Page 105 - Culture Society and the Media

MESSAGES AND MEANINGS 95
mass media. Art historians for example, such as Panofsky, rapidly identified the
fixed iconography of early movies.

There arose, identifiable by standardised appearance, behaviour and
attributes, the wel-remembered types of the vamp and the straight girl
(perhaps the most convincing modern equivalents of the medieval
personifications of the vices and virtues), the family man and the villain,
the latter marked by a black moustache and a walking-stick. Nocturnal
scenes were printed on blue or green film. A checkered tablecloth meant
once for all, a ‘poor but honest’ milieu, a happy marriage soon to be
endangered by a shadow from the past was symbolised by the young
wife’s pouring the breakfast coffee for her husband; the first kiss was
invariably announced by her kicking out with her left foot. (Panofsky,
1934, p. 25)

At the same time, however, there was a sense in which film and photography
involved some crucial changes from preceding signifying systems, such as
painting. Benjamin, in seeking to indicate the changes for works of art brought
about by the process of mechanical reproduction, suggests that such changes can
be illuminated by comparing the painter and the cameraman. The painter’, he
states, ‘maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman
penetrates deeply into its web’ (Benjamin, 1977). Even naturalistic painting
usually makes clearer the painter’s presence, his techniques and codes, than does
photography or film.

There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of
the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple
fragments which are assembled under a new law. Thus for contemporary
man the representation of reality by film is incomparably more significant
than that of the painter since it offers precisely because of the
thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect
of reality which is free of all equipment. (Benjamin, 1977, p. 400)

The problem is that photography and film, unlike many other signifying forms,
appears to record rather than to transform. Barthes suggests, for example, in his
initial analyses of advertisements that the photographic component constituted the
paradox of being ‘a message without a code’ (Barthes, 1971).
Barthes then continues, however, to establish the codes through which
advertisements and other mass media messages are constructed while
simultaneously carrying the claim of having-been-there, the evidence of ‘this-
iswhat-happened-and-how’. In his analysis of a Panzani advertisement, he points
to the signs of marketing, the string-bag, stocked with Panzani tins, spaghetti and
pepper and tomato, with the connotations of freshness of product and household
use; to the colour tints of the poster (yellow, green and red) which signify