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FILM LANGUAGE: A Semiotics of the Cinema
BY CHRISTIAN METZ, translated by Michael Taylor
Oxford University Press, New York, 1974; hardcover $10.95; 268 pages.
Film Language, by Christian Metz, is a text, whose translation, should end a period of excited and often confused expectations on the part of American film scholars who are interested in applying semiological methods to cinema. The volume is a series of essays ranging over subjects including 8Vz and the phenomenological conditions (like movement) of the impression of reality induced by film. One section, "Problems of Film Semiotics," sets forth the premises of semiological research in film. This is the core of the book and, since it is also the heart of current interest in the text, this review will concentrate primarily on it.
A distinction must be drawn between linguistics and semiotics. Semiotics proposes itself as a general study of patterns of communication including not only natural language (e.g. Chinese), but also less formalized patterns of communication like gestures. Linguistics is the study of language systems i.e. written and spoken communications of natural languages. Thus, linguistics is only a branch of general semiotics, a much wider field that purports to investigate the totality of communication. This is important to emphasize because, although Metz makes constant references to linguistics, he is involved in semiotics in the broad sense of the term.
Metz asks whether film is a language system which means the sort of object appropriate to lingusitic study. He argues it is not. He compares the basic element of a film, the shot, to a basic unit of linguistic analysis, the word. The two are qualitatively distinct. The relation between a word and its referent is arbitrary whereas the relation between a representational film image and its referent is based on perceptual analogies (verisimilitude).
The upshot of this distinction is that insofar as understanding a shot is grounded in perceptual analogies, films will not have parts of speech like nouns and adjectives. The tall, blonde man in a shot will not be three separate units of articulation ("tall," "blonde," and "man"), but a singular complex with an undefined quantity of properties-tall, blonde, fat, sad, wearing a green coat...
The film shot is not a single lexical unit of discourse but...