I strongly advocate the use of the term "language" in a narrow sense. I
know that it has been popular for almost 100 years to call every
phenomenon which has some recognisable pattern and significance a
"language". So we have a langage of fashion, a film language, etc. This,
in my opinion, obscures more than it sheds some new light on things
declared to be a "lanugage". And when Metz wrote about film as a
language he spent more space on describing the differences between
natural languages and film than he explained why he thought film should
be a language. So, yes, we can talk about, say, codes in films, but to
take for granted the metaphor "film is lanugage" simply doesn't work.
All that being said, the best book built upon this argument is not Metz,
but Michel Colin's _Langue, film, discours_ in which he tried to
establish "une sémiologie générative du film".
Boris
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