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FILM AND LINGUISTICS

Film language, film grammar, film theory and linguistics, semiology of the cinema: the

terms name only some of the configurations of 'Film and Linguistics'. They need to be

explored as separate conceptual categories, but also form a unity when viewed in the

context of successive historical debates and moments of theoretical reflection. While

conceptual distinctiveness derives in part from the inner logic of the disciplines involved,

the historical framework is defined by the cinema's variable status within 20th century

culture: as an art form, a communication medium, a mode of representation, and finally

-- in this context most importantly -- as a specific form of signification.

The rapport between film and linguistics is itself part of a history, that of our

society's changing view of art and the conditions of its production and reception. In the

case of the cinema, 'the only art form', as Bela Balasz remarked, 'that owes its existence

entirely to capitalism' (quoted in Witte, 1972, p 153), as long as the object of attention

is the film, attributed to an individual, the film language/film grammar model predomin-

ated. When attention focused on the spectator as 'reader' of a text, more properly

linguistic models found favour, since they provided a perspective on language as a set of

rules valid irrespective of individual input and constructing not merely an intelligibility,

but an intelligibility for someone.

If the film language/film grammar model carries prescriptive overtones, a

preference for classification is evident in the concepts that film scholars have drawn from

linguistics. Though the debates are not without polemics, one can recognize the

distinctions between an emphasis on pragmatics (the importance given to the spec-

tator's 'inscription' in the film), syntactics (the internal relations of film units or

segments) and semantics (what produces or controls meaning). There is also a marked

difference between approaches that use verbal language as the model for non-verbal

languages, and those that begin with semiotics in order to understand the cinema within

a cultural theory of signs.

The encounter between linguistics and film was arguably crucial in constructing

film as a theoretical object. Even in non-linguistic work on cinema, an increasing concern

with methods at once rigorous and systematic testifies to the impact of linguistic

procedures, as in Gilles Deleuze's revival of phenomenology (Deleuze, 1984, 1985), or in

recent studies drawing on cognitive theory (Branigan, 1988; Bordwell, 1989), where the

emphasis is anti-linguistic.

1. Signification

What brought film studies initially into contact with linguistics was not the fact that the

cinema (since its beginnings) had combined images with language, whether spoken

(during the film-performance) or written (in the form of intertitles). The appeal to

language was prompted by a number of theoretical and philosophical issues around the

question of signification. How can a photographic reproduction of reality be a meaningful

statement about this reality? As Christian Metz put it: 'we need to understand how films

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are understood', or in Bill Nichols' phrase: we need 'to understand images of the world

as speech about the world' (Nichols, 1985, p. 259).

1.1. Expression versus Signification

The emphasis on signification stands in a tension to a set of questions centred on the ci-

nema as the mechanical reproduction of the natural expressiveness of the real, an act of

copying rather than an act of language and of signifying, unmediated by the intervention

of signs or recourse to a system, neither inflected by intentionality nor comprehended by

acquired skills: the cinema's realism or 'reality-effect'. Theorists of realism (Hugo

Munsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim, Siegfried Kracauer, and André Bazin) already raised the

problem of how films are understood, relying on the psychology of perception or pheno-

menology to account for the fact that films not only give an impression of reality, but are

intelligible, while remaining interpretable by different users in very different ways. The

question whether signification resides in the film or in the processes it activates in the

spectator also implies whether such a separation is valid.

Theories of the cinema have always emphasized the constructed nature of filmic

representation: where they differ is in locating the source of that construction. If

linguistically-based theories attribute it to society, ideology and symbolic systems, realist

theories identify the mind as itself generating the structures which make the perceptual

data and stimuli intelligible. Both currents have a history, but it is the former that will

occupy us most. The emphasis here is on linguistics and semiology, giving only brief

consideration to the social, ideological or psychoanalytic ramifications of the topic

(although in academic film studies, it was the latter that predominated during the

1980s).

1.2. Discontinuity, Continuity, Segmentation, Pertinence

In terms of perception, a film is an experience of continuity, while at the material level,

it is made up of discontinuous, discrete entities: individual scenes, each consisting of a

series of individual shots, and each shot numbering many individual frames. The

'semiotic' problem is therefore that of, firstly, segmentation and identifying pertinent

units, and secondly, establishing a hierarchy among pertinent units, isolating such

properly linguistic features as phonemes, morphemes, clause, or aspect, tense, mood. It

will lead semioticians of the cinema to consider film within the context of André

Martinet's double articulation (Metz), to suggest a triple articulation (Umberto Eco), or to

the distinction between segmental levels (the shot, the autonomous segment) and

supra/sub-segmental levels (Raymond Bellour). These considerations all reversed the

realist perspective, which however persisted in the assumption of the frame or image as

the pertinent unit and became one of the major theoretical blockages in the field. Behind

the semiological problem stood a critical agenda: if the reciprocal relation between

(perceptual) continuity and (material) discontinuity was at the heart of the cinema's

power to signify, film semiology could account for its dominant ideological function: to

naturalize the act of representation via the 'impression of reality'.

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Furthermore, the fact that films were almost universally understood meant that

signification had to be explored at the level of possible deep-structures -- the level which

in linguistics is the province of grammar and logic -- which also meant that one was

looking for articulations other than the individual image. For defining the image as the

pertinent unit posed a second problem, involving continuity in another dimension: the

moving image, projected on the screen, is bounded by the frame, creating a visual space

which continues beyond, into what is not visible but present, so-called 'off-screen space',

an aspect of signification important to film theory from Bazin to the development of

psychoanalytic film semiotics and the concept of 'suture' (see Heath, 1981), but which is

not immediately amenable to linguistic analysis.

Despite these difficulties, the fact that the image track and the sound track in the

classical narrative film are combinations of discrete elements suggests that 'representa-

tion' is always already 'signification', and that one is dealing with some kind of language

system. A semiological analysis is tempting, but also problematic, especially when based

on a phonological model of the sign. Starting with Boris Eikhenbaum, Roman Jakobson

and Sergei Eisenstein, to Jean Luc Godard, Christian Metz, Umberto Eco, Pier Paolo

Pasolini and Peter Wollen, film theorists and filmmakers have looked to structural

accounts of language (mostly inspired by Saussure, but occasionally drawing also on

Peirce, and more recently, on Chomsky) for models of how to understand filmic

meaning.

2. The Language Analogy: A Historical Retrospect

The idea that film is like a language is as old as the medium itself and has often been

used in a proselytizing spirit, either by pioneer filmmakers anxious about the prestige of

their craft, or by those who, among the avant-gardes of the 1920s, wanted to claim for

this originally popular entertainment the status of an art form.

2.1. Cinema: The Esperanto of the Eye

Campaigning for the importance and dignity of film, the American film-maker D.W.

Griffith was one of the first to use the language model: he talked of 'moving pictures

might have saved the situation when the Tower of Babel was built' (quoted in Hansen,

1985), stressing the universality, untutored comprehension and communication potential

of the new medium. Vachel Lindsay, the American poet, in 1915 compared cinema to

Egyptian hieroglyphs and foresaw as momentous a cultural transformation as the inven-

tion of printing. Griffith is often called the 'father of film-language', because his

development of parallel editing to signify temporal simultaneity through spatial

contiguity was distinct from the mere sequential recording of events or human actions in

front of the camera. He systematically exploited discontinuity in his editing to construct

cause and effect chains according to a distinct story-telling logic (influential in the Holly-

wood film industry), but which especially in a film like Intolerance (1916) freed itself

from any time-space continuum, a practice emulated by European directors and avant-

garde filmmakers.

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Griffith's influence can be seen in the films of the German 'Expressionist' school

(Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau). More overtly, it is to be found in the editing practice of

the young Soviet cinema, Pudovkin, Kuleshov, Vertov, and above all Eisenstein, who in

several essays from the mid-1920s onwards ('A Dialectical Approach to Film Form', 'Film

Language', 'Dickens, Griffith and the Film today', Eisenstein, 1949) explored some of the

key aspects of editing as a form of cinematic language, propagating the notions of

'montage' and 'film grammar'.

The German and Russian avant-gardes' concern with intermittence, division,

combination and juxtaposition needs to be distinguished from the popular logomorphism

which often regarded a close-up of a hand, or a character's back as 'part of the cinema-

tographic alphabet' (Le Film, 1918). Discussion of film language in the 1920s tended to

compare the individual shot to a word in a sentence. Even Pudovkin seemed to endorse

this simplistic view of both the cinema and language, but he also wanted film montage

to be granted the kind of intentionality and control over meaning associated with linguis-

tic utterances, in contrast to the accidental montage effects typical of early cinema,

when short pieces of film were put end to end by distributors in order to make up an

evening's program. Pudovkin's (and Eisenstein's) use of the film language analogy points

to a battle over the control of meaning in the context of film production and distri-

bution/exhibition, while linguistically, the term 'film language' refers more to the level of

parole or 'performance' than to that of langue or 'competence'.

2.2. Eisenstein, Montage and Film Grammar

Eisenstein's conception of film language was quite eclectic, sometimes based on

analogies with the Chinese ideogram and the idea of 'pairing', at other times on an

abstract idea emerging from the clash of two images, and even by analogy to musical

counterpoint. 'If two arbitrary elements are joined together, they invariably lead to a

new idea, which emerges from the juxtaposition as a new quality' (Eisenstein, 1949, p.

50). He did recognize that the language of cinema had to be identified at a level other

than the individual shot, and his theory of montage, it could be argued, distinguished

between referent, signifier and signified (though he never employed these terms). His

notion of film grammar, however, did not differentiate clearly between the semantic and

the syntactic dimension, and it was the possibility of a (universal) film grammar which

came to preoccupy those influenced by his writings. Noting the many conventions and

regularities that seemed to govern the formal and narrative construction of films,

theorists in the 1930s had the notion of filmic grammar as a set of rules gradually

developed by professional filmmakers and more or less rigidly adhered to. Raymond

Spottiswoode published 'A Grammar of the Film' in 1935, in which a descriptive approach

is often at odds with a normative dimension, a dilemma inherited by countless text-

books, how-to guides and histories of the 'art', 'grammar' or 'technique' of film-making.

Their use of 'language' is clearly not structural, but 'philological', as it is even in Bazin,

signalled in the title of one of his most famous essays: 'The Evolution of Film Language'

(Bazin, 1967). Either there is evolution, in which case we are not dealing with a

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language, or there is language, in which case historical change would have to be

understood as structural transformations.

The concept of film grammar, evidently very problematic, usefully points to a

connection which was to become fundamental in the contact between linguistics and

film: the exploration of filmic signification by narratology and discourse theory, rather

than on the basis of the individual image as the signifying unit. The latter preoccupied

Eisenstein, who was as much interested in the iconicity of the filmic image as he was in

the grammar of film narrative. In this first phase, film and linguistics was poised

between approaches focused on the image, isolated as the signifying unit, and

approaches starting from the many semantic/syntactic relations that result from joining

images. For such a double conjuncture the writings, teaching and not least the films of

Eisenstein remain exemplary.

2.3. Film as Art

A persistent claim among avant-garde circles was that the cinema, originally part of

vaudeville or music hall, should be accorded the dignity of an art form. One of the most

ardent defenders of 'film as art' put it bluntly: 'The motion picture art is a great high

art.... The people I hope to convince of this are (1) the great art museums of America;

(2) the departments of English, of the history of the drama, of the practice of the drama

and the history and practice of art... (3) the critical and literary world generally'

(Lindsay, 1922, p 6). Similar sentiments were voiced by Riccotto Canudo, an early

theorist of the cinema, and Louis Delluc, filmmaker and critic in France.

While the 'realists' saw any selection or arrangement, such as editing and

montage, as an obtrusive interference with the art of the real which the cinema had

made possible, Lindsay, Delluc, Canudo insisted on the language analogy because they

sought to highlight the creative and expressive role of this interference. For them, the

term film language included the 'language of nature' as revealed by still photography

and moving pictures, but stood in opposition to mechanical reproduction, while for

others 'film language' included the notion of mechanical reproduction, but signalled

opposition to any 'spontaneous' expressivity of the filmic image. To complicate matters

further, whereas writers appealing to film language were often at pains to identify the

cinema's specificity, those waging battle for 'film art' sought criteria which the medium

shared with the other arts: plasticity, expressivity, rhythm, debating whether film was a

temporal or a spatial art. The most important texts to explore these formal affinities and

differences among the arts are Balasz' Der sichtbare Mensch (1924) and Arnheim's Film

as Art (originally published in 1933). Balasz in particular had a life-long preoccupation

with the 'language of the cinema'.

3. Formalism, Structuralism and the Need for Legitimation

Only with the Russian Formalists do we find a group of intellectuals and scholars who

explored in detail the relations between film and language. It was the 'poetic' aspects of

film which first drew their attention to the cinema, not surprisingly, given that most of

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them (Boris Eikhenbaum, Yuri Tynianov, Victor Shklovsky) were first and foremost

literary scholars. As one recent commentator has noted:

'Yuri Tynianov likened the shot to a line of verse and sought the cinematic equivalents of

epithets, similes, metaphors and other poetic devices. For Boris Eikhenbaum, film was to

photography as poetical language was to practical language [...]. Stylistics of the cinema

would then be based upon filmic syntax, the way in which the shots were linked into

'phrases' or 'sentences'[...]. Yet the Formalists did not rigorously compare language as a

system to cinema. This was partly because their literary criticism, despite its call for a

return to the study of language as a material, did not produce much strictly linguistic

analysis of narrative' (Bordwell, 1987, p. 17).

3.1. Minimal Units and the Formalists' View of Language

The Formalists' reference to film as language (what they called 'cine-language') is

connected with the quest for minimal units: 'Any art which is perceived in time must

possess a certain articulateness, since it is to some degree 'language'. Beginning with

the smallest parts which comprise the nature of the material itself, one proceeds to the

articulation, which represents defined structural portions that are actually perceivable'

(Eikhenbaum, 1974 [1927], p. 22). Eikhenbaum also developed the concept of 'internal

speech', suggesting not only that combination or selection of images in films are often,

consciously or unconsciously, based on figures of speech, conventionalized metaphors or

verbal cliches, but that 'film viewing is accompanied by a continual process of internal

speech.... To treat film as an absolutely non-verbal art is impossible. Those who defend

cinema from the imitation of literature often forget that though the audible word is

eliminated from film, the thought, ie internal speech, is nevertheless present (Eikhen-

baum, 1974, p. 14, see also Levaco, 1974 and Willemen, 1981).

However, the notion of language itself is far from consistent in Formalist writings

(see Revuz, 1974). In Eikhenbaum alone four distinct uses of the notion of 'language'

can be identified (the conventional character of every language, the opposition between

everyday language and art or poetical language, language as a social device of

communication where the intention to communicate is crucial, and finally, the relation

between stylistic norm and poetic transgression, also defined linguistically). All four kinds

of language have been important in studying the cinema, especially the first and third

notion, while the fourth was to influence Roland Barthes in his distinction between style

and écriture, which in turn is echoed by film semiologists, notably Stephen Heath

(1973), Marie Claire Ropars (1976) and Raymond Bellour (1990).

3.2. Roman Jakobson and Structuralism

As to the professional linguists among the Formalists, and above all Roman Jakobson, it

was their theoretical work not concerned with film which, because of its major influence

on French structuralism and on Lévi-Strauss, found its way into film theory. Metz

discusses at length his debt to Jakobson in 'Metaphor/Metonymy or the Imaginary Refe-

rent', a key chapter in The Imaginary Signifier. Similarly, Jakobson's celebrated

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definition of poetic language as the projection of paradigmatic relations onto the

syntagmatic axis found a confirmation in Bellour's analyses of classical Hollywood

narratives and his reference to 'textual volume', even if Bellour's more obvious source is

Metz's 'Grande syntagmatique' (see Section 5, below). Finally, Jakobson's essay on

'Categories of the Russian Verb' proved a fertile impulse for film narratology.

With the Russian Formalists, the recourse to linguistic notions was part of a

cultural strategy: to help break down the division between high culture and popular or

folk culture, by developing methods of analysis which could be seen to apply to both

with equal success. This agenda may well explain why their writings were 'rediscovered'

in the 1960s, when thanks to the pervasive influence of structuralism in the fields of

mass-cultural artefacts, a similar agenda took shape. Partly in reaction to this merging

of Formalism with Structuralism, there has also been a tendency to invoke Formalist

theory in film studies against Structuralism, stressing the former's importance for film-

stylistics, narratology and film-poetics, and setting it off from the latter's reliance on

Saussurean linguistics (Bordwell, 1985; Thompson, 1988).

3.3. The Filmology Movement in France

Theoretical writings about cinema during the 1920s and 1930s in Europe -- from the

filmmaking avantgarde to Balazs, Kracauer, Arnheim, and including the Russians

Formalists -- are to some extent united in their need to legitimate cinema as an im-

portant cultural fact and the art form of the twentieth century. This newly-acquired

status surfaced in the so-called 'Filmology Movement' in Paris after the Second World

War. Associated with Etienne Souriau, Gilbert Cohen-Séat and Jean Mitry, filmology was

instrumental in laying the ground for a systematic and institutionally based theory of the

cinema, leading to a concern with method, which was to have major consequences for

the relationship between linguistics and film. Instead of a set of ideas pursued by in-

dividual theorists or avant-garde groups, directly engaged on a cultural front, film theory

after the war became an academic subject and took root as a discipline.

The filmologists' main purpose did not differ radically from earlier approaches: the

objective continued to be, on the one hand, to study the cinema's 'impression of reality',

and on the other, the 'specificity' of cinema and film. Regarding the first, their writings

tried to work out the relation between the means of expression and materiality of those

means; with respect to filmic specificity, they saw the cinema's rapport with the other

arts as both a function and a limit condition. Central to this process of differentiation

continued to be the affinity between cinema and literature, as it had been for the For-

malists. The greatest advances therefore, were in the areas of narratology (Souriau),

exploring the philosophical aspects of film (epistemology, phenomenology, rhetoric:

Cohen-Seat) and in systematically describing the cinema's psychological features (Mitry)

rather than clarifying a linguistic basis in the narrow sense. Film remained a 'given

object' (Casetti, 1990), which had to be defined in its unique essence. The exception is

Edgar Morin, who in two path-breaking studies -- one on the star phenomenon, the

other Le cinéma ou l'homme imaginaire -- pioneered a structuralist and anthropological

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perspective, which focused neither on the object film nor its textuality, but on the

spectator.

Most of the writings so far considered theorized the spectator as passive (the

many studies of the 'impact' of film on different groups of spectators), as actively

passive (the psychoanalytical notion of 'regression'), and occasionally as active (the

film/dream analogy first advanced by Munsterberg). In each case s/he was above all an

object of observation (sociological or psychological), separate from the film and thus not

implicated in the processes of signification. The shift away from this paradigm was to

usher in a radically new interest in linguistics and cinema.

4. The Rediscovery of Saussure and the Linguistic Revival

The film theories that emerged in France during the 1950s and 1960s owe their origin to

the academic context of filmology. Partly continuing this tradition (still strong in the

early writings of Metz) and looking for ways of differentiating film from the other arts (as

in some of the essays by Bazin), writers tried to define the specificity of film, but broke

with the notion of film having to defend its cultural status, other than by making it the

field of an academic discipline. From an object of value, film became a possible object of

science, if scientifically inspired methods could be shown to be pertinent. The question

was once more the relation of object to method, and it is in this context that linguistics

began to play a major role in resituating film theory, since in its Saussurean form it

offered the most scientifically oriented body of theory available for the study of cinema.

4.1. Christian Metz

The starting point was the publication in 1964 of Metz's 'Le cinéma: langue ou langage'

in Communications 4 (an issue also featuring Barthes' 'Eléments de sémiologie' and

'Rhetoric de l'image', along with essays by Tzvetan Todorov and Claude Bremond). Metz

was the first to bring to filmic signification categories derived from (Saussurean) linguis-

tics, earning him the reputation of having founded 'a new discipline, the semiology of the

cinema' (Odin, 1990a, p. 81). Given some of the conclusions Metz arrives at, this may

seem paradoxical, and it has been argued that, in this seminal essay at least, Metz not

only fails to make a case for the pertinence of linguistics to the study of the cinema, but

that his method, within its own terms cannot be called semiological (Henderson, 1980).

Ambiguities arise partly from the timing of Metz's intervention (during the first

wave of enthusiasm for linguistics in literary and cultural studies), partly from his

intellectual style (precise to the point of pedantry in details, diffident when it comes to

making general claims), but also from the fact that his work appears to follow at least

three lines of inquiry, seemingly breaking off in order to start up somewhere else.

Having identified a crucial set of problems in his 1964 article, Metz extended, qualified

and restated them in subsequent pieces, published as Essais sur la signification au

cinéma I in 1969. In 1971 appeared Langage et Cinéma, a cautious and systematic book

which, rather than recasting the issues raised in the Essais in a more rigorous linguistic

terminology, is at first sight a mere exercise in taxonomy. On closer inspection, it

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mounts an oblique, and successful, reply to his critics. In 1972 Essais sur la signification

au cinéma II was published which consisted of material belonging (somewhat confus-

ingly) to the period prior to Langage et cinéma. In 1977, and again bringing together a

number of separate essays, Metz published Le signifiant imaginaire. Ranging across a

number of distinct topics in film theory ('the fiction film and its spectator', 'the imaginary

signifier', 'history/discourse', 'metaphor/metonymy and the imaginary referent'), its

most distinctive feature is the introduction of psychoanalytic categories to address both

questions of spectatorship and of the cinematic text. It proved to be Metz's most

accessible book, but thanks to its contribution to what he himself named the 'meta-

psychology of the spectator' rather than to a linguistics of cinema.

Metz's work fits into the theoretical preoccupations of French intellectuals

between 1960 and 1980 (the early essays are influenced by Barthes; Langage et cinema

owes a debt to Cohen-Séat, Hjelmslev, Eco; while the presiding authorities in Le signifi-

ant imaginaire are Lacan, Benveniste and Jakobson). Nonetheless, it is possible to

discern a coherent linguistic agenda across these different phases, signalled by the

importance in his studies of the syntagmatic axes (the process; the 'and...and' relations

in Hjelmslev's terminology) and the paradigmatic ones (the system; the 'or...or'

relations).

4.2. 'Le cinéma: langue ou langage'

Metz's basic terms (langue/langage) indicate his allegiance to structural linguistics and

the writings of Saussure (see Saussurean traditions in linguistics). Yet this formative

essay, as Metz's subsequent work, relies also on Hjelmslev's (1961 [1943]) and

Martinet's (1964 [1960]) contributions to linguistics. Metz takes up the debate whether

the cinema, as an art form, can be treated as a communication system at all: a

traditional issue, raised by Eisenstein as well as by Bazin and Mitry. Metz seems to come

down in favour of art, arguing that the cinema is not a system of communication,

because 'one cannot reply to someone who expresses himself', echoing the auteurist

view of the cinema current at the time, but also raising the fundamental problem of

considering cinema as language. Another historical sub-text is the nouvelle vague, since

directors like Godard and Truffaut had shown with their use of jump cuts, hand-held

shots and direct address to the camera, that the cinema, like other art forms, remakes

itself by defamiliarization. Their editing broke the very rules theorists had claimed to be

the 'grammar of cinema'. Metz seizes this argument in order to turn it around: 'the film

totality cannot be language if it is not already art', thus trying to overcome the

opposition expressive art form/ communication system while still insisting on the possi-

bility of the cinema being like a language: 'In the cinema, as in other non-linguistic

systems, the units of content are also merged with those of expression, but in a different

sense, on the level of the "sentence".... The cinema like language, has much to say, but

like signposts, it actually escapes the first articulation. It proceeds by "sentences", like

traffic signals, but like verbal language, its sentences are unlimited in number. The

difference is that the sentences of verbal languages eventually break down into words,

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whereas in the cinema, they do not. A film may be segmented into large units ("shots"),

but these shots are not reducible (in Jakobson's sense) into small, basic and specific

units' (Metz, 1974 [1964], p. 88).

After reviewing the various logomorphic and nominalist fallacies already

mentioned, Metz identified the conditions necessary for a signifying practice to qualify as

a language:

- the arbitrary nature of the sign, in that neither the graphic nor acoustic supports of the

signifier bear an intrinsic relation to the signified

- double articulation, which in verbal language consists of morphemes, ie meaningful

units, and phonemes, non-meaningful in themselves, but combinable into morphemes

- a finite number of morphemes generating an infinite number of utterances.

These conditions allow Metz to compare cinema with natural languages, where

structural linguistics distinguishes between langue and parole: the former actualized in

the latter, but the latter impossible without the former. Given the arbitrary but

necessary relation between signifier and signified in the verbal sign, signification for

Saussure results from the paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations between signs, from

their opposition to other signs in the same paradigm (the paradigmatic relations), and

combination with signs from different paradigms (the syntagmatic relations).

Within this Saussurean framework, the cinema does not fulfil the necessary

conditions of possessing a langue. For whatever one might understand by cine-

matographic language, it does not comprise units of articulation comparable to mor-

phemes, nor does it have any units at the second level of articulation, comparable to

phonemes. Even though an individual shot -- the most obvious unit to single out for

analysis -- can be broken down into discrete frames, it does not have the same

organization of constituent units that make the sounds c,i,n,e,m,a combine to form a

meaningful word. On the other hand, a shot of a face does not correspond to the word

'face', but already amounts, according to Metz, to a statement: the filmic image is

'always actualized', it is a complete unit of discourse: 'A close-up of a revolver does not

mean "revolver" (a purely virtual lexical unit), but at the very least... it signifies "Here is

a revolver"' (Metz, 1974, p. 67). The filmic shot 'is of the magnitude of the sentence'

(ibid, p. 86): the minimal unit of film is identical with the largest unit of linguistics.

More problems are in store: firstly, the cinematic image is an analogue of that to

which it refers, thus minimizing the distance between signifier and signified; secondly

the number of possible images is infinite, thus contravening the concept of language as

a finite system dealing with an infinity of meaningful utterances; and thirdly, the

meaning of an image or a shot need not derive from its opposition to or difference from

others. A linguistics of the cinema would have to be at the level of parole, an impossi-

bility if there is no langue to structure it.

The conclusion of 'Le cinéma: langue ou langage' would appear to put an end to

any serious linguistic study of the cinema. Metz, however, argued that the intuited

regularities in the organization of shots, and the intelligibility of the discourse that

results, justify the term language, though not in the sense used by Eisenstein or others

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in the film language tradition. Taking a position between two tendencies: one which

would deny the cinema any claim to the status of a language, the other which would

look for a grammar comparable or equal to verbal language, Metz's defined cinema as a

language (langage) without language-system (langue).

4.3. Linguistics and Cinema: a first summary

From this situation, a number of consequences could be drawn. While Brian Henderson

claimed that Barthes had insisted that there could be no linguistics of parole (Henderson,

1980, p. 163), Heath asserted that 'there is nothing necessarily paradoxical in the

definition of cinema as language without langue and the recourse none the less to

linguistic models' (Heath, 1973a, p. 107). Peter Wollen argued that Peircean semiotics

instead of Saussurean linguistics would yield a better analysis of the cinema's 'signs and

meaning' (Wollen, 1968). Nichols was to appeal to systems theory, Gregory Bateson and

Anthony Wilden, ie 'expanded' communication models, in order to stress the context-

bound nature of cinematic meaning (Nichols, 1976). These suggestions have never been

fully explored, although they were in part taken up by the turn to pragmatics.

Metz was far from giving up a properly linguistic investigation of the cinema. An

intermediary step in his formulation was the shift from a position on language which was

close to that of Martinet to one nearer to Hjelmslev's. What defines verbal language for

Martinet is the fact that it has a double articulation linked to a phonemic realization of

the linguistic forms. This contrasts with Hjelmslev's view, for whom language is pure

form, whose realization in a substance has nothing to do with its structure. Hjelmslev's

main distinction is not between linguistic and non-linguistic languages but between semi-

otic structures (linguistic or otherwise) and non-semiotic structures. 'Metz calls upon the

functionalism of André Martinet to demonstrate that cinematographic language does not

bear a double articulation, and he calls upon the glossematique of Hjelmslev to stress

the relations between codes and material of expression' (Odin, 1990, p. 93). Even more

paradoxical, 'Metz uses Martinet not to study the material of expression of cinema but to

demonstrate that cinema is not a langue, and uses Hjelmslev not to demonstrate that

cinema is a language but to analyze the distinctive features of his material of expres-

sion'(ibid).

5. Metz's 'Grande syntagmatique de la bande image'

The 'Grande syntagmatique' (GS), developed between 1965 and 1969, was Metz's

audacious attempt to analyze exhaustively one particular example of filmic speech. Once

it became clear that paradigmatic relations in film could not be defined by isolating

individual images, Metz tackled the level of image ordering, the relation between shots:

combination rather than commutation would explain how film comes to be a species of

discourse.

The GS, published in its revised version as 'Problems of Denotation in the Fiction

Film' (Metz, 1974a) was Metz's initial response to his discovery that the cinema constitu-

ted a langage without a langue, but it also confirmed his belief that 'it is not because the

12

cinema is language that it can tell such fine stories, but rather it has become language

because it has told such fine stories' (Metz 1974a, p 47). More precisely, the GS set out

to show how the spatio-temporal ordering of shots, which since Griffith articulated the

narrative logic of a film, was not only responsible for conferring upon the so-called pro-

filmic event meanings not contained in the analogical relations between iconic signifiers

and signifieds, but was governed by fairly strict rules. Furthermore, these

combinations/articulations were not infinite, and in the fiction film especially, they

attained the status of a narrative syntax, even if their quasi-universality must not be

confused with a filmic 'grammar'. Metz groups them in a hierarchy of complexity within

an overall framework, that of the 'autonomous segment', where autonomy is defined by

formal features (fade in/fade out) combining into a unit of sense, marked by a change of

location, the termination of an event or action. Within the autonomous segment, Metz

establishes eight types, ranging from the autonomous shot (characterized by spatio-

temporal unity) to the sequence (differentiated according to a branching structure

around single shot/multiple shots//a-chronological/chronological ///simul-

taneous/sequential). Metz also applied the GS to an individual film, Adieu Philippine by

Jacques Rozier (Metz, 1974a), and the combination of a theoretical exposition with a

practical illustration made the GS the single most influential contribution to the

semiology of the cinema.

Even if among the different syntagmatic types making up the GS, some proved

more convincing than others, the GS showed the possibility of isolating paradigmatic

relations among filmic syntagms, after Metz had failed to find them on the level of the

filmic image. It led him to conclude that filmic syntax conforms to the rhetorical trope of

dispositio (determined ordering of undetermined elements, in this case images) rather

than to a grammar. Writers such as Bellour were to demonstrate to what extent paral-

lelism, repetition, alternation and other rhetorical devices were to structure filmic dis-

course, and Metz himself has tried to define and delimit the pertinence to filmic

articulation of the paradigm/syntagm/metaphor/metonymy relations (Metz, 1982, pp.

197-206).

5.1. Difficulties and Critiques of the 'Grande syntagmatique'

Although it had laid the theoretical groundwork not only for understanding the semiotic

function of editing, but also for the small-scale and large-scale formal analysis of so-

called classical Hollywood narrative film (textual analysis), the GS was not without prob-

lems, recognized first of all by Metz himself: most significantly, the eight articulations

were all modelled on narrative film, which meant that narrative appeared not as one

form of image concatenation among others, but intrinsic to all filmic signification (thus

raising the question of how it was possible to understand documentary, avant-garde or

other non-narrative films).

Secondly, Metz in the GS still adhered to the photographic analogy, and the

realist aesthetics it implied. Not only is the image meaningful in itself, a proposition

especially problematic in Metz's (inadequate, because too inclusive) definition of the

13

autonomous shot, but equally contentious, the level of denotation (which in the GS

organizes and hierarchizes the connotative levels) is supported by the presupposition of

a time-space world existing independent from its filmic articulations. It is around the

primacy of time-space relations and the concept of 'diegesis' that one part of cine-

semiology redefined itself in the late 1980s (see Section 9.4). As far as the image is

concerned, it was Italian semiology which would bring new impulses. Metz's partly

negative conclusions proved paradoxically more productive than if he had been able to

settle the issues, since theorists, starting from the cinema's lack of a language system,

could begin to define its peculiarities by way of concepts less dependent on verbal

language, or by giving more attention to aspects of language other than phonetics.

5.2. Raymond Bellour and Textual Analysis

These options, coming to varying degrees out of the GS, led to a set of procedures for

conducting close readings and textual analyses of individual films: a pedagogical tool

which in the 1980s proved indispensable for introducing the subject of film studies into

the humanities curriculum (once more underscoring the close affinity of film theory and

literary studies).

One of the most successful methods emerging from Metz's suggestion to

concentrate on the syntagmatic chain, were the textual analyses of Bellour. Engaging

constructively with the unresolved difficulties of Metz's model of segmentation, and

drawing also on Barthes and Lévi- Strauss, Bellour developed a kind of 'poetics' of

narrative construction, rather than a 'grammar'. As already hinted, his method of

analyzing classical Hollywood film can be seen to have a parallel in Jakobson's famous

'closing statement'. For Bellour, paradigmatic relations manifested themselves through

repetitions, visual or thematic rhymes and en-abyme constructions, while the syntag-

matic chain was characterized by alternation, making up a semiotic system which Bellour

termed the 'repetition/resolution effect' (Bellour, 1978).

Bellour's segmentation exercises were not only the most thorough application of

the principles of the GS (see also his essays on a sequence from Hitchcock's The Birds,

on Griffith's The Lonedale Operator, and a scene from Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep),

they also offered a practical examination of its difficulties ('To Analyze/ To Segment',

dealing with Vincente Minnelli's Gigi: all in Bellour, 1979a). Bellour had a most wide-

reaching impact on film studies, especially in Britain and the United States, leading to

such trenchantly polemical essays as Laura Mulvey's 'Narrative cinema and visual

pleasure'(Mulvey, 1975), itself the single most quoted source for the development of

feminist film theory. Stephen Heath's analysis of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (Heath,

1975), inspired by, but also going beyond Metz and Bellour, was another landmark.

Although dealing mostly with narrative films, Bellour offered insights into the

structuring of non-narrative films as well (Bellour, 1979b), looking for a linguistics at the

level beyond the sentence, and opening up questions of narrative and narrative

grammar, of enunciation, of discourse, text and system. Before examining these paths

which had opened up from Metz's Essais sur la signification au cinéma, the other

14

problematic aspect of the GS -- the cinematic image as isomorphic with what it repre-

sents -- needs to be returned to, because of the contribution made here by a semiotics

not exclusively based on spoken language.

6. The Linguistic Status of the Image

Given the initial impetus to identify units in film which could be compared to those of

verbal language, and thus establish a basic correlation between verbal language and

filmic language, the almost exclusive focus on the visual aspect of film is

understandable, along with the privileged place accorded to the filmic image. Some

writers attributed 'minimal unit'-value to the so-called photogramme (eg Pasolini: see

Section 6.2); some were looking to the shot as the necessary basis for segmentation

(Worth, 1976); Metz's own position throughout the Essais is that the image is analogue,

grounded in the 'reality' of an object or view, and that the cinematic sign does not

encode reality by transposing it into another system, but by duplicating it.

6.1. Roland Barthes and the Rhetoric of the Image

It may have been more than chance that Metz's 1964 essay found itself sandwiched

between Barthes' 'Rhétorique de l'image' and 'Eléments de sémiologie', since these two

essays laid out many of the key problems a semiology of the cinema had to confront;

yet they also programmed one impasse for this semiology: the question of the image as

linguistic sign. Barthes, in three seminal essays on visual messages ('The Photographic

Message', 1961; 'Rhetoric of the Image', 1964; 'The Third Meaning', 1970, all in Barthes,

1977) tried to analyze how images signified, testing a number of linguistic concepts,

among them 'connotation/denotation', 'message/code', as well as Peirce's tripartite

division of the sign into iconic, indexical, symbolic.

In the earliest essay, Barthes had already stated the paradox which was to

preoccupy Metz: the photograph, being an analogue, represented 'a message without a

code'. In the later essays he was to argue that the connoted messages (what he also

called 'style') acted as the code, situating the denoted message: 'no filmed scene whose

objectivity is not finally read as the very sign of objectivity' (Barthes, 1977, p 18). He

contrasted the linguistic part of the photograph (an advertisement) with the image part

('the image is poly-semic, and the verbal message anchors it'). But if this anchorage

limited 'aberrant readings' (eliminating certain readings, encouraging others), it did not

necessarily eliminate ambiguity: often, the verbal part stood in a deliberate tension to

the visual. Barthes concluded that especially in the context of mass communication,

photo-journalism, news photography and advertising, it was culturally determined

connotations which construct the level of denotation. Analyzing an ad for Italian pasta

(in 'Rhetoric of the Image'), Barthes found that the denotation of a photograph was no

more than a kind of scaffolding, a physical support across which the connotations could

be deployed. Yet since this denotation was itself part of the connotation of other systems

-that of 'glossy' photography, for instance -there was a kind of 'relay' between connota-

tion and denotation, the two terms no longer naming a binary opposition, but denotation

15

becoming a special, restricted case of connotation.

6.2. Pier Paolo Pasolini

The debate raised by 'Le cinéma - langue ou langage', and in particular, the question

whether meaning in the cinema was produced 'diegetically' or 'poetically', took an

interesting turn when Pasolini delivered papers on 'The Cinema of Poetry' in 1965 and on

'The Language of Reality' in 1966. Pasolini was at once deeply impressed and offended

by Metz's argumentation, which to him seemed to condemn the cinema to 'prose' and to

narrative, if it was to be both creative (a 'language') and realistic. As Pasolini put it: 'The

cinema is a language which expresses reality with reality. So the question is: what is the

difference between the cinema and reality? Practically none.... When I make a film ...

there is no symbolic or conventional filter between me and reality, as there is in litera-

ture' (Stack, 1972, p 29). For Pasolini real objects make up the shots, and these real

objects are the minimal units of cinematographic language, which the filmmaker can use

'poetically', responding to their expressivity taken from life. Echoing 'realist' positions

from the 1920s, Pasolini argued that the cinema was a language, by virtue of the shot

which breaks up and decontextualizes the object or scene, but a language which did not

require double articulation, by virtue of the analogical nature of the image.

6.3. Umberto Eco

It was at this point that Umberto Eco intervened in the debate, taking issue with both

Metz and Pasolini. Eco went back to the possibility of a semiotic account of the image.

Siding with Pasolini on the question whether there can be a language without langue he

criticized Metz (and by implication also Barthes) for accepting too readily the idea that

the photographic image represented an analogon to the real object (which had been the

basis for declaring the cinema to lack the level of langue, and for Barthes' attempts to

derive a semiology of the image on the basis of Hjelmslev's 'connotation/denotation').

Eco began by rejecting Pasolini's notion of language:

When Pasolini considers his minimal units in the field of cinema as the real

objects which fill a shot, when he proposes to call these 'cinemes', analogous to

the phonemes, and when he sees the combination of these cinemes into larger

units (the shots) as corresponding to the moneme in the verbal language, he

does not distinguish between sign, signifier, signified and referent.... These

minimal units, cinemes, are not equivalent to phonemes. The phonemes are not

constituted by portions of decomposed signifieds. The cinemes of Pasolini are still

units of the signified. Also, this larger unit, the shot, does not correspond to the

moneme, because it already corresponds to the enoncé. (Eco, 1968, pp. 224-25).

But Eco also argued against Metz, pointing out that the photographic image was

not 'rooted in the real', and insofar as it could be termed an iconic sign, it was 'coded'

rather than 'motivated', ie its impression of analogy was purely conventional, relying on

as many as ten codes to secure its readability as a representation of a 'reality' (codes of

16

perception, of iconography, of transmission, of rhetoric, of tone and line). Eco preferred

to speak of 'iconic coding' in order to signal the impossibility of any kind of 'natural',

'spontaneous' or 'essential' resemblance existing between an object and its iconic

representation. Analogy was part of the 'impression of reality', an ideological effect

designed to efface the work of codification: 'Confronted with a conventionalization so

much richer, and hence a formalization so much subtler than anything else, we are

shocked into believing we stand before a language which restores reality to us. And so is

born the metaphysics of cinema' (Eco, 1976, p. 604).

6.4. Against Unitary Entities: Deconstructing Image and Sign

Not only did Eco deconstruct the argument from analogy, showing how the idea of the

image as a pertinent unit had produced a blockage for film semiology, he also cast doubt

on the usefulness of the notion of the iconic sign for the analysis of visual or audio-visual

messages. Against the cinema's lack of double articulation which led to Metz's formula-

tion 'language without language system', Eco posits a triple articulation of iconic signs.

Taking an example from Pasolini (the photo of a teacher in front of his class), Eco notes

that only after decoding perceptual units (angles, lines, figure/ground), comparable to

phonemes and of purely differential value and identifying smaller semic units (such as

eyes, nose, square surface) does the picture become readable as composed of larger

semes (such as 'tall blond man in a grey suit'), combining with other semes (such as

'group of children') to yield the meaning 'teacher' and 'class', as opposed to, say 'father'

and 'his children'. The many combinations possible with such triple articulation make it

that much more difficult to understand the working of the different codes across iconic

representation. Thus, rather than an instance of 'a message without a code', the

photographic image is made up of too many codes to allow for the application of bi-polar

models. Barthes' attempt to escape from binarism with his connotative dimension and

the positing of a 'third meaning' in some sense acknowledged Eco's insight that the

reality effect of the photograph was one of over-coding rather than non-coding.

However, instead of solving the problems of visual messages, the ten iconic codes

of Eco and Barthes' own brilliantly systematized intuitions made matters more

intractable, letting any hope of tracking down a 'master-code' of cinema recede further

and further. Eco himself moved away from his triple articulation model, stressing not

only the 'social' conventions involved in reading signs, but abandoning altogether the

notion of fixed values, in favour of 'coding rules', of which 'signs' are the transitional

manifestations. More recently, Pasolini's 'heretical semiotics' have undergone a

revaluation, precisely to the degree that there has been a shift in emphasis towards the

sign as always a sign for someone, and the image as part of social reality rather than a

construction forever separate from it (see de Lauretis, 1984, p. 48, Bruno, 1991, pp. 29-

42, Muscio, 1991).

17

7. Beyond Saussure: Codes and Signifying Processes

Eco's intervention was too radical to be taken up by film scholars, for whom his

grounding of semiotics in information theory was at once too general and too technical.

But it was symptomatic of the problems arising from structural linguistics generally, of

which those of a linguistically based film analysis were only one manifestation.

One tendency was the development of a theory which, while still adhering to

Saussurean precepts, was able to jettison the straitjacket of the langue/parole division.

In linguistics, this move is associated with Chomsky's 'standard theory' of transforma-

tional grammar, but no such quantum leap was taken in the study of the 'language of

cinema' for which the notion of transformational rules did not seem to apply, at least not

at the level of the shot/sentence. Only towards the end of the 1980s, in France, was

there an attempt at a 'Chomskyan' version of the Grande syntagmatique (see Section

9.4).

The other approach was to see verbal language within the context of both verbal

and non-verbal symbolic systems, instead of assuming that all symbolic systems

function in the manner of verbal language. This move was also designed to replace

Saussure's langue/parole dichotomy by a more flexible differentiation of levels, and

within semiology marks the transition from Barthes' early analyses of photographs,

commodities, consumer goods, food and fashion as species of language, to Eco's

semiotics which shared neither Saussure's nor Lévi-Strauss's exclusion of the com-

munication context.

The third line of attack was that of the deconstructionists - beginning with

Derrida's critique of Saussure's notion of the sign, the championing of écriture by the

later Barthes, by the Tel Quel group and Julia Kristeva, all emphasizing, among other

things, signification as process, and holding against the notion of the signifier/signified

relation that of signifier/signifier and of infinite 'semiosis'. It is to the latter, for instance,

that Stephen Heath's film essays and analyses showed their most direct allegiance

(Heath, 1981).

7.1. Language and Cinema

Metz himself took a slightly different route, neither abandoning Saussurean linguistics

outright, nor returning to the 'Grande syntagmatique'. His work since the 1970s can best

be understood as an attempt to take on board the wider developments in semiology,

while remaining as faithful as possible not only to his initial set of problems in film theory

but also to his linguistics masters, adopting key concepts from Benveniste and Jakobson,

reworking them in the light of his experience with analyzing cinema. In response to Eco's

critique of his concept of the image, Metz proceeded, with Langage et cinéma, to explore

concepts which in semiotics are cognates of, though not identical with the Saussurean

langue/parole: pairs such as 'code'/'message', 'system'/'text'. In a sense, Language et

cinéma can be read as a summing-up and as an opening-up, whose key idea is that we

need to give up the very ambition of finding a unifying, single codic principle operating in

18

films. Instead, a film is made up of many codes working together, all of which are func-

tional, even though few if any are unique to the cinema.

7.2. Codes/System/Text

Glossing Metz, Heath discusses the problems of codes, system and text as follows: 'The

term 'code' (in the operation code/message) is used by Metz to refer to the formal

machines constructed in analysis in order to render account of a particular area (the

process of) signification in a set of messages. As such, a code is distinguished by its

coherence, its homogeneity, its systematicity, in the face of the heterogeneity of the

message, articulated across several codes' (Heath, 1973c, p. 15). Metz's task, in

Langage et cinéma was to define, against the cinema's other (ideological, psychic or eco-

nomic) functions the scope of signification, but also to point out that systematicity is

something imposed by the 'terms of analysis' rather than inherent in the object film.

Metz identified different cinematic codes (such as framing, editing, lighting), and

distinguishing them from non-cinematic codes (acting, costume, dialogue). A further

category are the sub-codes (eg low-angle v eye-level shots). Whereas sub-codes are

mutually exclusive (paradigmatic), codes do not conflict, but combine with each other. It

is the way the codes are 'filled' by the sub-codes that make up a particular textual

system or define the style of a film-maker. With this, Metz undertakes his 'most radical

step in relation to linguistics, splitting the signifying function further open still.' (Nowell-

Smith, 1976, p. 40). If lighting, for example, 'is necessary to the form of expression (in

Helmsljev's sense) of the cinema, and different forms of lighting are in coded (paradig-

matic or syntagmatic) relation to each other, this does not mean that for every lighting

effect (signifier) there is a thing meant by that effect (signified)... Thus the high-key

lighting of film noir takes its value not from an intrinsic equivalence between the lighting

and 'its' content, but from a process whereby an original potential for meaning (dark

shadows = mysterious) becomes encoded and part of the languages of cinema' (ibid).

Secondly, since every film makes use of codes that also operate elsewhere

(lighting is also a code of theatre, dialogue can be found in radio plays, images

registered on celluloid emulsion are also the basis of still photography etc), Metz

differentiates between filmic fact (non-specific) and cinematic fact (specific). Film is thus

on the side of the message (and of the heterogeneous), cinema is on the side of the

specific and the homogeneous (of the code) (Metz, 1971, pp. 33-6). This may be

confusing, since one thinks of film as specific and the cinema as comprising more than

films, but what Metz stresses is that the specific is embedded in the social practice of

cinema, recognizing that signification is always a process in relation to some-

thing/someone. Here Metz breaks with any essentialist view of the cinema's specificity, a

spectre which haunted many of his early essays, by defining it in terms of a combination

of codes.

The notion of the plurality of codes gives prominence to the concept of the 'text',

which takes over from parole to designate the actualization of the work of the codes.

Constituted by messages from the different codes, texts are nonetheless singular

19

objects, analyzable in terms of 'systems', even though the play of codes ensures that

each text or body of texts lives from deconstructing other texts. The distinction between

text and message is then a corollary of that between system and code. Every message is

a text, but not vice-versa, since the film may be treated as a unique text (the realization

of a singular system), while a message is a text that is not unique in manifesting a

certain system (Heath, 1973b, p. 225). This also reformulates the structuralist issue of

what is preserved of a myth or narrative across different versions or media.

The direction of such questions may explain why Metz's method --to be syste-

matic about an unsystematic object -- was bound to encounter misunderstandings, if it

was seen either as a way of 'learning' the codes of cinema, or as a tool for textual

interpretation: instead, Langage et cinéma 'concerns itself with the conditions that

permit the establishment of different readings' (Nowell-Smith, p 39). With it, Metz

thoroughly revised his own earlier 'realist' assumptions, in order to explore as minutely

as possible what was involved in the cinema signifying at all, prior to it signifying any

reality, or signifying it to anyone in particular. In this respect, too, Langage et cinéma

was a work that both closes one particular line of inquiry, and necessitated others, such

as how the cinema creates 'diegetic worlds', the 'reality-effect' or levels of coherence

and progression. Most crucially, in the event, it necessitated an exploration of

signification as an effect of the encounter between a text and its reader(s).

8. Psycho-Semiotics or The 'second semiology' of the cinema

The inclusion of the spectator as part of the structure and meaning of a film was the

most important theoretical innovation of the encounter between film and semiology in

the mid-1970s. Instance of whom the text addresses, as well as of the text's intel-

ligibility, the spectator became the producer of meaning and subjectivity. Psychoana-

lysis, as redefined through structural linguistics, provided the theoretical framework for

the notion that any visual representation implies a (spectating) subject that, however, is

not to be confused with the empirical member of an audience.

Whereas the first semiology had concentrated on ascribing the generation of

meaning to the codes at work within the filmic text, giving the spectator no definite role

in the process, psycho-semiotics (also known as the second semiology or 'Screen

theory') concentrated on the construction of an ideologically coherent and gender-spe-

cific subject position as the necessary condition for a film's affectivity and intelligibility.

Film theory drew on the writings of Lacan, whose 'return to Freud', with its close, though

unorthodox appropriation of linguistics, especially that of Benveniste, proved a key

reference point for two major developments: close textual analysis of the kind ex-

emplified by Bellour (notably his influential readings of Hitchcock's North By Northwest,

Marnie, Psycho) and feminist film theory (see Section 8.2).

Lacan's famous dictum of the unconscious being 'structured like a language'

opened the way to raising fundamental issues in film semiology, but it was his reliance

on a perceptual structure -- that of the so-called mirror-phase -- to explain the

formation of human subjectivity which made him of such importance to film theory.

20

What emerged was the paradoxical centrality of the subject (or of 'subject-positioning')

for the question of signification, a subject seen as radically decentered in relation to

forces over which it had no control: only miscognition, repression, and mechanisms of

exclusion gave it the illusion of being a fixed and stable entity. These latter considera-

tions feature prominently in Louis Althusser's version of Lacan's redefinition of the

Saussurean bar separating signifier and signified. While in Lacan it represents an

unbridgeable blockage imposed by the unconscious to any unitary relation between the

subject and its symbolizations, responsible for the formation of an ego forever mis-

recognizing itself in its (linguistic, visual) representations, the same structure serves

Althusser to posit that the individual is 'interpellated' by ideology, the social tissue of

texts addressed to the subject. An influential and much-commented 'reading' of a film

along these lines was Cahiers du Cinéma's collective analysis of John Ford's Young Mr

Lincoln (Screen, 1972, and Brewster, 1973).

Aspects of this account of subjectivity in language were already present in the

linguistic theories of Benveniste, and his distinction histoire/discours, along with his

emphasis on énonciation/ énoncé, were to become crucial to the second film semiotics.

Subject-positioning also introduced the Freudian notion of fantasy, as a structure of

belief (and its corollary, disavowal), which in the formulations taken from the writings of

the psychoanalyst Mannoni (Mannoni, 1969) focused on the concept of fetishism, the

materialization of a lack. This in turn led to the theory of 'suture' (Oudart, 1977/78

[1969], Dayan, 1976, Heath, 1981) to explain the spectator's identification with the flow

of images on the screen, based as it is, according to this account, on the spectator being

'stitched' into the filmic discourse through filmic devices such as the shot-reverse-shot or

off screen space that elide, on the visual level, that which is absent, and on the

enunciative level, cover the gap between story and discourse.

8.1. Cinema and Psychoanalysis - The Imaginary Signifier

While the focus on enunciation indicated a deepening of the relation between linguistics

and cinema (film as a discourse for someone), it also led film theory increasingly to

approach its central problematic (representation as signification and the reality-effect as

a subject-effect) via concepts such as voyeurism and scoptophilia, relying on analogies

with the mirror, the Freudian dream screen, or renaissance perspectival projection in

painting -all of them tying the viewing subject to visual pleasure and specular fascination

by means of optical technologies that give the illusion of reality, while tightly organized

to 'place' the eye/I at the center of the representational space.

These concepts and analogies seem to have less to do with linguistics and would

not concern us here, were it not for Metz himself who, although he did not inaugurate

them, at least vigorously contributed to their circulation. Secondly, Metz's most influ-

ential interpreter and critic, Stephen Heath, in a series of essays published in the British

journal Screen, offered a brilliant synthesis of all these theoretical moves and

convergences, which ensured that in the Anglo-American field, 'Screen theory' domina-

ted the discussions for most of the 1980s.

21

From the mid-1970s onwards, Metz seems to have turned to psychoanalysis,

though not exclusively with Lacan as his source. Freud's notion of 'dream work' and

Benveniste's opposition histoire/discours play important roles in Cinema and

Psychoanalysis: The Imaginary Signifier). In the chapter 'Story/Discourse: A Note on

Two Kinds of Voyeurism' Metz reads Benveniste as offering important insights into filmic

enunciation, detailing how linguistically constructed marks of subjectivity, such as

personal pronouns and shifters, can be seen to be of relevance to filmic processes

controlling spectatorial subjectivity. On the other hand, the Lacanian concept of lack

finds its echo in Metz's discussion of absence as a condition of filmic signification: a

return to Saussure and Hjelmslev. Helped by Lacan's reading of Freud's fort/da game,

Metz argues that 'in order to understand the film (at all), I must perceive the photo-

graphed object as absent, its photograph as present, and the presence of this absence

as signifying' (Metz, 1982, p 57) making substitution at the level of the image a central

feature of filmic intelligibility, and incidentally revising his earlier statement that 'every-

thing is present in film.... The clarification of present by absent units occurs much less

than in verbal language' (Metz, 1974, p. 69).

More directly drawing on Lacan and the mirror-phase is Metz's discussion of what

he calls the metapsychology of the spectator. Here, an argument about the optico-

ideological construction of the cinematic apparatus (the camera, the projector, the

spectator before the screen) by Jean Louis Baudry, who himself brought together work

by Jean Louis Comolli on film technology and renaissance perspective with Althusser's

model of ideological interpellation, is complemented by an optico-psychic account (le

dispositif) of the cinematic experience, emphasizing the structural analogies with Lacan's

infant before the mirror.

One part of The Imaginary Signifier in particular proved exemplary for con-

fronting linguistics with psychoanalysis. The section entitled 'Metaphor/Metonymy or the

Imaginary Referent' is devoted to a detailed analysis of the Jakobsonian concepts

metaphor/metonymy, comparing and contrasting them with the Freudian notions of '-

condensation/displacement', while relating both to his own linguistic interest in 'paradig-

matic/syntagnmatic' relations. In the tradition of Metz's purely linguistic texts collected

in Essais sémiotiques, the section is a rigorously technical analysis of these concepts'

theoretical status. While its technicality makes it the least accessible part of the book,

'Metaphor/Metonymy' remains one of the most persuasive demonstrations of the

relevance of linguistics for film theory. It is also the most systematic attempt to cast the

problem of filmic signification and the viewer's participation in constructing the film's

meaning in a form that relies neither on a narrowly conceived analogy with natural

language, nor on optical and specular analogies, nor finally, on psychoanalysis, but

opens the way for a model that joins linguistic categories to classical rhetoric's concern

with figuration and tropes, taking in narratological categories, while also providing an

account of the cinema's unique affectivity. 'Metaphor/Metonymy' can even be seen to

offer an understanding of the relevance of gender to signification, a blind spot of Metz's

other writings, according to his most perceptive feminist reader, Rose (Rose, 1986), an

22

issue already taken up in Penley's commentary (Penley, 1981).

Metz's chapters also provided the inspiration for a widely-read study of the

openings of feature films, Kuntzel's two-part 'Le travail du film', in which Freud's dream

work (condensation, displacement, representability) and the tropes of rhetoric are

deployed to demonstrate the complex interpenetration of visual motifs, narrative,

semantics, figuration, ellipsis in the classical cinema's construction of enigma and

resolution. Kuntzel's essays are remarkable for going beyond voyeurism and the optico-

psychic captivation by the image (Kuntzel, 1972 and 1975) in explaining spectatorial

involvement.

8.2. Feminist Film Semiotics

However, it was Lacan's account of the mirror phase as the founding structure of human

subjectivity, his concepts of the imaginary and the symbolic, and the way in which

representation and signification can be understood as being 'gendered' which had the

most wide-ranging consequences for film theory, inspiring, if only by re-reading and

constantly displacing Lacan's premises, an entirely new branch of film studies: feminist

film theory. Central to the latter is the question of sexual difference as exemplified in

classical Hollywood cinema and the workings of the cinematic apparatus in relation to

the psychic dispositif. It signalled the high-point of the polemical, interventionist role of

linguistically inspired film theory in the construction of a new object of study and of a

new academic discipline, at least in the United States (see under Mulvey, de Lauretis,

Doane, Rose, Penley, Silverman).

8.3. Stephen Heath

The most comprehensive application, critique and restatement of Metz's work was

written by Stephen Heath. Originally intended to introduce Metz to an English speaking

audience, Heath's essays developed into a thorough engagement with the linguistic, psy-

choanalytic and Marxist assumptions of French film theory, culminating in a summing up

of this period of intense theoretical reflections, the massive 'Film and System: Terms of

Analysis' which, ostensibly devoted to a close reading of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, is

Heath's extended dialogue with Metz, Bellour and feminist film theory, reasserting but

also challenging their conception of the formal properties and ideological functions of the

classical Hollywood feature film.

For Heath the implication of film not being a fixed language system was that

mere exercises in segmentation were formalist unless they could show the filmic system

to be the effect of a structuration process rather than the articulation of a structure, so

that 'the postulation of the plurality of codes' opens the film 'to its insertion in the

totality of social signifying practices' (Heath, 1975, p. 118), which revolve around

spectatorship and the construction of subjectivity, but also the function of dominant

cinema as social and institutional practice. Heath's essays represent the most fully

worked out theory of the ideological and psychoanalytic subject: defined, positioned and

'held' by the formal, semiotic and narrative codes put in play by the film, yet at the

23

same time, the film as system does not simply place the spectator, or assign a specific

role. Instead, spectator and film system depend on each other, each ultimately engaging

with the other at the point of maximum instability and tension, in order to assure filmic

pleasure and ideological coherence. One of the key tenets of feminist film theory, namely

that Hollywood's patriarchal texts produce a fixed masculine subject-position, is not

wholly endorsed by Heath, who prepares the ground for many of the revisions since

offered of Mulvey's account of the Hollywood's cinema's modes of address and spec-

tatorial subject positions (see Doane 1987, Modleski 1988, Penley 1989, and also Rodo-

wick 1991).

9. Narratology, Text Grammar, Semio-Pragmatics

It is important to point out that psycho-semiotics and theories of subject-positioning

were not the only methodological tools for understanding the function of the spectator in

the signifying process. Narrative analysis, generative grammar, theories of narration,

cognitivism and semio-pragmatics all take up in important ways the questions first posed

by Metz.

Narrative as a fundamental issue in filmic signification was already implied in both

the 'Grande syntagmatique' and in the 'deconstructivist' critiques of Saussure, not to

mention the pluri-codic model proposed in Language et cinéma, or Bellour's textual

analyses, with their emphasis on the oedipal trajectory of the central protagonist and on

the enunciative strategies of the classical feature film. However, if Benveniste stands

behind work on filmic enunciation in relation to narrative, Greimas inspired the first

tentative formulations of a filmic text grammar, which explored the idea of deep-struc-

tures, either by assuming a kind of narrative 'logic', or by seeking to apply transfor-

mational rules. Other approaches started from a more literary orientation, notably based

Genette.

In the United States, in response to and as a critique of psycho-semiotics, one

finds a number of original contributions in the area of narration and spectator/text

relationships. Analysis of cinematic subjectivity is given a new rigor by a revitalization of

the term 'point of view' (Branigan 1984); also, Russian formalist distinctions between

fabula and syuzet are revived (Bordwell 1985), as an alternative to the problematic

transfer of Benveniste's categories histoire/discours to film. In so-called 'neo-formalist'

theory, the spectator is conceived as playing an even more active and decisive role in

the attribution of meaning to the text.

Finally, as a kind of compromise between the Saussurean traditions on the one

hand, and Anglo-American developments in linguistics on the other, a group of European

theorists have championed what they call 'semio-pragmatics'. Its main proponents,

Roger Odin and Francesco Casetti, focus on how meaning is constructed at a level

distinct from both the text and reception context. This level constitutes a kind of

'preferred reading', involving cognitive, discursive as well as unconscious structures.

They thus build bridges between psychoanalytically inspired accounts of textuality and

spectatorship, reader-response theory and discourse analysis, while in the choice of the

24

term 'pragmatics' they signal their adherence to a basically linguistic perspective.

9.1. The Logic(s) of Narrative

In France, paradoxically, the psycho-semiotics of the cinema as theorized by Metz in Le

signifiant imaginaire and practiced in the form of meta-psychology or textual analysis by

Baudry, Bellour, Kuntzel and Heath had a less lasting effect than they did in Britain or

the United States. Nor did feminist film theory find much support, despite the fact that

so many feminist (literary) theorists worked in France: Kristeva, Irigary, Cixous,

Kaufman. By contrast, the influence of literary narratology was substantial. Although its

origins can be traced to one strand of structuralism (Brémond, Genette, Todorov, who

coined the term), narratology emerged out of the impasse created by too close an

adherence to Saussurean differential accounts of signification, but also from the debates

over context-sensitive or context-free theories of the sign, focused on the issue whether

narratives preserved their meaning across the media and were independent from the

recipients' situation, as had been claimed by Lévi-Strauss for myths.

Narratology stands in the tradition of structuralist analysis of narrative which in

the 1960s, owing to the influence of Lévi-Strauss, had proved to be a powerfully reduc-

tionist tool in the debate between avant-garde and popular literature, as well as in the

analysis of other cultural texts. The possibility that narratives might help in the search

for formalized meaning systems in general was already implicit in Barthes 'Structural

Analysis of Narratives', where it seemed to him that 'beneath the diversity of narratives

there was a grammar of narratives and the laws governing their selection and

combination to produce meaning could be found' (Barthes 1977, see also linguistic and

structural theories of narrative).

It was the limiting and partly misguided analogies between cinema as a semiotic

system and a linguistics based on phonology which made film theorists look to

narratology, discourse analysis and text grammar, disciplines which had already tried to

find units of pertinence that went beyond the sentence. If the danger of moving from

phonology to syntax and semantics was the phantom search for a universal narrative

grammar, the advantages of looking to narratology were not only a set of often very

sophisticated formal analyses of literary texts (Genette's work on Proust, for instance),

but also a thorough awareness of the function of the reader.

Greimas himself has given the most eloquent defence of the uses of narratology

for the understanding of the formal organization of complex semiotic systems: 'First of

all it was important that the narrative structures could be found elsewhere than in the

signifying manifestations occurring in natural languages: in film language, dream

language, painting. ... The narrative structures, being logically prior to their manifes-

tation, must make use of linguistic units which are greater than utterances (énoncés) in

order to be able to find a place' (Greimas 1970, p. 159).

9.2. Text Grammar and Filmic Competence

One of the corollaries of trying to understand narratives within a logical or grammatical

25

model is to develop categories that not only get beyond the blockage produced by the

notion of the sign, but also to define what might be a text's deep structure, if we assume

that Saussurean linguistics concentrated on the surface structure. The effects one wants

to explain are on the one hand effects of the surface, such as a text's 'coherence' and

'progression'. As far as the text/reader relationship is concerned, strictly linguistic terms

such as grammatical/ungrammatical are perhaps less helpful than a term such as

'intelligibility' or 'readability' that is, what could be the rules or constraints that tell a

viewer how to read a shot or sequence. On the other hand, one is looking for elements

within film that point to the way the text is organized to allow the spectator to 'make

sense', even if certain markers of coherence are missing, or certain norms are being

violated. Here, the articulation of time and space is crucial for understanding film's

particular narrative logic. To read spatio-temporal relations correctly belongs to a logical

competence, which film shares with language. Such a process might begin by looking

again at the different categories of the verb (especially aspect, tense, mood) in relation

to film narrative (see Crawford 1978, Wollen 1989), but also take in the abstract

categories (the Greimasian 'logic' of discourse or narrative) by which a spectator reads,

for instance, certain spatial features (left/right, next to/opposite, a new character

entering the frame, movements of the camera) not simply as punctuation marks or

syntactic features, but semantically. This may help to understand how films establish

(and spectators recognize and accept) a 'total world', a diegetic coherence, from very

partial, incomplete and even conflicting information and data. Although such a procedure

involves examination of specific texts, it is not strictly speaking a textual analysis. The

object is not the film, but the totality of rules underpinning its understanding, and by

extension, the kind of competence -- and its relation to linguistic competence -- on the

part of the viewer which is brought into play. Following along these lines, film theory

might return to specifically linguistic/pragmatic categories or indeed, depart from

linguistics towards categories borrowed from cognitive theory.

While the consequences of these moves are only beginning to be explored (see

Section 9.4), there are a number of theorists who have taken Metz's work on

metaphor/metonymy not in the (Anglo-American) direction of psychoanalysis, but back

to the work of Greimas and Genette, exploring what in film corresponds to literary

perspectivism, 'focalization' and the complex modalities of action and tense, moving

away from the specular and dramatic categories of identification, fetishism, voyeurism

towards a semantics of temporality. Typical is a study of French cinema (Ropars, Lagny,

Marie 1986) and an essay on film and still photography (Wollen 1989). Mention must

also be made of the work of André Gaudreault who has studied the emergence of a

particular logic of time and space in early cinema by means of categories derived from

Greimas and Genette (Gaudreault 1988).

9.3. Narration and Point of View

Narratology, following Benveniste and Genette, made it its task to identify the marks of

discours in narratives. In the cinema marks of enunciation are more like enunciative

26

uses (or contexts) of which the viewer is either aware or not. If a stylistic feature 'draws

attention to itself', rather than functioning as a mark of enunciation, its enoncé may

connote a certain style, or point to the presence of something not shown. A hand-held

camera shot might signify 'cheap production' or 'authenticity' or 'we are about to see

someone running, out of breath, and this is his point of view' (see Jost 1988).

In the United States, the question of point of view, extensively discussed by

Branigan, became the basis for renewed interest in narration and also of authorship and

spectatorial competence (the author as an effect of narration, but narration as the

product of the spectator). The most influential study in this tradition has been Narration

and the Fiction Film (Bordwell 1985) which explicitly repudiates the distinction

histoire/discours, énonciation/énoncé (and its psycho-semiotic elaborations), in favor of

the Russian formalist distinction 'fabula/syuzet', and a typology of narration, ranging

from 'restricted' to 'communicative' narration, and applicable to both classical Hollywood

films, and art- or avant-garde cinema (Eisenstein, Godard, Bresson).

Returning to Le cinema: langue ou langage from a cognitive perspective,

Branigan, in a paper entitled 'Here is a Picture of No Revolver', starts from Metz's

example of the image of a revolver constituting already a sentence like 'here is a

revolver', criticizing Metz for not being able to account for the linguistic feature of nega-

tion. Agreeing that the project to prove the cinema's semiotic and discursive nature

must be able to specify tense, aspect and mood (and move beyond the word/sentence

opposition), Branigan reviews the debate which according to him, has become

entrenched in too rigid an opposition between mimetic and diegetic theories of narration.

His own contribution is the 'slot and filler' model which 'seeks to represent not only

significant parts, embedded patterns, and the sequence in which these elements are

perceived, but also the functions, or roles that elements have in the structure... A slot

and filler approach is more closely aimed at understanding language as a social

phenomenon rather than strictly as a matter of competence. Recently, versions of a slot

and filler approach have been used to model human thought, the general representation

of knowledge in memory, and such processes as attention and expectation' (Branigan

1988, pp. 12-3).

Branigan argues that the different approaches to structure have all led to devising

grammars, and based on the slot and filler approach, we would have a case grammar,

pointing to an underlying 'event scenario' in which participants, actions, perceptions and

properties of objects are related. Greimas had used case grammar for literary narratives,

proposing a set of roles or cases: agent, counteragent, object, result, instrument,

source, goal, experiencer, and Branigan's own Point of View in the Cinema was based on

a role table (or case frame) with six slots: origin, vision, time, frame, object and mind. A

sequence of shots would form a unitary structure, allowing one to allocate to specific

filmic devices certain roles, and even specify what might happen when certain slots are

left empty (ie if in a given segment not all the shots are present in this sequence). The

relation between a frame, its slots and the fillers would avoid the problems of

'denotation', i.e. some kind of approximation to reality. Instead, reference is conceived

27

as the relationship that pertains in a function between its variables and specific values.

Slot and filler models thus go beyond the opposition denotation/connotation, syntagm/-

paradigm to represent signification as a dynamic process. This model is more

encompassing than those based on the sentence, while still pointing to a stable

underlying structure. The discursive source or authority would be just one slot or role,

sometimes left open to produce invisible observation, effaced narration, and other

features noted by theorists such as Bordwell.

9.4. Towards Semio-Pragmatics

Other researches in this area are preoccupied by the question of specific codes and non-

specific codes. Colin, for instance, explored the points of contact between Metzian

semiology and transformational generative grammar, as developed by Petöfi, Wunder-

lich, Halliday. For Colin, 'generative and transformational grammar does not start from a

"living totality" (a set of actual produced utterances) but from simple abstractions of

generative and transformational grammar rules, such as the rules of rewriting, of

transformation, of deep structure and surface structure, in order to produce knowledge.

[Regarding the cinema] it will have to account for syntactic mechanisms and processes

of enunciation necessary for the production of a filmic discourse' (Colin 1985, p. 162).

The largely negative results of 'applying' linguistic categories directly to film do

not worry Colin, for whom the fact suffices that generative grammar can, for instance,

account for some features of filmic construction not touched by other models. Colin's

main contribution is his study of certain logical schemas which govern the disposition of

filmic space, for which he has recourse also to cognitive psychology (Colin 1985 and

1989). More specifically, he has given a reformulation of Metz's Grande Syntagmatique,

arguing that Metz had conflated the semantic and syntactic level (regulating, respective-

ly, the articulations of space and time) and secondly, had presupposed perhaps too un-

problematically, the existence of a stable diegetic world. By referring himself to concepts

such as the 'semantics of possible worlds' Colin is able to redefine in terms of inference,

analogy and generalization such central terms for film analysis as 'diegesis' without

having to invoke either 'realism', 'causality' or the 'time/space continuum'. Furthermore,

Colin insisted on distinguishing as sharply as possible, by referring himself to Chomsky,

between segmentation and syntagm (one having to do with 'independence' and physical

discreteness, the other with categorization and hierarchization). Metz's ambiguity on this

point largely explains the difficulties with the notions of sequence and syntagm in the

GS.

To this extent, according to Colin, a generative semiology can only be a

semiology of film, not of cinema, ie of the concrete object and textual system, rather

than the theoretical object constructed by film analysis (this distinction was fundamental

to Metz in Language et cinéma). A certain number of linguistic concepts may therefore

be appropriate to the study of both filmic discourse and verbal discourse, a position

which reflects the influence of Greimas. For Colin it is a matter of identifying what in a

given film belongs to the linguistic and the cognitive domain, rather than seeking direct

28

equivalents, so that his 'film linguistic sets out to argue that the construction of meaning

in film makes use of the same processes (process of transformation) as does natural

language' (Polan 1989, p. 172), the aim being that 'the application of generative

grammar to the analysis of film must help to solve the problem of the relationships

between linguistic competence and filmic performance' (ibid). While showing the extent

to which logical and grammatical rules are necessary for 'making the filmic message

accessible and acceptable' (Bächler 1989), Colin wanted to redefine the structure of a

sentence without giving priority to notions of subject and predicate (which as Colin

argued, were 'still too caught up in idealist conceptions of action'). Although Colin's

theoretical writings are not easy to come to grips with, his approach to film was, after

Metz, the most genuinely linguistic, incorporating work in linguistics not previously taken

up.

Another aspect rarely discussed is that of 'failed communication'. Semiologists

not only need to understand how movies are understood, but also how they are not

understood. Taking the films of Robbe-Grillet as an example, Chateau and Jost analyzed

a certain textual practice which transgressed implicit norms, and by that very

transgression, made these norms apparent. Syntactic features, including the creation of

a diegetically coherent narration, turned out to be merely the effects of certain kinds of

combinations of sounds and images. This clarifies what might be an 'ungrammatical'

film, by analogy to the 'grammatically correct' nonsense sentence in linguistics (Chateau,

Jost 1979).

Central to the semio-pragmatic theories of Odin and Casetti is the institutional

dimension of the filmic discourse, prominent in the psychoanalytical approach (via

theories of the cinematic apparatus and the alignment of the ideological subject with the

psychic 'dispositif') but absent from narratological models inspired by literary texts.

'Semio-pragmatics proposes to study cinema as the realization and the reading of film as

programmed social practices. Watching or making a film are not only aspects of a dis-

course, they are, in the first place, institutional facts' (Odin, 1983, p.68). Odin accords

pride of place to the notion of communication, not in the traditional sense of

interpersonal exchange, but as mediated by institutions. For instance, he distinguishes

different areas, such as pedagogical, familial (as in home movies), advertising, ex-

perimental, documentary communication. One of the few theorists to have analyzed

non-fictional films, his work points beyond analyzing cinema towards other audio-visual

texts, such as television, within a single theoretical perspective.

Using the notion of 'actant' (derived from Greimas), semio-pragmatics sees the

filmic communication act as defined by a producer-actant and a spectator-actant

(neither seen in terms of individuals, but as abstract 'forces' constructed by theory). In

the case of the feature film, the resulting effect (called 'communication in fiction') is

based on a limited set of operations; for Odin, these are seven in number: figurativ-

ization, diegetization, narrativization, monstration, belief, mise en phase (a notion which

could be translated as 'setting up') and, finally, fictivisation. Odin, like Metz and Colin

trained in linguistics, is one of the few narratologists currently working who has based

29

his semio-pragmatics on explicitly Greimasian premises.

For Casetti, a semio-pragmatic approach is necessary to deal with the problems

of enunciation (Casetti 1986). His close rereading of Benveniste and the concept of

'discours' have prompted Metz to a reply, where the aspects of 'deixis' (Jakobson's

'shifters') are viewed as a central problem for the filmic discourse (Metz 1991). Casetti

sees the spectator as a purely symbolic structure, an instance implied by the very

activity of the film (hence his preference for the concept of enunciation over that of

narration, as used by Branigan or Bordwell, both of whom regard the pair enuncia-

tion/enunciated as needlessly idealist). Casetti, on the other hand, insists that every

communicative act assigns roles. 'The spectator of Casetti is an interface: insofar as s/he

is manifested by traces of the enunciated, s/he belongs to the internal textual structures

which regulate its construction and functioning; insofar as the spectator is the 'you'

turned to the outside, it is in search of a body serving it as support. ... The film thus

signals the presence of that to which it addresses itself, assigning it a position, from

which it undertakes a trajectory' (Odin 1988, p. 138).

10. Conclusion

Expressing his dissatisfaction with the way linguistics has been used in film theory,

Bordwell once asked: 'Why is the employment of linguistic concepts a necessary condi-

tion in analyzing filmic narration? Is linguistics presumed to offer a way of subsuming

film under a general theory of signification? Or does linguistics offer methods of inquiry

which we can adopt? Or is linguistics simply a storehouse of localized and suggestive

analogies to cinematic processes?' (Bordwell 1985, p. 23). Leaving aside the polemical

intent, these are pertinent questions for anyone concerned with the relationship between

linguistics and film. For linguistics is certainly not the only theoretical approach to film

and cinematic processes. The present review has hopefully demonstrated how linguistics

could be said to have had a double-edged influence on film theory whenever there was

too great a proximity, too literal a translation or application. On the other hand, drawing

an analogy not with verbal language, but with linguistic procedures allowed film theory

to clarify key problems of film as signifying practice, as communicative act, as textual

system, and as narrative.

There was a growing unease, already apparent in the 1960s, about using those

areas of linguistics which concentrated on the verbal, on the phonological and even

grammatical aspect of language, because too restrictive for the complex (verbal-visual-

auditory-kinetic) signifying processes of cinema. Hence the move to semiology, taken up

by film-scholars at the same time as it was abandoned by mainstream linguistics. The

fact that the semiology used was structuralist and linguistic in inspiration has to some

extent eclipsed the potential for film studies of the semiology founded by Peirce or that

practiced by Eco. However, since Peircian semiology not only lacked the dimensions of

'structure', 'level' (notions crucial to many forms of linguistics), but was logical in

inspiration, this neglect --pending a more thorough demonstration of its uses -- may

have been justified. Why Eco's work, given its wide reception elsewhere, has not had

30

more impact in film theory is a question alluded to by de Lauretis (de Lauretis 1984).

Thus, one might agree that the imperialism of linguistics over film studies in the

past two decades was not a necessary condition for its development either in

constructing an object of study or as an academic discipline. But it is difficult to deny

that it was, despite and because of the inherent problems, the most productive and

energizing source for a reflection on the fundamentals of film and cinema. As in

linguistics itself, one can detect a shift away from models based on natural languages,

and a greater concern with artificial languages, expert systems, tacit knowledge systems

and different kinds of 'competence' as ways of further elaborating the peculiar status of

filmic communication, where the narrative, the iconic, the linguistic and the auditory

work together according to certain yet to be defined processes.

What needed to be shown was that the question of signification in the cinema,

and thus the relation of film and language/film and meaning, not only has a history

almost as long as the cinema itself, but that it is a history around legitimate questions. If

the different paradigms reflect the intellectual preoccupations of the day, the struggle to

define an object of knowledge and establish a method appropriate to this object has

remained a constant. Successive approaches first had to prize the question of significa-

tion away from the 'cinema as an art form' argument, before having to confront the

realist paradigm, by insisting on the conventional, rule-bound aspects of how the cinema

expresses, signifies, 'reconstructs', communicates a reality (assumed to be pre-given).

With the ascendancy of Saussurean linguistics in the humanities, the problem of filmic

signification fell prey to the opposite extreme to that of realism, namely the proposition

that 'if cinema is like language, and if language constructs reality, then cinema does not

represent reality but constructs it'. In reaction to such a 'logical' theory of meaning,

psycho-semiotics opened up the question of the filmic text's mode of address and

implied spectator, itself redefined in terms of the constitution of human subjectivity, and

interpreted as the construction of male subjectivity (with the exclusion/occultation of

female subjectivity). Since the feminist intervention, the field has sacrificed the unity of

a particular project in favor of a greater differentiation and precision of its partial

aspects, with case grammar, narratology, cognitive theory, pragmatics all continuing the

language analogy and its linguistic formulations without, however, venturing beyond the

confines of academic specialisation into the realm of cultural politics.

This may simply be the view from our present historical perspective: it is not

difficult to see in current work the possibility of a new interventionist agenda pointing to

the importance of breaking not only with the realist paradigm, but also with the

subjectivist one, in order to account for the cinema's capacity to generate virtual worlds,

not organized according to the spatio-temporal articulations governing everyday life and

yet 'readable', 'intelligible' and engaging with the spectators' competence and interests,

be they logical, communication-oriented or pragmatic.

Thomas Elsaesser and Emile Poppe

Amsterdam and Nijmegen, 1991