1. Christian Metz ( )
“A film is difficult to explain because it is easy to understand . . .”

2. “Cinéma: langue ou langage?”
Testing whether or not the analytical methods of semiology are indeed applicable to all nonverbal as well as verbal phenomena.
Film, which seems to be particularly resistant to the linguistic model, poses an especially interesting problem.
Moreover, the history of film theory is full of references to the idea of a "language" or "grammar" of film.
Metz is interested in sorting out these problems while developing a rigorous method for defining how films are meaningful for their audiences.

3. Cinéma: langue ou langage?
Metz's argument is established in three stages:
A Is the idea of "film language" an oxymoron?
B The linguistic approach:
Understanding film as distinct from a verbal language (langue). Testing the limits of the comparison of “film language” to verbal languages.
C “Some Points” and "Problems of Denotation."
From the linguistic to the semiological approach--towards a syntagmatic analysis of the image track. How images are organized and grouped with a view toward narrative meaning.

4. Cinéma: langue ou language?
Montage roi vs. the syntagmatic mind, or montage vs. decoupage.
"The cinema is a ‘language’; the cinema is infinitely different than verbal language [langue]”.
Ciné-Langue and Verbal Languages, or silent and sound film.
The language of silent film; language disappears when pictures talk.
"The specific nature of film is defined by the presence of a langue tending toward art, within an art that tends toward language."
Film may not be a language, but it is a discourse, a "language of art."

5. Cinéma: langue ou langage?
"The cinema is a ‘language’; the cinema is infinitely different than verbal language."
Film is too obviously a message for one not to assume that it is coded.
Includes partially coded elements (elements of continuity editing, e. g.).
Conventional to a degree in organization of narrative space and time.
But is there a pre-established film syntax? No, it is learned, established historically as an aesthetic norm.

6. Cinéma: langue ou langage?
Ciné-Langue and Verbal Languages, or silent and sound film.
The metaphor of language in theories of silent film.
“Language” disappears when pictures talk.
The appearance of the sound films demonstrates how film images are unlike verbal language.

7. Cinéma: langue ou langage?
"The specific nature of film is defined by the presence of a langue tending toward art, within an art that tends toward language."
Distinction between filmic discourse and image discourse.
Image discourse is where film resembles photography:
an open, highly connotative system;
not easily codified because it cannot be divided into parts;
it is "naturally" intelligible;
motivated relation between signifier and signified.
Filmic discourse means a completely realized artistic expression.
It is a language that contains a langue in the sense of talking pictures: images + speech, but speech 'encased' in a specific narrative form of images.

8. Filmic narrativity is a "language without a langue."
Parole -- langue. Individual utterance vs. the linguistic system through which we know whether utterances are grammatical or not, meaningful or not; e.g. the unconscious rules of English, French, etc.
Langue: distinguishing the rigorous use (English, French, German) from a loose, aesthetic use.
For Metz, language in the sense of everyday speech has a precise definition:
"Language (langue) is a system of signs used for intercommunication.”
Three precise criteria: system - sign - intercommunication.

9. Filmic narrativity is a "language without a langue."
Narrative films fail all three basic criteria for defining a langue.
Intercommunication. Film communication is unilateral; there is no reciprocity.
Absence of a strictly codified system: a highly organized code that establishes the parameters for all that can be accepted as meaningful or grammatical in a natural language.
There are no filmic "signs," at least according to Saussure's model.

10. Filmic narrativity is a "language without a langue."
There are no filmic "signs."
There is nothing in film that resembles double articulation:
2nd articulation: the level of the signifier. The combination of phonemes into meaningful sounds.
1st articulation: the attachment of sounds to a denoted meaning; simply speaking, a word.
signifier sound / shot / / plã / phoneme
signified concept "shot" "plan” morpheme

11. 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.

12. 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.