I'm not sure of the time-scale, Guillaume, but I think 
Barthes' work on language/myth in Ivan the Terrible 
pre-dates Metz. Certainly, both Image Music Text and 
Mythologies speak of myth and language occurring across 
culture, and especially in cinema. Consider Barthes' 
chapter on the Romans in film in Mythologies. As for the 
French understanding of langue versus parole, see Myth 
Today (M) and Rhetoric of the Image (IMT). But I don't want 
to be too picky, as I think you've hit the nail right on 
the head.

The subject of convention does interest me though. 
(Nate might be interested in this) It's interesting that 
you use 'table', as I've always used the word 'chair' to 
help explain the concept of language and myth. In 
particular, I find the Bauhaus Chair (you know, the one 
that's plastic and steel tube) very useful. It runs 
something like this:

We all use the word chair, but what actually does it mean? 
Put another way, how do we know that chairs are for sitting 
on until someone tells or shows us. The concept of chair is 
not just the object itself but the perception of it being 
there to be sat on. This perception flows form recollection 
- you remember what you learnt when you were first 
introduced to one. The object is independent of 'sitting' 
as the source of its function (it does not know it will be 
sat on) and your perception is independent of the chair you 
can sit on a table, the ground, or not sit at all). 

The perception of the chair, the object, the word, the 
action, all flow from the recollection of the convention. 
With the Bauhaus chair, we teach students that the Bauhaus 
created objects that were purely functional (Form Follows 
Function). However that's not really accurate, because the 
form only follows a perception of function, as it would be 
functional in many different styles. The perception here is 
that it _looks_ functional, based on the recollection of 
functional objects and materials. 

Eisenstein was working in cinema at about the same time as 
the Bauhaus, certainly on Strike, Battleship Potemkin and 
October, and you can see how this particular analogy 
translates. Eisenstein's development of film language via 
montage, I would argue, does much more than give the 
impression of movement, since in order to imply movement 
efficiently he would just have to keep the shot going. 
Instead he creates movement through an edit, which in fact 
breaks up movement into discrete elements.

In this sense, the movement acts as a 'third meaning' 
developed from two static shots placed in quick succession. 
A really good analysis of Eisenstein is given by himself 
(in Film Form) and a good re-reading is in Deleuze's first 
book on cinema. Deleuze considered Eisensteinian montage as 
creating a false movement, ie. movement extrapolated from 
immobility, that is recognised through conventions. Deleuze 
was suspicious of language(especially Metz) but the cinema 
books are a pretty good reorienting of Peirce in any case, 
and Peirce and Pasolini form the backbone of Deleuze's 
study. 

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Damian Peter Sutton
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