1. Raymond Bellour & Christian Metz Director of Research at the Centre Nationale de Recherches Scientifiques 1964-1980. The inseparability of Metz’s and Bellour’s research the former working in the context of a general semiology, the other developing concepts through the close textual analysis of individual films. Both in a close working relationship with Barthes

2. “ Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film” In order to understand the filmic code, or the existence of a film language, why does Metz focus on a syntagmatic analysis? How can we test Metz's categories? How can we put them to work in the analysis of the narrative form of films?

3. Filmic narrativity is a "language without a langue." There are no filmic "signs" because of the irreducibility or indivisibility of the shot. Due to the overwhelming impression of reality in the cinema and its analogical fullness, the image (signifier) is inseparable from, and indeed coextensive with what it refers to (its signified). the photographic image is universally meaningful--a “natural” sign where there is a motivated or nonarbitrary relation between signifier and signified. film images escape definition as a langue because of their connotative richness.

4. Filmic narrativity is a "language without a langue." For Metz, the closest linguistic equivalent for the shot is what he calls an enoncé, an oral sentence or statement. The closest linguistic equivalent for an image of a gun is "Here is a gun!." The image is, like a sentence, "a complete, assertive statement." The film scene or sequence, with its complex and partially systematic articulation of image- statements, is more like the novel, an aesthetic discourse.

5. The "shot is less unlike a statement than a word, even though it does not necessarily resemble a statement" (115). 1. Like statements and unlike words, shots are infinite in number. 2. Like statements and unlike words, shots are creations by an individual. 3. Like statements and unlike words, the shot presents a complex unit of undefined length; it presents the receiver with a quantity of undefined information. 4. Like statements and unlike words, the shot is an assertion, an actualized unit of discourse, expression not signification. 5. Like statements and unlike words, the meaning of the shot is organized syntagmatically (in relation to sequence or order) rather than paradigmatically.

6. Film denotation: a rhetoric or a grammar? Rhetoric organizes predetermined orderings of undetermined elements. Predetermined orderings are units that: are expressive; are discrete; are of large magnitude; and belong properly to the cinema and are common to all films.

7. Film narrativity and the grande syntagmatique Because of the absence of a cinematic langue, films are considered as texts or as discourse rather than as language. As a semiological phenomena, films escape analysis as langue in the strictest sense, but in this they are like poetry or literature-- organized narrative structures whose smallest meaningful unit is the enoncé or statement. The idea of a textual system applies more to individual films, than to an idea of a grammar or langue shared by all films.

8. “Notes Toward a Phenomenology of Narrative” Narrative structure in general is defined by: 1. Closure: a beginning and an ending. 2. A temporal sequence. 3. Discourse rather than langue; that is, an artistically realized language. 4. Imaginariness: narratives are unreal in the sense that they take place in a displaced time, a once upon a time, the there-then. 5. Basic parts that are the represented events. The essential divisions of narrative are actualized statements or narrating sequences.

9. A syntagm is a group of signs ordered in a meaningful, linear sequence. "... film, which by nature one would think adapted to a transversal reading, through the leisurely investigation of the visual content of each shot, becomes almost immediately the subject of a longitudinal reading, which is precipitous, "anxious," and concerned only with "what's next." The sequence does not string the individual shots; it suppresses them" (45).

10. Why shouldn't the grande syntagmatique be considered a grammar in the strictest sense? Individual creativity: artist creates his or her own variants; latitude for new forms. Diachrony or historical change: stylistic change and innovation of narrative forms evolve faster than ordinary language. Wider latitude for innovation includes greater tolerance for deviation from code, mishaps as well as creativity: artistic discourses will always be much less systematic than the fundaments of ordinary language; linguistics is a science; film analysis is an art.

12. Types of autonomous shots Nondiegetic insert. Comparative, symbolic value like parallel syntagm. Subjective insert. An absent, imaginary moment: memory, dream, hallucination. Displaced diegetic insert. Displacement of related image into a "foreign" syntagm. Explanatory insert. An enlarged detail, usually implying subjective pov.

13. Revision of the grande syntagmatique

14. 1. Bracketing: Thematic linking of images. 2. Descriptive: Establishes place of dramatic action. 3. Parallel: Thematic or symbolic associations implied by comparing or two or more chains of images. 4. Sequence-shot: Narrative event covered in one, continuous shot. 5. Scene: Narrative event characterized by very strong unities of time, place, and action. Several shots linked by strict temporal continuity.

15. Revision of the grande syntagmatique 6. Ordinary sequence: Narrative event characterized by unity of action in spatially contiguous settings. Small temporal and spatial ellipses, usually represented by inserts, pov shots, or alternation with a single diegetic space. 7. Episodic sequence: Strong temporal condensation of prolonged narrative event. Definite ellipses of space and time across series of images linked by dissolves. 8. Alternate sequence: Two or more narrative events are intercut. Temporal relations may be: simultaneous (pursuer and pursued); consecutive (point/glance); displaced (flashbacks and forwards).

16. Subtypes of the alternate sequence Alternating: cross-cutting two or more actions within same diegetic space. Alternate: cross-cutting two or more actions from discontinuous diegetic spaces (telephone call), within a consecutive time. Discontinuous space with consecutive time. Displaced: discontinuous in space and time.

17. Raymond Bellour, “Segmenting/Analyzing” Behind the apparent simplicity and obviousness of classic, Hollywood cinema, a complex weaving of non-specific and specific codes into a textual system. The repetition-resolution effect Patterns of symmetry and dissymmetry that bind together the textual system from its largest to its smallest parts. The effect of rhyming on both a horizontal dimension, and in the relation of parts to wholes. “Le blocage symbolique.” The importance of sexual difference in organizing relations of conflict and resolution, symmetry and dissymmetry in classic Hollywood narration. Oedipus as the symbolic structure governing the elaboration of textual form, mirrored from throughout the text from supra-segment to the weaving of codes in individual scenes.

18. Rhyming, repetition, and resolution in Gigi

19. Repeated elements tend to contract and group together as the film comes to a close. Motifs and actions dilate and contract at the expense of the “autonomy” of segments. From ideology of consorts to that of bourgeois family. Gigi’s education as consort gives way to Gaston’s education into family life. Reconciliation of aristocratic and middle classes. “Mistake” of Honoré and Mamita rectified by Gaston-Gigi The role of Oedipus and the resolution of an incest fiction: “This then is the story the film tells us, within a narrative which makes of the segmental the textual condition for a happy slide from the familial into the conjugal, and so assigns itself as an object the resolution of Oedipus.”