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I am not really satisfied by most thoughts I've heard on this question about film and language. Here are some conclusions without much explanation:

1. Film (video without audio) is only a language in a metaphorical sense or it's a sort of language. There are languages and languages. Not much hangs on this. What matters is how film can be logical - how it is true or false, how we can express propositions, entailment relations and arguments in film, and how logically rich film is. Good old Metz was instructive, both curious and obtuse, fun & dull, in a typically  philosophical sort of way. I can't remember what he said but whether film does or does not have a minimal unit (phoneme/morpheme) ; does or does not use arbitrary signs, and is or is not a two way street,  are not the most important things. The best I can say is that they are not  unrelated to the logical richness of a language, but Plato had much the same inklings in Cratylus. If we want to invent film theory it probably is not a good idea  to start with rudimentary semiotics and logic and stop there.

2. Film (video without audio) is propositional. A shot is a proposition. It is true or false. But unlike a sentence a shot is indeterminate in what it means, or perhaps manifold in it what means. A shot show/means, as it were, a world: it shows a totality of facts. A shot shows and is true or false of an indeterminately large set of events. A sentence is only true of a small number of events. The best we can do is make a truth claim with a shot about a small number of relevant or meant events in the shot, but a later shot in our argument (usually films are narrative arguments, especially silent films) might imply that there were other events shown by the shot that were relevant.

3. We can use a shot (actual footage) to make empirical observations of the events the shot records. This is an amazing thing for a proposition, and an amazing thing for historiography. Film is to the science of history what Galileo's telescope was to the physical  sciences. It is Ranke's dream technology - it sort of shows the past as it actually was.

5. Shots show particular events. Actual footage is always about the particular manifold of events shown. Nevertheless a shot can be a universal (ie the same shot can be used to show different events in different possible worlds). That is we can use a shot of Humphrey kissing Ingrid in Hollywood to show Rick kissing Ilsa in Casablanca.

6. What we cant do and what we need language to do is express certain functions of formal logic. Film has no  universal quantifier, no negation, possibly no disjunction, conjunction or existential quantifier either. This makes film logically  poor but semantically extravagant. 

7. Because film is fully, impurely, audio/visual we can talk/show with it and listen/see it, and converse with it. So we can do anything in film. In its fullest, proper and impure audio/visual sense film is as logically rich as any language.

Ross
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Given the character and number of responses to my last New Thread, [where I proposed that (as a kind of challenge) that the only way a film could really actually do philosophy was to dislodge viewers from the way they have been viewing and thrust them into a new perspective in order to be able to understand a particular film’s reason for existing] I got the feeling that this remark was actually opaque to folks.  “How could a film be like that?” I was imagining going on in most minds as they scrolled on by.
 
Now I would like to propose another, perhaps more easily contentious  question:
Under what circumstances could cinema be considered a unique and independent language?
 
I am aware of Metz’s treatment of this issue, which I will paraphrase: Film cannot be a language because it does not have a minimal unit (phoneme/morpheme); it does not use arbitrary signs, and it is not a two way street.
 
I am looking for original arguments here, not citations from extant work.
 
I am thinking especially here of Mike Frank’s to me quite original and probing question about pictures and propositions. This has churned my brain quite a bit and has led to a reframing of thoughts on the subject that have been lurking in my head for many years.

 
a verbal medium can more easily include language =96 eithe=
r as authorial reflection or in quoted conversation =96 that is plainly phi=
losophical, while a medium anchored in images would find that more difficul=
t . . . to that extent there may be more philosophy, narrowly construed, in=
 novels than in movies . . . but i take it that there=92s a big difference =
between QUOTING philosophy and DOING philosophy, and that this conversation=
 has been about the latter

Just trying to stir up some discussion that will appeal to my own admittedly warped interests.

And so it will rhyme I will ask again

Under what circumstances could cinema be considered a unique and independent language?

db


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