To what extent is cinema the most direct, honest, and true vehicle for expression and meaning? Project: Meaning is a short film that, for the purpose of investigating the language of cinema, translates literary text directly from the page to the screen, denying context and focusing solely on the affiliation between “shot” and “sentence.” Its text—seven works of prose fiction and fourteen poems—is drawn from the Carleton English Department’s “Exam Reading List 2007-08.”
From each literary work the artist has extracted the the final written line or sentence, and then for each, compose a shot or series of shots that attempts to directly convey the words themselves. In this way the relationship between "the abstract word" and the "the realistic cinema" is inverted, rendering the written word the signifier, and the cinematic image the sign.
The project's ultimate challenge lied in discovering how to transfigure written words, with their own inherent definitions, into boundless images. Theoretical grounding was found most significantly in work done by film theorist Christian Metz, who is most famous for applying Saussurian linguistics to film studies. Project: Meaning is neither absolute cinema, nor an attempt to corrupt literature. It is a self-contained space in which words and images can be in dialogue and opposition to one another.
[Project: Meaning by Sarah Nienaber is a 20 minute video project issued as a DVD with an accompanying 13 page Guide in PDF.]
