronic communications which facilitated a sweeping reconfiguration of world capital.

Was Marx vindicated? And all his discredited theories about the organic composition of capital and the immiseration of the proletariat proved correct?

It looks that way, doesn’t it?