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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Warren Buckland Wes Anderson’s Symbolic Storyworld. A Semiotic Analysis New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, pp. 224
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
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Reviews / Comptes rendus
2019-10-01
2021-09-02
2019-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Ruggero Eugeni
2019/10/01
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano
2036-461X
33
en
Warren Buckland Wes Anderson’s Symbolic Storyworld. A Semiotic Analysis New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, pp. 224
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16183/16658
19
Warren Buckland
Wes Anderson’s Symbolic Storyworld. A Semiotic Analysis
New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, pp. 224




   In this volume, Warren Buckland applies a method of analysis derived from the
structural anthropology by Claude Lévi-Strauss to the corpus of Wes Anderson’s
films. A curious and daring choice, of which it is crucial to understand both the
reasons and the limits.
   Chapters 1 and 2 introduce the method of analysis. Following Lévi-Strauss,
myths should be interpreted by identifying certain major, underlying content
categories: raw/cooked, life/death, water/fire, etc. These categories appear as
binary oppositions because the cultural function of myths is that of mediating,
in symbolic terms, between two irreconcilable categories. In any case, the French
anthropologist indicates the opportunity to overcome a linear and syntagmatic
analysis to access the achronic paradigms underlying the story. The reconstruction
of the symbolic system of a single myth can then be compared to that of other
myths, to obtain an ‘archi-mythical’ matrix of invariants belonging to a specific
cultural environment (type level), of which the single myths would have many
variants (token level). In applying Lévi-Strauss’s paradigmatic method of analysis
to Wes Anderson’s films, Buckland proposes replacing the concept of archi-
myth with that of the author’s specific ‘narrative world’: this should not be seen
as a single, mimetic, diegetic world, but precisely as the system of invariants
in Anderson’s cinema that the analyst must reconstruct. The second chapter
is devoted to a review of the previous application of the structural method to
the filmic text: Buckland favours those authors who, between the Sixties and
Seventies, attempted the structural analysis of the content universes of specific
film directors: G. Nowell-Smith, A. Lowell, Jim Kitses, R. Abel, B Houson and
Marsha Kinder, but above all P. Wollen, to whom we will return. Other approaches
to textual analysis, more focused on single sequences (such as those of R. Bellour)
are considered less functional to the methodological structure of the volume.
   Chapters from 3 through to 10 are devoted to the analysis one of Anderson’s
films (the director’s filmography is covered in full, except for Isle of Dogs,
released too recently). For each film, Buckland offers a plot synopsis divided
in sequences, and analyses the core meanings organized in paradigmatic
oppositions. Finally, chapter 11 reconstructs ‘The Symbolic Storyworld of Wes
Anderson’ as a whole. According to Buckland, this universe is dominated by
‘three types of kinship structures?’ (‘death/the absence of parents or spouses’;

                                                Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIX, no. 33, Fall 2019
                                 Reviews / Comptes-rendus


‘intergenerational relationships’; ‘interethnic relationships’); ‘death/life (funerals
and pregnancies)’; ‘exchange and gifts’; ‘mediation’; ‘relative worlds’; ‘water
and drowning’; plus ‘verticality, movement and water’ (p. 169). In a summary
table (p. 184) Buckland examines the recurrences and displacements of these
categories from one Anderson film to another.
   As I mentioned in the first few lines, it is useful to reflect on both the reasons
and limits of such an intentionally ‘outdated’ methodological experiment. Let’s
start with the reasons. Buckland claims to refer to the ‘auteur structuralism’
proposed by Peter Wollen in Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (first edition,
1969). If we reread the fifth and definitive edition of Wollen’s book, which brings
together all the materials accumulated in previous editions, we can read that it is
‘a book that constantly reimagines itself and gains new powers by responding to
new contexts’1. Indeed, Wollen, after having started a modernist and structuralist
theory of cinema, re-thinks it repeatedly in a post-structuralist key; in this
sense, the ‘auteur structuralism’ is later deeply criticized by the author himself.
It is therefore symptomatic that Buckland chooses to rely on the 1972 edition
of Wollen’s book: in this way, he explicitly states his intention to ‘freeze’ the
development of cinema theory just before the advent of both Grand Theory and
Post Theory. Starting from this point, I would argue that Buckland is proposing
a peculiar way of doing film theory, by re-enacting specific theories and methods of
analysis of the past. In other words, after carrying out a critical reconstruction/
deconstruction of some film theories2, Buckland reverses the operational
direction and experiments with their ‘rebooting’. In short, Buckland’s theoretical
gesture recalls the work of a media archaeologist, who recovers machines and
appliances from the past and puts them back into use; only, Buckland moves this
project from media devices history to film theory.
   Finally, the limits of such an operation are profoundly linked to its premises.
I will quickly highlight two. First, by dismantling the diachronic dimension,
Buckland becomes unable to analyse how, in Anderson’s cinema, paradigmatic
core-meanings are translated into syntagmatic narrative architectures. In this
respect, Buckland’s analysis is more prone to an anthropological approach than
a truly semiotic one: the question of the transition from basic semantic nuclei
to ‘surface’ narrative forms, which is at the centre of Greimas’ model, is not
considered here. Secondly, the conscious dismantling of the film-specific and
formal dimension (a critical point also in Wollen’s discussion) emerges with
particular emphasis in the analysis of Anderson’s cinema, which finds a strong
mark of authorial recognition precisely in the repetition of a group of formal
stylistic patterns.

                  [Ruggero Eugeni, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano]


1
  David N. Rodovick, ‘Foreword’, in Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, 5th Edition
(London – Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan – BFI, 2013), p. xiv.
2
  Warren Buckland, Film Theory: Rational Reconstructions (London – New York: Routledge, 2012)

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