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Matt Many interesting thoughts. I agree with the remarks about performative and performance- ive, and with the idea that a terminologically clear account of filmic actions would be a good thing. I also agree that the terminology of speech act theory does not map on to film and video very well - suggestive though it may be. I suspect that Austin and subsequent speech act theory was only deceptively clear about speech, and that Austin's influence was partly a result of a certain seductive, expositionary rhetoric - a clever pitch - in How To Do Things With Words. Speech and print are pretty muddy and film is even muddier, and we need a way -as it were - to precipitate the different communicative fractions out of the turbid solution. (Danger! Metaphor! Beware!) So I wonder if a theory of How To Do Things With Film might not be better attempted by using other ideas about communicative actions, such as, for instance Sperber and Wilsons inferential models as described in Relevance: Communication & Cognition, and more recent work. Despite my own pro-filmic bias, I admit I am at a loss to say one way or another whether an analysis of filmic action should try to avoid taking its lead from analogues in linguistic analysis, or, as I would like to think, it should theorise film and video first and as specific and unique. I suspect (not just hope) that rather than thinking of language and video as being fundamentally different it might be more fruitful, and more powerful to look to a universal theory. Another question is whether it would be better for film (or video) to theorise itself in, by and for film (or video) - or reflexively for that matter- rather than in print. On this, I suspect that a good theory might need what CS Peirce called a 'barbaric terminology' to clearly distinguish it from it object, and that this implies that a film theory might not be a film. I am not sure that film can be as terminologically barbaric as print. Or at least not for as long. Non fiction film is good at history, especially history in the age of film - but I dont know about theory. Ross