About this project:

This is a “starring” of a scene from the film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, by Todd Haynes. The concept of “starring” originates in Roland Barthes’s essay “S/Z”:

We shall therefore star the text, separating, in the manner of a minor earthquake, the blocks of signification of which reading grasps only the smooth surface, imperceptibly soldered by the movement of sentences, the flowing discourse of narration, the “naturalness” of ordinary language (13).

We star texts in order to interpret them, in the manner that Barthes describes:

This new operation is interpretation _(in the Nietzschean sense of the word). To interpret a text is not to give it a (more or less justified, more or less free) meaning, but on the contrary to appreciate what _plural _constitutes it. Let us first posit the image of a triumphant plural, unimpoverished by any constraint of representation (of imitation). In this ideal text, the networks are many and interact, without anyone of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend _as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable (meaning here is never subject to a principle of determination, unless by throwing dice); the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language.

We wish to free the text from the rigid structures of ideology and narrative that constrain their meanings. As the readers of the text, we wish to rewrite them by recognizing the myriad of meanings that are contained within it. To accomplish this, we first break down the text (in this case a musical montage) into its component fragments of image and lyric, which Barthes calls “lexias”:

The tutor signifier will be cut up into a series of brief, contiguous fragments, which we shall call lexias, since they are units of reading… it will suffice that the lexia be the best possible space in which we can observe meanings; its dimension, empirically determined, estimated, will depend on the density of connotations, variable according to the moments of the text: all we require is that each lexia should have at most three or four meanings to be enumerated (13-14).

Since Superstar is also notable for being reproduced as a poor image, I have elected to present each lexia as an animated gif image, with the corresponding text superimposed in the center. Because of the increased dimensionality of the film, I have also elected to separate out some lexias that occur temporally at the same time (i.e. the text overlay in the beginning and the corresponding voiceover).

Barthes advocates for a deconstruction of each lexia by annotating (starring) the signifiers contained within it with a combination of 5 “codes”, which

create a kind of network, a topos through which the entire text passes (or rather, in passing, becomes text) (20)

We use the codes to shed light on the particular connotations that lie beneath the surface of the text, and which connect it to external bodies of knowledge and ideology. By exposing these connections, we hope to make the text more accessible to both ourselves and other readers.

The film as we can view it now is in many ways a conversation between the director and the lineage of bootleggers who have kept the film on life support over the last two and a half decades, so each of the codes is a Tumblr that stars the primary text by reblogging each lexia with added commentary. That comment becomes visible on each lexia as sort of a reverse hyperlink (oh the magic of Tumblr), and all starring associated with a code is collected on that blog. Since Tumblr is fragile, some of the reblogs don’t show up quite as they should, and if the posts get any external notes the starring will start to get pushed further and further down the page. But the annotations themselves will always be accessible from the code blogs (it’ll just require some searching).

The 5 codes are as follows (in order of visual length on the page, which is to say in no meaningful order):

Hermeneutic

Proairetic

Semantic

Symbolic

Cultural

The lexias are linked below. You may want to play the audio track in this post and listed to it while you examine the lexias in another tab.