A hermeneutics of film: Pasolini's semiotics and a cinema of the sacred

This dissertation proposes a methodology for interpreting film texts for their theological content. This methodology is grounded in a synthesis of the cine-semiotics of Pier Paolo Pasolini with the hermeneutical interpretation theory of Paul Ricoeur. For both Pasolini and Ricoeur, all human interaction with the world may be seen as a form of discourse, and the primary means of humanity's engagement in that discourse is by arranging the seemingly random events of existence into narratives. As Ricoeur asserts, all human understanding of the world and of the self exists "only in and through the text," and it is through the interpretation of texts (hermeneutics) that we expand our self-understanding.In the first chapter of this study, the author considers Pasolim's notions of semiotics as reality's "descriptive science," and cinema as its "written language," to argue that a film is a text whose interpretation requires a theory of hermeneutics. In Chapter 2, an examination of the semiotics of discourse common to both Pasolini and Ricoeur finds in Rieoeur's literary hermeneutics an appropriate method for the interpretation of films. Returning to Pasolim's cine-semiotics in Chapter 3, the author explores Pasolini's delineation of the cinema of poetry, a "sacred style" through which certain film texts may be seen to evoke the transcendent. The final two chapters apply the author's hermeneutics of film in detailed analyses of two film adaptations of theological literary classics, each of them configured in the cinema of poetry style: Pasolim's cinematic reading of Furipides' Medea (1970) and Claire Denis' transfer of Melville's Billy Budd to modern North Africa as Beau Travail (1999).