An old woman lies in bed. On the wall is a glass case containing butterflies pinned to a board. She dies. At her funeral, when she’s being buried, a butterfly alights on the gravestone before fluttering away.

Forgive the shampoo commercial subtlety of the above, but thanks to a great script doctoring session today in my second meeting with a filmmaker developing his next short, I’ve been contemplating symbolism.

This stuff gets you early, and gets you hard when it works. I saw The Red Balloon countless times when I was a child, drawn to it every time it appeared on tv. It’s a gorgeous French short from the fifties, about a young boy who is followed around by a magical balloon. He becomes the subject of interest and envy from other kids, and some of them conspire to burst the balloon, the bastards. But a whole swarm (never mind the right collective noun) of balloons appear and swoop the lad into the sky.

It is not recorded if the balloons take him to a height so vertiginous that he blacks out or freezes to death. That’s outside the scope of the film, because what matters is how the balloon functions as a symbol. At the age I watched it, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you about the balloon being emblematic of youthful buoyancy and optimism crushed by the pressure to conform. Or how the flight into the skies at the end taps into religious metaphors of acension. But without knowing the words, I felt all of those things, and more. Which is why I watched the film time and again.

The mystic Gurdjieff was a dab hand with symbolism, it being part of the stock in trade of guru types to speak in riddles. He even had a symbol for how to communicate with symbols, using the metaphor ‘bury the dog’ to get across that the meaning of the symbol should be obscured. And even the ‘dog’ itself some say is a symbol, representing the role of Sirius (the Dog Star) in his teachings.

Point being, do what you can to make the meaning of your symbols indirect. Besides, you can do little but that. Once an image is loosed upon the screen, the person who placed it there loses control over what happens to it. Different audience members will respond in different ways. A rhubarb plant has one meaning to an audience who’ve grown up eating the stuff in crumbles. Quite another meaning in India, where a plant resembling rhubarb has poisonous stalks but edible leaves.

My A level English teacher, quite the feminist, was fascinated by a passage in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (or Baskervilles, as we insisted). In it, Tess skims milk, and Hardy draws attention to the sensuality of the experience. The English teacher was convinced that the device Tess used for skimming was phallic. The way I figured, it had to be something more like a tennis racket, since it’s a job you need something with surface area for. I was left baffled, and curious about what sort of penises the English teacher had encountered if she reckoned the skimmer was a phallic symbol.

Symbols are chocolates in a box. Pebbles on a beach. Plasticine waiting to be turned into a Wallace, a Gromit. And the better they are, the more they resist being pinned down to precise meanings.