Duration and relations of identity, expansion and condensation: a look at textual programming in the cinematographic discourse

Abstract

Cinema is an art that offers the representation of reality the possibility to express a unique network of temporal manipulations. In their narratives, many directors, writers and creators carry the fascinating power of manipulation of the category of time. Sometimes, such manipulation seems to have no limits. One possibility is focused on a semiotic process of duration understood as textual programming of cinematic time. To French semiotics, the programming of time is bound to the content plan, whereas textual programming, in turn, binds to the expression plan and, thus, creates a network of meaning effects that have the merit of maintaining an identity, an expansion or condensation of the duration identified in the cinematographic discourse. Therefore, textual programming concerns the manifestation of duration in the text. Every discursive event conveys a duration which can be expressed in the text in three different ways: identity, expansion and condensation. One of the theoretical tools in order to assist the analyst of films is, in our view, the discursive field of greimasian semiotics. One can notice and understand the film time in its semiotic discursivization. The aim here is to see how the process of textual programming occurs in the filmic diegesis, adopting as a guiding principle Fiorin’s (1996) proposition of the categories of enunciation and their semiotic implication. These developments will be checked within the cinematographic discourse.