The Panther Moderns

From Persona: Cinema of Interpretation, David Boyd
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3697385

"...to confer on all events, without indications to the contrary, an equivalent degree of reality: everything shown on the screen is there, present."

"Under the pressure of such contradictions, a chasm opens up between the interpretive situation inside the text and outside it, between the interpretant on the screen and the interpreter in the audience."

"This gap, furthermore, exposes not only the basic limitations of the interpetive metaphor on which the film has been based, but also the theoretically unresolved problems that underlie our interpretive practice in general:
- The unavailablility of a pre-text, a prior reality, in which to ground our interperetation of the text (the problem in other
words, of the referentiality of fiction)
- The difficulty of explaining one part of the text by reference to another, since everything within the text is equally in need
of interpretation (the problem of the hermeneutic circle)

"This sort of metaphorical breakdown ultimately signals an underlying theoretical scandal. It places in jeopardy, not just a particular interpretation of a particuar text, but rather the very possibility of interpretation. For some critical approaches, however, this situation presents itself not as a threat but rather as an opportunity. The same sort of breakdown which might seem to threaten an end to interpretation can equally well afford a beginning to deconstruction, to the rhetorical analysis of the text in order to reveal the ways in which it renders itself susceptible to incompatible, but equally legitimate, interpretations."

"Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of the text but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself."