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John Searle has argued: "Every subject matter has its catchphrases to enable us to stop thinking before we have got a solution to our problems. ... it is easy to stop thinking about the logical status of fictional discourse if we repeat slogans like 'the suspension of disbelief' or expressions like 'mimesis'. Such notions contain our problem but not its solution.” (_Expression and Meaning_, 1979, 60-61). One of catchphrases in film studies is, of course, ‘film is a language’. But Metz did at least clarify some of the confusions surrounding this phrase. Another, worse catchphrase is the often-heard statement ‘film is a language is meaningless’. Such statements prevent us from thinking about the problem. I have at least attempted to investigate the ‘film is a language’ catchphrase in Chapter 1 of my recently published book _The Cognitive Semiotics of Film_ (Cambridge University Press, 2000), and in my paper ‘Film Semiotics’ in Miller and Stam (eds) _A Companion to Film Theory_ (Blackwell, 1999). I concluded that the very idea of ‘film language’ for film semioticians is not simply an analogy (as it was in the pre-linguistic film-language comparisons of Raymond Spottiswoode, the filmology movement, etc.), for the semioticians’ analysis of film is not premised on identifying any direct resemblance between film and natural language. Instead, film semioticians argue that film is a medium that possesses its own distinctive, underlying system of codes that confers intelligibility on and lends structure to all films. (The term ‘code’ is simply a term that designates the underlying system that constitutes the specificity of, lends structure to, and confers intelligibility on phenomena.) The problem with Metz’s phrase that film is a ‘langage sans langue’ is that it simply reveals the limitations of his structural linguistics. Recently, researchers such as Roger Odin have argued that Metz is simply developing a pragmatic theory of film, although Metz did not have the tools to develop this idea. 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 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%