I'll jump in Adrian,

In THE THIN RED LINE (and many other films) inner speech is represented by
voiceover.
On the other hand, the dialogue and images represent the empirical - that
which is open to all. I have always thought that this film was about nature,
objects, the way everything (especially war) is a wild kind of nature, often
quite alien, but at any rate stuff unto itself. Possibly even those subjects
thinking those inner speeches are all in this objectivity of nature. That is
what the film makes me feel/think. (Thought is almost a kind of feeling for
subjects like us. Didn't Hume say something like this?) Subjects too are
objects. (And as Adrian suggests, films and all works of art seem especially
to have this extra-subjective character. They are astonishing objects.)

These things seem to say something about the question, 'Does thought
necessarily have a subject?' 'I am no longer myself,' wrote Deleuze/Guattari
'but thought's aptitude for finding itself.'

What are thoughts? I think that like many phenomenological (and social or
hetero-phenomenological) things thoughts are reflexively reified objects.
That is, our descriptions of thought or a thought effect and determine what
is being described. We construct and make these things real according to
their image or description. Subjects too are reflexively reified. These are
processes that characterise certain quite remarkable objects, objects that
are very important illusions, that are kinds of self-delusions, but no less
effective for that. Fictions let's say - which is perhaps a reason why
fiction is so important to us. A fascinating book on this sort of thing is
Heinz von Forster's 'Observing Systems', (although, I have been advised, for
my own good, that it is utter rubbish)

Meanwhile we have done this reflexive reification in language for as long as
there has been language. We have done the same in film since there has been
film. Filmic descriptions (depictions)  initiate their own kinds of
reflexivity. The old, organic character of speech has given language a long
role in human subjectivisation (hence its almost natural phenomenological
function in cinematic inner speech). Against this, film and its visual,
external character lends it to  the non-phenomenological, the empirical -
(awake and in the world of others as Heracleitus put it). Yet precisely this
almost natural empiricality of film is precisely what makes it so apt for
representation of that most inner of 'speeches' - dreams.

By the way, I am  intrigued by the sound of the chapters in Ian Douglas's
FILM AND MEANING and I am commencing a search. I have found livres maudits
easier to find than films or videos maudits ( or non-maudits for that
matter). Strange and disheartening that obscure philosophy is somehow more
popular than popular cinema.


P. S. I actually think we can and  do film (or at least signify in film)
conjunctions like 'however', 'nevertheless', 'and', etc. We do so when we
join two shots, and also when we move a camera or change lense settings. I
suspect that the conjunctions and/or disjunctions of montage and mise en
scene work more like those of language than the differences in media might
at first appear to suggest. Logic are logics, no matter what the
prepositional medium. If there is a conjunction that no one has signified
filmically, that is just a challenge to an editor - and an audience. Indeed
it can be done simply by proposing some kind of conventionalisation of the
image as has been done throughout movie history with dissolves etc.

Enough

Ross