Anthony Banks raises some valid objections to film semiotics. I shall
try to address a few of them here, in the hope of making meaningful
disagreement possible.
The value of Metz’s film semiotics is that it does not (except on one
occasion) posit any correlations between film and natural language.
Metz was simply using the *tools* of linguistics to analyse film.
Metz’s grande syntagmatique is about film segmentation. Where’s the
correlations between film and natural language? Metz argues that film
sequences articulate meaning because the filmmaker has a choice about
how to structure a film sequence. The different options constitute a
paradigm of alternatives (where’s the correlations between film and
natural language here?). In Language and Cinema Metz analyses film
according to the concept of code and sub-code, without using any
analogies to natural language.
The difference between film semiotics and earlier studies of film is
that film semiotics is more systematic and detached in its approach (in
some ways analogous to the difference between the old film history and
the new film history). Semiotics constitutes one of the paradigms that
effected the decline of the philosophy of the subject in the second
half of the twentieth century (existentialism and phenomenology), based
on private elements of human behaviour such as introspection and
intuition, in favour of the analysis of more ‘public’ elements of
human behaviour such as language. Many of the classical film theorists
that Anthony Banks mentions rely too much on introspection and
intuition.
Warren Buckland
Liverpool John Moores University
Dean Walters Building
St James Road
Liverpool
L1 7BR
ENGLAND.
+44 (0)151 231 5111
The Cognitive Semiotics of Film, available from
Cambridge University Press:
http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk/scripts/webbook.asp?isbn=0521780055
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|