Uploaded January 2023 | Updated September 2026, 3 days ago
This video provides an overview of David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's account of the four levels of meaning in films and artworks, which is laid out in their textbook Film Art. The four levels of meaning originates in David Bordwell's book Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in Film Interpretation. The video goes over each of the four levels--referential, implicit, explicit, and symptomatic meaning--examining Bordwell and Thompson's examples of meaning in The Wizard of Oz, and I provide my own examples of meaning in Rear Window.
*Correction: Around minute 17, I suggest that Laura Mulvey's reading of Rear Window can be considered a "symptomatic reading." This is not quite accurate. Mulvey's famous essay is indeed conducting a symptomatic reading of the conventions of classical Hollywood storytelling, but her readings of the films Rear Window and Vertigo is not straightforwardly "symptomatic" because she suggests (in a single sentence) that these two films are *about* issues of gender and sexuality. In other words, she seems to imply that Hitchcock is reflecting upon these issues in these films, which would make her reading of these films closer to a thematic/implicit reading, or at least exist in a hazy boundary between thematic/implicit and symptomatic.
This video provides an overview of David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's account of the four levels of meaning in films and artworks, which is laid out in their textbook Film Art. The four levels of meaning originates in David Bordwell's book Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in Film Interpretation. The video goes over each of the four levels--referential, implicit, explicit, and symptomatic meaning--examining Bordwell and Thompson's examples of meaning in The Wizard of Oz, and I provide my own examples of meaning in Rear Window.
*Correction: Around minute 17, I suggest that Laura Mulvey's reading of Rear Window can be considered a "symptomatic reading." This is not quite accurate. Mulvey's famous essay is indeed conducting a symptomatic reading of the conventions of classical Hollywood storytelling, but her readings of the films Rear Window and Vertigo is not straightforwardly "symptomatic" because she suggests (in a single sentence) that these two films are *about* issues of gender and sexuality. In other words, she seems to imply that Hitchcock is reflecting upon these issues in these films, which would make her reading of these films closer to a thematic/implicit reading, or at least exist in a hazy boundary between thematic/implicit and symptomatic.
