BEGINNING WITH a still from Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, Barthes outlines the several levels of meaning in an  image:
  • An informational level.  This is the level of communication.
  • A symbolic level, the level of referential, historical, and  Eisensteinian symbolism, accessible not through a science of signs, but  through sciences of the symbol (for example, dramaturgy, psychoanalysis).
  • A third level, which "transcends psychology, anecdote, function," which Barthes will call signifiance (43).
Barthes declares the second and third levels of meaning the focus of his  discussion in this essay.
    The symbolic meaning is intentional, and selected from a common  lexicon of symbols (43).  Barthes declares that "it is a meaning which  seeks me outóme, the recipient of the message" (43).  Barthes calls it "the obvious meaning."
    The third meaning, on the other hand, is a "supplement my intellection cannot quite absorb, a meaning both persistent and fugitive, apparent and evasive" (44).  Barthes calls this "the obtuse meaning"; it "opens the field of meaning totally" (44).

The Obtuse meaning

Barthes skips, like a stone across the water, across ways of  locating the obtuse meaning. It is bound to artifice or to disguise; it  is bound to emotion.  In the end, it is not articulable in language. Barthes claims that "if we remain on the level of articulated language in  the presence of these images . . . the obtuse meaning will not come  into being, will not enter into the critic's metalanguage" (56).  Finally,  in an effort to locate the obtuse meaning, Barthes locates it within the  filmicówithin that part of meaning which is not conveyed by the film,  yet which is integral to its existence as film (58ñ59).
        If the third, obtuse meaning is located within the filmic, Barthes  feels justified in searching for it within the film stillówithin the  the inside of the fragment (61).  Barthes calls for further study of this  third meaning. (David Beard.)

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Michael Hancher

Department of English, University of Minnesota

URL: <http://umn.edu/home/mh/txtimdb4.html>

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Created 24 December 1997