Receiving the Godfather

One in a series of videos that examines Wolfgang Isers reception theory, which posits that the meaning of a text is ideated by the reader during the blanks (narrative ellipsis, breaks between chapters) that punctuate a text. To explore this phenomenon, I selected the climactic scene from motion picture The Godfather that is alternately known as the baptism scene or the take care of all family business scene. I chose this scene because it resolves several different sub-narratives contained within the film in a complex matrix of crosscutting. In the process, associations are made by the viewer between the various sub-narratives, and the sub-text is created.

I heightened the function of the editing process and the purpose of blanks in the construction of narrative and meaning by coding the sequence into its constituent formal elements and exaggerating them. First, I broke the scene down to its individual shots (analogous to words in the written narrative) and overlaid onto the shots video titles to identify which shot was on-screen at a particular moment: extreme long shot, long shot, medium shot, close-up, extreme close-up. Next, I coded all of the shots according to what sub-narrative they were referencing. The different sub-narratives were all assigned a specific color. So according to what sub-narrative a shot was referencing, I assigned it that color and replaced the visuals with a solid field of color that lasted the temporal duration of the shot. Next, I exaggerated the temporal length of the blank that exists during each edit. Since the actual blank is nearly imperceptible to the conscious eye (lasting only a fraction of a second) I lengthened the time of each blank just long enough to be noticed consciously. The blank is represented by a flash of black on the screen.

Ultimately, what resulted was an abstracted, formal visual depiction of the process of creating meaning as described by Iser in reception theory.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• art+media

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