Abstract: "The Purple Rose of Cairo" is a surreal film with the style of Woody Allen. Its theme is "Dream of Life". It reveals the insurmountable gap between the fantasy movie world and the real world. Deep Woody Allen's pessimism. Woody Allen is a master of narrative in the contemporary film industry. The relationship between characters in his films is often based on simple sexual emotions, but once it is unfolded, it is quite intertwined. Three or five characters can be displayed in a large scale. Narrative. This article will analyze the relationship between the characters in the movie text of Woody Allen's "The Purple Rose of Cairo" movie text through the matrix model proposed by semioticist Greymas.
Keywords: Woody Allen Dynamic Element Greymas Matrix "The Purple Rose of Cairo"
1. Greimas matrix and movie text
After the semioticist Strauss proposed the "dual opposition model" for narrative, Greimas proposed his famous "narrative matrix" model. In Greimas’s view, ordinary binary oppositions are not enough to express the complete relationship in a story, so he expands on Strauss’s foundation and expands the binary oppositions to quaternary oppositions, making The connection to the text of the story is more complete. The so-called quaternary opposition is actually a quaternary relationship model similar to the "inverse negation proposition", and its specific theory is:
1. [X] and [反X] are a set of opposites
2. The third party, the contradictory but not opposite relationship with [X] is [not X]
3. The fourth, contradictory but not opposite relationship with [反X] is [非反X]
[X], [反X], [非X], [非反X] are related to each other. Under a certain narrative system, a complex narrative of movie stories can be completed. Use a graphical model to illustrate this relationship: (Figure 1)
In these groups of relationships, [X] and [反X] are usually in a state of confrontation, and the positions and attitudes they represent are often opposite to each other, such as "justice and evil", "poetry and reality" "Rich and poor". This kind of antagonism will produce what we usually call "contradictions." With contradictions, the narrative of a story can be advanced.
But a single antagonistic relationship is far from enough to support the narrative volume of a 90-minute movie. In the binary opposition, smaller collateral figures are generally involved, forming the so-called narrative camp. At this time, X and non-anti-X are in the same camp, anti-X and non-X are in the same camp, and anti-X, non-X, and non-anti-X all play a role in promoting or hindering X to a certain extent. As the main body of the narrative, X will become the focus of the story that the audience pays attention to, traversing adventures through a series of resistance and propulsion, and finally forming a wonderful narrative system.
In "The Purple Rose of Cairo", Woody Allen happens to construct a four-corner relationship, which is very suitable for deconstructing it with the Greimas matrix. A detailed analysis will be launched below.
2. Action meta-model and role analysis
"The Purple Rose of Cairo" tells the story of a movie fan during the Great Depression in the United States. The heroine Cecilia is a waitress in a restaurant in New Jersey. Husband-Monk. And Cecilia herself is an avid movie fan, deep down she yearns for a poetic life. A movie called "The Purple Rose of Cairo" aroused Cecilia's infinite love. She has watched this movie many times in the theater. She can recite every line and every action in the movie proficiently. In the movie, there is no economic decline, no husband's abuse, and some are just banquets and fun in the upper class. One day while watching a movie in Cecilia, the actor Tom in the movie suddenly walked off the screen and expressed his gratitude and love to Cecilia. Cecilia and Tom left the movie theater, and the two complained to each other. Although they were very romantic at the beginning, it did not fill their stomachs. At the same time, Tom's real-world actor Gil also appeared, and the two competed for Cecilia's heart.
In the chapter "Thinking about the Actor Model" in Greimas' first semantic book "Structural Semantics", he constructed a complete "Sixth Individuals": protagonist, object, dominator, inheritor, assistant, opponent. [1] The protagonist is the subject of all events in the story; the object is the pursuit goal of the "protagonist"; the dominator is the internal driving force that governs the protagonist's actions; the subject who finally obtains the "object" is called the "receiver"; The protagonist's series of actions are called assistants, and vice versa, they are called adversaries, which are the "non-X" and "non-reverse X" in the matrix mentioned above. Transplanting these six dynamic models into the plot of "The Purple Rose of Cairo", we can roughly get the dynamic positioning of a character in the plot, that is, Cecilia is the protagonist in the play, and all contradictory relationships revolve around her. . The "object" in the play is the poetic spiritual side that Cecilia has always pursued. This spiritual world is completed by walking into the cinema and watching movies continuously. In other words, Cecilia's movie-watching behavior is just a representation of chasing spiritual resonance based on her fandom. Contacting Woody Allen's 2011 film "Midnight Paris", we can understand the meaning of the so-called "representation" more clearly. The emotional contradiction of the male protagonist in "Midnight Paris" is also the huge ideal and reality. The gap and the contradiction of the incident are also accomplished by crossing, but the difference is that the protagonist in "Midnight Paris" is a writer, so all the people he meets after crossing are all jazz-age literature masters. It is also a literary topic. But from a deep point of view, "literature" and "movie" have a certain degree of homogeneity. In other words, Cecilia's protagonist identity and the object identity of "Poetic World" are constant in this film, while "movie" and other behaviors are just behaviors that will continue to change as the plot advances.
To further layer the plot of "The Purple Rose of Cairo", we can regard "Tom's screen leap" as an important time node. According to this node, the following two character dynamic analysis diagrams will be generated: (Figure 2 and Figure 3)
Picture 2 depicts Tom’s transition from the character before. At this time, Cecilia is the unchanging protagonist. The way she pursues the spiritual world is to watch movies, so the movie is her dominating power and helper to realize her spiritual pursuit, and The real characters represented by Monk and the depressed real world are the power to destroy the spiritual world of Cecilia, so at this time they are the hindrances. When Tom crosses the screen, the relationship between the dynamics and the elements in the plot is as shown in Figure 3. Tom’s ability to traverse controls Tom to reach Cecilia, and Tom himself exists as an entity that realizes Cecilia’s poetic dream. To say that love is also an act of isolation from the real world. But when Tom's real-world actor Gil appears, Tom becomes illusory. The game between Gil and Tom can also be seen as a game between poetry and reality, so the obstacle at this time is changed from Monk. For Gil. The above is based on the simple analysis of the character dynamics after the hierarchical structure of "The Purple Rose of Cairo".
3. The Contradictory Motif of Woody Allen's Movies-Poetry and Reality
When people talk about Woody Allen movies, one theme that cannot be avoided is Woody Allen's special attitude towards the relationship between reality and art. He eliminates the distance between the screen and the audience by using a unique Allen-style technique, and at the same time, arouses the audience's attention to the "immediacy" of the screen performance. For example, at the beginning of Woody Allen’s movie "Annie Hall," he broke the fourth wall directly facing the audience, using a stand-up comedy to tell (Figure 4): "There is an old man The joke is like this. Two old women went on a trip to the Catskill Mountains. One of them said:'Hey, the food in this place is terrible.' The other said:'No way, the portion is so good. Less.’ My attitude towards life is also roughly the same: Although it is full of loneliness, pain, misery and misfortune, but I feel that everything is passing too quickly." This joke of Woody Allen did not serve the "Anne Hall" Narrative information, but put oneself in a special field between the screen and reality, and become a heart-seater of the audience. Even if he is the protagonist in the film, Allen has to maintain an outsider look and get away from the illusory narrative (perhaps this is a special way of acting based on Allen Dong's identity as an actor). From the perspective of the content of the joke, Woody Allen has always regarded the real world as something similar to "Catskill Mountain Food", which makes people feel helpless and bad but also feels that everything is passing too fast. The huge contrast between the trivial real world and the poetic art world is what he has been dedicated to expressing in the movie. Going back to Greimas's theory, Greimas divides the text into two levels-surface structure and deep structure. The focus of the surface structure lies in the plot of the story, the advancement of the plot, and the actions of the characters. The focus of the deep structure lies in the binary oppositional relationship within the story, through which the entire narrative mode can be deduced. According to the motif of Allen's narrative contradiction mentioned above, the binary opposition of "The Purple Rose of Cairo" is still the opposition of poetry and reality.
In the plot setting of "The Purple Rose of Cairo", the four characters in the play, Cecilia, Tom, Gil, and Monk, form two character camps, namely Cecilia and Tom are the poetic movie world, monk and gil are Represents the real world. As the protagonist of the story, Cecilia has been struggling between reality and fantasy. This struggle constitutes a contradictory relationship between push and pull, and promotes the continuous development of the plot. We can summarize the trajectory of Cecilia in the plot:
(1) Cecilia works in a restaurant during the day and is abused by her husband at night (push)
(2) Cecilia walks into the cinema (pull)
(3) Tom walked out of the screen to confess to Cecilia (pull)
(4) Gil appears (push)
(5) Gil and Tom compete for Cecilia (push-pull contradiction)
(6) Cecilia finally returned to the real world (push)
In the antagonistic relationship in the movie, the plot follows the constant denial of the pursuit of Cecilia's spiritual world. Without the "push", there is no motivation to develop the plot. In this push and pull process, the four characters in the plot cleverly constitute the four elements in the Greymas matrix (Figure 5). Tom exists as a pulling force in the plot. On both sides of the screen, between you and me, he prompts As Cecilia further pursues the emotions in the film world, immersed in the poetic art world. But at the same time, he is also powerless to change Cecilia's real-life situation. Apart from leading Cecilia to the park, he cannot influence or change any real-life events. So his identity in the matrix should be "non-anti-X". As for Cecilia's husband, his identity in the matrix is self-evident. He has always existed as a perpetrator of Cecilia, both mentally and physically, so his identity should be undoubtedly anti-X. Tom’s real world actor Gil, his identity is for Tom. He has no connection with Cecilia’s husband Monk, but his confrontation with Tom caused him to be in the same camp as Monk invisibly. So his identity in the matrix should be non-X.
Through the above, we have clarified the positions of the four protagonists in the plot matrix. At the same time, we should also realize that the Greimas matrix is not a static model, and the quaternions in the matrix are not simply opposites. . As Frederick Jameson said: "Let each item produce a logical negation, or contradiction. This creates a space for true dialectical negation." [2] In other words, the Greymas matrix is a follow-up The open phalanx that continues to advance in film narratives is also a "completely negative" symbolic phalanx.
Concluding remarks
"The Purple Rose of Cairo" is a masterpiece of Woody Allen's ambivalent mentality of intellectuals. He uses movies as an exit from reality and fantasy as a means to resist depression. Through the analysis of the Greimas matrix, I can see the confrontation between poetry and reality more clearly, and also re-covered a dreamy veil on the film as the seventh art. Movies are not a tool to prolong our lives, movies are our lives. The screen is no longer a window to another world, the screen is another world.
references
[1]Wang Weiwei, Wu Jitao. Analysis of "October Besieged City" from Greimas's Narrative Theory[J]. News World, 2010(12):168-169.
[2] Liu Xiaoqian. Analyze the movie "Dear" from Greimas' narratology theory[J]. Journal of Chongqing Radio and Television University, 2014, 26(06): 42-46.
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