Way to go, Frank. Unfortunately (pronounce this the way Schwarzenegger does in Total Recall), there are no context-free images ... And hence, through context, they can and do lie. We haven't even broached the subject of digitally generated imagery, which might pose as indexically created, simulating reference external to itself, which might - in the strict sense of the word - not exactly lie, but come across as phony, even without textual context. But even then, there is always extratextual context, schemata of intertextual and real-world knowledge which invariably come into play. A (semio)pragmatic approach seems inevitable.

Second interjection: imho the search for a filmic language always ends up doing film analysis, ultimately in the form known to us all as, e.g. Bordwell/Thompson's Film Art, or Giannetti's Understanding Movies.

Henry

photographs lie only when you assume that they are SAYING something as opposed to SHOWING something . . . a photograph understood as simply showing something cannot lie, it only shows what it shows . . . the idea that what it shows corresponds to something else not in the photograph is an idea [maybe a linguistic idea] and cannot be blamed on the photograph itself -- for the poor photo does nothing more than show what it shows . . . which is axiomatic

mike

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