Roland Barthes, "The Third Meaning"
"[The Third Meaning] outplays meaning. A new--rare--practice affirmed against a majority practice (that of signification), obtuse meaning appears necessarily as a luxury, an expenditure with no exchange. This luxury does not yet belong to today's politics but nevertheless already to tomorrow's." (62-63)

"On the one hand, it [the third meaning] cannot be conflated with the simple existence of the scene, it exceeds the copy of the refential motif, it compels an interrogative reading . . ." (53)

"The obtuse meaning is not in the language system (even that of symbols). Take away the obtuse meaning and communication and signification still remain, still circulate, still come through . . ." (60)

"Everything that can be said about Ivan or Potemkin can be said of a written text (entitled Ivan the Terrible or Battleship Potemkin) except this, the obtuse meaning." (64-65)

" . . . the obtuse meaning is not situated structurally, a semantologist would not agree as to its objective existence . . ." (60)

"The filmic, then, lies precisely here, in that region where articulated language is no longer more than approximative and where another language begins . . ." (65)

 

From Freud's On Dreams:
" . . . we obtain material that enables us to resolve any pathological idea if we turn our attention to precisely those associations which are 'involuntary,' which 'interfere with our reflection,' and which are normally dismissed by our critical faculty as worthless rubbish." (10)

From Barthes, "The Third Meaning":
" . . . the obtuse meaning appears to extend outside culture, knowledge, information; analytically, it has something derisory about it: opening out into the infinity of language . . . it belongs to the family of pun, buffoonery, useless expenditure." (55)

From 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould:
"My own personal philosophy of interviewing . . . is that the most illuminating disclosures usually derive from areas only indirectly related to the interviewee's line of work."

 

From Freud's On Dreams:
"I could not help noticing that this revealed an unsuspected connection between parts of the content of the dream and my associations. If one follows the train of association starting out from one element of a dream's content, one is soon brought back to another of its elements. My associations to the dream were bringing to light connections which were not visible in the dream itself." (12-13)

"By following the associations which arose from the separate elements of the dream divorced from their context, I arrived at a number of thoughts and recollections . . . . This material revealed by the analysis of the dream was intimately connected with the dream's content, yet the connection was of such a kind that I could never have inferred the fresh material from that content." (14)

From Barthes, "The Third Meaning":
"It is clear that the obtuse meaning is the epitome of a counter-narrative; disseminated, reversible, set to its own temporality, it inevitably determines (if one follows it) a quite different analytical segmentation to that in shots, sequences and syntagms (technical or narrative) -- an extraordinary segmentation: counter-logical and yet 'true.'" (63)

"Imagine following not Euphrosyne's schemings, nor even the character (as diegetic entity or symbolic figure), nor even, again, the face of the Wicked Mother, but merely, in this face, this attitude, this black veil, the heavy, ugly flatness-you will then have a different time-scale, neither diegetic nor oneiric, a different film." (63)

 

From Freud's On Dreams:
"The dream was unemotional, disconnected and unintelligible; but while I was producing the thoughts behind the dream, I was aware of intense and well-founded affective impulses . . ." (14)

From Barthes, "The Third Meaning":
"I believe that the obtuse meaning carries a certain emotion. . . it is an emotion which simply designates what one loves, what one wants to defend: an emotion-value, an evaluation." (59)\

 

From 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould:
Gould #1: "I'm not at all happy with words like 'public' and 'artist.' I'm not happy with the hierarchical implications of that kind of terminology. . . . The artist should be granted anonymenity, he should be permitted to operate in secret. . . . Given that disappearance, the artist will then abandon his false sense of public responsibility and his audience or public will reliquinish its role of servial dependency."

Gould #2: "And never between shall they meet?"

Gould #1: "No, they'll make contact but on a much more meaningful level."

Gould #2: Well, Mr. Gould, I'm well aware that this sort of idealistic 'role swapping' has a certain rhetorical flourish, the 'creative audience' concept . . .

From Barthes, "The Third Meaning":
"Obtuse meanings are to be found not everywhere . . . but somewhere: in other authors of films (perhaps), in a certain manner of reading 'life' and so 'reality' itself . . ." (60)