xxxiii that could be substituted for it. The essential point is that the language has many
differences. The differences in languages are the diacritical theory of meaning which proves the single more influential idea operative within film semiotics.
2. Metz’s Theory
The key figure among the filmo-linguistic pioneer was Christian Metz. Stam dedicated his book New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics in 1992 to his
mentor, Metz, as an outer framework of film theory. Stam stated that Metz’s purpose was to “get to the bottom of the linguistic metaphor” by testing it against
the most advanced concepts of contemporary linguistics Stam, 1992: 33. In another book, Lapsley and Westlake included Metz’s answers
concerning the main semiotics question if the cinema is a language or not. Metz says, as cited by Lapsley and Westlake, that the cinema is a language but it has
not a langue, where langue is understood in the Saussure theory as the system of signs intended for inter-communication Lapsley and Westlake, 1988: 38. Metz
wanted to achieve an understanding of how films are understood, but the recognized fundamental differences between language and cinema had prevented
the wholesale importation of Saussure’s concepts. The concept of langue was inapplicable to cinema for three basic reasons. They are:
a. Cinema is not available for inter-communication. It is a communication at all
rather than expression, it is one-way communication. b.
The filmic image is quite unlike the Saussurean sign, with its arbitrary relation between signifier and signified, and instead, in its reproduction of the
conditions of perception, can be termed as the block of reality. The cinema has as its primary material a body of fragments of the real world, mediated
xxxiv through their mechanical duplication. Whereas a verbal signifier acquires its
significance from its place within a system, that of an image derives from what it duplicates. Moreover, as well as resemblance there is material link
between the image and its objects, making it index as well as icon, and therefore motivated. However, there were qualifications even in Metz early
work, as when he acknowledged that an image necessarily involves distortion and deformation. Later, this idea was developed through the identification of
codes at work in the image. Despite such qualifications, the general tenor of the argument was that cinema duplicated rather than articulated reality.
c. For refusing cinema’s status of langue was that it lacks the double articulation.
The characteristics economy of language, through which infinity of utterances can be generated by means of a very small number of basic units, is achieved
through this double articulation. At the level of the first articulation a limited number of words are combined in different orders to provide a limitless
number of utterances. But a still greater economy is permitted through a second articulation, by which morphemes are made up of a very much smaller
number of phonemes, these become the smallest distinctive units of language. These are without meaning in themselves, but systematized on the basis of
phonological properties to produce consequential differences. Metz concluded that the shot is more like a statement than a word, but even here the
resemblance is limited in that a statement is reducible to discrete elements, the morphemes and phonemes, in a way that the shot is not Lapsley and
Westlake, 1988: 40.
xxxv Based on the three reasons above, hence cinema is not langue, it is
nonetheless language. It is due to the extent that it orders signifying elements within ordered arrangements different from those of spoken idioms, and to the
extent that these elements are not traced on the perceptual configuration of reality itself. Cinema transforms the world into discourse, and is not therefore simple
duplication. But a semiotics of the cinema cannot work at the level of the image, since each image is unique, novel and analogous to reality, with its meaning
produced not by its place within a system but by what it duplicates. There is no process of selection from a lexicon of images in cinema as there is from the verbal
lexicon of a natural language Lapsley and Westlake, 1988: 40.
3. The Language of Film
