Resume of Christian Metz "Film is not a language"

Cinema possesses various dialects (documentary, fiction-narrative, scientific..)

Cinema is a machine to telling stories had never been really considered.

Cinema wasn’t a specific language from the inception.

Until “Birth of a nation” all films weren’t films in our modern determination.

Pioneers of cinematographic language are Griffith, Porter, Méliès: they cared little about the symbolic, philosophical or human message of their films.

Men of denotation rather then of connotation (more important to tell a story).

Georges Sadoul has shown how Méliès was led all his tricks. Jean Mitry has written precise synthesis of procedures of filmic language: the close-up, the pan shot, the tracking shot, parallel montage, and interlaced, or alternative – montage – among the film primitives. It was Griffith’s role to codify the function of these diffirent procedures in relation to filmic narrative.

Semiotics of cinema can be conceived as a semiotics of connotation, or as a semiotics of denotation.

Another way of putting it is, a word's denotation is its primary or literal significance, whereas connotation is the range of secondary significance which a word commonly suggests. Denotation is the strict dictionary meaning of a word. Connotation is the emotional and imaginative association surrounding a word.

The study of connotation brings us closer to the notion of the cinema as an art (seventh art). Connoted instance: framing, camera movements, light effects. Connotation plays a major role in all aesthetic languages. It’s significate style, genre, symbol (philosophical, humanitarian, ideological etc.) or poetic atmosphere, - and its signifier for all denotated material.

For example, in American gangsters movies, slick pavement of the waterfront distills as impression of anxiety and hardness (significate of connotation), the scene represented (dimly lit, deserted wharves, with stacks of crates and overhead cranes, the significate of denotation). Technique of the shooting, which is depended of lightingin order to produce certain picture of the docks (signifier of denotation) converge to form signifier of connotation.

Technique of the shooting, which is depended of lighting in order to produce certain picture of the docks (signifier of denotation) converge to form signifier of connotation.

Study of cinematographic expressiveness derived from linguistics. Two researchers Thomas Sebeok and Samuel R. Levin.

The sum of film’s denotation: the narration itself.

The central questions to the semiotics of the cinema (next task for practic - to shoot a essay with next subjects) are how does cinema indicate succesivity, precession, temporal breaks, causality, adversative relationships, consequence, spatial proximity, distance etc.

We have to understand that from the semiological point of view the cinema is very different from the photography (Roland Barthes theory). The photography is visual transfer (chemical reproduction) which is not codified. Level the connotation of the photography is lighting, camera angle, effects...

In dennotation of the cinema (for example "house") will be codified, we can shoot staircase, window, door... but on the picture we will show the house itself. The film puts together haphazardly would not be understood.

Shot is the largest minimal segment (by André Martinet).

Methods of linguistics - communication, analytical breakdown, strict distinction between the significate and the signifier, between substance and form, the relevant and the irrelevant etc provide the semiotics of the cinema to become progressively refined.

#semiotics