Film Semiotics

Debbie wrote on 7/29:

I spent some time reading Metz's Semiotics of the Cinema last night because I was trying to make a connect with the proposition idea and how it would apply to film. Well, this is what Metz says and I think it fits nicely into an adapted version of a Turner and Greene-like propositional base. I'm not quite sure because I don't know the Turner and Greene as well as I should. I plan to go back to Spivey this afternoon and flesh that out for myself. Anyway, this is how Metz defines units of cinema. He differentiates film and language like this "to 'speak' a language is to use it, but to 'speak cinematographic language is to a certain extent to invent it" He alsothe smallest unit that can be analyzed is the "shot" . He compares the shot to the taxeme (Hjelmslev) in that it constitutes the largest 'minimum segment (Martinet), since "at least one shot is required to make a film, or part of a film--in the same way, a linguistic statement must be made up of at least one phoneme. To isolate several shots from a sequence is still, perhaps to analyze the sequence; to remove several frames from a shot is to destroy the shot. If the shot is not the smallest unit of filmic signification (for a single shot may convey several informational elements), it is at least the smallest unit of the filmic chain." However, he also noted that "not every minimum filmic segment is a shot. Besides shots, there are other minimum segments, ‘optical devices’—various dissolves, wipes, and so on—that can be defined as visual but not photographic elements. Whereas images have the objects of reality as referents, optical procedures, which do not represent anything, have images as referents (those contiguous in the suntagma). The relationship of these procedures to the actual shooting of the film is somewhat like that of morphemes to lexemes; depending on the context, they hav etywo main functions: as “trick” devices (int his instance, they are sorts of semiological exponents influencing contiguous images), or as “punctuation.” The expression “filmic punctuation,” which use has ratified, must not make us forget that optical procefures separate large, complex statements and thus correspond to the articulations of the literary narrative 9with its pages and paragraphs, for example), whereas actual punctuation—that is to say, typographical punctuation—separates sentences (period, exclamation amrk, question mark, semicolon), and clauses (comma, semicolon, dash), apossibly even “verbal bases” withour without characteristics (apostrophe, or dash, between two “words,” and so on”.

Therefore…in my own words, I think we need to make an analogy of the proposition to a largest “minimum segment” of meaning. The shot as taxeme is one. However, we should not separate frames from the shot (like Leander did in the RRQ article) because this destroys the shot. However, there is also the minimun filmic segment of the “optical devices” such as transitions. So, using this framework, we analyze shots and transitions. Interestingly, as James and I worked slowly through one movie (00Q) we naturally seemed to separate the movie into shots. So I think this really works. Should I add this to the analysis in the AERA proposal??????