Quick thoughts
Heaven does forbid the translation of a shot into formal logic. It
forbids the translation of a shot into ordinary language. If you could
translate a shot into a sentence then I suspect something like the
following Tarskian truth conditions would have to hold: The shot F is
true if and only if a particular sentence S (the linguistic translation
of S) is true. You just cant find a sentence to that will do this.
(Tarski's theory of truth is also a theory of translation, translation
being a matter of preserving truth values.) A shot is worth more words
than you can come up with. Film is too logically poor and too
semantically rich. Language is articulate by being determinate and
sacrificing detail. Film is articulate by being indeterminate and
sacrificing logical richness.
Diagrams (moving ones) are a way of limiting the details of a shot to
make a shot that is more determinate. Peirce, with some
justification, thought formal logic was diagrammatic and actually
tried to introduce a formal logic that was diagrammatic.
A shot is indeterminate but language too is somewhat indeterminate.
Quine's gavagai example illustrates this. And Quine's problem of the
indeterminacy of translation has at least a pragmatic solution in
exercising some principle of charity - and principles of charity depend
on the assumption that what someone is proposing (showing on film or
saying in words) is for the most part true.
When you correspond in video (like in Dan's film letter) you pretty
soon start to appreciate that you get nowhere without some such
principle, and you pretty soon try to establish logical conventions by
doing really simple things and making what Quine called analytical
hypotheses mutually manifest. Quine's gavagai story describes this
process for language which is so much easier than video because it so
much more determinate. Early filmmakers also established a rudimentary
system of conventions in much the same way, but the conventions, which
for the most part remain, were no more than simple pragmatic ways of
maximising the probabilty that the logical inferences that audiences
needed to make about shots that were valid (ie inferences which yield
true conclusions from true shots).