| The thesis opens a series of theoretical investigations and concrete textual analyses aimed at 'action' and 'object' as points of entry into the discourse and text of narrative film. Working with a corpus of five American, French, and Italian films from the period 1940-1961 (The Maltese Falcon, Open City, Hiroshima mon amour, Psycho, and An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge), the analyses educe the different practices of figuration, of action and object, as economies of filmic text and discourse. The thesis's theoretical constructions draw on the general fields of semiotics and psychoanalysis, selectively exploiting them, in order to fashion a number of tools and frameworks for a practice of textual analysis of film concerned with: (1) the logical plane of narrative action in film, its articulation, the intelligible relations and implications of the actional chain--as an economy--, to be mapped in order to then analyze the manifested textual figurations of a film, its turns, continuities, and gaps, its obvious units, and its effects destined to establish and move a spectator (as a subject of narrative discourse); (2) the object of and in narrative film as a pivot between the logic and economy of narrative in its semiotic dimension as an object-of-action (exchange, transformation), and in its psychoanalytic dimension as an object formed in signifying chains and subjective relations of loss, demand, and desire.;In its form as a deconstruction of these figures and economics, textual analysis of film assumes its power as ideological and cultural criticism.;The focus, in analysis, on economy, figuration, and discourse enables an effective movement from textual form to the dimension of spectatorship as it is conducted by the film's discursive management of the figuration of action and object. |
