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TO
SEMIOTICS
edited by
THOMAS A. SEBEOK
26
LANGUAGE AND CINEMA
by
CHRISTIAN METZ
Translated by
Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok
Indiana University
1974
MOUTON
THE HAGUE - PARIS
Copyright 1974 in The Netherlands.
Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague.
6. Textual Systems 91
6.1. The film as a unique totality 91
6.2. The system of the film as displacement 99
6 CONTENTS
deceptive state of research on the subject. What one most often calls
a 'theoretician of the cinema' is a sort of Renaissance man, ideally
possessing an encyclopedic knowledge and a quasi-universal method-
ological formation. He is expected to be familiar with the principal
films produced in the entire world since 1895, as well as their main
filiations (he is thus a historian); he must also, evidently, set himself
the task of revealing a certain number of insights into the economic
circumstances of their production (so that he is also, in this case, an
economist); he must force himself as well to specify in what way and
why a film is a work of art (here he is an aesthetician), without
neglecting to consider it as a sort of discourse (in this case he is a
semiotician); quite frequently, he also feels obliged to make copious
observations about the psychological, psychoanalytical, social, political,
and ideological phenomena to which particular films allude and around
which their content revolves; in sum, virtually nothing less than a
universal anthropological understanding is required.
Under these conditions, what is surprising is not the still embryonic
attraction of cinematic studies, but rather the existence of a certain
number of precise contributions to the understanding of film. Method-
ological procedures have been such, until now, that it would have
seemed more reasonable to expect practically no progress at all.
This is not, however, the case; in the theoretical texts of Balzs,
Arnheim, Bazin, Laffay, and others, as well as in the writings of
Eisenstein and the Russian formalists, or even of Morin and Cohen-
Seat (where the selection of relevant analytic criteria is already more
deliberate), we find a number of observations and very keen analyses
to which we have referred more than once in the past and which we
cannot afford to ignore in constructing a rigorous theory of the cinema.
These materials constitute an entire period of reflection on the film, a
period whose culmination and synthesis is found in the impressive
Esthetique et Psychologie du cinima (1963-1965) of Jean Mitry.
It would be impossible to prolong this period without doing it
damage. Its justification and raison d'etre (as well as its relative and
absolute fruitfulness) stem from the fact that the cinema was a com-
pletely new and still astonishing phenomenon: entire books were
devoted to commenting upon its very existence, without any further
refinement of an analytic point of view. But today the cinema, although
a recent development as noted above, has become an established
cultural fact. We can no longer content ourselves with remarking
upon it as a newly created marvel, but rather must begin to under-
WITHIN THE cinema: t h e filmic f a c t 11
stand it in its diverse aspects, and for this we must have some idea of
the different perspectives from which it may be studied.
There is another sort of 'theory of the cinema' which, because it is
foreign to the principles followed in the present book, will not be
discussed here. In the present jargon of professionals (film producers,
critics, historians of film), the term 'theoretician' frequently designates
an author whose writings are primarily normative and the principal
aim of which is to exercise an influence on future films, even to pre-
scribe for these films the choice of certain subjects (subjects of social
significance, for example). In this sense of the term, there exist some
great theoreticians of the cinema, many of whom are Italians and
avowedly Marxists and whose conviction and inspiration are estimable.
In some cases their influence on the production of films has been greater
than would have been imagined possible (one has only to think of the
rise of certain schools and of certain trends in the cinema, for example,
Italian neorealism, the English documentary school, expressionism and
'KammerspieF in Germany, and various present day groups of the
'new cinema'); during the great era of the Soviet cinema, the Marxist
inspiration was deepened and an attempt was made to refrain from
opposing 'content' and 'form', and from relegating the latter to an
ahistoric futility.
Although there are numerous marginal cases here, as elsewhere, it
is not the directly prescriptive theoreticians we are thinking of when
we speak of a 'first epoch' in the theory of film, but rather those authors
who, like those specifically mentioned above, have devoted all or a
significant part of their cinematic efforts to the analysis of films such
as they are, and who appear, as such, as the precursors of a descrip-
tion of the film, in the sense that this word has in the sciences of
man, particularly in linguistics. This choice does not entail a judge-
ment of the principle of a normative theory - since the semiotician,
like any member of an audience, finds himself confronted with films
that he likes and others that he does not like - but simply the necessary
distinction between two types of 'theories'. On the one hand, there
is that type of theory which is concerned with films to come, which
sees things in terms of influence, which does not hesitate to counsel
and prescribe, which seeks to respond directly to the technical prob-
lems of the 'creative artist' and is significant only from this per-
spective. On the other hand, there is that type of theory which is
concerned with discourses which already exist and which seeks to
analyze them as givens. Aestheticians encounter a similar problem:
12 WITHIN THE CINEMA : THE FILMIC FACT
1
Essai sur les principes d'une philosophic du cinema (Paris : P.U.F., 1946; new
edition, 1958), 53 ff.
WITHIN THE CINEMA : THE FILMIC FACT 13
The notion of filmic fact, in the sense just specified, is, however,
still too vast to attribute to it the principle of analytic distinctiveness
suitable to a semiotics of the film, for the film itself is a 'multi-dimen-
sional' phenomenon. Some of its elements are of interest to psychology :
the psychology of perception (the film as a perceptual and spatio-
temporal 'Gestalt', monocular or binocular relief - three-dimensional-
ity - the projection of color by the mind in black and white films, retinal
after-image, the 'phi effect', 'intermittent light stimulation', the role of
maskings and movements, filmological studies with electroencephalo-
grams, 'screen effect', etc.); cognitive psychology (experiments on the
comprehension of film by children, peoples unacculturated to the
cinema, variously pathological subjects; the film as a test of level of
intelligence; the role of short-term memory and rapid restructuring of
the field of perception in the comprehension of a chained sequence,
etc.); psychology of emotion (the film as projective test, projection and
identification, affective participation in the unfolding of the film, etc.);
psychology of memory (how are films remembered, and for how long);
and of course psychology of the imagination (the film between the real
and the imaginary, between the dream and the spectacle, between the
nocturnal dream and the daydream, the problem of the 'impression of
reality' in the cinema and more generally of the 'imagination', in a
Sartrian sense), etc. It should be borne in mind that there have been
studies (and sometimes in great quantity) devoted to all of these topics
and more, and that the discipline known as filmology has, for the most
part, concerned itself with the study of the film with methods proper to
psychology, experimental and social psychology in particular. It is
precisely in this area that it has achieved the most precise results.3
On the other hand, some of the most outstanding characteristics of
the film are of direct concern to sociological investigation. If studies of
audience influence or reception (and, at the other end of the chain of
events, the sociological description of decision-making contexts) belong
to the cinematic rather than the filmic fact, sociology has nonetheless
to concern itself with the latter in other respects. In the present state
of research it is interested, for example, in the content of films, the
social elements of which (collective representations, diverse types of
stereotypes, ideologies, propaganda, 'images' and 'roles' put forth, etc.)
are more immediately apparent than what is called its form. Content
analysis is one of the tasks of communication research, especially
" On this point, see Essais sur la signification au cinema, text 3, especially 64-65.
18 WITHIN THE CINEMA : THE FILMIC FACT
should be, but of what is, and literary studies have a considerable
headstart, in spite of their own aporias.
Under these conditions, the sole division of labor within the study
of film that can be envisaged, for the time being, is one of those
divisions said to be 'based on methods', but which is based, in fact, on
the insufficiencies of these methods. This sort of classification, as we
have just seen, is always founded on method, and it is simply when
method is further extended that an object is created. This, again, does
not at all modify the problems of analysis.
It is necessary, then, to consider it as normal that the 'semiotics' of
film depends on data (but not on methods) borrowed from the psy-
chology, sociology, aesthetics, history, etc. of film. The amount of
interference will necessarily be great, but it is not necessary to try to be
clearer than the facts themselves, that is to say than our knowledge of
the facts.
The fact clearly remains that none of the disciplines just mentioned
have been able up to now to master the film as a total signifying-
object, and this objective is precisely the one that a 'semiotic' analysis
of the film could and should adopt. Moreover, semiotics, as has some-
times been pointed out,9 is meaningful only as a general study of
cultural configurations and logic, rather than as a mechanical extension
of linguistic methods applied to more and more diverse 'objects' (such
as the film) taken individually. By its very nature, the semiotic
enterprise must expand or disappear, while other disciplines (such as
certain behavioristic or experimental studies) lend themselves to a
procedure more certain to survive, since they at least achieve partial
results which are never completely useless.
To this extent one can - and ought to - assign to the semiotics of the
film the goal of the complete study of the filmic discourse considered as
an integrated signifying event (form and substance of content, form and
substance of expression). On the level of long-term objectives (which
one must have), this is the only definition that appears to us to be
possible for this growing discipline. It will someday no longer be a
question, then, of 'semiotics' in the somewhat restricted and provisional
sense that the term sometimes has today (on the margins of linguistics),
but rather of the structural analysis of the film and films (with linguistic
models, in this broader perspective, still playing an important role).
Nevertheless, we should not confuse distant objectives with more or
' For example, Tzvetan Todorov in "Perspectives semiologiques", Communi-
cations 7, 1966, 139-45.
20 WITHIN THE CINEMA : THE FILMIC FACT
less quickly realizable tasks. At the present, semiotics has not mastered
the film as a total structure any more than has sociology, psychology,
or aesthetics. We may be convinced that it is better suited to do
this (with the aid of these other disciplines) than they are themselves,
but such convictions cannot be spread simply by multiplying the
number of programmatic statements; what is important is to provide
analyses, which are always incomplete.
This book would never have been undertaken without the idea that
a semiotic type of analysis is alone capable of providing in advance
the framework for a coherent and unified understanding of the filmic
object. The day when the realization of this goal is in view the
semiotics of the film will have only to conserve this name; it will be
in reality (or more in reality) what it is today programmatically, i.e., a
theory of the filmic fact, and not an application of linguistic methods,
even if it must pass through such a stage in order to reach its goal.
In parallel fashion, and for the same reasons, disciplines like the
psychology of film, the sociology of film (not to be confused with the
psychology and sociology of the cinema, i.e., of publics), etc. will
preserve a sort of de facto autonomy - an autonomy also founded
on method, in the sense defined above - as long as the unitary theory
of film has not been achieved. We might even add that it is precisely
at the moment when one hopes to surpass this too highly fragmented
situation (which teems with psychodramas, regardless of whether they
are disguised as interdisciplinary discussions or not) that one should pay
greatest attention to its provisional yet real existence. Methods are
things which cannot be interchanged (and which cannot be 'combined'
without great danger of giving rise to monstrosities), but data and
insights, bits of experience attained, can and ought to circulate freely.
Anyone unfamiliar with the cinema will never develop a semiotic
theory of it.
The first era of general reflection on the film is, as we have said,
coming to a close, and every filmic study must clearly and consciously
select its principle of relevancy. During this first phase, what was called
the theory of the film (or the theory of the cinema, for they were scarce-
ly ever distinguished) consisted of a global, on occasion sustained and
precise, focusing of attention on the filmic or cinematic fact: an
eclectic and syncretic, and in some cases very enlightening study which
made use of several methods without applying any of them in a con-
sistent manner, and sometimes without being aware of doing so. In a
third phase, which we can look forward to entering some day, these
WITHIN THE CINEMA : THE FILMIC FACT 21
1
For additional bibliographic information, see Chapter 10.1.
26 WITHIN THE FILMIC FACT: THE CINEMA
four sensorial series (which are really five, since the written credits are
often forgotten), as well as by the technological processes to which
this quintuple physical chain owes its definitive nature (in the sense
that it may be said that televised images do not all share the same
definition, i.e., the same number of 'lines'). What is characteristic of
the cinema is that the speech events are recorded on a sound tape
(and are not, for example, transmitted by telephone, or overheard
directly), that the images are photographic (and not video-taped, or on
the other hand obtained by hand), etc. Defined in this way, the cinema
is nothing more than the combination of messages which society calls
'cinematic' - or which it calls 'films' - and it so calls any message that
corresponds to a certain technico-sensory determination: technical in
terms of the transmission, sensory in terms of the reception. The
cinema is that which is materially cinema.
Thus it can be explained why the word 'cinema', in ordinary usage,
sometimes serves, among other things, to designate a certain sum of
ms. This is a secondary meaning which is not uncommon and which
appears in sentences or expressions like : English cinema can offer no
film comparable to the latter; the Soviet cinema of the great epoch;
the best film in the entire history of the cinema, etc. In an equal number
of cases the word designates an object which - in addition to what
would belong, according to Cohen-Seat, to the 'filmic' - consists more
precisely of the sum of a certain number of films; this 'cinema' is in
some sense the result of a process of accretion.
In the works of the first theoreticians, it is in regard to the technico-
sensory definition that the art of moving (and at that time silent)
pictures was considered a 'language', or a 'script' - or yet again
(depending on the author) as a means of expression capable, through
progressive refinements, of becoming a language or a script. When
Louis Delluc, Victor Perrot, Jean Damas, and Ricciotto Canudo
developed such themes, they not only intended to assert, with a some-
what militant fanfare, the abundance of an intuited 'expressive richness',
but also the visual specifiicity (the sensorial particularity) of this tool so
full of potential resources. If, for these authors, the cinema - actually or
potentially - merited consideration as a language or a script, it was
because it had a material of expression which belonged exclusively
to it, i.e., animated photography and linear order. Even today some
authors take this same view - for the single sensory series of silent
pictures, they have simply substituted the multiple series appropriate
to talking pictures.
WITHIN THE FILMIC FACT: THE CINEMA 27
We have to admit that in itself there is nothing wrong with this
definition of the cinema. It rests, in fact, on a commonsensical pro-
position which, on that level, cannot be disputed, and which is not
incorrect. We shall reconsider it from another point of view below
(see the whole of Chapter Ten), in order to try to clarify it. Within
a preliminary delineation - still wholly external, but clearly necessary
it is clear that the 'cinema' could be nothing more than a certain
(putative) signifying system which is distinguished from others by its
material of expression. The cinema, to begin with, is evidently that
which is neither painting, nor sculpture, nor theater, etc.
It is in some of its extended forms too tempting and too often
considered to be self-evident that the technico-sensory definition
may be criticized. From the idea of a material homogeneity, one slips
in many cases into the impression, even into the assertion, that there
ought obviously to exist (at least in principle) a single system - a
single code - capable of accounting for all of the significations found
in the messages whose physical nature corresponds to the definition
given. Thus, from material singularity one slips into systemic singularity,
unless the possibility of distinguishing between the two was never even
considered. Because a combination of physically homogeneous messages
exists, there must exist a single 'language'. What is meant by 'cinema',
in this case, is not only the sum of films, but also the unique and
sovereign code which is assumed to be coextensive with all the semiotic
material provided by these films. It is the sum of the characteristics of
these films, in addition to the sum of the films themselves. It is all the
films, but it is also everything about the films. It is a postulated logical
uniqueness as well as the established physical singularity.
Emilio Garroni has presented a penetrating analysis of this gradual
transition, and has pointed out its dangers.3 The 'cinema' so under-
stood becomes a unique and total code. Of course it is not claimed
that this code is already known, that the analysis has been carried to
its logical conclusion, or that its paradigms and its syntagms (or its
modes of generating) have already been established. But the goal of this
analysis will be that of elucidating the code of the cinema, without
necessarily calling this code a 'language', terminology which betrays
the confused desire, proper to this conception, of renouncing neither
physical nor systemic singularity, whether they are judged inseparable
2
Semiotica ed estetica (L'eterogeneit del linguaggio e il linguaggio cinemato-
grafico) (Bari : Laterza, 1968). To appear in French in the series "Champ Libre",
and in English in the Approaches to Semiotics series.
28 WITHIN THE FILMIC FACT : THE CINEMA
4
Les langages et le discours (Brussels : Office of Publicity, 1945), Chapter IV.A,
34-37.
30 WITHIN THE FILMIC FACT : THE CINEMA
Garroni, Julien Greimas, and the present author, have shown that, in
each of the diverse 'language systems' of photography, drawing, graphic
schematization, 'diagramatization', cartography, cinema, etc., different,
perfectly distinct systems intervene in the same message, and that many
of them are not specific to the language system considered, but have a
larger socio-cultural significance and appear as well in other language
systems used by the same civilization at the same time. Thus the photo-
graphic message brings into play - in addition to those systems proper to
it and sometimes even before they intervene (the 'before' being logical
rather than chronological here) - diverse perceptual systems which are
also pertinent in the deciphering of the real (non-photographic) world,
codes of identification which also function in the stylized design or in
the recognition of everyday objects, codes of iconographic systems
comparable to those studied by Erwin Panofsky9 in pictorial works,
systems of connotation and of 'taste' which extend well beyond (but
without excluding it) a properly photographic aesthetics, etc. You will
recall that, in a chapter of La struttura assente,10 Umberto Eco under-
took to draw up a preliminary list of the different codes which can be
found to be operative within the still picture (which constitutes a
physical class of messages). He arrived at the number ten - ten main
categories of codes - and his enumeration does not pretend to be
exhaustive.
Jacques Bertin has noted, in the course of his study of Simiologie
graphique,11 that certain conventional symbols frequently found in
geographical maps are nevertheless foreign to a properly cartographic
code, for example when the diagrammatic silhouette of a house repre-
sents the hotel trade, or the abstract design of a fish the fishing
industry. (It is thus a question of modern ideograms, as George Mounin
has remarked in another context.12 It is also a question - the two are
not mutually exclusive - of specific signifying units which give rise
to one or another of the systems of diagrammization studied by
18
See the beginning of "Conditions d'une semiotique du monde naturel", in
A. J. Greimas, ed., Pratiques et langages gestuels, (== Langages 10) (Paris: Di-
dier-Larousse, 1968), 3-35.
14
Semiotica ed estetica, 140-41.
34 WITHIN THE FILMIC FACT : THE CINEMA
nature and function of the socially and humanly most important 'lan-
guage systems'.
In the case of specialized systems, the distinction between language
and code frequently tends to disappear. The messages which constitute
such a restricted signifying ensemble are entirely regulated by the action
of a single code (or - but the final result is about the same - the diverse
secondary codes which are linked to the principal code have an
anthropological significance which is even more restricted than that of
the principal code, and thus are rather weak in absolute terms). To be
precise, it cannot be denied that the code of road signs is found together
with a certain number of appended systems of a connotative or stylistic
order. The different occurrences of the same sign - if the distinctive
unit, Hjelmslev's 'invariant', is called 'sign' - differ among themselves
in a number of ways, and these traits, which are not relevant to the
study of the principal system, become distinctive again in relation to
diverse expressive codes. The situation, at least in principle, is thus the
same as for the richest language systems, like natural language. Thus,
the base of the traffic sign will be more or less high, the triangle of
metal more or less large, the arrow which is represented more or less
wide, etc. But these variations are of sufficiently minor interest that the
principal code, in practice, becomes coextensive with the whole of the
'language system'.
We find, then, as is normal, that the number of codes which are
involved in a language system increase with the 'richness' of the
system as a whole. Specialized systems, which are in use only in
certain very restricted contexts of social life, are thus protected against
the large amount of complex and constant fluctuations of meaning in
cultures.
The cinema, on the other hand, like all rich languages, is largely
open to all symbolisms, collective representations, and ideologies,
to the influence of diverse aesthetic theories, to the infinite play of
influences and filiations between different arts and different schools,
to all the individual initiatives of film-makers ('revivals'), etc. In this
way it is possible to treat the total ensemble of films as if they were
the diverse messages of a single code.
This complexity of films is also the result of the fact that the cinema
is what we call an art. To say this is not to render a value judgement,
nor to wish to rediscover some classical 'hierarchy of fine arts' (itself
normative and arbitrary). Certainly one can, against some academic,
reactionary, and basically ignorant 'taste', choose to assert that certain
38 WITHIN THE FILMIC FACT: THE CINEMA
films are very beautiful, and, against some other taste (fanatical, vision-
ary, and equally ignorant, although these are not the same things)
that the cinema has, until now, offered us only a rather limited number
of films of a depth and richness comparable to those of the great
literary, musical, or pictorial texts. But these would be considerations
of another sort. Within the perspective which we have adopted here,
the inclusion of the cinema in the arts does not oblige us to say that the
film is always (or frequently) a work of art by its success, nor that
many films are 'beautiful', nor that a beautiful film is more beautiful
than a beautiful book, etc. We will maintain only that the film - and
even the ugliest, dullest, and most absurd one - is always a work of
art by virtue of its social status. We should guard against confusing
'work of art' with 'aesthetic object'. Mikel Dufrenne has aptly said16
that many aesthetic objects (like the sea, the forest, or the greyhound)
are not works of art, and that many works of art (weak or unsuccess-
ful ones) are not aesthetic objects.
The film is a work of art by its intention. It is an object which is
composed, willed, concerted in its total organization, destined to please
(or to touch, to disturb, to revolt, etc.), lacking any immediate practical
utility. It is also a work of art by its consumption. The viewer rates it
as 'success' or 'failure', 'original' or 'banal', 'interesting' or 'boring', etc.
The cinema is an art because it functions socially as such, even if our
culture does not accord it the same dignity or the same legitimacy as
the traditional 'fine arts'. It is necessary to note, in addition, that in
certain cultures - as those of contemporary Egypt or India, great
producers and consumers of films - where the social image of the
cinema is very different from the image it has in our country, it is the
entire group of arts, and not the cinema in particular, whose mode of
cultural function is rather far from what we know.
Through its affinity with the arts the cinema is comparable, rather
than to specialized systems of communication, to those vast, complex,
and, so-to-speak, fundamentally socio-cultural 'language systems' which
cannot be reduced to a single code, namely, the oldest arts such as
myths, social rituals, beliefs, collective representations, tales, symbolic
behavior, ideologies, etc.
To this it may be added that the cinema, contrary to restricted
modes of communication, has no sector of meaning (no portion of the
material of the content, in Hjelmslevian terminology) which is proper
" At the very beginning of volume 1 ("L'objet esthetique") of Phinominologie
de l'experience esthetique (Paris: P.U.F., 1953).
WITHIN THE FILMIC FACT: THE CINEMA 39
to it. Certain 'language systems' are at the same time semantic fields
- for example, traffic lights, the whole 'meaning' of which can be
reduced to the social problem of the movement or non-movement of
automobiles and pedestrians - but others are restricted to organizing
and expressing no particular field. Thus the cinema, like literature or the
theater, is in principle capable of saying anything, and conveys non-
specialized signifieds which are above all ideological and cultural, and
which could be found just as well - presented and organized in a dif-
ferent manner, but taken from the same semantic pool - in other
language systems utilized by the same civilization during the same
period.
and p. 39), that the last term preserves in other contexts its neutral and
recapitulatory meaning (the sum of individual films), which does not
contradict the meaning we are considering here.
2.5. CINEMATIC-FILMIC/CINEMATIC-NON-FILMIC/
FILMIC-NON-CINEMATIC
always be avoided (if it threatens) by the use of these two terms. How-
ever, in the perspective we have adopted here, we shall - except in a
context which could promote confusion - simply call the cinematic-
filmic 'cinematic'.
The adjectives 'cinematic' and 'filmic', as defined above, do not
maintain parallel relations with their corresponding nouns. A filmic
fact isfilmicby its source; it is a fact which has been discovered initially
in a film. A cinematic fact is cinematic by its destination; it is a fact
that the analyst consciously attributes to one or the other of the codes
proper to the cinema. Thus, a filmic fact has the film behind it, and a
cinematic fact has the cinema before it.
The difference is due to the fact that the film is a message, while
what is proper to the cinema is a group of codes. An analysis which
does not have to establish the literal purpose of the filmic, must on the
contrary construct the cinematic piece by piece. For the semiotician,
the message is a point of departure, the code a point of arrival. The
semiotic analysis does not create the film, which it finds already made
by the cineast. On the other hand, we can say that, in a certain manner,
the analysis 'creates' the codes of the cinema; it should elucidate them,
make them explicit, establish them as objects, while in nature they
remain buried in films, which alone are objects which exist prior to the
analysis. It should, if not invent them, at least discover them (in the
full sense of the term). It should 'construct' them, which is in one sense
to create them.
A filmic fact cannot be filmic by its destination. The film is not
something which one can decide whether to attribute or not attribute
to such and such a fact, for it is already 'complete' when an analysis is
made of it, and it thus already contains within itself the different traits
which the analysis can but discover. Similarly, a cinematic fact cannot
be cinematic by its source. The codes of the cinema are not things which
one can immediately discern somewhere, for the cinematic does not
exist independently; only an analysis can separate it out. It thus consists
only of what the analyst puts into it.
The analyst's task, in sum, is to uncover certain filmic facts and to
construct the cinematic codes by means of these facts; some filmic traits
are cinematically specific, others are not.
3
1
Movies is more common than 'cinema' in French, without, however, correspon-
ding to 'cine'; students of English see in this an 'Americanism'. On the other hand,
English also has the word 'cinema', but which is rarer than its French cognate
and does not have the same area of usage.
52 'film' in an absolute sense
examples are simple and common, and could be easily multiplied. What
do they show ? They show that the word 'film' - even in the absolute
sense where it refers to a group of traits which are of the same
order of generality as the 'cinema' and which, like it, may be
applied to virtually all films - does not, however, designate the same
thing as 'cinema'. Certainly it becomes generalized in this way, and in
this approaches our 'cinematic', a convergence which formed the basis
of the terminological undertaking envisaged a moment ago. But m,
even in the general singular, is still the message, and it is the message
which begins most often with the credits, has a beginning and an end,
etc. All propositions which obviously imply a closed text, a discourse,
but which would no longer have any meaning - and moreover would
not occur to anyone, which accounts for the unacceptable sentences - if
they had to apply to a code (system), i.e., to a purely abstract entity
which does not involve a textual representation, and thus no 'beginning*
or 'end'. This ideal substance is cinematic. And concerning 'film' in
an absolute sense, one does well to exclude reference to any specific
message, but continue no less to include the fact itself of the message,
which is distinct from any code, codical elements, or group of codes,
a sufficient reason for abandoning the idea of using it as a substitute
for our 'cinema'. There is a second reason, a corollary to the first -
namely, that the message, precisely because it is a message, manifests
conjointly all sorts of specific or non-specific codes; however, our
notion of the cinematic excludes the second, retaining only the first.
Thus, cinema is in opposition not only to films (distributive plural),
but also to m (absolute singular). Similarly, 'literature' may be con-
trasted with 'book' as well as 'books', and 'painting' with 'picture', as
well as 'pictures', etc. For particular messages are not the only ones
to differ from general codes; the very existence of the message is dif-
ferent, or the ensemble of traits common to diverse messages to the
extent that they are messages and not codes. A book always has a be-
ginning and an end, while literature does not. A piece of music is a
discourse, while 'music' is not.
This notion of 'absolute-film', or at least the principle behind it, does
not present any difficulties. It designates - it is even, in its most common
usage, the only term to designate - what one has in mind when one
wants to speak of the message (a delimited object, a closed sequence, a
manifest and actualized unit, a web of co-presences) without referring
to any specific message(s) and in imagining what one says as being
applicable to any message - but also without this element of generality
'film' in an absolute sense 53
being able to lead to confusion with the system at the corresponding
level (a purely abstract signifying-ensemble, and as such never man-
ifested), which is equally a 'general' thing, but in a different manner.
The word 'film', in its diverse spontaneous uses, is thus always on
the side of the message, and it is to the context that tradition assigns
the task of indicating if it involves a given message or the fact of the
message. Everyday language maintains this last distinction in a rela-
tively clear way, although by means of quite different signifiers. Thus,
on the one hand we have This film is very beautiful, I don't like this
type of fiIm, Murnau's films have not become dated, etc. - and, on
the other, The film is thoroughly meaningful, Films are social objects,
A film is a work of art, All films are basically documentary, etc. These
examples also show that use of the word 'film* in the grammatical
singular is not necessarily always based on the singular of generality (a
semantic notion). If, for example, someone tells us that This film is one
of the most beautiful around, or that The film just shown was made in
Australia, the grammatical singular obviously excludes all generality,
and on the contrary, recalls the various remarks made earlier about
the plural of particularity. 'Film', in those cases, is similar to 'films'; it
is a question of particular messages, even if for the moment only one
is mentioned. Inversely, it may happen that the idea of generality is
easily established in propositions where the word 'film' is used in the
grammatical plural. Instead of saying that the film begins most often
with the credits, one can just as well say that Films begin most often
with the credits, and it is clear that in both cases one has said the same
thing. We shall nevertheless speak of the absolute use of the word
(rather than of its 'singular of generality') and of its distributive use
(rather than of its 'plural of particularity'). It would have seemed
simpler to distinguish between the 'general' and the 'particular' uses,
but this terminology would have been dangerous, invoking much too
much the notion of language usage (ordinary usage or, on the contrary,
special usages). However, the distributive use of the word 'film' is in
no way, in the present usage of French, an unusual one, but on the
contrary the most ordinary one, and the absolute use is, according to
present usage, the more restricted of the two. 'Film' serves much more
often to designate one or more specific messages proper to all films.
Thus the fact of the message, even considered in its greatest gen-
erality, is not to be confused with the fact of the code. And yet there
is nothing more in the message than in the ensemble of codes of this
message - if not their combination, which is itself a system, but a
54 'FELM' IN AN ABSOLUTE SENSE
particular system - since all the signifying structures, all the organized
configurations, all the 'laws' which the analyst discovers within the
message are the very things which will be attributed to one or another
of its codes, and which will thus contribute to the detailed establishment
of these codes. The particular combination of several codes within a
single message is nothing less than the structure of that message. But
the structure of an object and the object itself are nevertheless two
different things; the latter is what initially serves as the object of
analysis, while the former is the expression of the completed anal-
ysis. Codes exist only because the analyst has created them with
materials furnished by the message, but they (or their combination in
a particular system) are not real objects in the world and thus remain
inalterably distinct from the message. Thus we can understand that it
is not the cinema which has a beginning and an end, or which begins
with the credits - but only the film, which is always a message.
In English and German, the words movies and Kino (the closest
equivalents to the French cinema) are primarily restricted, in current
usage, to the designation of diverse things which Cohen-Seat would call
cinematic. 'Movies' and 'Kino' have only a slight connotation of the
filmic; they evoke the industry, technology, economy (like cinima),
but only slightly the discourse, language, or the work itself (contrary to
cinema). Also, in order to designate the filmic fact in its most general
sense, English and German use, in many cases, only 'film' in its absolute
sense. We leave aside the English motion pictures, which is very in-
consistent. In French, on the contrary - and in other languages, like
Italian, which behaves in this regard very much like French - the word
cinema currently designates filmic facts (example: le cinema est un
langage), except that the absolute sense of the word film is also used.
Thus French makes use of two terms within this semantic domain,
while English and German for the most part have only one, i.e., in
those cases where one would like to mention the filmic fact outside of
any particular film. It is without a doubt this duality, proper to certain
languages, which explains why the two terms are specialized and tend
to share the semantic field, 'cinema' on the side of codes, and 'film' (in
its absolute sense) on the side of the message itself, designated as a
general fact.
We shall conform, then, after having investigated them, to the
dominant tendencies of the ordinary usage of the word 'film', and will
duly use it in its distributive as well as absolute sense only to designate
facts of (particular or general) messages with the plurality and hetero-
'film' in a n a b s o l u t e sense 55
status of the figure, for it is evidently its filmic status which is thus
revealed. On the contrary, if some theoretician of the screen established
in his 'montage schedule' a privileged relationship between the cross-
cutting montage and the parallel montage, emphasizing their common
characteristics and pinpointing precisely their differences in order to
establish their paradigmatic relationship, everyone would judge that it
was the cinematic situation of the figure (and not itsfilmicsituation) that
the author was attempting to show.
In the Soviet films from the classical period, the symbolic opposition
between the 'Reds' and the 'Whites' often helped to organize and
punctuate the narrative. One could not, and does not, speak, however,
of it as a cinematic construction, for the paradigm of the Reds and the
Whites belongs to a political code and not a cinematic one. When
it appears in a film, one speaks of it as a filmic construction. But it
could happen that the manner in which this opposition is used, in the
detail of images, calls for resources proper to the cinema. One could
say, for example, that The cinematic treatment of the antithesis be-
tween the Reds and the Whites was especially successful in this film.
A sentence like Cinema is a language (or Cinema is an art)
is much more common than Film is a language (or Film is an
art). One speaks of a cinematic language more often than of a filmic
language. In these three pairs of expressions, the version containing
the word 'film' (or 'filmic') borders on the unacceptable. It is felt to
be such in everyday language itself. To think that the cinema is an art
does not allow us to say that film is one, since it can only be a realiza-
tion of this art, and not the art itself.
In cinema, sound is as important as images/ In flm, sound is as
important as images: these sentences are both possible, and express
just about the same thing. This is because, at this degree of generality,
the idea which is put forward (the great importance of sound) is true
both of codically heterogeneous messages and of the homogeneous,
specific codes. On the other hand, it is at the end of the film - and
certainly not at the end of the cinema - that sound sometimes continues
to be heard while all images have disappeared from the screen : the
proposition, this time, makes sense only in reference to a message.
The contexts in which 'cinema' and 'film' (or 'cinematic' and 'filmic')
become interchangeable are quite numerous. Examples are easily found
in the literature on the cinema, and often consist of quite simple
sentences without any sort of affectation. We have already cited some
examples; there are many more, for example, The Cinema (or film)
'film' in an absolute sense 57
brings into play four types of materials, visual images, sound effects,
speech, and music.
The quite considerable extent of this zone of overlap should not be
surprising, and the overlap itself is no anomaly to be 'done away with'.
This phenomenon of contextual neutralization is not restricted to the
domain of the cinema (or of thefilm!); its equivalent may be found in
other semiotic studies, even in linguistics. To propose that Morse code
is based entirely on the opposition between short and long, or that
Every message transmitted in Morse is based entirely on the opposition
between long and short, is one and the same thing (except that the
words 'based entirely' do not have exactly the same meaning in both
cases). Similarly, if one asserts that clichis are practically nonexistent
in the French language, one could just as well say that Clichis are
practically nonexistent in French utterances (it is simply that the non-
existence in question is not exactly the same in both cases). It could
never be said that the notions of language and utterance are, in lin-
guistic research, freely interchangeable, or that their opposition rests
on uncertain and obscure considerations. It is clear to everyone that
these are two quite distinct notions. And yet there exists a class of
propositions which are true of both the utterances and the language; the
example given of clich6s is one. Others are perhaps more common;
thus, one can say that The combination of a verb and a noun is in
many idioms an essential characteristic of the language, but just as well
that The combination of a verb and a subject is in many idioms an
essential characteristic of the utterance - that The French language
permits both coordination and subordination, but just as well that
French utterances permit both coordination and subordination, etc.
We can understand, then, that if the distinction between cinema and
film is sometimes a source of difficulties, it is not because the two
notions are inherently ill-defined, or that their opposition is complex
and ephemeral, but rather that habits of rigor are less well established
in research on the cinema than in other disciplines. That two concepts
should overlap in one place while remaining distinct elsewhere should
cause confusion only in studies which are themselves confused.
What remains true, however - but which is of greater interest to
stylistics than to our terminological project - is that current usage turns
out to be on the whole more strict and more consistent when it is a
question of the word 'cinema' than of 'film'. The word 'cinema' almost
never occurs in statements concerning the message and the message
alone: anyone might say that Films rarely last more than three
58 'film' in an a b s o l u t e sense
hours, but no one says that The cinema rarely lasts more than three
hours (or at least one is speaking of something different: of the 'film-
show', which is a social institution and not a message or a discourse :
a good example of a cinematic-non-filmic fact). Anyone might say that
Films ordinarily end with a visual image which is longer than the others,
but no one would say that The cinema ordinarily ends with a visual
image which is longer than the others. One can commonly talk about
serial films, but not of serial cinema, etc. On the contrary, in certain
propositions concerning the code and it alone, one much more frequent-
ly finds the anomaly which causes 'film' to appear where 'cinema' was
expected. We have already mentioned Film is a language, Film is an
art. One also comes across sentences like It is difficult to compare
literature with film, for..., or still, Film achieves spontaneously and
effortlessly what baroque art has long been striving toward. Uses of
this sort are almost unacceptable in ordinary language, but occur quite
frequently in conversations or books on the cinema.
This means that there exists a sort of sub-usage, which may be
judged to be unfortunate but which has its own rules. These rules
predict that the interchangeability of 'cinema' and 'film' is unilateral:
'film' cannot be replaced by 'cinema', but 'cinema' may be replaced by
'film' (at least when it does not bear Cohen-Seat's meaning, and refers
to filmic facts). The idea of a code is more clearly present in 'cinema'
than the idea of message in 'film'. In addition, 'cinema' is ruled out
when speaking of the message, but 'film' is apt to designate both the
fact of the code and the fact of the message, or at least does not exclude
the code as clearly as 'cinema' does the message. 'Film' is thus capable
of being used in all cases, while 'cinema' may be employed only when
speaking of the code. This is precisely why 'film' can always replace
'cinema' without the reverse being true.
Why is this sub-usage unfortunate ? Because it deprives us of a term
which is clearly opposite 'cinema' as message to code, and which
designates only this message. And also because it creates with 'cinema'
and 'film' an unnecessary pair of terms when it is a question of re-
ferring to specific codes. We shall thus reject this particular usage in
order to preserve the tacit definitions of more general usage: 'film'
designates the message in its plurality and its codical heterogeneity,
'cinema' the ensemble of homogeneous and specific codes. The two
words are interchangeable only when what one wants to say applies, in
effect, to the two corresponding objects.
We shall conclude this chapter by remarking that the existence of
'film' in an absolute sense 59
this sort of overlap is inseparable from certain characteristics of the
semiotic enterprise itself, as well as of the facts that it attempts to
understand. If 'cinema' and 'film' are sometimes interchangeable, the
first reason is that certain phenomena, by their very nature, belong
both to cinema and to film. What we call cinematic, you will recall,
is the cinematic-filmic. Any cinematic fact is a filmic fact (although the
reverse is not true). Thus, the processes included in what one oc-
casionally calls the 'rhetoric of the screen' (montage figures, camera
movements, splicings, etc.) belong both to the cinema (and thus are
cinematic) and appear in films (thus, they are filmic). This is why, as
long as one is describing the most general principle of a form of mon-
tage, without any detail - as in the example of the lap dissolve and the
cross-cutting montage mentioned above - one can correctly speak of it
indifferently as afigureof cinema or of film.
In addition, there exists a level of analysis at which general codes
can be described as being made up of the combination of characteristics
common to all particular messages ('the cinema' thus rejoins 'the
film'), with the exception, however - the unavoidable exception - of
the very fact of the message. In addition, different features of signifi-
cation lend themselves to being analyzed, at least during a certain
time, as belonging to both cinema and film, or more exactly as being
situated beyond the point where the distinction is meaningful. Thus,
the two notions have in common a part (and only a part) of their
content, as is witnessed by the very existence of 'cinematic-filmic'. But
even in regard to this shared part they continue no less to differ radically
in terms of their definition, and to represent two objects which have
every reason to remain distinct in regard to the analytic procedure.
Code always differs from message in that one is code and the other
message, and - even if the complete list of what one finds in the
message were identical with the total list of what one introduces into
the code (a hypothesis which is immediately ruled out when several
codes are at work within the same message) - it would still be true that
these traits should be understood in the future as being associated with
one another throughout a given discourse, and thus linked by the co-
herence of a logic which is always tacit. The cross-cutting montage,
envisaged in its most general sense, can very well be both a process of
the cinema and film. It is nevertheless (or in any case it ought to
be) conceived of in the film as a form capable of occupying a particular
segment of the film tape, and in the cinema as a figure - another figure,
and yet the same, hence the confusion - which realizes one of the
60 'film' in an absolute sense
The reader will have noticed that until now the notion of the cinematic
has been defined in terms of two distinctive features. To say that
something is cinematic means first that it occupies a position (or that
one hopes to assign it a position) within a generally coherent system,
i.e., a code. As long as a trait is found in a message and one merely
limits oneself to establishing its presence or superficially describing it,
one is treating it as a filmic trait. From the moment that one thinks of
it in terms of a code it becomes - or at least one tries to make it - a
cinematic trait. Codicity (i.e., the position with regard to the code,
to what is no longer the bare message) is thus one of the distinctive
characteristics of the cinematic. The other is specificity : we will speak
of the 'cinematic' only if the codes which we have in mind belong to
a certain means of expression (called the 'cinema'), or if we have the
intention of demonstrating that they do.
However, popular opinion and current usage implicitly associate the
notion of cinema with a third characteristic which cannot be confused
with specificity or with codicity - namely, the seme generality. The
word 'cinema' represents to most minds an ensemble of traits common
to all films. 'The cinema' is frequently opposed to 'films', and in doing
so it is not so much (or not immediately) the difference between code
and message, or between specific and heterogeneous, that one has in
mind, but much more spontaneously, the difference between the general
and the particular.
This suggestion, no matter how widespread, is the result of a mis-
understanding. The notion of the cinematic only involves generality
when the word is used in its absolute sense and with no modifier. The
indication of generality is thus limited to this use of the term and not to
the term itself. If I say that The cinema is a concrete art, I obviously be-
62 PLURALITY OF CINEMATIC CODES
lieve that my statement applies to all films. But I can just as well say
that Films are more concrete than books and the suggestion of generality
would be just as strong, in spite of the absense of the word 'cinema'.
Inversely, it suffices to modify 'cinema' with some modifier in order to
make the idea of generality disappear: when someone talks to me
about the German cinema, or about the avant-garde cinema, or the
cinema between the two Wars, what follows is not expected to concern
all films.
It is once more necessary to note that the word 'cinema' (a sub-
stantive) is hardly ever used in the plural (when one speaks of 'cinemas'
one is thinking of movie theaters). This preponderance of the singular
form certainly contributes to a large extent to the misunderstanding that
we would like here to eliminate. One confusedly imagines the cinema
as a unique and global thing. (Likewise, it is because the word 'film' is
very often used in the plural that the notion is commonly felt to be
distributive and particularizing.) With the adjective 'cinematic' the
error is less pervasive, and the suggestion of an automatic generality
disappears. Since one can speak of cinematic styles, of cinematic codes,
of cinematic genres, etc., a fact can be cinematic and yet limited to
certain films.
Thus, cinematic phenomena are not necessarily common to all films.
They can be, in which case it is a question of general cinematic
phenomena. In this category, one can include not only the traits which
are in fact cinematic, but also those which are potentially so. It is clear,
for example, that the pan shot - if one means by this the figure itself,
and not just one of its particular values, which already puts us on the
level of a sub-code - is capable of appearing in any film, while other
traits are not (e.g., certain types of long shots are common only to the
Western, certain types of camera movements only to the German ex-
pressionist school, etc.). The pan shot thus constitutes a general
cinematic phenomenon, and yet its generality is only potential, for some
films do not include a single pan shot.
We shall call general cinematic codes those systemic processes
(which are to be constructed by the analyst) to which may be attributed
those features which not only characterize the big screen, but which
in addition are (actually or potentially) common to all films.
Opposite the general cinematic codes, particular cinematic codes
include those elements of signification which appear only in certain
types of films (which is why they are particular), but which nevertheless
are realized only in films (which is why they are cinematic). The
PLURALITY OF CINEMATIC CODES 63
presence of codes of this sort is quite evident in films which belong
to a well-defined 'genre' like the classic Western. The Western mani-
fests a code (or a combination of codes) which is distinct from those
which characterize films in general (in the Western, the former are in
addition to the latter), but also from those which would play a role in
the organization of a song or an oral narrative of the American West.
The 'genre' is, however, only one example of those classes of films to
which particular cinematic codes correspond. There are others, such as
the films of a given 'school' (if a unity of choices really exists for it), or
a given epoch, or a given country (if indeed they have traits in common
which differ from those of other countries), or a given cineast, etc. We
shall return to these problems in Chapter Seven, Parts 1 and 2.
A particular code is not a particular system. Both a particular code
and a system are obviously general, as is indicated by their respective
names. But they must still not be confused. Each film has its own
structure, which is an organized whole, a fabric in which everything
fits together; in short, a system. But this system is valid only for one
film. It is a configuration which results from diverse choices of elements,
as well as from a certain combination of the chosen elements. These
choices have been made from among the resources provided by diverse
(general or particular) cinematic codes - but also by non-cinematic
codes. A film is not 'cinema' from one end to another, and what it
contains of the non-cinematic (its political background, for example,
or its character sketches) is just as important as the rest when it comes
to defining its uniqueness, i.e., to defining what differentiates it from
all other films. To the extent that films are considered as unique
totalities, each contains within itself a system which is as unique as the
film itself. It is a system, but not exactly a code, since it would have only
a single 'message'. Particular cinematic codes, on the other hand, in
spite of their particularity, well deserve to be called codes, for each of
them is at work in several messages (even if not in all the messages of
the cinema) and does not specifically concern any one of these messages.
One should be careful, then, not to confuse the particular with the
singular (in spite of the lack of generality common to both), for the
particular is still on the side of the code, while the singular refers to
the structure of the message (see Chapter 5.5). Note, in addition, that
the general and the particular, despite the difference of their scope,
have in common the fact that they are not singular, i.e., that they
remain codes.
In a word, if common intuition (incorrectly) attaches to the notion
64 PLURALITY OF CINEMATIC CODES
relevance. But when one treats the film as a unique totality, the same
rigor of relevance demands that one take into consideration all the
codes which are manifested in the film in question, including those
which are not cinematic. There are, however, many of them, and
they play a most important role. There are a thousand things in a film
which do not come from the cinema (even if their realization within
the film - their 'treatment' - is capable of borrowing properly cinematic
means); for example, all the filmic material commonly subsumed under
labels like 'the psychology of personality', 'the study of customs', 'the
psychoanalytic background', 'the social (or religious or political) theme',
of the film, 'thematics'. (It is of little importance that all this is in-
correctly named - i.e., that the cinematic and the non-cinematic, within
a film, are not as opposed as a pure 'form' to a pure 'content'.1 In any
case, what remains is that certain elements of the film, with their form
and their content, are intrinsically tied to the cinema, while others are
not.) Thus it is true that the study of individual filmic systems is quite
distinct from the study of the cinematic language system or the diverse
cinematic codes underlying it.
All this confirms the fact that there are two different ways of being
interested in a given film and that common usage, when it speaks of
the 'study of films', often fails to distinguish clearly between them.
A film may serve simply as an example for a study of the cin-
ematic language system, or some general or particular cinematic code.
In this case it is a question of a process whose real point of application
is not the film, but the cinema (or at least some aspect of it) on the basis
of the example of this film. Among all the semiotic material afforded by
the film, the traits which the analyst will retain as relevant will be
those which are not unique in this individual film. It could also happen
(and the solution is in a sense the same) that one wants to examine one
or several non-cinematic codes, using this film as an example, as when
sociologists study certain social systems of representations or expecta-
tions behind films of fiction which do not, in themselves, interest them.
(In other words, one must understand that anyone who studies the
forward travelling shot on the basis of these very films is not more
'intrinsically' interested in films than is the sociologist; the latter is
more interested in the cinema than the former, not in the films which
serve as examples for both. A film, in other words, is not only an
example of cinema, but also of culture.)
1
We have studied this point in particular in "Propositions methodologiques pour
l'analyse du film".
FROM CODE TO SYSTEM; MESSAGE TO TEXT 73
step, while the viewer practices it directly and implicitly, wanting above
all 'to understand the film*. The semiotician, for his part, would also
like to be able to understand how the film is understood, a path
'parallel' to the spectator's, we have said, but one which also goes one
step further; the two paths are truly parallel, in sum, and not at all
intersecting. The semiotician's reading is a meta-reading, an analytic
compared to the 'naive' reading (in fact, the cultural reading) of the
spectator.
The semiotician follows a path which leads in the opposite direction
from that of the cineast. The cineast starts with diverse (most often
implicit, sometimes even unconscious) systems in order to arrive at a
demonstrable text. The semiotician focuses on the text in order to
reconstitute (and always explicitly) the systems which are implied by it,
which are invisible in it, and which are discoverable in it alone. What
the cineast constructs is the text, while the analyst constructs the system.
This distinction between the two approaches does not necessarily
presuppose the physical separation of persons nor of 'works'. We know
that, in regard to a book, the writer and the writing, to use Roland
Barthes' terms, occasionally tend to converge (Blanchot, etc.). The
notion of deconstruction advanced by the 'Tel Quel' group refers,
among other things, to the site of this juncture. There is no reason
why we should, in principle, ignore the cinematic equivalent of this
(see the studies undertaken in journals such as Cahiers du cinima or
Cinethique). It is simply more difficult to realize in practice, for the
average degree of theoretical maturity, judging from the whole of the
'domain', is appreciably smaller when it is a question of the cinema -
and also because the problem of the equivalence of the metalanguage
becomes much more complicated here. An expos6 written about the
cinema is not of the same form as what it is talking about, contrary to
what occurs in the theory of literature. Inversely, the utilization of the
cinema as a metalanguage reflected by (and reflecting upon) itself is
still an uncommon and very difficult operation, for it is not rooted in
the rich reflective past which exists for written works.
' See the first nine chapters of Proligom&ne une thiorie du langage. The
opposition of these two terms reoccurs, moreover, in all of Hjelmslev's writings.
He frequently used procks in place of 'texte'.
' Concerning L'Esthetique et Psychologie du cinema by Jean Mitry, we have
progressed to a rapid historico-bibliographical 'focusing' on this question:
pp. 191-93 of "Problmes actuels de theorie du cinema", Revue d'esthetique
XX:2-3, special issue on "Le cinema", 1967, 180-221.
76 FROM CODE TO SYSTEM; MESSAGE TO TEXT
entire set of possible filmic studies. This first definition will remain
external and so-to-speak purely negative.
If we consider Carl Dreyer's Ordet, in its uniqueness as a finished
work of art, as a singular text, we find in it only a single system, one
overall system which coincides with what many would call the 'struc-
ture' of this film. If we look at it as a particularly rich source of diverse
and specific frame lines,4 Ordet (or rather its frame lines) are no more
than the messages of a general system, the system of frame lines in
the cinema - or of a more particular system but which does not specifi-
cally concern Ordet (or any other film), and thus which remains a
code, the code of frame lines in films of a certain (sometimes called
'expressionistic') style.
There are thus, concerning the film, three main types of systems, the
first two of which are codes and the third singular systems : general
cinematic codes, particular cinematic codes, and systems proper to
diverse films.
With the singular systems we apprehend the film as a 'work', while
with the codes it is seen rather as a fact of language, as the product
of a particular means of expression. One could say then - in temporarily
yielding to an impoverishing and all too common classification - that the
singular systems maintain a more visible, more obvious, relationship
to the 'aesthetic' approach to the filmic fact, and the codes to its
'semiotic' approach. However, as a singular system is at bottom only
a combination of several codes (and as, inversely, what is common to
all codes is that they are combined in singular systems), the so-called
aesthetic approach could only do itself damage if it neglected codes, and
the so-called semiotic approach would be dangerously incomplete if it
ignored singular systems.
We have come, then, to propose a distinction between codes and
singular systems. Each of the systems, it was said, borrows its elements
from the codes, while remaining distinct from them as a system. Thus,
for example, the cinematic codes include, among other elements, the
possibility of that particular construction known as the parallel montage,
but the study of these codes, in itself, would never tell us to what
extent and in what manner the parallel montage dominates the total
composition of D. W. Griffith's Intolerance. For to focus on this point
and to understand its exact significance, it no longer suffices to consider
the parallel montage as such, nor even to know what its place is in the
* See Philippe Parrain et al: "Dreyer, cadres et mouvements" Etudes cinema-
tographiques 53-56, Paris, 1967.
78 FROM CODE TO SYSTEM; MESSAGE TO TEXT
eautious about saying that singular systems are 'real', for a system is
never real (only a text is). If the singular systems seem to be real, it
is because they are singular, and thus located in a unique and 'con-
crete' place. But this place is concrete only to the extent that it is a
text. The corresponding system, for its part, is nowhere made explicit,
even in this place. What the film copy in good condition preserves for
us, what it offers us, is the text of the film and not its system. Thus the
system is not 'real', which is why it is a system (a fabrication of the
analyst, like codes). What remains, nevertheless, is that the analyst
may effect this construction on the basis of a single text, while in order
to construct a code it is necessary to refer to multiple and dispersed
messages. Thus, the basic material one begins with (the corpus) coin-
cides in one case with an ensemble which was unified even before being
made into a corpus, while in the other case its unity is due only to the
organization especially undertaken by the analyst in view of constituting
a corpus. If one gets the impression that singular systems are more
real than codes, it is, after all, because the latter have several messages
while the former have only one.
Obviously one could, on the contrary, assign the characteristic of
being 'real' to the investigator's own construction: this construction
could be rigorous, coherent, and account for the facts. But in this case
too it is clear that the codes will not be less real than the singular
systems.
We may conclude, concerning this point, that it is possible to
contrast codes and singular systems as systems of possibilities to
realized (but not 'real') systems - and that this distinction does not in-
volve introducing, between these two sorts of constructed sets, any dif-
ference in the empirical degree of reality, but simply asserting (in an-
other way) that a singular system is a combination of several codes.
(much less general ones), one also finds those which belong to the
Western, and correspond thus to an intermediate degree of generality.
But if one simply divides codes into the general and the particular,
those of the Western and those of the Italian Western would uniform-
ly belong to the class of particular codes.
It should be understood, then, that the so-called 'particular' codes
are codes which are more or less particular - and, from this, that
the dual division of general and particular codes has as its only effect
(and also as its only goal) to distinguish clearly from all others those
cinematic systems which present the maximum degree of generality.
The principal dividing line, in fact, passes between phenomena which
concern all films and those which do not concern all films. When it is a
question of the latter, the difference between those which concern a
slightly greater or lesser number of films is not, of necessity, of com-
parable importance. It is a question, in any case, of phenomena which,
even if authentically cinematic, are differentially significant, i.e., which
distinguish certain films from others. General cinematic traits, for their
part, distinguish the film from what is not film : the study of these
traits thus poses very directly the very problem of the cinema itself,
while in establishing particular codes one deals with problems which
are posed, so-to-speak in the cinema.
But if this is the case, one could object, perhaps, that particular
codes are not truly cinematic, since what they are associated with is not
the cinema but a group of films. A fact deserves to be called cinematic
only if it belongs to the cinema, and thus to all films. The only cin-
ematic traits would thus be those which we call 'general cinematic',
and even this label would be a pleonasm. And 'particular cinematic
code' would be a contradiction in terms.
In fact, this is not at all the case, for certain traits present the re-
markable characteristic of appearing only in certain films, and of
nevertheless appearing only in films (at least in the exact form in which
they are observed). Hence there are characteristics which, without
belonging to all films, nevertheless belong to the cinema. Phenomena
of this sort are numerous and one comes across them at every step. It
is clear, for example, that the 'strong' forms of montage, as explored by
Soviet cineasts from 1925 to 1930, are so many properly cinematic
structures, although they have been noticed in only a small number of
films in relation to all those which exist. In sum, a cinematic trait is
years, by cineasts such as Sergio Solima or Sergio Leone. To this day, the best
knows film of this genre is Leone's II etait une fois dans L'Ouest.
FROM CODE TO SYSTEM; MESSAGE TO TEXT 81
The terminology adopted in Chapter 5.2 might at first glance give the
impression of being arbitrary : why especially choose the word 'system'
as the most general term, and the word 'code' to refer to a particular
sort of system ?
In fact, if 'code' was selected here to refer to non-singular systems,
it is because in all its present uses it already (and exclusively) designates
such systems. In its original context, i.e., information theory, it serves
to name a system of similarities and differences which, by definition,
is designed to serve repeatedly and to remain the same across numerous
'messages'. In linguistics, into which the word was later imported, it
refers to langue (but not langage, discourse, or utterance), which pres-
ents the same character of anonymous repeated applicability. In sociol-
ogy and anthropology, where it is sometimes used, 'codes' are systems
of behavior, expectations, or collective representations which are
manifested on numerous occasions in the life of a group, and not just
once in the history of its development. In ordinary speech itself, the
word 'code' always designates systems with multiple manifestations and
frequent reutilizations, e.g., 'highway code', 'the code of maritime
navigation', 'cipher code', 'Social Security code number', etc. In truth,
the idea that there exist, except accidentally, several messages for a
single code - i.e., the idea that a code is a system capable of being in-
finitely reutilized - is an inherent part of the word itself, as it is
employed today. Moreover, when one talks about a 'code valid only
for a single message', as happens in the structural analysis of poems, it
is always in a so-to-speak manner, presenting this definition as meta-
phoric. Because it assumes the multiplicity of messages, the word also
has a connotation of instrumentality : a code is a tool, and if it normally
has several messages, it is because it is designed to serve. It is also quite
true that this instrumentality, this 'transitive' characteristic, inevitably
84 FROM CODE TO SYSTEM; MESSAGE TO TEXT
normative, and sometimes in the crudest and most naive manner. (It
has happened that, in the world of cinema, one calls 'theoreticians'
persons whose writings are devoted to advising cineasts to deal in their
films with 'social' rather than 'psychological' subjects.)
Another terminological refinement, this time relative to the word
'text': It is evident that this term, for us, does not apply solely to the
verbal element of the film. In one of its current uses, the term has a
restrictive sense and refers only to an intelligible series of words (and
even of written words, rather han spoken ones). But we will take it
here in Hjelmslev's sense, that is to name any semiotic expression
('process' according to the Danish author), whether it is linguistic, non-
linguistic, or a combination of both (talking pictures are associated with
the third of these cases). A series of images is also a text, as is a sym-
phony, a sequence of sound effects, or a series including images, sound
effects, and music, etc., together. This point will be further discussed, in
regard to the film, in Chapter 8.5.
since there are several codes. The autonomous structure one is trying
to find is thus not the structure 'of the message', but of the combina-
tion of messages. Inversely, to be able to speak justifiably of a structure
of the message, in the singular, it would be necessary to have before
one a fragment representing a single code (or even, which comes to
the same thing, a fragment which one has decided to analyze with
regard to only one of its codes). However, this message - correctly
named at last - would no longer have a structure of its own, so that
the moment the second half of the expression becomes exact ('of the
message'), the first ('structure') ceases to be so. In the present case, the
analyst would, as a working hypothesis, attribute to the single code all
the structural regularities found in the message. He would thus have a
structure in the message. This would not be a 'structure of the message',
but rather the structure of the code implicitly present within the
message. Thus, when a discourse is the message of a single code (or
when it is provisionally treated as such), it has no structure distinct
from the structure of the code. When one studies a natural language by
abstracting from all the codes of connotation grafted onto it, the
structure onefindsin each utterance is nothing more than one manifes-
tation of the structure of the idiom (of its grammar, its phonology, etc.),
which is present in that utterance as in any other, and which does not
account for its uniqueness. But if one takes into consideration other
codes (stylistic, intonational, etc.) represented in this utterance, a struc-
ture appears which this time cannot be confused with the structure of
any of the codes which are involved in it, since it consists, by definition,
in combining them in a certain way. It is this type of structure which
we would prefer to call a 'singular system'. The corrolary of this system
on the level of manifestation (i.e., the perceivable discourse in which
this system is found) is not the message, since it contains several
messages, but the text: to be exact, the text of that particular system,
of that single and overall system (for each of the messages within this
text itself remains a text, i.e., one of the texts of the corresponding
system, which is in this case a code).
Strictly speaking, there is never a structure of the message. This is
not paradoxical, but simply logical: only a plural text can offer a
singular system. We shall return to this problem, from another direc-
tion, in Chapter 7.6.
But if this is so, one could then say that this singular system, which
must not be called structure of the message, could at least be called
structure of the text. Does not the above discussion show, in fact, that
FROM CODE TO SYSTEM; MESSAGE TO TEXT 89
the object whose structure this structure is (in our example, this object is
itself a system) - while in saying 'system', one suggests that the form,
for its part, tends to become a sort of object and that this object, like
all objects, has its own structure. Take, for example, the proposition
The structure of this system is very complex (or numerous other sen-
tences of this sort): if it has any meaning, it is because the system
is assumed to be known, constructed, already demonstrated by the
analyst. It thus becomes itself a sort of text (an artificial one), and it is
of this text that one asserts that it has a complex structure.
6
TEXTUAL SYSTEMS
no less proper to this film, and which are nevertheless not inseparable
from the cinematic fact (although they are linked to it in the film in
question).
All this, it might be said, applies to films which are original, and it
may happen that a film comes close to platitude and banality : to speak
of what this film 'has in its own right' thus becomes problematic. Let
us accept this, at least temporarily (for the absence of peculiar
characteristics is still, in one sense, a peculiar characteristic). It remains,
in any case, that this lack of peculiarities can just as well characterize
- depending on the film - the use which is made of cinematic codes,
the use which is made of non-cinematic codes, or the use which is
made of one and the other at the same time. Thus, it is not only filmic
systems in their realization and their manifestation which combine the
cinematic and the non-cinematic; this same combination is also as-
sociated with their disappearance, i.e., with, in the extreme, their
'absence'.
We shall refrain, then, from using the confused notion of originality
and banality to create pseudo-problems. The distinction, if better
understood (for it would be impossible to eliminate it entirely), cor-
responds to something completely different. Certain ways of utilizing
codes are more common than others, certain combinations of codes
are more common than others, and certain codes are more common
than others. But this fact is of a very general validity, and applies as
much to non-cinematic as to cinematic ones.
That is not all. A banal film is in reality not a film that is lacking
a singular system; it is a film whose singular system is banal. This is not
at all tautological, if at least one admits that a banal system is a system
quite similar to numerous other systems. Quite similar, but not iden-
tical, for each banal film is banal in an original way, and you will not
find two banal films which are banal to exactly the same degree or in
exactly the same way. Banality allows many variations, quantitative
and qualitative. If one defines it with reference to the commonplace,
it remains true that large numbers of cinematic and non-cinematic com-
monplaces exist, and that these are not the same ones that appear in
diverse commonplace films. It also remains true that no film is made
solely of commonplaces, and that two films which would be identical in
regard to their quantity of commonplaces - a hypothesis which is al-
ready extreme if taken literally - would continue to differ from each
other according to the small portion which, in each of them, escapes the
commonplace. Obviously, there are many other ways to define origin-
94 TEXTUAL SYSTEMS
ality and banality. One could define them, for example, in terms of the
subject of the expression, i.e., in an original work, the subject which
'expresses itself' is a unique and singular being, an individual - while
in the banal work this subject is, in reality, a social group, or an anony-
mous ideology, or an ensemble of collective representations, or an ar-
chetype stemming directly from some profound but impersonal psy-
chology, etc. (in this conception, the 'official author' of a banal work is
thus not its true author). If one adopts this defining frame, the fact re-
mains that the anonymous forces which thus come to be expressed in
banal works are also quite numerous and of very diverse natures, and
that it is never exactly the same ones that inspire two banal works. One
could also define the original and the banal in terms of codes : the banal
is the mechanical application of a code (or reliance upon a combination
of codes which is itself codified), while the original is the 'play' on the
code or codes, the deviation of the code from itself, the new shifting
of one code onto another, etc. But even here it is necessary to note that
the codes (or combinations of codes) capable of being applied mechan-
ically are numerous, that there are several mechanical ways of making
use of the same code, etc. More generally, it is clear that none of
the criteria which may be invoked in order to define the banal allow
us to say that a banal film is one that lacks a singular system. This
may be expressed as follows : if a film is banal, it is because the
spectator, in seeing it, experiences a combination of impressions which
he summarizes by declaring that the film is banal (there exists no
other primary foundation for the notion of banality than the im-
pression of banality itself); and if the semiotic analysis of this film is
carried to its logical conclusion, i.e., if it succeeds in accounting explicit-
ly for the intuitive impression of the spectator, what it will inevitably
show is that the singular system of this film is banal. This film there-
fore has a singular system; and if it is, in turn, more or less banal, it
is because it is more or less similar to a greater or lesser number of
other singular systems.
This reasoning may even be pushed to its extreme: if it happened
that the singular systems of several banal films were absolutely identical
(a completely improbable hypothesis, after all), each of the examples
of this apparently non-singular system would remain a singular system
in the sense that we are here trying to define, namely that each of
them, in effect, would continue to express the whole structure of a
given film conceived of as a singular totality, would continue to com-
bine diverse codes within it, would continue to be distinct from all the
TEXTUAL SYSTEMS 95
3
In the domain of the cinema, this notion has been adopted notably by
Eisenstein; see "The structure of the film", in Iskusstvo kino, (Moscow, June
1939); reprinted in Film Form (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949); in French,
a portion of the article was published in Reflexions d'un cineaste (Moscow:
Editions en langues etrangeres, 1958), 57-67, under the title "L'unite organique
et le pathetique dans la composition du Cuirasse Potemkine".
96 TEXTUAL SYSTEMS
audience perceives them. At the outset the film 'adopts the most diverse
forms, but in the end all these forms have become cinematic, for each
of them has undergone a transformation which is the proper work of
the cinema, and has thus been augmented (or altered) by a sort of
automatic coefficient of cinematization.
Such conceptions, however, as we said in Chapter 2.4, in fact come
down to a begging of this question and leave untouched the problem
that they are meant to resolve. In fact both things can be reduced to
one. This cinematization is understood as concerning the physical form
of the signifier, and in this case one has stated nothing more than the
obvious (it is quite certain that any signification which enters into a
film becomes materially 'cinematized', since it is physically transmitted
through the medium of the cinema); but this comes down to saying that
this signification, initially forged outside the cinema, has merely turned
up for the moment in a film. In sum, every signification which enters
into a film is found in this film! With the intention of demonstrating
that this signification has become cinematic, we have simply proved
that it has become filmic. Or, on the other hand, the process of
automatic 'cinematization' invoked may be understood as affecting
the very form of the signification, i.e., its structure and not merely the
physical nature of the signifier. This is to admit, in this case, that the
structures are modified solely by virtue of a physically filmic trans-
mission. Moreover, to the extent that it is clear that a change in the
physical nature of the signifier can in some cases lead to a change
in the structural form itself, it is difficult to consider such a process
as unfailing and automatic. The film can transform the non-cinematic
structures that it takes up, but it can also be content with merely
adopting them as they are, i.e., inscribing them in a new material
while preserving their original form. It is always the case, for example,
that the sound film does not modify the structures of a language (which
it nevertheless 'borrows'); it simply inscribes these structures in the
recorded phonic material ('sound-tape'), while in their natural state
it was the directly perceived phonic material which transported them.
This modification does not, however, have the effect of adding a tense
or an aspect to the conjugation system, of displacing the differentiation
between voiced and voiceless phonemes, of creating a new series of
suffix derivations, etc. (The film introduces new forms of spoken
discourse, not new forms of language. Thus linguistic meanings, non-
cinematic in principle and origin, remain non-cinematic when they
appear in a film.) The coefficient of cinematization, if considered to
TEXTUAL SYSTEMS 99
apply to the structures themselves, is thus not at all automatic, no
matter what popular opinion has to say about it. It simply represents
a possibility which is realized for certain extra-cinematic codes (and
for certain films) and not for others. We shall return to this question,
from two different perspectives, in Chapters 6.3 and 10.7.
It is a common occurrence that films, consciously or not, reflect
various systems of political thought, and that these - even if this time
they are expressed in the framework of a film rather than a book or a
poster - are not, by this fact alone, unerringly modified in their
structure. Once more in this regard we come across the problem of
original films, which should not give rise to a confusion of another
sort, viz., that where an inventive cineast can profoundly renovate,
even in its very structures, the system of political thought which initially
inspired it, this remodelling itself is not necessarily a 'cinematization',
for the new system may remain on the same level as the old one,
i.e., remain, like it, purely political, and not maintain any more of a
necessary relationship with the cinema, although it was in a film that
it happened to be elaborated. To modify a code is not necessarily to
render it more cinematic. It is cases like this that critics of the cinema
are thinking of when they say that some film has a rich and new
'content' in a still classic or even banal 'cinematic form'.
'make films') with anything that is available to him; that it is not suf-
ficient to have many things to say in order to make good films, but that
in addition one must be capable of putting them onto the screen and
of 'thinking cinema', etc. Moreover, all these observations are correct
to the degree that they imply that the structure of each film results
from a sort of interaction between properly cinematic factors and
external properties. But they are false in that they all assume, quite
improperly, that the final word in this dialectic rests with the cinema
in an automatic and unilateral fashion ('or else the film is bad'...).
There is no final word on this subject, and the interaction is a true one,
without a victor or a vanquished.
From the moment that a text assumes the form of a film, cinematic
codes (or some of them) are always present in it - and their very dis-
appearance (in the extreme, their absence) still has a meaning which
remains cinematic: 'icriture blanche', refusal to 'make cinema', re-
jection of certain codes in favor of others which do not yet appear
to be such (this is the case of those films regularly described as 'shatter-
ing the cinematic language', while, if one is to believe the same analysis,
this language was already 'completely destroyed' by another film just a
few years ago). But from the moment that a film talks about something
- and all films say something, despite the formalist's illusions about this
subject - extra-cinematic codes are always present in it, for there is
nothing which can be said which does not have any form.
Saying that a filmic system is a combination of several codes also
implies that it consists essentially in a displacement. To the extent that
one envisages each of the codes that appear in films individually, one
can without difficulty - by a useful methodological convention, some-
what analogous to the one underlying the notion of synchrony ('state of
a language') in linguistics - allow oneself to treat the systemic as static.
It is true that a code - a code - functions at a given moment of its
historical evolution as a closed system which regulates choices which
can be listed, and which permits syntagmatic combinations which can
themselves be enumerated. (This is also the case, appearances to the
contrary, in transformational generative g r a m m a r : the originality of
this linguistic theory is in directly applying itself to the infinite number
of possible 'grammatical' messages, but the elements at the base of its
combinatorics - 'constituents' and 'rules' - are still finite in number. It
is thus not by chance that it has as its goal the study of a single code,
the 'model of competence'.) On the contrary, no code plays a central
role in the overall structure of a given text, not even those 'mobilized'
102 TEXTUAL SYSTEMS
by the text. What 'makes' the system of a film is the passage from one
code to another; each film takes shape with various codes, and it is in
this 'with' that the importance lies.
With diverse codes, but also against them. In this sense, each film
is built upon the destruction of its own codes. It is not enough to prove
that in a filmic system each code is inessential because it is only the
combination of codes that is essential. It is necessary to understand,
beyond this, that the proper task of the filmic system is to actively
underplay each of these codes by asserting its own particular logic and
because it asserts it, an assertion which is necessarily accomplished
through the negation of that which is not itself, i.e., codes (which are,
as such, no longer important and become but the 'building blocks' of
another structure). In each filmic system, the (cinematic or extra-cin-
ematic) codes are both present and absent: present because the system
is built upon them (on the basis of them, with/against them), absent
because the system is only a system to the extent that it is something
other than the message of a code (or a series of these messages) i.e.,
because it begins to exist only when (and where) these codes begin to
cease to exist in the form of codes, because it is this very movement of
negation, of destruction-construction. In this regard, certain notions
advanced by Julia Kristeva in another domain are applicable to the
film.
The relations between a code and its message are peaceful: in being
expressed, the message also expresses the code, since it has no other
structure than that which it has taken from this code. Thus each
spoken utterance expresses the code of the language (to the degree that
this language is considered by a legitimate abstraction as a uniform
code of pure denotation, i.e., to the extent that one ignores the other
codes which are at work in the same utterance : expressivity, connota-
tions, etc.). The situation is the same every time that one has to deal
with 'domains of a single semiotic dimension': groups of texts that
follow a single code, or that one wants to analyze in relation to only
one of their codes (this notion will be elaborated upon below, in
Chapter 7.6). But the relationship between a text and its codes cannot
be this harmonious. Within the overall system of a text, the different
codes do not align themselves next to one another in places which
could be predicted in advance. The filmic system is not a mere
accumulation of codes but an original combination which demands to be
executed (the notion of 'composition' in the theoretical writings of
Eisenstein, of 'production' in contemporary Marxist studies, of 'realiza-
TEXTUAL SYSTEMS 103
tion' or of 'staging' for certain film critics and aestheticians). This com-
bination, which is new for each text, certainly constitutes a structure,
but one which is inseparable from an active process of restructuration,
without which a filmic system would be nothing more than the sum
of its codes (however, a code is not a text, and it is necessary to explain
how one goes from one to the other). The only thing which can be said
to be distinctive of the system of a film is that it integrates several
codes, that it cannot be reduced to any one of them (or to the sum
of them), and that it too plays them one against the other. The system
of the text is the process which displaces codes, deforming each of them
by the presence of the others, contaminating some by means of others,
meanwhile replacing one by another, and finally - as a temporarily
'arrested' result of this general displacement - placing each code in a
particular position in regard to the overall structure, a displacement
which thus finishes by a positioning which is itself destined to be
displaced by another text. The intrinsic consideration of a code does
not tell us how it may be articulated with other codes (or with which
ones), and at what level it may play a part in the general economy
of a long and complex text (as is every film, even the most rudimentary).
It is not the code which decides its own particular place in the system
of the film, or which determines which other codes will become its
temporary neighbors; it is the system of the film itself which does this.
the study of a code of cinematic montage does not tell us which
function it will fulfill in a given film, this is simply because a code of
montage does not make a film; even less does it do so alone.
It is not a question here of reverting to the old idea according to
which the film is an example of a language without a code,0 a pure
invention arising without cease, a creation ex nihilo - or again
(which comes to the same thing) an activity of organization and re-
organization arising directly from 'reality'. What is called reality - i.e.,
the different prefilmic elements - is nothing more than a set of codes,
that set of codes without which this reality would not be accessible or
intelligible, such that nothing could be said about it, not even that it is
reality. Whether the film is 'invention' or 'creation' is dependent solely
* In our early articles (notably "Le cinema: langue ou langage ?", Communi-
cations 4, 1964), we were rather wary of this conception (the influence of Andre
Bazin on cinematic studies was stronger then than it is today). Hence the auto-
critical notes which were added in the second publication of this article in our
Essais sur la signification au cinema (1968). Conversations with Italian semio-
ticians (in particular Umberto Eco and Emilio Garroni) have contributed to this
development
104 TEXTUAL SYSTEMS
Since we define singular filmic systems in this way, the reader will
perhaps wonder why we persist in refusing to consider them as being
wholly endowed with cinematic specificity. Is not the singular system,
as described a moment ago, profoundly tied to the unfolding of the
film, to its composition, to the arrangement of its images and sounds ?
In sum, is it not a cinematic thing from one end to another ?
There is in this regard, in effect, a difference - and an important
one - between the codes which appear in films and the systems of these
films themselves. Among the first, some, as we have said, are largely
extra-cinematic, and it may even happen that their adoption by a film
scarcely affects their proper structure. The process of 'cinematization',
for a code, is not at all infallible. In its absence, the influence of the
film on the code modifies only the material of expression and thus
brings about only a renewal of the manifestation of this code, through-
out which the form, i.e., the relational network of oppositions and of
combinations, remains intact. Thus, when the 'plastic effects' frequently
employed in painting are adopted as such by certain color films pre-
occupied with 'beautiful images', in still shots naively presented for
prolonged contemplation, the code has not changed, but only the
physical definition of its signifies In the first case, it is the colored
106 TEXTUAL SYSTEMS
image made by hand, in the second case it is the colored image obtained
by means of a camera.
No matter how common they are in films, phenomena of this sort
have a paradoxical appearance. One would expect, rather, that the
change in manifestation would involve a change of form - a trans-
formation that one does not have reason to expect in every case but
which would seem, at least, to be capable of consisting quite frequently
in a series of distortions, displacements, and inflections which together
would suffice to establish a new code distinct from the initial one,
even if similar to it. It happens, however, that even this is not the case,
because the code is not the film, but simply the partial material of the
film, such that its internal structure is not necessarily engaged in the
general movement of displacement by which the film is a film. The
films, moreover, may be content to actualize the code so-to-speak in
passing (to utilize it without working it), and in this case, if the initial
code is extra-cinematic, it will remain as such after having become
filmic. The proper task of the filmic system is to modify the codes that
it integrates; however, it is a question of an overall modification estab-
lished at the level of the entire film. This does not mean that every
film modifies all of its codes, and leaves untouched that vast domain in
which the analyst uncovers so many filmic codes which remain extra-
cinematic.
But all this changes when attention is focused upon the system of
the film itself. This system is not a material out of which the text is
constructed : it is this construction itself. It is not a partial element of
the film, but a structure coextensive with the entire film. Is it or is it
not compromised in the work of the film, and to what degree ? This
question can no longer be asked, since it is this very work. In addition,
the system of a film, differing in this from all (cinematic or extra-cin-
ematic) filmic codes, cannot under any circumstances consist of a
'form' which is totally extra-cinematic.
It does not follow from this that one must jump to the other
extreme, i.e., that it is necessary to admit, as has been done all too
often, that afilmicsystem is an entirely cinematic structure. The diverse
figures which invade the film from without, i.e., which come to it from
some other cultural domain (from other arts, from everyday, already
organized semiotic practices, etc.), do not penetrate into it solely by
means of its codes; one does not see the mysteriously insurmountable
barrier which keeps them from being introduced into the film from an-
other direction and from making their importance felt in the overall
TEXTUAL SYSTEMS 107
composition which animates the film. However, there is still one dif-
ference - namely, that, when this influence is exerted at this level, it is
from the very outset mixed up with cinematic constructions. A code, in
sum, may be cinematic or extra-cinematic, while a filmic system is al-
ways both cinematic and extra-cinematic; it is the system of a film,
and not of a book, social behavior, or any other 'text', but this film, in
turn, may not be reduced to a 'pure' product of the cinema alone. There
are two sorts of codes but only one sort of filmic system, which is mixed.
According to one current conception, the proper task of the film is
to organize diverse non-cinematic materials into a cinematic construc-
tion. What we are maintaining here is that the proper task of the
film is to integrate cinematic codes and non-cinematic codes into an
overall construction which preserves this duality, while surpassing it in
the logical and structural unity of a singular system, i.e., which trans-
forms duality into mixture.
Consider David Wark Griffith's film, Intolerance (1916), one of the
classics in the history of the cinema. The text is composed of four
distinct narratives, each of which evokes a particularly spectacular
instance of intolerance, fanaticism, or persecution (one has as a context
ancient Babylon, another France of the 16th Century and the Religious
Wars, another Palestine at the time of the crucifixion of Christ, and the
fourth, modern America). It has often been remarked that parallel
montage and acceleration play a central role in the overall structure
of this ample filmic fresco - in the system of the film, as we say here.
At the beginning of the film, each episode is presented at length before
passing on to the next; eventually, the unfolding of images increasingly
intermixes the four stories, according to an alternation whose rhythm
becomes more and more rapid, until a final crescendo where the mixture
becomes a visual whirlpool and induces in the spectator a sort of four-
termed mental superimpression, the symbolic intention of which is
clear, and even emphasized.
This configuration, which dominates the whole film (and, literally,
assembles it), is obviously not absolutely lacking in cinematic specificity.
With another means of expression (written language, for example),
alternation - and its acceleration - could not have been organized into
as direct, and as tightly knit an affective and visual whirligig. The
author could not have rendered the constantly underlying humanitarian
symbol in the same manner: the rapid unfolding of the four images
gives one the feeling of an almost physical interpenetration among the
four different historical epochs, and the acceleration in the periodicity of
108 TEXTUAL SYSTEMS
the code of montage from which they nevertheless come - is that the
historic and geographic diversity of acts of fanaticism is an illusion,
that the more profound nature of intolerance remains the same in all
times and places, that it is like the contrary of the maternal (human-
itarian) sentiment invoked by the visual refrain. At this level, all the
images of intolerance in the film may be regrouped into a single
'motif', which in turn enters into parallel montage with Maternity: an
alternation of the fourth degree, which opposes Maternity with Intol-
erance while the other three assimilate the three faces of Intolerance.
This construction is closely linked to a certain idea of intolerance itself
and, beyond that, to a certain idea of history, of human nature, etc., all
things which are not primarily cinematic, but ideological. What should
be examined here is the state of American society at the time when the
film was produced, Griffith's cultural and social antecedents, his political
opinions, etc. Such a fragment of ideology can just as easily be ex-
pressed in a novel, in the propoganda poster of a philanthropic associa-
tion, or in an allegorical painting.
There is an extra-cinematic input, then, which nevertheless, as
pointed out above, plays an essential role in the structure of the film.
The filmic system would appear - and it is in this that it is profoundly,
intimately mixed - as the place where the cinematic and the extra-
cinematic meet, where they form a juncture (more or less 'happy'
depending on the case), where each is transformed in relation to the
other and where both take on the same form and give rise to correlative
choices. What is distinctive in the system of Intolerance is neither the
parallel montage nor the humanitarian ideology, both of which appear
elsewhere, nor even a unique use of parallel montage or a unique
version of the humanitarian ideology, for nowhere (and above all not
in Intolerance) can one find one without the other. The system of the
film is the interaction of one with the other, the active fashioning of
one by the other, the exact point - the only point - where these
two structures succeed, in every sense of the word, in 'working' to-
gether. Each film is the site of a (more or less) productive encounter
between the cinema and that which is not the cinema - 'between the
cinema and the world', as is sometimes said, but on condition that what
is meant by 'world' is an extremely varied collection of figures and
cultural systems which have in common only that they were not created
by the cinema.
If the parallel montage rather than some other form of montage
dominates the entire development of Intolerance, it is because this
TEXTUAL SYSTEMS 111
Not always, but sometimes. One finds here the idea of an eventual
cinematization of certain non-cinematic codes, as a possible con-
sequence of their adoption by films, i.e., in cases where the filmization
is accompanied by a cinematization (itself capable of several degrees).
Sociologists like Edgar Morin have remarked12 - and common observa-
tion confirms it - that in certain times and places the courting behavior
of adolescents was in some measure influenced by the erotic stereo-
types proposed by films. These stereotypes thus become innovators;
they fashion expectations and behavior, facilitate complicity, offer
patterns of dress, bearing, speech, seduction, unconstrainedness, etc.
Certain adolescents try to conform to them in their everyday life (take,
for example, the 'James Dean phenomenon',13 whose astonishing
magnitude in its day we all remember). In our view, what characterizes
cases of this sort is that the interaction between the cinematic element
(the role of the star, iconic charm, etc.) and an extra-cinematic code
(for the case in point, a social code of everyday behavior, a small
portion of a 'life style') comes to survive the film and continues to be
expressed outside of the textual system. Thus we can speak, here, of a
cinematization of the code itself, since it remains impregnated with
echoes of the cinematic when it functions elsewhere than in a film.
There is something two-directional in this: the film borrows certain
codes which are external to it, but when it restores them to the culture,
they carry with them, in varying degrees of strength, a little of the
cinema with which they found themselves neighbors in the film (an
association which, elsewhere, would have remained without conse-
quence), and their proper (codical) structure as such finds itself
modified or reshaped. The film reflects social behavior, but may also
remodel it to a certain extent (which must not be overestimated). We
are dealing with such phenomena each time that the film exercises an
influence on something other than itself: not only on customs, but also
on other means of expression (the influence of cinematic montage on
certain narrative codes in use in modern American novels, etc.).
The notion of cinematization makes sense only in relation to these
cases, which are probably less numerous than is sometimes assumed. (In
addition, we must not forget that the reverse process exists as well:
cinematic figures become, so-to-speak, partially 'de-cinematized', i.e.,
modified and reshaped as a result of their contact with non-specific
mythology of 'pure creation' - while textual systems may be, and fre-
quently are, banal.
One hears it said quite frequently in discussions about the cinema that
what characterizes somewhat complex and profound films, i.e., films
with which we become involved and which live with us, is - contrary to
that heavily insistent univocality which marks the overall nature of the
filmic production - the capability of being understood in several ways,
of offering their symbolism, outside of any semantic 'castration', to
several systems of interpretation, of allowing several levels of reading.
This is the theme of 'multiple readings' which is applied to the filmic
text as to other sorts of texts, and with good reason.14
But the expression of this idea sometimes gives rise to a theoretical
misunderstanding which is not without importance. It happens, in fact,
that the plurality of readings is associated with the plurality of codes
which give form to the film : the 'rich' or emancipated film would thus
be one which makes use of diverse codes, the poor or conventional film
one which is constrained by the tyranny of a single code, displayed in
all its redundant self-sufficiency.
What we maintain here, on the contrary, is that any film, even the
dullest, contains within itself several codes, such that the diversity of
possible readings in the most elaborate films corresponds to the number
of textual systems, not to the number of codes.
That several codes are at work in a text is a very general fact, as we
have tried to show in the entire first part of this book, and one which
does not especially characterize the great texts. But that several textual
systems come into play in the same film - while the textual system is
what unifies and organizes the film., and would thus seem to be obliged,
in every case and with good reason, to remain unique - is already less
probable (and in fact extremely rare). It is something slightly
11
At the origin of this theme one would expect to find specific authors, like
Roland Barthes with the notion of plural reading, or Umberto Eco with that of
open work, or Julia Kristeva with that of dialogism. And it is true that they are
sometimes invoked in cinematic discussions, but this is rather rare, and on the
whole very recent. In the realm of the film the (much more vague and general)
idea of a multiplicity of levels of interpretation is often expressed without
reference to such authors, and it was expressed before them. It is an 'indigenous'
theme.
TEXTUAL SYSTEMS 119
miraculous which 'fashions' the text of the film (the text itself, and the
text in us) in a completely different manner.
To invoke the notion of 'multiple readings' too often, and without
taking an exact measure of what its logic involves, is to obfuscate it. To
say that a text allows several readings is to advance an idea which
would lose all meaning if each of the readings invoked did not bear
on the ensemble of the text, or if each of them did not provide it alone a
sort of 'thread' guiding one from one end of the text to the other, such
that these readings constantly maintain relations of substitution and
exclusion, reduced to entirely eliminating each other or, even when they
'refer' to one another, can only do so, with each revolution of the
semantic turnstile, by also referring the entire text to the reading. This
is why their simultaneous assertion seems paradoxical and acquires a
value which is both weak and strong.
But we see at the same time that this particular structure, which
met en resonnance ('sets to resonating')16 the textual surfaces, can only
be established if each reading re-orders all, or at least the principal,
elements of the film (re-orders, in sum, their very structural relations);
the notion of 'level of reading' ceases to be intelligible if each reading
should simply correspond to a code. In a film, each code is a partial
element, and as long as these codes invest different parts or aspects of
the film, their plurality gives rise only to the processes of combination,
complementation, or reciprocal alternation which characterize any
textual system (see Sections 6.2 and 6.3), and are found just as well in
primarily univocal texts, albeit ones which are insistent and as closed as
possible, as for example that of Intolerance discussed above.
A film does not have to be subtle in order to be pluri-
codical. It is such by necessity, and simply in order to exist. If it wishes
to tell a story, even an insipid one, it must rely on a narrative code; as it
is necessary to tell it in a certain order, even a banal one, and thus to
divide it into sequences or into 'episodes' of whatever nature, recourse
to schemas of composition, conscious or unconscious, is imposed on it
no matter what; as each of these sequences must be filmed, it cannot
do otherwise than mobilize systems of cutting and of editing, even if it
uses the poorest of them; as each frame must be 'lit', under pain of
offering to the spectator only a black rectangle, it is necessary to select
a type of lighting (and natural light, in 'outdoor' shootings, is also a
choice); etc.
u
Formula borrowed from Jeffrey Mehlman, "Entre psychanalyse et psychocri-
tique", in Poetique 3, 1970, 365-383.
120 TEXTUAL SYSTEMS
Until now we have reasoned as if 'the film' - that is to say the single
and entire film - constituted the only unit which offers a coherent text
to which there corresponds a textual system; in sum, we have asserted
(or have seemed to do so) that all textual-systemic units have the
dimensions of a film, and that none of them is larger than a single
film or smaller than an entire film.
However, this is not at all the case. Textual-systemic units, in the
sense in which we have tried to define them here, are capable of
considerable variation in size. Thus, it is clear that to the classic
Western, for example (which has already been the subject of a rather
large number of books), there corresponds a single overall system. This
system mobilizes at the same time diverse particular cinematic codes
(a privilege accorded to mass shots, great panoramic shots, etc.) and
diverse non-cinematic codes which are also particular: a certain code
of honor and friendship, of restrictive rituals concerning gun duels,
etc. These two sorts of codes do not belong only to the classic Western:
shots of large, open spaces also appear in certain adventure films, the
code of honor in songs of the old American West ('Western songs', not
to be confused with 'Western films'). What characterizes the classic
film of the West, and it alone, is a certain number of selections that are
made from among these codes, and the arrangement of those elements
into a quite definite overall configuration resulting from the interaction
between the cinematic and the extra-cinematic options. This configura-
tion is thus a textual system, since it displays exactly those charac-
teristics which in the preceding chapters we have attributed to the
system of each film. The only difference is that it is associated with a
group of films, and not a single film. It is the text whose dimensions
have changed: the analysis has chosen to consider the ensemble of
classic Westerns as forming a single vast and continuous text.
122 TEXTUALITY AND 'SINGULARITY'
several sorts of groups of films which constitute, each at their own level
and in their own way, authentic textual-systemic units. Thus, what
could that which is known as the 'work of a cineast' possibly b e - i n
those cases where it has a minimum of coherence, that is to say
existence - if not the single vast text of which each completed film be-
comes a chapter, and thus the vast system which is erected out of
several sub-systems ? It would be necessary in principle to take into
account all the films of a given cineast, but not everything in these
films. One would, on the contrary, strive to isolate that which in these
films stems from the system which characterizes this cineast (or is
capable of demonstrating that such a system exists). Thus, among other
traits of these films, those which refer to a single sub-system (to a single
film of the cineast) would be excluded, except if they were found to
be in structural correspondence - homologous or the reverse - with
traits found in other films (in this case, moreover, one could no longer
say that they refer to a single sub-system). In return, one would
exclude those traits - if any exist, which depends on the cineast and
on the film - which definitely belong to one of the films, and not to
the 'work of the cineast'. However, it is precisely these which will be
found at the center of the analysis if the 'work of the cineast' had as its
declared object a single and entire film. We thus see that the universe
of meaning includes a mass of signifying-units self-embedded ad in-
finitum, and maintaining among themselves thousands of relationships
of intersection and of inclusion, such that the essential thing is always
to know what one is talking about. This elementary and fundamental
requirement is rarely respected in the domain of cinematic studies,
where one is accustomed to mixing everything together; it is this
perpetual uncertainty in regard to the subject treated and to the criteria
of relevancy adopted which explains (in part) the frequency of mis-
understandings and the violence of polemics in everything that touches
films.
The work of the cineast is not the only textual-systemic unit greater
than the film. There is also what one calls the 'cinematic genre': bur-
lesque, 'hard-boiled detective', musical comedy, etc. We have said above
that one may apply oneself to the task of disengaging from a corpus
composed of several Westerns (the number and choice of which depends
on the exact orientation of each study), the distinctive traits of 'Western-
ness'. It is these traits that make a Western a Western, and make it so
that - even if the thing is at no moment made explicit in the film, neither
its credits, nor in the posters or taped announcements of its publicity
XEXTUALITY AND 'SINGULARITY' 125
campaign - it is unmistakably recognized as such by any public which
has at its command the appropriate socio-aesthetic information, i.e.,
which is to some extent familiar with the system of the Western.
Another textual-systemic unit larger than the film is the production
of what was called a 'school' of cinema (Kammerspiel, the English
documentary school, the Soviet school of the 'golden era', etc.) or the
'total production' of a given country, or of a given period, or of a given
country in a given period (assuming, which is at first glance less prob-
able, that it would seem to present a minimum of unity, and that one
would attempt to support or invalidate this impression in constituting
to this effect a corpus of several films, selected according to what one
wanted to prove or disprove).
It is useless to continue this enumeration, which is not exhaustive. If
we brought it up, it was only to underline the fact that the real
opposition is not between cinematic language system, on the one hand
(that is to say the group of general or particular cinematic codes), and
ms, on the other (that is to say the systems proper to a single and
whole film) - but rather that this distinction is only one particular form
of a more vast and more essential division, which places on one side
the codes (general or particular, cinematic or extra-cinematic), and on
the other systems which are associated with particular filmic texts,
texts whose 'length' is quite variable. We have called the latter textual
systems; the totalities which correspond to them, whether small or
large, are texts. The term filmic text does not assume anything about
size. The single and entire film (film in the distributive sense, as defined
in Chapter 3.1) is obviously the filmic text par excellence, but it is not
the only one.
If a portion of a film or a group of films may be texts (in the exact
measure that one treats them as complete discourses), it may happen,
inversely, that a film is not treated as a filmic text; one may simply see
it as one message, among others, one code among others.
Between the filmic texts which coincide with films and those which
are larger or smaller than films, there is nevertheless a difference which
cannot be done away with by the development of analytic procedures,
which can be eliminated only by a profound change in cinematic
practices themselves. At present, cinematic production is accomplished
film by film. Also, when the analyst takes a film as a filmic text, he
is sure that the external contours of his text, its material extension,
have been fixed by others and exist prior to his analysis. It is not
necessary to exaggerate the importance of this reassurance of object-
126 TEXTUALITY AND 'SINGULARITY'
ivity, for some genres or sequences have more reality than some films;
nevertheless, there is in this a sort of guarantee which limits the degree
of arbitrariness.
But the whole problem is to know if one ought to draw from this
a negative conclusion (the rejection of pluri-filmic texts, or, on the
contrary, fragmentary texts) rather than a positive conclusion, which
amounts to an effort of great prudence in dividing these somewhat
particular texts, as well as a continuous respect for the initial criterion
of distinctiveness (to measure conclusions against the act of selection
without which these conclusions have different boundaries). In this
sense, and as was said above, such analyses are always tentative. It
is not really a question of asserting that a cinematic genre is a vast
single film, but rather of seeing what one comes up with if one decides
to treat it as such.
Between the negative and positive solutions we would not hesitate to
choose the second, considering the obvious importance of phenomena
such as 'genre' (and, more generally, inter-filmic affinities) in the history
of the cinema, and, at the other extreme, the very strong unity of
certain sequences of films, which have made possible some of the most
solid textual analyses available today.1
1
Example: Raymond Bellour, "Les Oiseaux de Hitchcock: analyse <fune
sequence", in Cahiers du Cinema 216, October 1969, 24-38. Analysis of a filmic
segment of 6 minutes IS seconds (84 shots), according to three textual criteria
precisely stated and followed throughout
TEXTUALITY AND 'SINGULARITY' 127
code, since particular codes exist and since they are characterized
(whether they are cinematic or extra-cinematic) by not appearing in
all films but only in certain ones - that is to say precisely by their being
associated with groups of films. But it may also be a question of a
unique totality analogous to that constituted by a film, and which differs
from it only by its larger size. In the second case, the ensemble of
films is apprehended as a single and continuous text which contains
within it a textual system. In the first case, on the contrary, each of
the films of the group is examined separately, and one considers those
of its traits which realize the code under study. Due to the very nature
of the research, the group's unity is broken, and even doubly s o : first,
by the fundamentally enumerative procedure which attends the regroup-
ing (a procedure implying that the films of the group form a group
only from a very specific point of view, and only through a small
number of their traits), next because each of the films of the group, in
the same movement, sees its continuity taken apart, the codically
distinctive traits being taken into consideration by abstraction from all
the rest of the film. A group of films, when it is of this sort, is not felt
to form a profound kinship. Taken as a whole, the films of the group
may not even resemble each other at all (if not on points which are,
in each of them, perhaps secondary). From the point of view of cultural
consumption (which is not a semiotic analysis), the group may be
heteroclite to the greatest degree. (It may be, but not necessarily. Every-
thing depends upon the importance of the code in relation to which
the films have been grouped. If it is a question of a code of interest
only to cinematic 'punctuation', the films preserve an immense area
in which they may differ from each other. If it is a question of a more
or less encroaching political symbolism, the domain of difference is
reduced to that extent, and the films may resemble each other globally,
even on simple viewing.)
On the other hand, when by 'group of films' one understands a vast
collective text which crosses over several inter-filmic boundaries, it is,
by definition, that one supposes between these films a profound and
global kinship, a certain homogeneity involving the general structures
of each film, and to which there necessarily corresponds - although this
may be in different degrees - a certain unity of impression, an air of
family resemblance which influences the ensemble and may be directly
observed - in brief, to a resemblance in the most ordinary sense of the
word. This is the case, notably, for well-structured cinematic genres
(i.e., those that are fully genres). Take, for example, the American
128 TEXTUALITY AND 'SINGULARITY'
1
See Raymond Borde and fitienne Chaumeton, Panorama du film noir amiri-
cain 1941-1953 (Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1955).
TEXTUALITY AND 'SINGULARITY' 129
set of structures constituted by what one has agreed to call the 'content'
of films. One also does not consider establishing a relationship (itself
structural) between these two orders of considerations, in order to be
able to analyze as a complete discourse such a film or such a group
of films belonging to one or the other of the periods which one has
distinguished.
Thus one has classified the films according to some of their traits
(initially abstracted from others) - namely those which are supposed to
be properly cinematic, and which in addition are supposed to represent
the reality of the proposed periodization. Thus, each of the great phases
which may be delineated in the history of the cinematic language
system corresponds exactly to what is here understood under the name
of cinematic sub-code (or again, to a set of several of those sub-codes
which were in use during the same epoch).
" See Marcel Martin, Le langage cinematographique (Paris: Ed. du Cerf, 1955,
new augmented edition in 1962), 37 and 40.
* See Marcel Martin, 41. Or Henri Agel, Le cinema (Paris: Casterman, 1954),
62.
134 TEXTUALITY AND 'SINGULARITY'
them with it. But this 'something else' may be of two sorts, and there
are two ways in which it may be 'in addition'. Most often this distinction
is not made and the two cases are confused.
In the case of the first, what is implicitly asserted is that certain
processes of the cinema are impossible to interpret if separated from
the film (or the very least from the portion of the film in which they
are found). The context invoked is thus a syntagmatic context, a context
in the proper sense of the word. There remains, however, a fact which
is almost always forgotten - namely, that a context so defined could
have the explanatory value one credits it with only if it is itself analyzed,
such that one could relate each of its traits (or sets of traits, or
relations between traits) with the figure being studied. It is true that
this coupling makes it possible in numerous cases to determine the
signifieds of the figure. On the other hand, if what is designated by
the term context is a film (or a passage of a film) taken globally,
before any analysis has been made, it could in no way explain the
figure, for it would itself need to be explained. (One could obviously
respond that, even before the analysis, films have a meaning which is
directly comprehended or 'lived' by the spectator. This is the phenom-
enological level of meaning. But this fact, which we would not want to
contest, concerns the meaning of the figure as well as that of the
context. The problem would thus be eliminated, for at this level the
meaning of the figure is always already known. On the other hand, if
one is not content with thisfirstperception, if one wishes to go as far as
the specific units on the level of the signified, it is then necessary to
analyze both the figure and the context.) The objection may thus be
rejected. But one thing remains : a unit of analysis which would isolate
the figure from the very beginning may make work impossible, while
a unit initially constituted by the 'process* and its setting may make it
possible to analyze both. In sum, what has explanatory power is not
the syntagmatic context as 'brute' filmic text, but this same context to
the extent that it contains within itself a textual system. In other words,
certain cinematic processes acquire a fixed meaning only in relation
to filmic systems.
But there are other cases where, it would seem, this is not what
theoreticians of cinematic figures have in mind. Various passages in
their writings appear to suggest that some of these figures - far from
having an indeterminate number of signifieds (as many as there are
singular systems) - represent on the contrary a relatively fixed number
of 'meanings', even if this number is rather large, even if the different
TEXTUALITY AND 'SINGULARITY' 135
We said in Chapter 7.3 that the notion of sub-codes has been adopted
here in the same sense as it is used in linguistics (viz. in relationship to
the code, each sub-code constitutes a sub-set, and this in two ways :
because it concerns a smaller number of films, and because it confers
on the resources of the code an organization and value which are only
some of those the code permits). But in spite of the similarities of
definition, we begin to notice, with the facts presented in Section 7.4,
an important difference between cinematic sub-codes and linguistic
sub-codes, a difference which concerns the degree of stability of codes
with multiple sub-codes. Concerning the cinema, we call sub-codes
different responses to a single question: these are, as American
semioticians would say, several 'coding devices' (coding processes,
types of codifications) destined to resolve a single problem, several
ways of utilizing and of structuring the same set of possibilities. But the
'common trunk' onto which these diverse solutions are grafted - that
138 TEXTUALITY AND 'SINGULARITY'
is to say the level of the code, to the extent that it is distinct from that
of the sub-codes - may very well appear, in the study of certain cine-
matic phenomena, as relatively thin, and of a degree of precision
inferior to that which one would have expected of a code. It is, in some
sort, the balance of forces between the code and its sub-codes which
may shift in favor of the sub-codes more than would be the case in
linguistics. In certain cases - but not all - the place of the code (the
common core) seems to be made up of something which, in the
absence of sufficiently definite structures, is not yet a code but rather
the potential location (although already outlined) of diverse possible or
future codifications, a coding problem and not yet a code, a question
and not yet a response, a set of possibilities and not yet an organization
of these possibilities. The 'responses', the positive organizations, come
into play only with the sub-codes.
In linguistics, each sub-code ('level of language', or 'linguistic usage')
augments and details in its own manner the productions of the code,
but these productions are already determined before any activity of
this sort. The different pronunciations of French, which vary from the
most relaxed to the most formal (or from one region to another, from
one social category to another, etc.), introduce notable variations, but
the total weight of these different traits remains nevertheless relatively
slight in relation to the importance of the shared features which define
the code, i.e., the phonological system of ordinary French. It is this
phonological system, and it alone, which already indicates the major
portion of the characteristics which will subsequently reappear, iden-
tically, in all pronunciations. Thus the list of phonemes (and hence of
relevant distinctions, which is more important) may essentially be estab-
lished at the level of what is called the 'common language'. Differences
between sub-codes will influence only the 'optional variants' of these
phonemes, and sometimes a small proportion of the phonemes them-
selves. (The French dialects of the Midi often continue, in 1970, to
treat as two different phonemes those segments which the orthography
notes as 'in' and 'un' respectively, while the dialects of northern
France, for the most part, have lost this distinction, which in certain
cases they no longer even perceive, and have a single phoneme in the
corresponding position on the phonological matrix; but besides this,
they all have thirty phonemes in common.)
In cinematic matters it may happen that the code is rather vague
- at least in a certain sense, which, as we are also going to see, is
relative - and that it is necessary to look to the sub-codes in order to
TEXTUALITY AND 'SINGULARITY' 139
find more precise indications. We have seen an example of this in
Chapter 7.4, with those cinematic figures which acquire a signified
only in each sub-code and which, at the level of the code (that is to say
for the ensemble of films), remain as signifiers without a signified. This
example is, moreover, doubly significant: it also shows that the
position of the code, even if 'vague', guards important and precise in-
formation, since it includes an exact list of the commutable signifiers,
which is in itself a great deal. It thus begins to appear that the dis-
tinction between 'questions' of coding and their 'answers' - to which
one has recourse here for convenience of explanation - does not cor-
respond to situations as decisive as the words used would lead one to
suppose. It suffices that, at the level of the 'question', a definite set of
semiotic circumstances already exists, so that this question is already
the beginning of an answer. It contributes information, since it excludes
a considerable number of possibilities. The 'vague position' may be
precise as the outline of a 'problematic'.
Another example, and even of particular historical importance, would
be that of cinematic montage: montage in the broad sense,5 not
limited to the cutting and pasting that one practices in the editing room,
after filming, but includes the 'shooting-script', that is to say the
manner in which, before the filming, the segmentation of the film (and
thus also, in part, the forms of this very filming) is conceived. Depend-
ing on different cinematic practices common to different countries,
epochs, schools, etc. - and also depending on different theories, for
this problem has always been linked with normative conceptions about
'the essence of cinematic art' - several sub-codes of montage are found,
each very different from the other, which go from extreme fragmenta-
tion to continuous filming with wide pans. However, the common base
from which the principal styles of montage diverge does not consist
of a pre-organized system, but may be reduced to a certain number
of specifically cinematic features and traits which are sufficiently gen-
eral so that the sub-codes deviate considerably from one another
(thereby indicating the importance of their own contribution), but
which are sufficiently precise so that they are in opposition on the
same territory and, if we may so express it, so they are all talking about
* This notion of montage in the broad sense but the 'broad sense', in this
case, is at the same time the strictest sense already appeared in the work of
Andre Bazin (notably 61-62 of Orson Welles [Paris: Chavanne, 1950]); it was
presented in a particularly precise manner (in its relations with the 'splicings',
montage in the narrow sense) by Jean Mitry, Volume (1965) of Esthitique et
Psychologie du cinema, 9-61, especially 21-22.
140 TEXTUALITY AND 'SINGULARITY'
the same thing. There is, notably, the fact itself of the cut, i.e., the
possibility of segmenting the film strip (or of not segmenting it) - of
interrupting the filming (or of not interrupting it) - at any point between
two photographs; the fact of splicing, which makes it possible to con-
nect two (separately recorded) segments of film at any point between
two photographs, according to quite variable methods; the scope of the
field of vision, that is to say the capacity of the camera for taking in
a more or less prolonged event: when the field is very small for each
take, it is quite possible that many 'shots' will be necessary in order
to constitute an entire scene, but when it is more vast, one can film
the whole scene continuously. (The reverse is also true: one decides
what the size of the field should be according to whether one wants to
obtain a more or less fragmented scene.) There are differences in
focals and of diaphragmation which make it possible, all things being
equal in regard to the length of the shot and to the eventual movement
of the camera, to obtain a clear and legible photograph at a greater or
lesser distance (axial distance, lateral distance, or both at the same
time). In sum, what is common to the diverse sub-codes of montage is
not the general lines of the solution adopted, but the basic givens of
the problem, and the very definition of the problem which is to be
treated (how must one 'put together' a scene ?).
For all forms like cutting, splicing, etc., some of which were discussed
just now in a very simplified manner, even though of a very general
significance, nevertheless remain without an exact equivalent - and,
as a whole, without any equivalent at all - in other forms of expression.
They accurately delimit a field of research which the sub-codes will
occupy. Of course, strictly speaking there is no code of montage if one
understands by this a positive and detailed process of montage which
would be valid for all films and which would be distinct from any sub-
code (that is to say, from all styles of montage which have existed) and
which, in relation to the latter, would be in a position of a common
code anticipating only minor variants or supplementations. But in
another sense there is a code of montage, since all these sub-codes have
in common the characteristic of 'playing' on a number of specific traits,
to the exclusion of all others, traits which are differently exploited in
each of them. In the extreme, and perhaps by forcing things a little,
one could conceive of a particular type of code which, outside of any
precise specifications, would be defined only as the place common to
several sub-codes, as a calculus (in the logical sense) of possible codifi-
cations, as the space without which one could not know that the
TEXTUAL AND 'SINGULARITY' 141
sub-codes have to do with the same point in the cinematic process and
are in mutual relationships of concurrence. As for the selection
from among the resources available, the hierarchy to be established
between them, and their combination into an organized system which
alone is able to assign a value to each of them, all this could be decided
only on the level of sub-codes.
Thus we can say that the location of the code, in certain sectors
of 'cinematic grammar', is not occupied by a code but by a coding
problem. One could also express this in another way - a question of
terminological convention - by saying that among cinematic codes,
some are only weakly expressed and remain as sketches, leaving to
their sub-codes an important part of the work of codification.
This phenomenon varies considerably in degree, moreover, when
passing from one cinematic fact to another. Thus, the level of the
code is more indeterminate in the case of montage than in the case
of figures without a general signified, for, before any intervention of the
sub-code, the latter display, more clearly than the former, an already
well-defined organization on the level of expression (the proper system
of signifiers). Later in this book (pp. 268 and 281), we shall also see
that codes of analogy form a stable and organized unit even without
their sub-codes. Similarly, in linguistics, the supplementary information
and the specific variations that the sub-codes add to the code are of
unequal importance, according to the idiom and the degree of 'unifica-
tion' proper to each of them, according to whether it was a question of
phonology, syntax, lexicon, etc. While it has been found that the level
of the code compared to that of the sub-codes is more consistent in
spoken language than in the cinema, it is a question of a difference of
degree, which may be expressed in terms of averages.
With this qualification the difference remains and is significant. For
the very notions of code and sub-code do not directly express empirical
reality, but are analytic tools. The code is not an object which exists
in the real world, but is a name given to that part that is common to
different semiotic facts. And this common part is of varying im-
portance according to the concrete case. If it is on the average less
important in the cinema than in natural languages, it is because the
cinematic language system is in effect less 'unified' than a natural lan-
guage, for diverse reasons of a sociological nature which we have
examined in another book. This language is used (at least at the
Essais sur la signification au cinema, notably 103 and all of text 3 ("Le
cinema: langue ou langage ?"), 39-93.
142 TEXTUALITY AND 'SINGULARITY'
In the preceding pages, we have made rather wide use of the notion of
textual system, as opposed to the notion of code (a more or less general
system). This will perhaps astonish those who have the idea (or the
impression) that, by definition, a system is always a general thing and
a text always a particular thing - i.e., all those for whom the opposition
system/text is closely parallel to social group/individual. It is very
largely upon this criterion that rested, as we know, the distinction be-
tween langage and parole in Saussure's thought. But we also know
that the tendency of more recent linguistic research consists, on the
contrary, of reformulating in terms of sub-codes - 'secondary modeling
systems' according to Soviet scholars, 'models of performance' ac-
cording to Chomskians, etc. - the ensemble of variations that Saussure
classified, as a whole, as parole. These variations, in effect, are irrelevant
only in relationship to the code of a common and neutral 'langage'
and it is only from this point of view that one can consider them as
pure 'facts of parole'. They become distinctive again as soon as one
144 TEXTUALITY AND 'SINGULARITY'
At certain points along the chain of speech, the Latin language offers
a choice between a so-called final proposition and a consecutive one. If,
in a given utterance, it is the consecutive proposition which appears, one
would not be dealing as such with some 'singular linguistic system'. But
this depends on this particular situation. Concerning spoken language,
there is a very strong tendency, since Saussure, to consider the code of
the language in isolation. One sometimes ends - contrary to the wish of
Saussure - by forgetting the existence of the initial act of abstraction,
and by confusing langue with all of langage. For it is quite certain that,
in relation to the langue, the selection of the consecutive and the
exclusion of the final in an utterance does not refer to an autonomous
system, but falls within the pure and simple irrelevancy of 'facts of
speech' (parole). In this perspective, it is the general existence of a
paradigm 'final/consecutive' which constitutes the only relevant fact.
The utterance in which either member of this paradigm appears only
indicates the existence of this paradigm, and not the existence of some
textual system.
But from the moment that one considers langage, and not langue,
one finds that each utterance is constituted as such on the basis of
several sorts of choices, which refer to several distinct codes. And if
the utterance appears nevertheless to the hearer as a coherent and
unified whole, it is because these multiple choices have not been brought
together at will, but rather because they respect constraints of mutual
compatibility and because they are organized or combined into an
overall configuration which is of a systemic nature but which happens
nevertheless to appear in a particular utterance and in it alone. For it
is uniquely in each utterance that this overall system reveals itself to be
distinct - distinct as system - from different codes which are more
fragmentary, within it, and more general, outside of it. Latin culture
(even when it borrows a linguistic vehicle) is something much more
vast than the Latin language. If one takes into consideration the dif-
ferent Latinic 'writings', or the style of different authors (and many
other systems as well, which are external to the langue, but within the
realm of langage in general, to the verbal language), the selection of
the consecutive and the exclusion of the final in an utterance cease to
be irrelevant features, for they are no longer the only ones involved
but are related to literary forms, to intentions, i.e., to many other
selections and other exclusions, and it is the set of these choices which
defines a coherence proper to the utterance (a coherence which would
not be the same in another utterance, in which the only point in com-
148 TEXTUALITY AND 'SINGULARITY'
mon with the first would also be to have opted in the langage for the
consecutive), a coherence which, in each instance, delineates a textual
system. The singularity of this system is analyzable only in relation to
the diverse codes and sub-codes which are combined within it. But this
system is distinct from any one of them: first, because what charac-
terizes it is that it combines several of them; next, because the combina-
tion is unique, while that which it combines is not.
In sum, and as was already announced in Chapter 5.5, the very fact
of treating a domain as dependent upon the conjoined action of several
codes necessarily leads whoever envisioned it as such to clearly dis-
associate, by introducing the notion of singular system, the opposition
between the systemic and the textual from the opposition between the
particular and the general.
In the case of spoken languages, which are extremely complex
signifying-ensembles, one can obtain a domain of a single semiotic
dimension only at the price of an initial act of abstraction (and it is
this same complexity which renders the methodological act indispen-
sable, and thus legitimate). When, on the contrary, it is a question of
intrinsically simple units of a rather small scope, the domain with
a single semiotic dimension is in. large measure acquired in advance,
without having to isolate phenomena of expression, connotation, or
others. For facts of this sort, in such domains, hardly exist and play
quite a modest role, as was said in Chapter 2.3. Thus, for other reasons,
the practical situation is in the end the same. This explains why the
synonymy of code and system, very much at ease in the study of natural
languages as unitary systems of pure denotation, are just as much
at ease in the analysis of road signs, messages transmitted by flags or
lights, or certain strictly monosemic gestural languages made up of a
small number of uniformly obligatory signs, etc.
On the other hand, it is important to consider that the filmic fact
(to which we now finally return) could not be treated as a domain with
a single semiotic dimension - and especially in the present state of
research - in a manner as permanent and as generalized as are spoken
languages. This methodological abstraction has an immense field of
application in the study of natural languages, because the level which it
isolates (and which is precisely what we call the langue) is endowed
with a very strong and very obvious social reality, in spite of the parallel
presence of the sub-codes which have been abstracted. But in the cin-
ema, there is no langue (see below, in Chapter 11.5). The codes exist,
of course, and it is this existence which is sensed in the very notion of
TEXTUALITY AND 'SINGULARITY' 149
'cinematic language system'. But this language system does not have the
same cohesion or the same precision as a spoken language (and, in
addition, it remains to be established). In parallel fashion, the textual
systems of different films, of different cineasts, of diverse genres, etc.
(and in which one finds, among other things, the 'aesthetic' dimension
of the filmic fact) play a considerable role in the cinema. Some of them
have as much autonomy and cohesion - as much 'reality', we might say,
if this word were not so problematical - as the cinematic language
system. Thus, in comparison with what takes place in the study of
spoken languages, it is the balance of forces between the code and the
singular system which is displaced here. In addition, even within non-
textual systems, this balance of forces is displaced in a second manner :
the relative weight of the sub-codes, compared with that of the codes,
sometimes comes to be more important than in the case of spoken lan-
guage. We saw an example of this above (Sections 7.4 and 7.5), in
establishing that certain cinematic figures, lacking a signified at the level
of codes, may acquire one at the level of sub-codes.
For all these reasons, the very person who studies a general cine-
matic code and (in principle) it alone - thus placing himself before
a domain with a single semiotic dimension - is incapable of constantly
and without further qualification maintaining this operational abstrac-
tion, which will nonetheless serve him as a guide. He must at each
moment take into account (if only in order to explain that he is provi-
sionally putting them aside) the diverse textual systems, on the one hand,
and the diverse sub-codes, on the other. He must clearly present them as
such, but they are more difficult to 'separate' from the cinematic codes
than is the structure of a poem or a sociolinguistic sub-code from the
code of a spoken language; or again (but the result is the same), it may
be that one is less accustomed to separating them, and that the research
is here less advanced, and rigor less an established habit. From whoever
talks about the cinema, one still hears about total discourse (the mirac-
ulous response to all frustration) which one no longer expects to hear
from the linguist on the subject of verbal language. The different levels
of analysis, the relatively autonomous phenomena, the different sorts of
'embedding', of multiple codes within a single text, all these, when it is
a question of linguistic objects, are (in a certain measure) distinguished.
In regard to the cinema, on the contrary, one generally continues to
mix everything together.
It is nevertheless important to begin to disentangle these notions, and
this is why the semiotics of the filmic fact ought constantly to make use
150 TEXTUALITY AND 'SINGULARITY*
of three concepts which it can always use with ease. Having defined
them, let us repeat them. They are :
(1) filmic texts, which may present different degrees of material scope,
the privileged one being the single and entire film (the notion of
'film' in its distributive sense);
(2) textual filmic systems, i.e., filmic systems which correspond to these
different texts; and
(3) non-textual filmic systems (codes), which themselves present dif-
ferent degrees of generality (the distinction between code and sub-
codes), and which, according to the individual case, may be cine-
matic or extra-cinematic; those which are cinematic constitute, as
a block, the 'cinematic language system'.
We could thus summarize the task of the semiotics of the filmic fact
as follows : to analyze film texts in order to discover either textual
systems, cinematic codes, or sub-codes.
As for extra-cinematic codes, we have mentioned them only in
order to recall that they play an important role in films. But a study of
these codes could not be the goal of the analyst of the cinema, nor of
the analyst of films. Neither is it a question of a unified study, i.e., a
'discipline'. The extra-cinematic material found in films is as extensive
and varied as social life itself (from which it directly stems), and
its analysis relies upon quite diverse skills and a large number of pre-
existing disciplines. In the division of labor customary today, one al-
ways has the tendency to confound the cinematic and the filmic, and
to expect from the analyst of the cinema a science which covers all
aspects of all films. It is not understood that this would be an almost
universal understanding, because films may be about anything. Th&
immoderation of the expectation only encourages cinematic journalism.
The latter has its own proper function, which is to account for the
events of the present, to keep the public informed, but it is not nec-
essary that the accomplishment of this task engulf the totality of
writings on the cinema or on films.
mixed with those which are not. And, once the first are isolated, what
could be done with them, if not to attribute them to the cinema ? 'Cin-
ema', you will recall, is taken here to be synonymous with 'cinematic
language system' (see Chapter 2.4) which indistinctly refers to all cin-
ematic codes and sub-codes (see Chapters 4.3 and 7.3). However, the
traits in question - the final frame purposely longer than the others, the
frequently initial position of the credits, etc. presents the double
characteristic of being specifically cinematic and common to all films
(or, depending on the case, to a class of films). In addition, they depend
on cinematic codes (or sub-codes) and thus at any rate on the 'cinema'.
There is in this something of a paradox. The traits which are common
to films as films and not cinema nevertheless belong, in another sense,
to the cinema and not to the film. (We shall return to this question
below.) Just as all that is codical in texts is general, everything which
is general in texts is codical.
Given a proposition like Films usually last an hour and a half,
to what can it be said to 'apply' ? Literally, it is to the text, of course,
and to it alone (one could not even say The cinema usually lasts an
hour and a half); no code, sub-code, or textual system lasts an hour
and a half.
We shall omit the textual systems from this discussion, which con-
cerns only more or less general filmic traits, and thus those irrelevant
to any singular system; we shall call 'code' any non-textual system,
code, or sub-code.
What is characteristic of the code is that it is a construction of the
analyst and not a pre-existing discourse. Thus the code consists of a
collection of propositions relative to texts and only verifiable in
them, statements which announce the characteristics of the text but
which, precisely for that reason, are propositions of the code. The more
or less general traits which, first, 'belong' to the text are the very ones
whose specification and classification 'belong' to the code.
It is still true that it is the film, and not the cinema, which lasts an
hour and a half; the text, and not the code. But that the film has, on
the average, this duration rather than another is an important aspect
of the cinema as a codical fact. And if - as is possible, as it seems
already to present itself - the average duration of the film became
little by little more variable, less uniform, it is obviously the di-
achronic evolution of one of the cinematic codes that one is witnessing
(or the replacement of one sub-code by another, which is still a codical
fact).
TEXTUALITY AND 'SINGULARITY' 155
One must not confuse the syntagmatic with syntagmatics. The latter is
a study, the former, what is to be studied, the very fact of the syntagm
and the existence of syntagmatic relations. Syntagmatics (as paradig-
matics) is one of the parts of the analytic activity proper to the
semiotician; if the syntagmatic is always 'given', syntagmatics never
is : co-presences in the text are manifest, but their organization is not,
and this is why syntagmatics belongs to the code. That one type of
combination is possible and not another is plainly of a codical order.
One could even define a code - at least from the perspective of a
non-generative structuralism - as the set formed by a para-
digmatics and a syntagmatics articulated one with the other. (Emilio
Garroni has recently noted this,1 and in a convincing manner.)
This was already the position of Saussure when he noted that the
'grammar' of a language (element of a code) has two major com-
ponents : an 'associative' (paradigmatic) grammar and a syntagmatic
grammar. Similarly, glossematic theory rests entirely on the idea that
the analysis of relations 'in the text', or 'in the process' (functions of
the type 'both-and', Hjelmslev's relations) and the analysis of relations
'in the system' ('either-or' functions, co-relations) constitute the two
essential tasks of the internal study of a language. In sum, and contrary
to what might be suggested by the terminology (which, no matter what
one does, always threatens to lead to automatism), the system is not
concerned only or even particularly with 'relations in the system', but
just as much with the 'relations in the process': for the latter may indeed
be 'in' the process, but their structure is nevertheless 'in' the system.
Each code is characterized, among other things, by the types of
syntagms that it permits. All linguists admit that the study of language
cannot be reduced to the establishment of paradigms, but also requires
1
Semiotica ed estetica, 19-20.
164 PARADIGMATIC AND SYNTAGMATIC
* "Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics", in T.A. Sebeok ed., Style and
Language (New York, 1960). Reprinted under the title "Linguistique et po6tique",
in Essais de linguistique generale (Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1963), 209-48. Trans-
lated by Nicolas Ruwet.
* Ibid., 358. "The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the
PARADIGMATIC AND SYNTAGMATIC 167
It is, in effect, in quite diverse degrees that the 'facts studied' are pre-
existent to the study; the degree of pre-existence varies with the nature
of the study; thus, it is greater in the experimental sciences than in the
formal sciences; within semiotic studies, it is greater in syntagmatics
than paradigmatics, since the second (but not the first) consists in
bringing together elements which it defines itself as having been
separated before its intervention. Paradigmatics, we know, has as an
objective the comprehension of relations in absentia. But by the very
fact that it formulates them, it makes them, in some way, relations in
praesentia. It is in this sense that it largely 'creates' its object, at least
more than does syntagmatics, which, if one can put it this way, relates
the already-related, without explicating the laws of comparison which
do not figure clearly in what is compared.
And yet, traditional theory seems sometimes to suggest that the
degree of pre-existence of the object would be as great in paradigmatics
as in syntagmatics; the paradigm, like the syntagm, 'would exist' (its
terms being exhibited and assembled) before any analysis; it is only the
place of this exhibition which differs : the syntagm pre-exists in the
message, while the paradigm pre-exists in the mind of the user. In sum,
it is a little in the form of a more or less conscious association of
ideas, depending on the case, that the paradigm would be an object
anterior to its formalization. One finds in Saussure passages which
lead in this direction;4 this is doubtless the reason why what he called
'associative' relationships are today normally called 'paradigmatic'.
But this psychologism and this associationism are precisely among
As the film is an object which occupies both time and space, the
syntagmatic dimension in it is deployed as much along the axis of
sequences (as 'shots' which succeed one another within the sequence)
* "Les niveaux de l'analyse linguistique", in Proceedings of the 9th International
Congress of Linguists, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1962 (The Hague: Mouton,
1964). Reprinted in Problimes de linguistique generale (Paris: Gallimard 1966),
118-31.
174 PARADIGMATIC AND SYNTAGMATIC
Analyses oriented in this way are less common in writings about the
cinema, where one readily confuses langage and langue, and where
linguists, who study the latter (langue) are often considered to be
studying the former (langage). In this way the idea is spread that the
phoneme, the morpheme, etc., would be the minimal units of the spoken
language, and that they would thus belong to all manifestations of a
certain material of expression - phonetic substance - and that, since
'the cinema' is also characterized by this means of expression, it ought
to have, in the same way, one specific minimal unit, or one specific
battery of minimal units integrated among themselves (a specific system
with several articulations). One begins to search for the minimal cin-
ematic unit, which is sometimes believed to have been found in the
Such a remark is not only critical, but also autocritical. In our Essais
sur la signification au cinima (pp. 212-34), we studied a certain sub-
code of montage, the large syntagmatic category ('grande syntagmati-
que') of the picture-track in the classical film narrative. It was said in
various places (notably pp. 122 and 138) that this is only one cinematic
code among others; however, in certain passages (p. 138 + passim),
the importance of this code in relation to the ensemble of the cinematic
material is clearly overestimated, and the idea that one could really be
dealing, if not with the single code of the cinema, at least with a
privileged and particularly central code, was not sufficiently avoided.
This vacillation explains, and justifies in part, some of the criticism
which has been levelled against us, and which nevertheless remains
unfounded. One has especially reproached the study of the large syn-
tagmatic category for not having mentioned certain cinematic elements
whose importance is unquestioned: sound, dialogues, the visual
'point of view' in which the action is presented to the spectator, the
construction of images proper to the most recent and most innovative
films, etc. These signifying configurations certainly stem from other
codes, the study of which, from the beginning, was excluded by the
very definition which we gave the large syntagmatic category (122).
However, the expose did intrinsically lay itself open to these criticims,
to the extent that it failed to establish explicitly enough the pluricodical
nature of the cinema, such that the only code (or rather sub-code)
which, in the passage in question, was studied in detail tended to appear,
from a somewhat hurried reading, as the only code of the cinema.8
0Cinema e film 2, Spring 1967, 175, and in Essais sur la signification au cinima,
122.
Thus it is quite true that each of the autonomous segments recognized
in a film remains a heterogeneous conglomerate in other respects, and constitutes
an authentic unity only within a certain perspective, i.e., in the perspective of one
of the formal models which may be as we have said constructed by abstrac-
tion from the concrete text: the autonomous segment is not a unit 'of the film',
but a unit of one of the systems of the film. Our attempt thus leads in the same
direction as do Emilio Garroni's thoughts on the codical heterogeneity of the
cinematic language. It would, moreover, be an unusual coincidence if the different
systems of the film all gave rise to units, within the filmic chain, whose boundaries
coincided exactly with their syntagmatic positioning: it is thus normal that the
units of this particular code ( = the autonomous segments) are not units for other
filmic codes; but we have not said that they were.
9
The Collectif Quazar group in Brussels (a team of cinematic semioticians led by
Michel Gheude and Daniel Peraya) accord a great importance to the level
of the photogram, without, however, making it the universal minimal unit; see
"Les photogrammes comme signifiants", comments made by Michel Gheude at
the Conference, Stato e tendenza attuali della ricerca sulle communicazioni di
massa, un particulare riferimento al linguaggio iconico (Milan: Institut Agostino
Gemelli, 9-10 October 1970). The photogram is considered to be a unit of second
articulation.
The photogram plays an important role in the paper by Umberto Eco on triple
articulation in the cinema (cf. note 7).
Recently, authors like Roland Barthes and Silvia Pierre have examined the
notion of photogram, but from a point of view which is foreign to the present
discussion.
THE PROBLEM OF DISTINCTIVE UNITS 191
shot, which also shows the furniture, the body of another person in
'outline', etc.): here is thus a group of codes - and there are others -
where the minimal unit is certainly elsewhere than in the photogram.
It is when one is thinking of cinematic codes of this sort that one may
rightly assert that the cinema is not a machine for the purpose of
combining photograms, but rather for suppressing them and rendering
them imperceptible.
On the other hand, one also finds at least one group of codes in
which the photogram is certainly the minimal unit (or one of the
minimal units, if one allows several integrated articulations): we are
thinking of the technological codes which are involved in the very
functioning of the cinematic equipment (of the camera), which are its
program (in the sense that one speaks of the program of a computer)
and which constitute the very principle of its construction and
operation. These technological codes, although they have machines
as their 'users', have been constructed by men (inventors, engineers,
etc.); moreover, the structures which they impose on the information
are again treated and mastered - but this time at the level of decoding -
by other humans, the spectators of the cinema, who perceive the pro-
jected images and understand them. Among these codes, there is one
which is so important it is even commonly considered to be the very
principle of the cinema, its very definition: this is the complex system
according to which the cinematic equipment (recording camera, film
strips, projector) 'reproduces movement' - in fact: analyzes it, preserves
it and recomposes it on demand - by making use of diverse optical
phenomena, primary among which is the' -effect'10 (and not the retinal
after-effect, which simply plays a balancing role, in other respects quite
important for a better legibility of the image). Everyone can understand
that in this technical code (which is the very code of the cinematograph),
the photogram is truly the minimal unit, or at least one of the minimal
units. It is the smallest segment along the axis of sequences, like the
phoneme in spoken languages, but not along the axis of the simulta-
10
The ' -phenomenon', or 'illusion of movement' was know long before the
invention of the cinema, and commonly considered to be 'natural'. As early as
1840, psychologists were describing it without analyzing it. These were the famous
experiments of Wertheimer (1912), and of Korte (1915) which have established its
existence in a precise manner. See R.C. Oldfield, "La perception visuelle des ima-
ges du cinema, de la television et du radar" Revue Internationale de Filmologie
1: 3-4, October 1948, 263-79), and A. Michotte van den Berck, "Le caractere de
'realite' des projections cinematographiques" (same journal, same issue, 249-61).
11
The same idea (with a different context) is expressed in the work of Umberto
Eco concerning "triple articulation" in the cinema (cf. note 7).
192 THE PROBLEM OF DISTINCTIVE UNITS
them, and not within the 'cinema') the minimal unit which belongs to
one or the other.
The problem of minimal units is not an autonomous theoretical point
which could be settled independently of a more general investigation of
'cinematic grammar', and before undertaking such a study. The m i n i m a l
unit does not exist outside of the conceptions which one may have of
the grammar, and it already engages them in their most general outline;
it does not constitute the preface to it. To the multiplicity of codes there
corresponds the multiplicity of minimal units. The minimal unit is not a
given in the text; it is a tool of analysis. There are as many types of
minimal units as there are types of analysis ! (By 'analysis' it is nec-
essary to understand the analysis performed by the users as well as
that made by semioticians, since the latter has as a goal, among other
things, to make explicit the former.)
There is no cinematic sign. This notion, like that of 'pictorial signs',
'musical signs', etc., stems from a naive classification which proceeds
according to material units (langages) and not by units of a logical order
(codes) : a fanaticism of specificity which is not without some meta-
physical notions, as we have said in another context in Chapter 2.4. In
the cinema (or elsewhere) no sovereign code exists which imposes its
minimal units, which are always the same, on all parts of all films.
These films, on the contrary, have a textual surface - which is temporal
and spatial - a fabric in which multiple codes come to segment, each
for itself, their minimal units which, throughout the entire length of the
filmic discourse, are superimposed, overlap, and intersect without their
boundaries necessarily coinciding.
The present state of cinematic semiotics, marked by the absence of
minimal units which are clearly recognized and agreed upon by all, is
not at all especially discouraging, or at least would not be so if
theoretical confusions did not complicate matters. The study of codes
can begin without delay, and the minimal units will be established in
the course of time. The essential thing, now as later, is never to make
a minimal unit of a cinematic code into a minimal unit 'of the cinema'.
There is some similarity - which is methodological, not substantial -
between this situation and that of the morpheme in natural language, as
it is represented by transformational generative linguistics. Nevertheless,
transformational generative grammar deals with a single code (spoken
language, the 'model of competence', an abstraction made from all the
'models of performance'), while the study of the cinema has greater dif-
ficulty in establishing for itself a domain with a single semiotic dimen-
THE PROBLEM OF DISTINCTIVE UNITS 195
sion (see Chapter 7.6). The similarity lies elsewhere; it concerns the
relationships which exist between the determination of the minimal
unit and the overall study of grammar. Generative linguistics, we know,
holds that the minimal segment which is distinctive for the 'syntactic
component of the grammar' - the 'terminal constituent' of the syntactic
phase of generation - cannot be the object of a predetermined definition,
independent of the detailed analysis of the syntactic machine itself.
Even this analysis can show, for example, that certain segments com-
monly considered as morphemes (bifacial units with a signifier and a
signified) in reality merit another name - these are pure jormants, in
generative terminology - for they consist of simple grammatical tools,
lacking any particular signified, as the English do in negative or inter-
rogative sentences, ne or pas in the code of French 'neuter' (where the
only group 'ne...pas' constitutes a morpheme, which has negation as its
proper signified,12 etc. In the 'syntagmatic' (or 'categorial') part of
syntactic generation, the terminal constituents - minimal units - are
all morphemes; in the transformational part of the syntax, which comes
later, the terminal constituents are formants, some of which coincide
with morphemes (they have been led back in identical fashion, trans-
formation by transformation, from the terminal-syntagmatic string
to the terminal-transformational string), and some of which are new
and specific constituents, which do not appear in the terminal-syn-
tagmatic string and which had to be introduced in the course of the
transformational phase : these formants (do, ne, pas, etc.) are not mor-
phemes.
There can thus be two sorts of minimal units - and it is not a ques-
tion here of minimal syntactic units (Andr6 Martinet's units of first
articulation). Similarly, at the level of the second articulation, the study
of phonological mechanisms shows, according to generative linguists,
that it is not impossible to do without the phoneme,1* and to directly
represent the phonetic content of spoken strings in terms of distinctive
features; these features may be combined successively (in which case
u
On the other hand, as Nicolas Ruwet remarks {Introduction la grammaire
ginerative [Paris: Pln, 1967], 38), pas may occur without ne in the colloquial
sub-code of French (Je veux pas). We might add that, in an 'aristocratic' sub-code
ne may appear without pas (Je ne saurais le dire). In such cases, pas (on ne) alone
expresses negation ( = proper signified), and alone constitutes the transformational
development of the element eg. included in the deep structure (terminal syntag-
matic string); the formant thus coincides with the morpheme.
" See, for example, Sanford A. Schane, "Introduction" to La phonologie gendra-
live, Langages 8, 1967, 3-12.
196 THE PROBLEM OF DISTINCTIVE UNITS
that the treatment of these symbolic units, the modalities of their ex-
pression, their contextual positioning, the overall network where they
are 'used', etc., are quite different in the film from what they would be
elsewhere - that a staircase which is evoked verbally and one which is
photographed are two distinct objects. For similar propositions, which
are not at all questionable, concern other codes (which organize the
'treatment'), and the only one of which it is a question here - the one
in which the unit staircase is symbolically associated with the perfor-
mance of the sexual act16 - remains independent of the cinema, and
identical in other means of expression. (In the course of psychoanalysis,
it happens that one 'translates' images into words without paying atten-
tion to the connotative losses brought on by the 'betrayal' of other
codes. One works, in these moments, according to what Freud
called 'symbolic' - to the temporary exclusion of larger 'primary
processes'. It also happens that one attaches oneself to the most recur-
rent representations in dreams in order to disengage their, in some sort,
literal meaning, i.e., in this case, their corresponding impulse in the
unconscious. This is proof that it is a question there of an autonomous
level of meaning, which one may consider by abstracting from the
modalities which preside over the concrete evocation of these same
symbolic objects.) When a case of this sort is presented on the screen,
the filmed-objects - or more exactly certain filmed-objects - acquire
a status of distinctiveness for the decipherment of the film; but they do
not become, as such, minimal cinematic units; and to suppose that they
do elsewhere, in some more specific cinematic codes (and not neces-
sarily in all!), it is clear that this distinctiveness will thus be charac-
teristic of all filmed-objects (of the 'object-unit' as such) - or at least, if
it is necessary to admit that certain objects are cinematically more
distinctive than others, that this would not be selectively those of them
which play a privileged role in dreams. Thus, the filmed-object-of-a-
fixed-psychoanalytic-value offers us an example of a distinctive unit
which is filmic without being cinematic.
There are many others. In certain Westerns, for example Howard
Hughes's film entitled The Outlaw,16 critics have discovered a precise
'theme', 17 an organized and repeated structure which one could call
Remember that "Calamity Jane" (the true Calamity Jane, who was called
Mary Jane Canary or Mary Jane Connaray, and lived from 1852 to 1903)
had dictated her memoirs, and that book had had a great success.
THE PROBLEM OF DISTINCTIVE UNITS 199
thus sees to what point one risks missing the real structure of films
when one insists on finding the minimal filmic sign.
The minimal units of the film (cinematic or not) are not only distin-
guished by their numerical multiplicity, but also - and this is the con-
sequence - by the variation in their material form, and notably in their
syntagmatic scope. Some of them are small, others much larger; each
of them, however, is minimal in relationship to its code: 'minimal'
does not mean small, but designates the smallest unit which is still
commutable (and which may be rather large).
We saw above that the minimal unit is in certain cases the photo-
gram, in others the shot; these are two very unequal filmic segments
with respect to their size (syntagmatic dimension), i.e., in regard to the
material quantity of textual surfaces that they respectively occupy (this
surface, you will recall, is also a temporal surface, since the filmic text
is inscribed in a material of expression which mobilizes both space and
time). The shot always contains several photograms, and sometimes a
very large number of them - 144 for one six-second shot
In certain psychoanalytic codes capable of playing a role on the
screen, a brief example of which was mentioned in the preceding
chapter, the distinctive unit is of the order of the size of the filmed-
object. It is the same with codes of iconic designations, as we shall
call the systems of correspondences between distinctive iconic features
and distinctive semantic features of spoken languages which allow the
spectators of films, elsewhere users of some spoken language, to identify
the recognizable and recurrent visual figures, and to assign to them a
name drawn from that language: it suffices for the French-speaking
spectator to perceive on the screen a fast-moving quadruped with striped
coat in order to think 'zebre', without needing additional visual clues;
the recognition does not operate according to the overall ensemble of
the image, but according to the distinctive features of the iconic signi-
fier, which correspond, in turn, to the distinctive features of the lin-
guistic signified (on this subject, see the analyses of A. Julien Greimas,
on the one hand,19 and Umberto Eco, on the other).20 Here again, the
distinctive unit is of the order of the size of the object, or more exactly,
one has a system with two integrated levels (two articulations) in which
the large distinctive unit is the nameable object - the zebra - and the
small unit the feature of iconic recognition (the stripes of the coat, etc.).
These units, whether it is a question of the nameable object or of a
distinctive part of it, are of small size in relationship to the total surface
of the film.
However, in other cases (in other codes), the minimal unit occupies
a much larger filmic segment: thus in narrative codes (see the works
of Propp, Bremond, L6vi-Strauss, Greimas, Barthes, Todorov, etc.),
codes which appear on the screen as well as elsewhere, the distinctive
units - whether their definition centers around the action, the sequence
of actions, the character, the octant, or the function, etc. - may each
occupy several minutes of the film strip. Other actions, it is true, are
evoked by the film with extreme brevity; but this variation itself con-
firms to what point one must guard against the tendency to confer the
status of a minimal unit on filmic segments of some particular absolute
order of size.
The different minimal units of the film thus differ in size, but also in
syntagmatic form, i.e., in the exact contour of the 'hole' that each of
them leaves in the textual surface of the film, if one subtracts a minimal
unit from the film, ideally leaving all the rest intact, notably the imme-
diate surroundings. When the units consist of filmed-objects, they
occupy a continuous segment of filmic space and time; the hole would
be so-to-speak of a single piece. In these cases, the distinctive unit has
for material content a certain surface of image and a certain time of
projection, both of which are measurable; the same may be said of units
like the shot, the photogram, the entire sequence, etc.
But in passing we have already come across examples of a quite
different situation. Thus, in the ideological code of the Western, with
the theme of the woman and the horse (see p. 198), the unit of analysis
does not, properly speaking, occupy any textual surface; it is only
the figure of the woman, or that of the horse, which occupies any text-
ual surface; but they are not distinctive for the code considered; it is
rather their co-presence which is. And the fact of co-presence, as such,
occupies neither space nor time; it is an 'abstract', immaterial, primarily
THE PROBLEM OF DISTINCTIVE UNITS 201
relational unit - and yet strictly localizable within the filmic devel-
opment; one localizes the co-presence in terms of the co-present objects,
and one can say exactly at which minute of the film and in which
images this antithetical theme appears, this theme which however
occupies neither a fraction of a minute nor of an image.
There is another striking example of these filmic units which occupy
no place and which can nevertheless be situated. They belong, this time,
to a cinematic sub-code, which we have studied in another book under
the name of 'large syntagmatic category' (see Chapters 8.4 and 9.2).
This code, let us recall, specifies the principal sort of 'sequences' which
appear in the picture-track of the classic narrative film; their funda-
mental types are of a fixed and limited number, and each of them has its
own principle of internal construction, an intelligible and formalized
'scheme', a certain spatio-temporal logic of the ordering of the suc-
cessive images within the same sequence. (With the 'cross-cutting
syntagm', which is one type, the alternation on the screen of two series
of intermixed images - A-B-A-B, etc. - signifies that event A and event
are simultaneous in regard to the plot of the film; with the 'parallel
syntagm', the same alternation signifies something else in the chronology
of the story, etc.) The distinctive element in such a code is not the
sequence itself (the entire sequence, with all its textual fabric), but only
the logical principle of ordering with animates it and which assures its
cohesion, permitting the images to form a sequence instead of remain-
ing isolated views (cf. p. 171); it is a question, in sum, for each type
of sequence, of a certain form of montage, i.e., of one of the figures of
specifically cinematic space-time. In films, the cross-cutting syntagm
may serve to represent a chase (alternation between the images of the
chasers and the images of the chased), but also a siege (images of the
besiegers and images of the besieged), a football game (images of team
X and images of team Y), and even other actions. However, elements
like 'chase', 'siege', 'football game' - even those which, in a cross-
cutting syntagm, occupy the surface of the image and the time of the
projection - are not distinctive for the codical definition of the cross-
cutting syntagm, and thus of the minimal unit considered here. The
latter consists neither of the images which alternate, nor of the actions
which are supposed to be simultaneous, but of the figure of significa-
tion which says that the alternation of (no matter which) images may
denote the simultaneity of (no matter which) actions : a purely logical
entity which, by itself, does not take place in the film; however, one
knows exactly at what moment of the film a cross-cutting syntagm
202 THE PROBLEM OF DISTINCTIVE UNITS
appears, at which moment it does not. Thus, in this code of the 'large
syntagmatic category', the distinctive units do not consist of filmic
segments, but of sorts of abstract exponents each of which is attached
to a filmic segment. (It will also be noted that, as for these segments
themselves, they may be of a very large size - for certain sequences
are very long - without their 'exponent' ceasing to constitute a single
minimal unit.)
In certain color films the distribution of colored masses according
to the space of the image and the time of the production follows a
precise and highly elaborate structure. It may be a question of one
or more cinematic (or simply filmic) codes relative to the symbolism
of colors in the culture, or of different textual systems used throughout
the same film, and which are not without analogy in the systems of
values of black and white in films 'without color' (see p. 178), such as
Eisenstein has theorized about and practiced them. When one analyzes
films of this sort, certain distinctive units will thus be colored, and color
(contrary to appearances) occupies no textual surface: it is a colored
object which occupies it, and not the fact that it is blue rather than
red (in which, and in which alone, the color consists). However, the
color is localizable, according to the placement of the colored object.
Color, when it is distinctive, thus offers another example of an ex-
ponential-unit. Compare the similar case of movements, which must
not be confused with the spectacle that they permit us to observe, or
which is made available to us by means of them,21 etc.
It seems, then, that the different (cinematic or non-cinematic) dis-
tinctive units of the film, considering what we called earlier their syn-
tagmatic form, may be classified into at least two categories: there
are those which are segmental (the photogram, the shot, the filmed-
object, the entire sequence, etc.), and those which are suprasegmental,
like the co-presence of two objects, color, camera movement, figure
of montage, etc. The latter, as was said, consists of exponents which
selectively affect - and this is how they can be localized - a specific
filmic segment (or several, in the case of co-presences), but which are
not confused with the entire textual surface of this (these) segment(s),
and do not occupy any place by themselves : this is why we call them
(metaphorically) exponents.
In the realm of linguistics, the distinction between the segmental and
71
On the 'suprasegmental' status of camera movements, see Christian Metz,
Essais sur la signification au cinema, 76.
THE PROBLEM OF DISTINCTIVE UNITS 203
the suprasegmental has been made - notably by Andr6 Martinet22 and
Zellig S. Harris23 - in order to account for the difference between two
of the principal aspects of phonology: phonemics (the study of pho-
nemes, i.e., of articulation) and prosodies (the study of intonation, or at
least of those aspects of intonation which belong to the langue and not
simply to langage, in particular accent, tone, and vocalic quantity).
In a verbal utterance, the phonemes are strictly consecutive, and
it never happens that two of them are emitted at the same time (this is
the famous 'linearity' of language, or more exactly of the spoken utter-
ance). Each phoneme thus occupies a segment of the utterance (from
which comes the name 'segmental'), and the succession of phonemes
constitutes the second articulation, on its syntagmatic side. But it also
happens that the chain of linguistic signifiers is so-to-speak divided in
half (notion of the 'suprasegmental') and that a second chain - signi-
ficant or simply distinctive, according to the case -is expressed at the
same time as a phoneme or a sequence of phonemes, and in some sort
over it: thus, in tone languages (as certain languages of Southeast Asia),
the grave or acute pronunciation of a vowel belonging to a given pho-
nemic sequence is sufficient to establish, with this 'unique' sequence, two
different morpheme signifiers (in practice, two different words of ab-
solutely distinct meanings); all this happens, then, as if the melodic
pitch of the voice had contributed an additional distinctive differentia-
tion, being added (along the axis of simultaneity) to those already
furnished by the diverse phonemes of the sequence.
One sees that the linguistic distinction between the segmental and the
suprasegmental is very close to the distinction we have made beween
two sorts of distinctive filmic units; hence the terminological trans-
ference. The objects distinguished, of course, have nothing in common;
but the distinction is separate from the objects distinguished. supra-
segmental unit, in linguistics, does not, properly speaking, occupy any
segment of the spoken chain; what does occupy a place is the vowel
pronounced with an acute tone, not the fact that this tone is acute
rather than grave (in which, and in which alone, the distinctive supra-
segmental distinction consists); however, the latter may be accurately
localized, since it is attached to one vowel or another (or syllable, in
23
See Chapters 3-24 and 3-35 of Elements de linguistique generale, 77-90. And
studies such as "Accents et tons" (Miscellanea phonetica, 2nd fasc., 1954, 13-24),
reprinted and augmented in La linguistique synchronique (Paris: P.U.F., 1965),
141-61.
23
The notion of 'contour' ( = distinctive suprasegmental intonation); see for
example, Methods in Structural Linguistics, 169-70.
204 THE PROBLEM OF DISTINCTIVE UNITS
other cases) which, for its part, is fully segmental. The relationship
which exists between the tone and 'its' vowel is thus homologous to
that which unites thefilmiccolor to 'its' object - or, in the code of the
large syntagmatic category, the spatio-temporal logic of the cross-
cutting montage (here alone distinctive to 'its' sequence, i.e., to the
material segment of thefilmin which it is used).
We shall agree to call frame of syntagmatic reference, or simply
'frame of reference' - also a term inspired by linguistics - the textual
segment to which a distinctive filmic unit of a suprasegmental type is
'attached'. In this way one can distinguish the exponent itself (the
distinctive unit) from that which is only its textual support. The frame
of reference is always of a segmental nature. It may happen that it has
itself the status of a distinctive filmic unit, but in another code; for
example, the 'sequence', which is only a frame of reference with respect
to the units of the large syntagmatic category, becomes in turn dis-
tinctive (at least in certain cases) in relation to the narrative code of
action. However, when such a segment is designated as a frame of
reference, it is, by definition, because it is not envisioned according to
the code in which it is distinctive, but according to the code in which its
exponent is (or else there would be no reason to call it this, since then
it would itself be the distinctive unit). Similarly, in the suprasegmental
analysis of certain languages, the tones have the vowels as frames of
reference which elsewhere, when the segmental analysis is being made,
are phonemes like the others, distinctive units and no longer only the
support of distinctive units. This change, which is produced in lin-
guistics when one passes from one sector of the code (the prosodic) to
another (the phonemic), appears in filmic research when one passes
from one code or sub-code to another.
'SPECIFIC/NON-SPECIFIC':
RELATIVITY OF THE CLASSIFICATION RETAINED *
1
Copenhagen : Nordisk sprog og kulturforlog, 1959 (Volume XII of Travaux du
Cercle linguistique de Copenhague).
* In "La stratification du langage" (first published in the form of an article in
Word X, 1954, 163-88).
210 'specific/non-specific'
nature is dependent on the material (thus, in natural languages, the
substance of expression is the phonetic sound, i.e., it is confused
by its physical nature with the material of expression, which is also
phonetic sound), and it takes its relational organization from form. We
know, in effect, that for Hjelmslev substance (considered at least from
a semiotic point of view) does not have a special form - the form that it
has is that which has been imposed upon it - in all senses of the word -
by 'the form', which is the only semiotically existant form. This inter-
pretation has the advantage of eliminating any mysterious, encumbering,
or supranumerary 'third term': the substance so understood does not
constitute some third thing which will come to be added to the form
and to the material; it is simply that which appears when a form happens
to organize a material, or when a material is organized by a form. Sub-
stance, Hjelmslev adds (Prolegomdnes, p. 76), is not something other
than the material (here called 'meaning'), for it is characteristic of the
material only to appear as the substance of a form; nevertheless, the
substance is logically distinct from the material (p. 76), for one calls
'substance' the material which is already formed, while the term
'material' (or 'meaning') designates by definition something not yet
formed ('amorphous', according to Saussure); the result of imposing a
form is to transform material into substance (p. 76).
One will also note that this interpretation accords well with what is
said in Essais Linguistiques, on pp. 72-74 : 3 language as a 'schema'
corresponds to pure form, and language as a 'norm' to material form;
however, in another passage of that work (p. 31),4 Hjelmslev reproaches
the Prague phonologists - wrongly, it seems to us, but this is another
question - for not having considered 'pure form', but form as already
manifested semantically (or phonetic manifestation as already formed):
with distinctive features, certainly, but with distinctive features form-
ulated in phonetic terms. one compares these two passages - and even
others - one sees that phonological studies concerned, in the eyes of
Hjelmslev, the 'material form' (or the 'norm') of the level of expression,
i.e., that area which is neither pure form nor pure material, but quite
precisely substance in the special sense that, in our opinion, the
author gave to this notion despite his diverse variations in formulating
it. Pages 48-50 of Essais Linguistiques support this interpretation of
In "Langue et parole" (first published as an article in Cahiers F. de Saussure 2,
1943, 29-44).
* In "Structural Analogs of Language" (first published as an article in Studio
Linguistica I, 1948, 69-78).
' In "La stratification du langage".
'SPECIFIC/NON-SPECIFIC' 211
'substance', since it is said there that the material is the manifestant
in general (even unformed), while the substance is, uniquely, the al-
ready formed manifestant.
We shall adopt then, for our present purposes, an interpretation of
Hjelmslevian thought in which one has only two logically prior things,
the form and the material (which correspond rather closely to a defini-
tion which current usage gives to these two respective words) - and
in which the substance is nothing more than the formed material, or
the materialized form.
Also, the term 'substance' is not used in this book. But this does not
mean, far from it, that considerations of substance are absent from it:
one shall return to this point in Chapter 10.8.
Form is thus proper to codes, material to language. It is this point
of view which has been maintained, in anticipation, since Chapter One.
But one point still remains to be discussed. In the writings of
Hjelmslev, the distinction 'form/material/substance' is always com-
bined with another, which opposes expression and content (the level
of the signifiers and the level of the signifieds), and which is independent
of the first, such that their recombination is organized into a double
entry table which contains six final items : from of expression, form of
content, material of expression, material of content, substance of ex-
pression, substance of content.
There are thus two 'materials'. And if, throughout this book, it has
only been a question of one of them (the material of expression), it is
because it is the only one which distinguishes one language system from
another. The material of content, as Hjelmslev remarked,6 is common
to all semiotic phenomena (for our part we would say : to all language
systems and all codes); in some a single material of content exists, which
is what one calls meaning (the fact itself of the meaning, the semantic
fabric). What varies from one semiotic phenomenon to another is the
division of this fabric into distinctive units of signifieds - i.e., the
form of content, the proper system of the signifieds themselves - but
not the nature of the fabric itself, which is always the meaning. All
systems of signification whatsoever have as a function the transmission
of meaning. They may borrow their signifiers from quite different
spheres (visual, auditory, etc.), but their signifieds always belong to the
semantic sphere and to it alone: to this ideal 'material' - immaterial
material, so-to-speak - to this psycho-sociological material which is
'meaning'.
* For example, Essais linguistiques, 61, in "stratification du langage".
212 'SPECIFIC/NON-SPECIFIC'
Until now, we have distinguished those filmic codes which are specifical-
ly cinematic from those which are not. The existence of the latter
scarcely poses any problem; any problem of principle, at least, for to
actually draw up an exact list would take a long time; but their status
itself (their non-specific nature) may be established without difficulty in
7
Ibid.
'SPECIFIC/NON-SPECIFIC' 213
each concrete case, on the sole condition that one sets apart, as has
been done in diverse passages of this book, the treatment of the code
in the film, which is distinct from the code itself, which is in fact the
work of other codes, and which may be cinematic, if these other codes
are. Once this precaution has been taken, there is nothing adventurous
in considering as extra-cinematic, for example, a given collective re-
presentation or some social imago (the seductor, the model spouse, the
wayward youth, the adventurer, etc.) which appears in films as well as
in books, newspapers, and conversations, at least within a given cultural
area.
On the other hand, it is much more difficult to ascertain with any
certainty that a given code is specifically cinematic. In order to do this,
it would be necessary, in effect, to establish, if not that this code is
manifested in all films, since the sub-codes are also specific (cf.
Chapter 5.3), at least that it never manifests itself elsewhere than in
films (this last point calls for some discussion, which will follow, in
Chapter 10.4; but it remains, nevertheless, in all evidence, linked in
one way or another to the very definition of the 'specific') However, it
is not necessary to go very far in order to ascertain that certain codes
(or articles of codes), intuitively felt to be specific and commonly
presented as such in writings on the cinematic language, appear as
well, in more or less similar forms, in the 'text' provided us by other
means of expression. Borrowings, transferences, imitations, adaptations
of semiotic figures (and, more generally, all of the vast domain of what
we will call semiotic interference between arts) represent a rather
common phenomena, which constitute the rule and not the exception :
certain configurations which would appear to be most obviously cine-
matic reappear in comic strips, or in literature (such as the 'cross-
cutting montage' in the novels of Faulkner); certain plastic effects
which seem most closely linked to pictorial art have been adopted by
German or Swedish expressionist films; narration in the first person,
a construction which is said to be 'essentially novelesque' became com-
mon in films after 1939;8 etc.
This objection, however, in turn gives rise to diverse counter-
objections : the 'adaptations' of semiotic figures do not take place
s
This problem has often been studied by theoreticians of the cinema. See in
particular Jean-Pierre Chartier, "Les 'films la premiere personne sonore' et
l'illusion de ^ l i t e au cindma" (Revue du Cinema, 2nd series: 4, January 1947,
32-41); Albert Laffay, Logique du cinema (Paris: Masson, 1964), 77-82; Jean
Mitry, Esthitique et Psychologie du cinema, tome II, 68-71, 107-112, 140, 403-
404.
214 'SPECIFIC/NON-SPECIFIC'
without profound distortions of the signifier and the signified, and one
could not pretend that the same figure 'passes' from one art to
another without abusing the English language since, at the end of this
'passage', it is not exactly the same as it was before. To speak of a
cross-cutting montage in the work of Faulkner, or of the flashback in
the novels of Sartre, as has sometimes been done, is to employ meta-
phors; it is also to confound diachrony with synchrony, for there may be
historical influence without structural identity. It is clear that a con-
figuration of montage as particular as the 'bracketed syntagm' (if one
takes this notion in the precise sense in which we have tried to define
it elsewhere)9 exists only in the cinema or on television, even if it has
undergone, during its development, the influence of some construction
already in use in literary works, and even if it 'inspires' in turn certain
pictorial compositions of certain stationary 'photo-montages': for these
precursors of these heirs of the syntagm are not bracketed syntagms.
In addition, it often happens that it is a particular unit of a code, and
not the entire code, which individually serves as the object of borrow-
ing. Faulkner has perhaps 'adopted' the cross-cutting montage, but he
has certainly not adopted the entire system of cinematic montage (in
which the cross-cutting montage is opposed to other types of montage,
and draws a good part of its meaning from this contrast). It might be
added that this system of montage, despite all its influences or localized
offshoots, remains specifically attached to a particular art, the art of
the cinema.
However, these circumstances are not enough to eliminate the
objection mentioned a moment ago (the argument of 'semiotic inter-
this code to one or the other of two arts. Also, from the moment that
it is entirely adopted into the domain of the second, it 'belongs' to it as
much as it belongs to the first. On the other hand, what is of interest
to semiotic analysis (the analysis of the texts themselves) is that the
clear-obscure as a phenomenon is intrinsically visual, such that its
visual representations are closer to its perceptual reality - and, so-to-
speak, to a less transposed degree - than are its written expressions.
Inversely (and in parallel fashion), there are certain poetic effects which
are linked in their very existence to the grammar or phonology of
spoken language (which Roman Jakobson is thinking of when he
speaks of the "poetry of grammar" and of the "grammar of poetry")10:
figures based on the use of the tenses of verbs, on a certain manipula-
tion of phonological oppositions proper to the language, etc. It is
writing which offers us a direct expression - or at least a more direct
expression - of this type of 'effect', and it is the study of visual
equivalences (as in certain silent films striving toward 'rhyme') which
constitutes here a transposed manifestation of the system.
The above remarks have introduced the idea that the material of
expression - in the degree which shall be specified in Chapter 10.3 -
may be on the receiving end in the identification and the enumeration
of codes. It was said, for example, that, in certain cases the diversity
of manifestations is enough to establish the very plurality of codes if
the form (structure) remains the same. We shall see, in addition
(Chapter 10.7), that this is not always the case, for certain codes are
from the beginning independent of any perceptual sphere.
Considerations of this sort have intentionally not been introduced
earlier. It seems to us, in effect, that the most important thing, in studies
devoted to productions of the big screen, is to clearly distinguish be-
tween the cinema as a specific fact and the film as the place where the
specific and the non-specific intermingle; it is at this point that the
most common and most serious confusions are made. It is also nec-
essary to insist on the fact that afilmiccode is not necessarily cinematic,
for a code (in principle) is defined exclusively as a relational logic, as
pure form, and is thus not linked to a particular material of expression,
for example the material of expression which is proper to the cinema.
10
"Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics", 244-47 in Essais.
In this passage, the author discusses primarily poetic figures connected with the
grammar of languages, and not with their phonology: but in other passages (for
example 240-43, or 222-34, concerning the reiterative 'phonic figure*), Jakobson
studies what could be called (in paraphrasing) the 'poetry of phonology' and the
'phonology of poetry'.
'SPECIFIC/NON-SPECIFIC' 219
However, as was remarked on pp. 42 and 137, our definition of
the code - and from the very beginning - includes an indirect reference
to the material of expression, by the sole fact that the existence of
'specific' codes in permitted; indirect reference, since specificity ought
to be defined as an ensemble of codes and not directly by the material
nature of the signifier, but reference all the same, since these codes,
in turn, can only be declared specific if one supposes them linked, in
their very existence, to the material of expression which is proper to
the cinema, i.e., if one supposes them absent in other materials of
expression.
sum, the position which is adopted here includes two elements,
not one: (1) the specificity which interests semiotics is the specificity
of codes, not the 'crude' specificity of physical signifiers; (2) the speci-
ficity of specific codes nevertheless refers to certain features of the
material of expression.
The first aspect is necessary and sufficient to distinguish the cinema
from the film, the pluri-textual code from the pluri-codical text, i.e.,
to set apart those codes which are not specific. But one now comes to
the second, which is indispensable if one wishes to say in what exact
sense those codes that one declares specific are specific.
Considerations of 'material', eliminated to the benefit of codical
considerations, ought to be reintroduced to the precise degree that they
concern these very codes.
The entire preceding chapter leads to the conclusion that the choice of
one or another material of expression is not, all the same, insignificant;
by taking this detour, and by more 'aesthetic' paths, one finds one of the
principal objections which has been addressed to Hjelmslev in properly
linguistic discussions. That the material, in itself (in the sense that
Hjelmslev understands it), cannot be the object of a semiotic study, and
that the latter inevitably has as a goal and as an effect the isolation of
the form that this material manifests, is certain; but it also seems
clear to us that the form would itself have been different if it had been
inscribed in another material. In this regard, certain responses that the
Prague phonologists made to Hjelmslev appear to be difficult to refute :
how is one to believe that the phonetic nature of the signifiers, in spoken
languages, has no influence on the very form of its signifiers, and on the
system which they constitute ? We know, furthermore, that this
220 'SPECIFIC/NON-SPECIFIC'
13
Esthitique et Psychologie du cinima, tome , 149-51.
222 'SPECIFIC/NON-SPECIFIC'
met, in passing (p. 199), a code belonging to this group, the code of
'iconic designations' (a system of correspondences between the distinc-
tive features which make it possible to identify the image as a recurrent
visual figure, and the distinctive semantic features of the lexeme - or
rather of the 'sememe', in the sense specified by Greimas [cf. p. 32])
which, in a given language, designates the recognizable object, thus
rendering it even more recognizable. This code is not the only one of
this group. There are many others, for example all those which - in
order to employ a favorite term which is somewhat bizarre, and in any
case improper in the case of the flat picture - concern the 'plastics'
of the picture: spatial disposition of iconic elements, the role of the
frame (i.e., of the finitude proper to iconic representations) in the
ordering of visual elements, distribution of masses and lines of force
(thus the 'golden mean', which we know preoccupies, after painters,
certain cineasts), the play of figures and grounds (principal 'motifs' and
backgrounds), etc. The cinema, as some authors have said, is also a
'plastic art', something which becomes important in certain films, like
those of the German expressionist school or the later films of Eisenstein
(Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible). To this first category of
codes, which is associated with visual iconicity, belong even (or rather :
belong first) different systems of great anthropological importance,
which we shall call 'codes of analogy': those which are responsible for
analogy itself, which operate in view of 'resemblance', which cause the
resembling object to be felt as such. Analogy is not the contrary of
codification, for it is itself codified, although its codes have the property
of being felt to be natural by the user. It is a question of a whole
ensemble of psycho-physiological montages, integrated with the per-
ceptual activity itself, and whose modalities vary noticeably from one
culture to another (see especially the works of Pierre Francastel). The
role of these codes in a semiotic perspective has been the object of
diverse studies, among others by American semioticians, and in Com-
munications 15.14 They are common to the cinema and to other iconic
language systems.
But the picture-track of the film is not sufficiently defined by this
iconicity; there is still the fact that the images of which it is composed
are obtained by mechanical duplication. Thus codes of a second group
14
Paris, 1970, special issue "L'analyse des images".
On this point, see the contribution of Eliseo Veron (52-69), of Jean-Louis
Schefer (210-21), of Umberto Eco (especially in B.I., B.2. and B.3., i.e. 11-40),
and our own "Presentation" (1-10).
'SPECIFIC/NON-SPECIFIC' 229
may appear in it, those which are proper to the 'mechanical picture' in
general, and thus to the group of means of expression which have
recourse to this picture - codes that the cinema shares with television,
photography, a sequence of photographs, etc., but not with drawing,
painting, fresco, animated design, cartoon (where the pictures are
composed by hand). Such codification presents a less than maximum
degree of cinematicity but one which is greater than that of generally
iconic codes. The cinema shares them with other language systems, but
the latter are already less numerous. This second class of language
systems is in a position of inclusion in relation to the first. The two
circles are 'concentric' (an approximate metaphor, which should not be
taken too literally). It is here that one finds the codes which are some-
times called photographic, a term which is moreover improper since the
televisual image, contrary to the cinematic image, is not photographic.
But the notion of photograph, by a sort of implicit synecdoche, des-
ignates in certain contexts the ensemble of figurative images obtained
by mechanical means (and which, in effect, are quite similar with
respect to reception, as one finds with the pair cinema-television). In
this group, one thus has 'photographic' codifications linked to phe-
nomena like angular incidence (shooting angles : high angle shot, ground
angle shot, frontal incidence, 'inclined framing', etc.), the 'scale of
shots' (which is commonly classified according to the progressive
layering of 'sizes' in the axial line of the lens, the size considered as
distinctive being that of the principal motif of the image: long shots,
medium shots, close-ups, etc.),15 the perceptible effects of different
lenses as well as filters and other apparatus, the diaphragm stop (on
which depends the scope of the zone of visibility around the object on
which the focusing of the lens has been regulated, and thus the ensemble
of variations of the 'depth of the visual field' or its absence), etc. All
this plays the most important role in films.
However, the image in the cinema is not only mechanical and
iconic; it is, in addition, 'multiple', i.e., related sequentially with itself;
a film is several images. A new bifurcation arises : the cinema, in this
15
Authors like Fran501s Chevassu (Langage cinimatographique. [Paris: d.
de la Ligue frangaise de l'enseignement, 1962] 14) or Jean Mitry (EsthStique et
Psychologie du cinima, I [Paris ditions universitres, 1963], 149) have insisted
on the fact that each 'shot size' corresponds to a sort of size scale ( = surface
relation between the dimension of the screen and that of the principal object
represented).
The 'size scale* taken as a whole is thus a scale of scales, a scalar hierarchy.
One could speak of 'scalar variations' as one does of angular variations.
230 'SPECIFIC/NON-SPECIFIC'
engineer Maurice Vareille. See what Epstein himself says about this in "La
valent du son", in Livre (Tor du cinima frangais (Paris: Agencc d'information
cinematographique, 1947-1948.)
u
Marcel Martin, Le langage cinimatographique, 119.
234 'SPECIFIC/NON-SPECIFIC'
The very notion of specificity loses all meaning if one does not link it
closely with a discussion of the physical nature of the cinema, of a
definition of the 'cinematic' which is literal and technical (craftsman-
like, one could say) - or, more exactly, of certain features of this defi-
nition on the basis of the material of the signifier - namely those features
which are commutable with features belonging to other language
systems and which, consequently, as material as they are, are neverthe-
less divided into discrete units (distinctive features) and are organized
into a system: that system which is formed by different language
systems between themselves, and thus the different specific codes
between themselves.
From the moment that one defines specificity in this manner - as a
notion which is at the same time material and systemic - it does not
take long to see that problems of specificity are considerably more
complex than is customarily thought. In the presence of a codification
which - if only because its manifestation is not universal - could in one
manner or another be specific to a given language system, one must al-
ways ask to what extent it is (i.e., with how many other language systems
does the language system under study share it), and in what manner, i.e.,
with what other language systems is it shared, and what is the material
trait which is common to the language systems of the group so con-
stituted. A codification, as we have just seen, may be 'cinematic' to the
extent that the cinema is made of pictures, but it may also be cinematic
to the extent that the cinema is moving, or to the extent that it is
sonorous, etc.
These phenomena of imbrication, which forbid the making of
'specificity' into a homogeneous and compact domain, are thus directly
related to the distinctive features of the material of expression. This is
only normal; if the code is specific, it is that it is linked to certain
physical characteristics of the signifier (if not, what would 'specific'
mean?). But there may exist several language systems in which the
signifier presents these characteristics; and inversely, the signifier of
each language system has several characteristics, all of which it does
not share with the same set of other language systems. These two
circumstances, which are combined among themselves, come down to
an 'overlapping of specificity' (exclusions, inclusions, intersections).
In this chapter we have merely tried to lay bare the basic principle of
this overlapping, rather than attempting a complete exposition of all
its complexities. We can say the same thing more quickly, in stating
'SPECIFIC/NON-SPECIFIC' 235
simply that a single language system belongs simultaneously to several
classes of language systems.
when they do not involve a perceptible difference in the text itself, in the
'filmophany' (p. 13) - also stem from the 'cinematic' domain so defined
(non-filmic-cinematic; cf. Chapter 2.5).
All this, obviously, does not have the effect of volatilizing the
existence of different codes. First, because there are no airtight
compartments between considerations which are properly semiotic and
those which concern instead sociology or technology, between the
filmic-cinematic and the non-filmic-cinematic. Next, because the cin-
ematic material of expression and the televisual material of expression
still remain separate - but for long ? - by a distinctive feature which
affects the text in a perceptible manner - namely, the size of the screen.
(It is not by chance that, in ordinary language, this trait alone, of all
the differential traits, has been retained in order to express the dif-
ference between the two language systems : the 'big screen' and the 'little
screen'.)
In spite of this reduction in size (the codical consequences of
which are still poorly understood or perhaps not understood at all), it
remains that the respective texts of the cinema and of television have
in common all the most important distinctive material features (which
will be recalled in a moment), and that the specific codifications, i.e.,
those linked to the distinctive features, are largely the same in the two
cases. In both one finds close-up shots and medium long shots, lighting
effects, dolly shots and trajectories, images perceived as 'photographic',
sound-off and sound-on, 'dialogue' and external 'commentary',
credits, 'sound effects' coordinated with the pictures, chronological
montage and flashback, rapid montage and 'sequence-shot', etc. It
would take a long time to enumerate the figures and systems of figures
which are common to the big and little screens. Their precise use,
their average frequency, their preferred context, etc. may vary from
one to another, but they may also vary within the frame of each: it is
a question of differences between sub-codes, not between language
systems. In addition, still concerning usage, we know each day that
cinema and television resemble each other and interact more and more.
Differences which separate the cinema or television from any other
language system have nothing in common with those which separate the
cinema from television: the first are compact, both immediate and
irremediable; definitive differences between materials of expression,
involving entire groups of specific codes. The radiophonic piece is not
visual while the cinema and television are, but the photograph is fixed
while the cinema and television are moving, etc.
'SPECIFIC/NON-SPECIFIC' 239
On page 225, we defined neighboring language systems as language
systems which have in common a certain number of distinctive physical
features, and thus a certain number of specific codes. In essence, cin-
ema and television are nothing more than two neighboring language
systems, but ones which push this relationship much farther than is
ordinarily done. Within each of the two, the distinctive physical features
and specific codes which also belong to the other are much more
numerous and important than those which do not belong to it; and
inversely, those which separate them are much less numerous and im-
portant than those which separate them, in common, from other lan-
guage systems.
Thus one can treat them as if they formed a single language system.
This is only a convention, since the differences remain, and they would
become of primary importance if one undertook the internal study of
the cinema-television pair. (Also, it is clear from the very outset - and
common opinion does not contradict this - that these two 'media' are
both distinct, and yet very similar.) But this convention may bring
about greater clarity and discard several false problems in the classifica-
tions and discussions which, going beyond the frame of the cinema as
that of the television, envisage the more general state of codifications
and specificities in a rather vast domain, like that of the 'audio-visual'
and, a fortiori, of general aesthetics.
It will be said, then, in this spirit, that cinema and television are two
technologically and socially distinct versions of a single language system
which is defined by a certain type of combination between speech,
music, sound effects, written credits, and moving pictures (to the notable
exclusion of smells, tastes, tactile sensations, etc.) - it being under-
stood that the techniques of mechanical duplication utilized in order
to 'reproduce' these five sorts of elements end, for the three of them
which are auditory, by largely re-establishing the phenomenal and per-
ceptual richness of the object which is reproduced, while the iconic
series (however obtained, also, by mechanical duplication, as compared
with what takes place for example in painting or design) manifests
a partial and incomplete perceptual analogy in relation to the re-
produced object, since it tolerates the alteration of some of the per-
ceptible characteristics of the 'model' (presence of the rectangle of the
screen which is absent in ordinary vision, absence of binocular factors
of relief which are present in ordinary vision, different functioning of
the mechanisms of the re-establishment of constancy, etc.).
A definition of this sort, we see, applies both to cinema and to tele-
240 'SPECIFIC/NON-SPECIFIC'
and others which are associated with its movement These two sorts of
organizations - which are distinct, moreover, since sequences of still
photographs exist like those which form the 'photo-novel' - constantly
interpenetrate and are combined in films, for whose montage they
assume in common the responsibility. For the internal study of the
cinema, what is most important is this very collaboration, i.e., the
montage - the analysis of which, however, could only gain in rigor if
the two elements are clearly distinguished. (In this case, one would
find, as we have done elsewhere,21 that the concerns of sequencing
have had priority over the problems of the elaboration of movement
in certain phases of the development of the cinematic language system,
which has been dominated by an obsession with montage in a narrow
sense, i.e., of cutting and splicing, thus of sequentially more than of
movement.) And yet, it cannot be doubted that the mobility of the
image is more specific to the cinema than is its plurality : the first, not
the second, has given its name to the cinematographic, the first is found
only in a small number of means of expression, all of which appeared
only recently, the second in many 'modern' language systems - the
forerunners, and others, such as the photo-novel, the cartoon, the lay-
out of illustrated magazines, etc. - as well as in older productions:
frescos, paintings or drawings ordered in series, triptychs, or even
strongly 'narrative' individual paintings, as those of Breughel, with their
numerous motifs which defy any reading other than a successive one.
It is, moreover, a rather common judgment, present in many recent
representations of the cinematic fact, that movement - from an implicit-
ly taxonomic view - is more characteristic of films than the plurality of
'shots', almost to the point of also admitting (in modifying the perspec-
tive, even unknowingly) that the succession of images plays as important
a role, in these very films, as does their mobility.
We shall thus try to keep from confusing degrees of specificity with
estimations of 'importance', for the first can only be decided in com-
paring several language systems, and the second only for each system
taken separately. (It is not, after all, certain that the question of im-
portance is of great significance. What is important is the articulation
of codes in the language system, and not the list of merits that one may
draw up for it. It is not indispensable, in order to analyze the cinema, to
know if it is 'the art of movement' rather than 'the art of the image',
n
" 'Montage* et discours dans le film", in Volume I of Linguistic Studies Pre-
sented to Andre Martinet (Word 23 : fascicle 1-2-3, dated 1967, appeared in
1969), 388-95.
'SPECIFIC/NON-SPECIFIC' 245
'the art of space' or - why not ? - the art of situated sounds; it is all
this at the same time, and it is this 'at the same time' which is im-
portant. But also, in order to disentangle this 'at the same time' with-
out confusion, it is necessary initially to consider its components one by
one.)
Having arrived at this point, the reader will perhaps wonder what good
it does to 'attach oneself to the idea of specificity when one is led to so
qualify and circumstantiate it, and why not admit (as Emilio Garroni
has done) that the codes themselves are never specific, and that only
combinations of codes may be ?
The reason is that the notion of the 'specificity' of certain codes
seems to us to represent - at least in the present state of research, which
Garroni anticipates with a little too much optimism - the only way of
accounting for so directly perceptible a phenomenon, which should be
probed and analyzed by structural methods, such as we understand
them, and not excluded offhand. The common experience of the re-
ception of diverse texts leads us to believe that, of the codes which are
combined in the text of each art, such codes are closer to this art itself
than others - and that each language carries with it certain formal
systems while it is content to adopt others.
Take, for example, a system of clear-obscure, specific both to
painting and still color photography; in the experience of cultural
consumption, it would be effectively felt to be specific in both cases,
despite the fact that there are two of them. This is because in both
cases it will enter into contact with other codes, which will be less
specific than it. At the heart of the pictorial work, this clear-obscure
will be found, so-to-speak, beside the painting (and not the painted
subject), since the same painting will manifest elsewhere - and this
is only one example - some code that Panofsky would declare to be
"iconographic",22 and which would organize the mythological material
(if it is a question of a painting with a mythological subject). In other
words, if it is true that not everything in painting is pictorial, it is not
true that everything in it is non-pictorial to the same degree, and
certain configurations are more pictorial than others. Pictoriality is only
a part - but a true part - of painting, in the same way as the 'literariness'
(literaturnost), for the Russian formalists, was not the sum total of
2a
Essais d'iconologie (see note 9, Chapter 2).
246 'SPECIFIC/NON-SPECIFIC'
are or are not closer to the technical constraint to which this language
system owes its definition, and even its independent existence. One can
investigate specificity in comparing several language systems from the
point of view of a single code, but also in comparing several codes from
the point of view of the same language system.
The distinction proposed in Chapter 10.2 between the three cases
of semiotic interferences was situated within the perspective of the first
procedure, since it was a question of 'following' a single code (or a
single figure of a code, or a single group of codical transpositions)
across diverse language systems; on the contrary, the differentiation of
the vehicle and the program follows this second procedure, since the
segmentation that it establishes divides the ensemble of codes of a
single language system into two groups.
However, to the extent that it is necessary for the clarity of things
that the two procedures not be confused, it is appropriate to repeat, in
the sense already indicated a moment ago, that these two procedures
lead to the same result, or, more exactly, that the specificity of the code
may only be established at their intersection; they are distinct in their
principle, but they refer to two complementary aspects of the notion
of specificity, and this duality does not at all have the effect of creating
two conflicting lists of specific codes. The distinctive features of the
material of the signifier specify the group of language systems in which
a given code is may be manifested, but they contribute by this to the
definition of these language systems; they thus tell us about both the
specificity of codes and the specificity of language systems.
This is why each language system is not specific only with respect to
the combination of its codes, but also in terms of certain of these codes
which enter into combination.
The notions of vehicle and program may be formulated in another
manner. There are, in each language system, codes of expression and
codes of content, which implies that entire codes (each with its level of
expression and its level of content) may be found unilaterally on the
side of expression (or on the side of content) in relation to the overall
text of a given language system.
Take, for example, the cross-cutting montage, which has been
discussed in several places, and which belongs to a code of montage.
In itself, it is presented as a unit of signification, if one understands by
this that it already has a signifier side (the alternating disposition of
images) and a signified side (the indication that the corresponding
'SPECIFIC/NON-SPECEFIC' 249
the form of the signifiers, and the content which corresponds to them
consists of what they tell us about what is recountable (and thus about
what is not recountable) in each culture. In a text, on the other hand,
this entire code is on the side of the content (and thus enters into
interaction with the specific codes).
It is codes of this order which, in the cinema (language system),
constitute the non-specific element and which, in the film (text), come to
inscribe their signifiers and their signifieds on the side of the content.
Certain modern studies have already given us an idea of the manner
in which such codes function. This is, however, an extremely difficult
problem, and it is too early, above all in the cinematic domain, to
undertake a general work which would aim to formulate in a theoretical
manner, and in all its fullness, the 'non-specific' status of the codes of
content and the exact nature of their relationship to diverse language
systems.
Such a study could not even be begun here. We only wish to situate
these codes, as from the outside, in relation to others (to those which
are specific); to mark their place in some way.
One of the principal difficulties for the future seems to be the follow-
ing : what is the exact relation - transposition (as in Chapter 10.2) or
other relation, and of what sort ? - between certain codes of content and
certain codes of expression which give the impression of being ad-
jacent ? For example, how is one to understand a notion like 'sunset',
mentioned above in passing, which seems to refer to a code of content
when one thinks of its appearance in a written text, but which comes
closer to a code of expression in visual, colored, and figurative language
systems ? Or yet: what is the sector of the material of content (and is
there one) which is proper to music ? In one sense, it is clear that there
is none; music is not a specialized language system (see p. 211); the idea
of a properly musical content (which would be, for example, the in-
effable emotions) is completely obscure and unsatisfying; but, on the
other hand, how is one to forget that music is not capable of expressing
everything, that it cannot tell a story or conduct an argument? The
same problem is posed, moreover, for the cinema (where it is, however,
less central): the cinema is also not a specialized language system, and
yet it cannot (in spite of certain hopes on the part of some) conduct an
explicit theoretical discourse in the same manner as would a written
text or an oral expose (unless this discourse is entrusted to the voice of
a personage, of a speaker, or to 'cartoons' using writing). Semiotics, as
we see, encounters here some very old problems, and it is not the only
'SPECIFIC/NON-SPECIFIC' 251
science which has been hindered by their complexity.
It is thus not impossible that, among the codes of content them-
selves (as a whole non-specific), some nevertheless find themselves in
a position which is not equidistant from all language systems, for
reasons which, in this case, perhaps no longer concern the material of
expression - and that thus, to the specificity which we have defined,
ought to be added on another level a new notion which remains to be
determined.
One readily speaks of the cinema (and has for quite some time) as of
a script. Certain critics and historians employ the expression 'cine-
matic writing', journalists, even more often and with less precaution,
and theoreticians and commentators make different sorts of comparisons
between the cinema and writing. But in the majority of cases, these
comparisons are hasty and may be understood in several ways, which
are not always clearly distinguished. We are now going to attempt to
somewhat disentangle them.
There is a first point common to cinema and writing - namely, that
they are both recording techniques (they are not only that, of course).
We shall subsume under the word 'recording', in conformity with a
frequent usage, the three successive stages of the process when it is
completely developed: the recording, properly speaking; the preser-
vation; and the ultimate 'reproduction'.
Cinema and writing thus record events. But these events are quite
different in both cases. Those which the cinema 'captures' are groups of
events accessible to view and to hearing; those fixed by writing are
either spoken sequences, and only spoken ones (in the case of diverse
phonetic scripts : syllabic writing, which records syllable by syllable;
alphabetic, i.e., phonemic writing, which records phoneme by phoneme,
etc.), or discrete elements of social experience, when it is a question of
different so-called ideographic (morphogrammatic, pictographic, etc.)
scripts.
A difference which, if one thinks about it, encompasses two dif-
ferences whose effect is cumulative. First, the event which is recorded
does not in all cases belong to the same sensory order: auditory and
visual with the cinema, only auditory (and more precisely phonetic,
which even excludes many auditory elements) with phonetic scripts, and
purely mental, non-perceptible, with ideographic writings; we know, in
CINEMA AND WRITING 255
effect, that in the latter, the grapheme which designates a 'tree' does not
record the tree as an object of the world ('the referent'), but a certain
notion of the tree (we shall return to this in Chapter 11.6).
In the second place, depending on whether or not it is a question of
the cinema, or phonetic or ideographic writing, the recordable event
does not occupy the same position in relation to social communication.
What the phonetic script records is a spoken discourse, thus an object
which was plainly linguistic before being recorded; in addition, phonetic
writing retains of the spoken utterance only what belongs to the lan-
guage; it excludes the other elements of spoken language, it 'records'
one code and only one. (There are exceptions to this, which perhaps
do not merit this name, for example graphic signs which, like certain
exclamation marks, correspond to purely expressive, i.e., extra-lin-
guistic intonations; but these signs are precisely those which do not
appear in the proper system of the phonetic writing and have simply
been added to i t : thus, in the case of alphabetic writing, these would
be the graphemes which are not letters of the alphabet.) This is because
phonetic writing, in principle, records a pre-existent code - the phono-
logical code, for the alphabet - that it is defined by linguists as a
surrogate code, a code of the second degree. (Apparent exceptions,
again, should not mislead one: it is true that in French one finds
several different graphs - 'im', 'ein', 'ain', etc. - for the single
phoneme / / ; these are paradigmatic distortions. It is also true that
each of these graphs uses several letters, while / g / is not a sequence of
phonemes but one phoneme; these are syntagmatic distortions. But here
one touches upon orthography, which is not writing, and whose very
existence results from the disjunction between the alphabetic script of a
language and the adoption or the maintanence of an alphabet which
was made for some other, more ancient, language, having a different
phonological system; thus the 'Latin' alphabet serves to record French,
German, Polish, etc. Moreover, when the orthographic fact has a very
important place, as it does in contemporary French, the theoretically
phonetic writing ceases in part to be phonetic and achieves a sort of
ideography; certain written words are recognized as a whole by their
orthographic contours, such that the notation, in practice, relies a little
less on phonemes, units of the second articulation, and a little more
directly on units of signification, of the first articulation. This evolution
has been commented on by linguists like Ferdinand de Saussure,
Charles Bally, Marcel Cohen, Andr6 Martinet, Georges Gougenheim,
Charles Beaulieux, Claire Blanche-Benveniste, Andr6 Chervel, etc. In
256 CINEMA AND WRITING
11
"Cinematurgie de Paris" (1965), 43, cols. 1, 2, and 3.
" Ibid., 43, col. 3.
u
Ibid., 43 ,col. 3, and 44, col. 1.
u
Ibid., 43, col. 3.
15
Ibid., 43, col. 3.
264 CINEMA AND WRITING
" Ibid.
17
Ibid., 39, cols. 1 and 2.
18
"Cinematurgie de Paris" (1933), 293 (Lapierre pagination).
" "Cinematurgie de Paris" (1965), 39, col. 2.
CINEMA AND WRITING 265
estimates the role of the gestural in ideography itself; this gestural part
exists, and corresponds in general to those ideograms which are
'dactylograms'; but many other ideograms (morphograms, for example)
are not gestural and do not have a special relation to gesture (on these
points, see p. 272).
(4) What 'talking' pictures have added to silent pictures is not only
speech, but also sound effects and music, which have no place in
Marcel Pagnol's cavalier view. However both, in all evidence, have
very little relationship to phonetic writing. And even, concerning the
sound effects - which in the cinema comes to complement the pictures
and not speech, such that the most important division does not pass
between the visual and the auditory (nor consequently between the silent
cinema and the talking cinema) but within the auditory itself, and results
in putting to one side speech, to the other the complex image-sound
effect, where codes associated with iconicity predominate - the com-
parison to look for, even if it inspires in turn many reservations, would
be as much with ideographic writing as with phonetic writing (see
p. 272).
In sum, the conceptions of Marcel Pagnol on the 'silent' picture as
ideographic writing and the 'talking' picture as phonetic writing do not
help us to understand the cinematic language system. But, to tell the
truth, this is not their goal, and it is a question rather of an author's
aesthetics; the father of Fanny makes it quite evident, and often with
much humor, that he is above all searching to support with general
considerations his personal preoccupations as a cineast-playwright. It
is only in the measure that these concerns lead him to more theoretical
excursions that the existence of this chapter is justified.
As the immediate reactions of an author to the advent of the talking
picture, the opinions of Marcel Pagnol have played a positive role in
the history of the cinema, in particular during the early thirties. They
issue directly from an attitude of broad acceptance of the talking
picture, in a period where many of the great, well-known cineasts or
critics persisted in repeating, in diverse forms and with different amounts
of force, that with the death of the silent picture it was the cinema
itself which was dead. Marcel Pagnol's response to them was useful,
often quite just, and always amusing. We have touched upon this other
aspect of the question elsewhere.20
The usual comparisons between cinema and writing are not always
based on the idea of recording or on that of transmission. In other
(particularly frequent) cases, their support lies elsewhere, and what
they seem to focus on is not writing as a social code, the writing
that one teaches to children in primary school, but writing as an
activity of composition, as an artistic activity in the most general sense.
And it is true that the film, similar in this to the book and not to spoken
conversation, is an especially fabricated object, wholly invested with
intentions, which presupposes a complex and costly operational activity,
a sustained work, at the origin of which is found a decision (that of
'making a film', of 'writing a book'), which is localizable and does not
allow itself to be diluted in everyday experience: speech, on the
contrary, is closely linked to everyday life and to general social activity.
To all this, which we shall not deny, we do not see what recourse
to the notion of 'writing' can add. Remarks of this order are also valid
for a piece of music, a sculpture, a painting, etc., and one speaks,
moreover - in the same somewhat extenuated sense - of 'musical
writing' or 'pictorial writing'. The cinema, in those of its aspects in-
voked here, does not merit being especially compared with literature
(which 'writing' suggests), since this usage, in a simultaneous and
contradictory manner, calls 'writing' any fabrication of texts, whether it
does or does not have recourse to writing in the common sense of the
word.
But it is precisely this contradiction, or at least this ambiguity,
which makes it possible to see what the metaphor is aiming at when
it is treated in such a journalistic manner. It searches, obscurely, to
operate in two areas, and would like to have at the same time, by the
inclusion of all the 'arts', a vast field of application, and, by the
privileged allusion to literature, which is understood, an appearance of
selective precision at the same time as of cultural legitimacy, to the
extent that literature (in our society) is of all the arts the most re-
cognized and the noblest.
The history of cinematic opinions offers a particular and rather well-
known avatar of the comparision between the cinema and writing under-
stood as composition - a comparison, in this case, more explicit and
more motivated. In his Manifeste de la camera-stylo,21 Alexandre
Astruc proclaimed that the cinema, whose expressive possibilities are
a
In L'ecran frangais, issue of March 30, 1948.
CINEMA AND WRITING 267
" Le degre ziro de l'icriture (Paris: Seuil, 1953). English edition, trans. Annette
Lavers and Colin Smith (Londen: Cape, 1967).
268 CINEMA AND WRITING
music), but less specific than the writings, for many manifestations
which still imply language exclude writing (such as scientific treatises,
didactic texts, etc.).
In both cases one would thus have more specific and more conscious
codes, the writings, which would come to lean upon the codes of
denotation which are less specific and of more generally social import:
spoken language in literature, iconic codes in the cinema; and also
spoken language in the cinema itself, when it is a question of the verbal
utterances of the film in their literal meaning.
Thus 'recast', the comparison holds longer. It must be remembered
that it no longer concerns the cinematic language system itself. It is not
the cinematic language system which is a writing. But one finds writings
in the cinema as in literature, and here, as there, a language system, or
something which takes its place.
In this perspective, the internal dividing line, in the cinema, does not
pass between general codes and sub-codes. Certain sub-codes are not
writings, but rather styles of cineasts (one finds an analogous situation
in the literary domain). And, what is more significant, certain general
codes become difficult to situate exactly between 'language system' and
'writing'; it is a question of codes other than those of iconicity and which
are nevertheless common to all films (as, for example, those which
concern the camera movements, relationships between the image and
sound, the broad features of montage, etc.). Their generality forbids
our calling them 'writings', and yet they are the work of cineasts, like
writings; they thus do not constitute a 'language system', and yet are as
common as it.
Thus, we see appear discrepancies there where we hoped to have
settled everything. To this is added the fact that general codes other
than iconic ones sometimes concern the literal meaning of the film,
sometimes its connotations, and quite frequently both at the same time.
They participate in the filmic composition and in its 'effects', similar
in this to writings. But they also intervene, and this time in close
contact with iconic codes, in the first decipherment of the film : for the
latter may not be reduced to the identification of objects seen or heard,
but also supposes the correct understanding of their connections and
mutual relations (spatio-temporal relations, cause-effect relations etc.);
and here configurations are at work which are much more specific than
those of iconicity, in particular those of the montage in the broader
sense, which assumes conjointly denotative and connotative functions
(we have insisted a great deal on this double role on different occasions).
CINEMA AND WRITING 271
There is more. The first comprehension, in the cinema - and thus
the function of the language system - in certain cases makes use of some
of these 'large sub-codes' which should be situated on the side of
writing (and which, moreover, are located there, as much by their
lack of generality as by their rapid evolution linked to conscious in-
novations) : thus, for example, the large syntagmatic category, which
plays an important role in the denotation of temporal relations within
the sequence (p. 200), is established within strict chronological limits
- a period of twenty years, as we have said elsewhere. It marks - be-
coming again, in this, writing - a certain epoch of the cinema, a certain
aspect of cinematicity (the one to which one gives the name 'classical
shooting script'), without ceasing to assure its working of 'language'.
The Barthesian notion of writing draws its force from the clearness
with which it stands out against the background of something 'lasting',
spoken language. In the cinema, the dividing line is not as definite. One
witnesses partial exchanges (exchanges of characteristics and exchanges
of functions) between what serves language and what serves writing.
It is also preferable not to call iconic codes a language system (al-
though they are the equivalent of it in certain regards), nor the large
sub-codes writings, although, like them, they are both distinct from
individual styles and general codes.
One finds in the cinema, to a certain extent, the opposition between
language and writings. But what specifically characterizes the cinematic
language is less this opposition than its weakening: in the cinema,
that which serves as language has certain characteristics of a writing,
and writings certain functions of a language.
M
This text is not included in Volume III of Oeuvres completes, published by
Gallimard. (This volume, published in 1961, brings together, among others, the
main cinematic writings of Artaud.) An extract of this work is found in the
anthology by Pierre L'Herminier, L'art du cinema (Paris: Seghers, 1960), 57-59.
" Vienna : Deutsch-sterreichischer Verlag, 1924.
30
L'ecriture chinoise et le geste humain (Paris, 1937, doctoral dissertation). It
274 CINEMA AND WRITING
the latter do not note the 'stylized' contour of the object, but represent
schematically the gesture which designates the object in a gestural
code that the same ethnic group utilizes. These are notations of the
second degree, which happens to be, in this regard, on the same level as
alphabetic characters, even if the code which they transmit is gestural
and not phonetic; in a sense they are not ideographic, since they do not
write the 'idea'. Ideographic writings also include phonetic graphemes
(or, sometimes, mixed ones, and in the process of being made phonetic),
which refer to certain elements of the language spoken by the com-
munity at a given moment; we know that in the course of the historical
evolution of scripts which are predominately ideographic, the proportion
of these phonetic graphemes have little by little increased (see, for
example, Gustav Guillaume,81 J. J. Gelb,82 and historians of writing).
But inversely, in our modern, predominantly phonetic and 'sub-
stitutive' scripts, certain graphemes directly note an intellectual opera-
tion, or introduce an element which by-passes sound and has no equi-
valent in the spoken utterance: asterisks, braces, parentheses (it is the
phonetic discourse which, by retroaction, sometimes says 'parentheti-
cally'), brackets and hyphens, certain quotation marks,83 the grave
accent on the French preposition '' (which is thus distinguished, in
writing but not orally, from the French verb 'a'),34 duality of the semi-
colon and of the period (which corresponds in speech to a single pause),
etc. These signs, in a certain manner, are ideographic.
The situation is thus less simple than those who would equate cinema
with an ideographic script think, and the existence of the latter in such
a sense - which, in order to sustain the comparison at the level where
it was posed, ought to consist, for example, of a homogeneous sequence
of morphograms - has never been demonstrated. One could not com-
pare the cinema to a 'pure' ideographic script which does not exist, and
to which the picture-track of the cinema itself (as well as certain other
modern iconic productions) comes closest - a picture-track which al-
is on this work that Van Ginneken's theory just mentioned rested, which is no
longer accepted today. But the facts reported by Tchang Tcheng Ming remain.
a
Review of Van Ginneken's La reconstruction typologique des langues
archaiques de l'humanite (1939) in Bulletin de la Societe de Linguistique de Paris
XL, dated 1938, published later.
13
A Study of Writing, the Foundation of Grammatology (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952). Progressive
decline of "Semasiographics" ( = non-phonetic notation) in favor of "phonogra-
phies" ( = writing in relation to phonetic substance).
33
Already noted by Buyssens, 49-52.
* Ibid.
CINEMA AND WRITING 275
ways 'directly' represents the object of perception (photograms) or
directly designates a thought process (as in the fade out, evoking the
idea of a strong separation), remaining 'ideographic' in one case as in
the other, and even when it ceases to be photographic (a dissolve is not
a photograph). One has the impression that certain commentators con-
ceived of ideography on the basis of the model of the cinema, and
compared the cinema with itself. On the other hand, the picture-track
includes written credits, and these have recourse, according to the
country producing the film, sometimes to phonetic script, sometimes to
ideographic script, sometimes to mixed and quite complex scripts (like
Japanese script as it appears, for example, in the credits of con-
temporary Japanese films). The 'comparison', decidedly, is not at all
settled.
It remains, obviously, that the cinema could resemble, if not ideo-
graphic scripts such as they exist or have existed, at least that which
they have which is truly ideographic. A comparison remains possible
between the cinematic language system and the ideographic principle
itself.
Here new difficulties emerge. The greatest ones are, moreover, not
those which could come easily to mind, and which one finds clearly
exposed (or simply suspected, according to the case) in the work of
certain theoreticians of the film, hostile for their part to the ideographic
conception of the cinema. It is not certain, in effect, that it is necessary
to oppose the schematicism proper to the ideogram - the ideogram is
not, as we know, a drawing, which designates all trees by a single
grapheme, with 'normalized' contours, representing the general notion
of tree without representing any particular tree - to the concrete rich-
ness of the cinematic image, which can only show us singular trees with
the knots and gnarls of their trunks and all the trembling detail of their
foliage. One separates a little too much, sometimes, the concrete-visual
(filmic image) from the abstract-visual (ideogram); the works of Jean
Mitry, which avoid the criticisms which follow, do not entirely escape
this one. Besides, one opposes too crudely the ideogram as a conven-
tional (although not arbitrary) sign to the filmic image taken for non-
conventional and purely analogical, for a "printing of reality" or a
"language of objects", as expressed by Andr6 Bazin,85 principal re-
presentative of the tendency (sometimes called 'cosmophanic') which
accords to the cinematic language system the omnipotence of the
* In "Le langage de notre temps", contribution to Regards neufs sur le cinima
(collective work directed by Jacques Chevallier, Paris: Seuil, 19531).
276 CINEMA AND WRITING
'natural'. For when it is thus that one refutes the ideographic nature of
the cinema, one exposes oneself to a danger which, in certain regards, is
the reverse of that which awaited the theoretician of the silent picture
who is fond of ideography; one is less mistaken than they are in regard
to the ideogram, but one is still quite mistaken about the cinema.
In Le langage et la pensee,36 the psychologist Henri Delacroix re-
marked that the ideogram, if it does not note the word of the spoken
language, nevertheless notes a concept which has a name in this lan-
guage (this is his theory of the 'idea-word', which insisted on the ideo-
gram's conventional and codified nature); but does one not in fact
find a phenomenon of the same sort in the cinema and in all 'concrete'
images, with the codes of iconic designations discussed above (p. 199),
and which associate spoken language with the identification of visual
objects ? From the material absence of the language, one must not
too quickly conclude its codical absence. Paradoxically, it is more
present in concrete images than in ideography.
The schematicism, which is a mental and notably perceptual prin-
ciple, goes far beyond the field of schemas in the current sense of the
term (materialized schemas, like the ideogram), and the most concrete
vision is a classificatory process. The cinematic, or photographic, image
is legible (intelligible) only if one recognizes objects in it (as Antonin
Artaud insisted in regard to La coquille et le clergyman), and to 're-
cognize' is to classify, such that the tree-as-concept, which does not
figure explicitly in the image, is reintroduced there by sight. We also
know, through technological (notably televisual) studies and through
informational theories of perception, that the most faithfully figurative
image is analyzable into a certain number of discrete and geometrical
elements (points, spots, 'lines', etc.); Abraham Moles has produced
experimental films where this is shown with humor. Modern studies, as
much in semiotics as in the psychology of perception, cultural anthro-
pology, or even in aesthetics (Pierre Francastel), no longer make it
possible to oppose as simply as in the period of Saussure the conven-
tional and the non-conventional, the schematic and the non-schematic;
they end up rather by distinguishing modes and degrees of schematiza-
tion, or, on the contrary, of iconicity (Abraham Moles' "degrees of
iconicity", for example).
It is precisely these degrees and these modes which differentiate the
cinematic image from the ideogram. Their divergence is important. It
is not unimportant that the notion is based on the distinctive features
M
Paris : Alcan, 1924, 342.
CINEMA AND WRITING 277
of recognition and on them alone, thus illuminating the material in-
scription of others, as is in general the case in the morphogram - or
that on the contrary the 'text' itself, as in the cinema, offers the features
of identification to sight only mixed with all the others, and without
explicit indication of their ranking. It is true that the spectator, as
long as he understands the image, will himself construct the ideogram,
but it is also true that it is up to him to do it, while ideography (more-
over by quite variable means) presents him with the ideogram already
made. The path, in the cinema, is a little longer, and it is a little less
certain: the object is recognized more or less quickly, more or less
precisely; there are some dead ends and some surprises, which do not
have a morphogrammatical equivalent but that certain films selectively
exploit (fantasy films, horror films, certain 'suspense' films, etc.).
In a more general way, if one does not take into account the dif-
ference between the schematicisms of the ideogram and those which
permit the perception of the filmic image, one cannot understand the
polysemic potential of the latter (the reading of which, even when it
does not decidedly 'go astray', may hesitate or divide itself between
several simultaneous series), nor its trick shots (about which one is
concerned only because the most fundamental trick shot of the non-
trick segments does not appear, and this is why no one would fake an
ostensible schema), nor all its plays on the impression of reality
(realistic and unrealistic mystifications).
There is good reason, in this regard, to recall the partial similarities
between filmic perception and everyday perception (sometimes called
'real perception'), similarities that certain authors (including the present
author) have sometimes misinterpreted. They are not due to the fact that
the first is natural, but to the fact that the second is not; the first is
codified, but its codes are in part the same as those of the second. The
analogy, as Umberto Eco has clearly shown,87 is not between the effigy
and its model, but exists - while remaining partial - between the two
perceptual situations, between the modes of decipherment which lead
to the recognition of the object in a real situation and those which lead
to its recognition in an iconic situation, in a highly figurative image such
as that of the film (but not like the ideogram).
There is another difference which is tied to this one. A cinematic
image can directly designate only visual objects. It is true, and aesthe-
ticians of the cinema have said so, that it succeeds in suggesting sen-
sorial impressions of a non-visual order, and presenting the visual
" La struttura assente, Chapter .1..3; in French, 14-15.
278 CINEMA AND WRITING
Michotte van den Berck, Cesare L. Musatti, Yves Galifret, Rene Zazzo, R. C.
Oldfield, etc.) as well as in L'esperienza cinematografica by Dario F. Romano
(1966): we have discussed this ourselves in " propos de l'impression de realite
au cinema", first text of Essais sur la signification au cinema.
They have become fashionable once again since 1968-69, with the influence of
the journal Cinethique (Paris) and, following this, the group Collectif Quazar
(Brussels), who sought to renew the problematics by showing that the impression
of reality is in itself an ideology. This latter position seems basically correct, but
its supporters present it in an overly monolithic and sometimes uselessly 'terrorist'
form which is insufficiently technical and circumstantiated ( = underestimation of
the relative autonomies and mediations).
280 CINEMA AND WRITING
for its part, is not writing, but what writing makes possible; this is why
we have defined it as a language system ('cinematic language system');
a language system makes it possible to construct texts, but it is not itself
a text, nor an ensemble of texts, nor a textual system. One can thus
discard the notions of 'cinematic writing', on the one hand, and of
'filmic language', on the other (on the second point, see p. 55), both of
which would be almost a contradiction in terms, in order to preserve,
with the two remaining combinations, a clear distinction between the
set of codes and sub-codes (cinematic language system) and the set of
textual systems (filmic writing).
The study of the cinema thus involves two great tasks : the analysis
of the cinematic language system and the analysis of filmic writing. This
book, as its title indicates, dealt essentially with the first of these. the
second was discussed (Chapters 5, 6, and 7), it was in order to try to
define its connections (and its differences in distinctiveness) with the
first, in order to situate them in relation to one other.
In regard to the first itself, the reader will perhaps be surprised at not
having found here an explicit enumeration of specific codes. This
omission was intentional. First, because to study the status of a phe-
nomenon (to define it intensionally) and to deploy its entire content (to
define it extensionally) are two distinct steps and that, when the 'phe-
nomenon' is rather a constructed notion (as is the case for the cinematic
language system), the detailed exposition of distinctiveness is what
should take pride of place. Next, because cinematic studies are not yet
developed enough; one is not able to seriously advance an explicit list
of all the codes and sub-codes. It is, of course, possible, even desirable,
to proceed already to a preliminary listing, to propose a beginning of an
enumeration, even if incomplete and still approximative. But even this is
a task which, in order to be useful, demands specifications which would
require a separate book.
One has sometimes remarked1 that the cinema does not, at first
glance, represent any of the three characteristics which are common-
ly made the elements of an implicit definition of a language system; one
considers as 'language system' a system of signs destined to be used for
communication.
However, the cinema, at first blush, presents a completely different
picture. To the always more or less enumerable lexicon of spoken lan-
1
Gilbert Cohen-Seat, Essais sur les principes d'une philosophie du cinema, 146.
The author does not take into account the definition of language in question here;
in formulating it, he (clearly) sums up an opinion which is not uncommon.
CONCLUSION : CINEMATIC LANGUAGE AND FILMIC WRITING 287
of the objects compared, and which is based oil the historical divergence
of studies conducted in the two areas ? Is it necessary to recall that the
morpheme - which one often invokes in discussions of this sort as proof
of the intrinsic systematicity of spoken languages - is in no way a man-
ifest reality which would impose itself upon a simple 'naive' attention,
but a unit of commutation and of internal functioning which could
only be discovered after years of detailed research ? Is it necessary to
recall that it is with the actual speech (and not with the phoneme,
as some have attempted to do) that it is necessary to compare some
unanalyzed iconic element - and that, in this new confrontation, it
would be difficult to predict on what side the impression of unsystem-
aticity would be the most striking ?
One of the goals of this book was to show that the problem of cin-
ematic signification cannot be conveniently treated if one holds to the
definition of language as a system of signs destined to be used for com-
munication. It only really begins to take shape if one has recourse to
more precise notions - more 'technical' notions, as is sometimes said -
and if it is relocated within the larger framework of present semiotic
research.
A cinema is not a system, but contains several of them. It seems not
to have signs, but this is because its own are very different from those
of spoken language; in addition, the domain of signification largely
goes beyond that of signs (see p. 207). It also goes beyond that of
communication strictly speaking : the cinema, it is true, does not author-
ize the immediate play of bilateral exchange, but it is not the only
semiotic system to behave in this way; nothing directly responds to a
myth, to a folktale, to a ritual, to a culinary or clothing system, to a
piece of music.
"Is or is not the cinema a language system ?" : this is a debate which
is already traditional. But it needed to be enlarged, and at the same time
made more precise (one does not go without the other, contrary to
appearances). This is what we have tried to do here.
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1960 Les fondements de l'art cinematographique (Paris: Cerf).
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292 REFERENCES
sound-track of the film, 26,123, 262-264, 118-121, 121-129, 143-148, 150, 150-
278-279 163, 176, 184-187, 285
specificity, 31-34, 36, 61-70, 79-83, 126- dimensions of a text (see external con-
131, 134-135, 235, 240, 245-246, 285- tours of a conversation)
289 "general text", 150-156
degrees of specificity and degrees of intertextual, 150-153, 180-181
importance, 243-245 intertextual paradigms, 180-181
ideology of specificity, 24-25, 41-43, plurality of the codes in the same text
97-99, 101, 106, 114-117, 193 (see textual system)
intermixed specificities (partial over- plurality of distinctive units in the
lapping of the specificities of several same text, 184-187
language systems), 212-235 plurality of the textual systems for the
maximum specificity (specific codes of same text, 118-121
a single language system, codes with plurifilmic texts, 121-129, 150-153
unique manifestation), 223-224, 235, "structure of the message" or structure
240 of the text?, 54, 63-64, 87-91
modes and degrees of specificity of a textuality, generality, singularity, 74-
code in relation to a language system, 79, 117, 150-156
43, 224-235 textual polysemy/codical polysemy,
multiple specificity (specific codes of a 179-180
group of language systems, codes textual system, 54-55, 62-63, 67, 70-79,
with multiple manifestation), 212- 91-121,126-129,130,143-148,149-150,
235, 247 175-184, 242-243, 285-289
"no specificity" (non-specific codes, paradigmatics and syntagmatics in the
codes with univeisal manifestation, textual systems, 175-184
codes of content, semantic codes), plurality of the textual systems for a
28-39, 72, 149, 223, 245-251 single text, 118-121
relation between specificity of the codes textual system as displacement, 99-114,
and specificity of the language sys- 248
tems, 247-248 textual-systematic units, 121
"structure of the message" or structure textual systematic units, 121
of the text?, 54, 63-64, 87-91 transmission(thecinema as transmission),
"study of film", 156-161 257-263
"study of films", 70-74 transposition from language system to
sub-code, 30-31, 36, 61-70, 79-83, 126- language system (see codifications
131, 135-136, 137-143, 144, 149-150 more or less the same in several lan-
degrees of particularity of the cinematic guage systems)
sub-codes, 79-80
"large cinematic sub-codes", 267-271 "unique and total code by the language
substance, 208-212, 251-254 system" (traditional idea), 27, 34-36,
suprasegmental, 179-180, 200-204 40,43
exponent/frame of reference, 149-150
syntagmatic and consecutive, 173-175 vehicle/program, 23, 246
syntagms of signifiers, 179-180 "visual/verbal" (traditional opposition),
syntax, 163-164, 195 31-35
system; systematic, 22, 73-74, 74-79, visual; visuality, 31-35, 107, 173-175,
83-87, 143-150, 156, 287-288 213-218, 220-223, 225-232, 254, 256,
systematic, generality, singularity, 74- 258, 259, 262, 264, 265, 272-274, 275-
79, 143-150 282
"the cinema, art of the image" (tradi-
tional idea), 25-27, 34-36, 41-43, 245
television, 235-240
text; textuality, 21, 70-79, 87-99, 117, Western, 63, 79-80, 121, 124, 152
SUBJECT INDEX 301
working of the analyst/working of the writing (the cinema in relation with the
cineast, 23,49, 74 writing), 254-285
working of the cinema by the film, 108- ideographic writings (see ideography)
110 writing in the sense of Degre Zero,
267-271
INDEX OF NAMES