colouredtapeonthefloor during rehearsals. Waters’s ‘point and shoot’
simplicity echoes the perfunctorypicturesmadebyPeckerinthefilm.
CinemaataStandstill
In 1973 Artforummagazine published Roland Barthes’ essay ‘The Third
Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills’.^16 Barthes was inter-
ested in the idea that the mechanically recorded image, filmic or otherwise,
contains more potential meaning than can ever be accounted for. In
cinema we do not to see this excess, since the individual images are not
there long enough for us to contemplate them. Imagine a cinema audi-
ence watching a narrative film. At any one moment most eyes will be
focused on just a small portion of the screen, usually a face or something
on the move. Given just a single frame to look at, the gazes will begin to
drift around the image in more individual ways. Eyes and mind can wan-
der, chancing upon details beyond the conscious intention of the director
or performers. Barthes’ essay was a kind of revenge upon the power of
the moving image. He looked at single frames from films by Eisenstein
and found new meanings, many of them non-specific and incomplete.
The story and acting were of lesser interest to Barthes than the capacity
of the still frame to scatter our attention, returning the making of mean-
ing to the spectator. His choice of filmmaker was provocative. Famously,
Eisenstein had championed the putting of one shot after another in a
sequence to implant a very different kind of ‘third effect’ (e.g., shot of
marching soldiers + shot of injured mother = the indifferent might of the
state). Much more disturbing, Barthes’ third meanings residewithinthe
single shot and will always have the potential to escape control, even
from the tightly organized imagery of the Russian avant-garde.^17 More to
134 the point and quite against the grain of popular wisdom, Barthes argued
120 John Waters,Hit Your Mark(1998).