Some time ago, in the context of discussing filming thoughts the name of Ian Douglas and his book Film & Meaning came up. What intrigued me were the topics Reduction and Possible Worlds, The Fugitive Fictive & Inner Speech. I was also intrigued by Adrian Martin's hint that Douglas was bit of a philosophe maudit. After inquiries at the time, this book has eventually come into my hands. It came and went courtesy of a vestige of past social democratic aspirations - the public library.

It is an enthusiastic farrago of ideas and opinions stimulated by readings in analytical philosophy of language, semiotics and film theory - rather than a sustained inquiry and explanantion of the subject matter (ie film meaning). The danger of such an approach is that philosophy can become the bowerbird activity that Heracleitus warned against; the advantage is that it can be full of brief fascinating insights. In Douglas you get both.

At the book's heart is a problematic that haunts and sometimes needlessly troubles film theory - that of the tension between the felt necessity of a logomorphic theory of film and the desire for for a primarily filmic theory of film. Needlessly feeling caught in the horns of some dilemma, cinephile philosophers sometimes seem to reject the sensed logomorphic imperative, almost as an act of faith. Although Douglas is more than merely faithful, I get the sense that this dilemma possesses him when he ponders a theory of film metaphor ('figures of sight') as if it should be expected that language alone not have a mortgage on this celebrated engine of poetics and cognition. Douglas partly avoids the problem by turning, on a number occasions, to what he calls film's extended metaphors (fantasy, allegories, etc). On the one hand trying to redeem film's apparently limited metaphorical character by crediting it with really BIG METAPHORS, while, on the other, passing over the point that in metaphor language makes a virtue of a constraining necessity that film (as vision) has transcended. Film has other fish to fry, and, almost despite himself, Douglas does turn to these, but under limitations partly of his own making, partly of the times and philosophical circumstances he wrote in. (There have been great insights into the philosophy of language and the theory of discourse in the last 20 years - thanks largely to the naturalisation of epistemology - something that Douglas himself anticipates and, in his most important insights, honours. Personally, however, I am not aware of a work on film theory that has taken advantage of them.)

In the chapter on Inner Speech, Douglas ponders what to my mind are a number of related phenomena - the reflexive self representation of the organism and the psyche, Fodor's 'language of thought', the innate grammaticality of human psyche, the inferential interpretation of narrative or other discourse, the internalised rehearsals of speech or written language. Analytical questions about whether inner speech is conscious or not, verbal or not, infantile only or not, depend for their answer on just which phenomenon is under inquiry. Anyway, inner speech is certainly not only verbal, certainly not only pictorial, certainly not only conscious, and certainly not only infantile. Of the phenomena I mention the one that film theory needs to analyse most urgently (I think) is that of inferential interpretation of the film syntagma. It is also the one to which a possible world analysis is most valuable, and Douglas makes some tantalising remarks on this.

In the context of inner speech the problem of logomorphism is still present - that is, whether inner speech (or for that matter film meaning) is, in Paul Willeman's words, 'in the final analysis verbal.' It is not a cinephile act of faith to say that Willeman is wrong about this. Terms like 'in the final analysis' should signal DANGER. Douglas himself makes a similar 'final analysis' claim when he claims that discourse is primarily expression and only secondarily communication. Despite his careful analytical distinctions between synchronic and diachronic matters, notions of primacy in the context of what to me seems like it should be clearly specified as either a functional or historical analysis confuse the issue by dosing it with the seductive quasi-profundity of first philosophy. (In relation to this, I like to think of film as a johnny-come-lately compared to language, knowing that what matters is not only what comes first, but also what comes last. Someone should write or better still film an analytical philosophy of film that was in the first and last analysis filmic.)

In the last chapters, Douglas ponders the problem of fiction and its supposedly 'null denotation' (a red herring this). Fiction fascinates me and so I was bit disappointed that Douglas turns to considering an alternative concept of 'the fictive' as if fiction was just pretending and not the real thing.

Thanks for bringing this book to my notice.