Christian Metz's Semiotic Film Theory

hey folks and welcome to the first video on  film theorist christian metz's semiotics of film christian mess is certainly one of the  most well-known and studied film theorists but he's quite difficult um so he was born  in 1931 died in 1993 he's often considered the first or one of the first major figures  of contemporary film theory you'll recall that division between classical and contemporary  film theory we talked about is contemporary film theorists adoption of popular ways of thinking  or

discourses for example linguistics or marxism or foreign psychoanalysis that's one of the ways  in which contemporary film theorists are marked as contemporary film theorists and christian  met's semiotics of film is heavily marked by the adoption of linguistics especially structural  linguistics so the text we're going to be looking at is called film language a semiotics of the  cinema it was published in 1974 but it's really considered a collection of work that he wrote in  the 1960s it's a l

andmark text of semiotic film theory what is semiotics it's the study of signs  and symbols and their use or interpretation so we'll get into that a little bit more in the next  parts of the video primarily the book is a study of how narrative films create units of meaning and  how the history of film theory has approached this question so the central question that christian  mets is definitely asking is this is film a language and the subsidiary question he might be  asking is if so in what sen

se is narrative film a language and the third question he might  be asking is how have previous film theorists understood narrative film to operate like a  language so if you're at all familiar with the history of film theory you might say wait a minute  i know of previous film theorists or film thinkers that have thought of film as a language or have  strove to make films with the ambition to make film like a language the biggest collection of  thinkers in that tradition are definitely the sovi

et montage theorists including people  like sergey eisenstein and lev kulashov in fact sergey eisenstein wrote now why should the  cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language which  allows wholly new concepts or ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two  concrete objects what eisenstein is saying here is he has an ambition to use montage that is the  synthesis of different shots and the juxtaposition of those different shot

s to create something new  he thinks that that idea of taking two concrete things yoking them together in succession is a lot  like the way language works the way that language sometimes takes two concrete words and unites  them to create something new or takes words in succession and informs them to make a sentence and  part of christian metz's text is to acknowledge the history of film theorists people like  eisenstein and think about how they thought about film as a language he'll say in pote

mkin that is  eisenstein's most famous film three different lion statues filmed separately become when placed in  sequence a magnificent syntagma we'll get to that word syntagma in a little bit the stone animal  seems to be rising and is supposed to yield an unequivocal symbol of the worker's revolt  it was not enough for eisenstein to have composed a splendid sequence he meant it to be  in addition a fact of language submits is saying a couple things here first he's reminding us of  the fact th

at soviet montage theory which is all about the fact that film is and can be understood  as what you create by juxtaposing different elements from different shots feels like the logic  of a language either individual letters coming together to form words or individual words coming  together in succession to form sentences but not only that he's saying that eisenstein's belief  that the particular choices of shots in succession would yield meanings that were unequivocal that  were absolutely unde

rstood by spectators in the same way that you can absolutely understand the  words that are coming out of my mouth right now that belief that the choice that goes into shots  will create unambiguous meanings is part of the soviet montage theorists ambition that film strive  to communicate meaning the way that language communicates meaning and as a bit of a preview  christian mets will not necessarily agree with this position and you can see a simpler version  of this belief that film is like a l

anguage in the kuleshov effect remember this experiment  that's supposed to communicate the idea that a face when juxtaposed with an object will  create a synthesis of an emotion on that neutral face so when a face is juxtaposed with soup it  creates the idea of hunger when that same face is juxtaposed with it with a dead child it creates  the impression of sadness or when the face is juxtaposed with a reclining woman it creates the  impression of lust once again the ambition here is to structur

e individual thoughts together  in a sequence and construct new things the way that language constructs ideas through  the juxtaposition of letters to form words or words to form sentences so we might simplify  christian metz's position on this way of thinking about film in this way he might say okay yes the  soviet film theorist aspired to think about film as a language but let's be more rigorous about the  film language analogy in the wake of structural linguistics so what is structural lingui

stics  well you can find nods to structural linguistics whenever mets mentions either in name or in  concept the thought of ferdinand does so sore so i'm going to be weaving little bits of dissosource  thought throughout this series of lectures but the first thing that i want to do is to simply  introduce this idea of structural linguistics what it means structural linguistics denotes schools  or theories in which language is conceived as a self-contained self-regulating semiotic system  whose e

lements are defined by the relationship to other elements within the system so in its  simplest form structural linguistics is an approach to studying language that privileges the  idea that languages are self-enclosed structures or systems of meaning that have particular rules  and structural linguistics is part of a broader discourse of thought called structuralism  structuralism is a method of interpretation and analysis of aspects of human cognition  behavior culture and experience that focu

ses on relationships of contrast between elements in  a conceptual system without a doubt the biggest name in structural linguistics and frankly in  structuralism in general is in fact fernando sosur whose most influential writings have been  brought together in this book called course in general linguistics almost everything that  christian meds is doing in this book film language is to ask the question is film like a language  through the lens of sosur's structural linguistics so you might put

the fourth question this way when  i ask is film a language what i really mean is in what sense is narrative film a self-contained  system of meaning analogous to the way that language is a self-contained system of  meaning if you want a spoiler for christian metz's answer to this question the answer is no film is  in fact not a self-contained system of meaning however his entire book will look at what can be  productively said in juxtaposing the structural linguistic thought of desosor and the

way in  which films tell stories so how are we going to be exploring this question well we're going to  spend the majority of our time on chapter four some points in the semiotics of the cinema and  just be transparent i'm mostly going to be looking at this set of excerpts from this article that are  produced in the brody cohen film theory anthology the way i want to proceed is to look at the  title some points in the semiotics of the cinema and summarize what are some of those points that  chr

istian makes in starting to ask the question what would a structural linguistic semiotics of  the cinema look like so in other words what are christian metz's points for investigating film  as a language well the first is that he's going to be looking at narrative cinema only he'll say  this we know since the observation of bella bella chandra melrose edgar moran jean-mitri those are  a bunch of film theorists and many others that the cinema was not a specific language from its  inception before

becoming the means of expression familiar to us it was a simple means of mechanical  recording preserving and reproducing moving visual spectacles whether of life the theater or even  of small mise-en-scene which were specifically prepared in which in the final analysis remained  theatrical in short a means of reproduction so what does he mean by this he means there is no  system of narrative signification evidenced in these early cinema shorts one of the main reasons  he thinks that there's no

cinematic signification is that for mets signification is primarily going  to arise through edits through cuts and these early 60-second films by the lumiere brothers  don't have cuts they're single continuous takes and mets is not being naive here he understands  that there is in a sense a very marginal and minimal kind of storytelling happening in these  two films but he's saying what i'm looking at is the way in which codes of editing have  emerged 10 years after 1895 and those codes are wha

t he's going to think about so narrative  cinema only number two the shot is not analogous to a word it's a phrase remember how we were  talking about that intuitive idea that film narrative is like a language well it's maybe like  a language because the way that words are strung together to form sentences maybe shots are strung  together to form sequences or scenes he's going to say well there's one problem with that so remember  the idea of the kuleshov effect that there is this intuition that

to understand how the effect  works you want to kind of boil down each shot into a singular concept or a word neutral face  plus soup equals new concept the concept of hunger that we can see on the face of the actor metz is  going to say this particular fantasy that film is like language in this way is false and we can  see that logic here the shot he says is therefore not comparable to the word in a lexicon rather it  resembles a complete statement okay but what's his reasoning so let's look a

t this with a more  constructive example i have here a singular still from a shot from alfred hitchcock strangers  on a train it is a close-up of a gun christian metz has a famous line about a close-up of a gun  particularly a revolver he says in this book film language the close-up of a revolver does not mean  quote-unquote revolver a purely virtual lexical unit but at the very least and without speaking of  the connotations it signifies here is a revolver so what does he mean by this well what

he's trying  to say is that when you're watching the narrative film when you see a sequence of shots being  shown to you you're always aware of the idea that the shots are being shown to you by some  invisible force that you might want to call the enunciator or the narrator i don't mean a narrator  that is located within the world of the film but just the idea that because film is a narrative  or we're talking about narrative film storytelling every single image that you see is being shown to 

you it's being selected for the strict purposes of relaying a story so it would be wrong  to look at a single shot of an object and and think that this shot of a gun simply  translates to gun at the very least he's saying it translates to the statement something like here  is a gun that i'm showing to you dear spectator and not only that because he's saying that  this is a limit case situation if i were to actually look at this particular moment  from this fiction film strangers on a train by al

fred hitchcock i would have to situate  that shot of a gun within the narrative and within the shots that come before it  and come after it and if i were to be more precise about what that shot of that gun  actually is saying i might say something like this here is the gun resting in a drawer that guy our  protagonist has just opened which he received from bruno the antagonist who sent it to him  as the murder weapon to kill bruno's father this is a more precise approximation of what  that singl

e shot of the close-up of the gun actually means single shots within narrative  films of objects or people or even landscapes can never simply translate to single words and  we'll get back to that idea in a little bit number three cinema is a language or  longage not a language system or long christian mets will clarify he'll say contrary to  what many of the theoreticians of the silent film declared or suggested the cinema is certainly not  a language system it can however be considered as a la

nguage to the extent that it orders signifying  elements within ordered arrangements different from those of spoken idioms and to the extent that  these elements are not traced on the perceptual configurations of reality itself which does not  tell stories filmic manipulation transforms what might have been a mere visual transfer of reality  into discourse so you might see that this is actually one of the main theses of the entire  book film language because what christian mess is trying to do i

s to ask that question to what  extent is film like a language within the view of language provided by structural linguistics  and his answer is to say that film does indeed construct meaning through a set of codes that  operate in succession however film is not a self-contained system of meaning the way that  english or french or japanese is and you'll see him pose this question of cinema as language or  language system throughout the entire book in fact it's the title of his previous chapter t

he cinema  language or language system from chapter three but now i want to look at a particular passage  within that chapter that i think will clarify the logic of this distinction he'll say there's indeed  language system but neither the image discourse nor filmic discourse are language systems  whether language or art the image discourse is an open system and it is not easily codified  with its non-discrete basic units the images its intelligibility which is too natural it's lack of  distance

between the significant and the signifier so i understand that this passage is probably  very confusing and it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense so what i'm going to do is i'm going to  break down this sentence into its component parts because looking at each of these component parts  is going to help us understand what christian mets means when he says that film is a language but  not a language system question mess is saying in this sentence film is not a language system  the way that engli

sh or french or japanese is a language system because its basic units the images  or you might say the shots are non-discrete basic units in other words he's reiterating that  idea that i said earlier that the close-up of a revolver is not equivalent to the word revolver  just like the close-up of the neutral face and the kuleshov effect is not equivalent to something  that we might call face and the first reason that we discussed is the idea that every shot within  a film is not a word it's a p

roclamation here is a gun that i'm showing you to your spectator but  not only that think about all the ways in which each of these images these shots cannot be  reduced to a single word consider the top image this is indeed a picture of a gun but it's not  just a gun it's a particular kind of gun it's also a gun from a particular angle with a particular  set of lighting with a particular background it's also resting in a drawer take the same idea of the  kuleshov effect face in the experiment t

he face is supposed to be neutral thereby demonstrating the  idea that the face gains its signification from the objects that it's juxtaposed with but do you  think that face is neutral can you stare at it and start to see signification within the face itself  i see a small smirk happening on the face's left side i also see a particular pattern of shadow  the left side of the face is washed out the right side is in shadow it's also a particular kind of  person and that person appears a particula

r way this is what it means to say that images  are non-discrete they are full of detail and that detail always has the possibility of  signifying beyond the very basic general concept of something like quote unquote gun or quote  unquote face so that's one way in which film is not a language system because its individual  components unlike words and language are not discrete units that can be juxtaposed to create  sentences number two film is not a language system because of its intelligibility

which is  too natural so what does christian mets mean here well what he's trying to say is that the  way in which human beings acquire the knowledge to understand how narrative functions in cinema is  not analogous to the way that human beings acquire the knowledge to understand how language works the  grammar of understanding french or english is a lot more complex and abstract than the grammar of  understanding how film works and partly to support this is a famous line from christian mets th

at i  quite like he said film is difficult to explain because it is so easy to understand what he might  mean here that film is easy to understand or that its intelligibility is too natural might be  exemplified by the image that i'm showing you here the relationship between these two shots the shot  of jimmy stewart looking through his binoculars and the shot of the man that he's seeing implies  a code of connection that code is saying that the second shot is indeed the contents of what jimmy 

stewart is seeing right it's not natural that that connection between these two shots is communicated  to us it is indeed a code but the way in which the two images come together to form that meaning he  says is not purely analogous to the way that the words strung together in the sentence the cat is  on the mat come to signify the idea that a cat is sitting on the mat he thinks that these images  come to signify what they signify almost too easily too naturally they're not quite abstract  enoug

h third film is not a language system because of its lack of distance between the significant  and the signifier what does it mean by this so i'm going to give you a quick explanation and  i'm going to give you a more detailed explanation here on the left side of the screen i have two  signifiers one is a shot of a close-up of a gun that we've already seen the other is the word  tree as it's written those are both signifiers because they're signs that signify something  that is not presently the

re to me if we take mess's explanation perhaps that gun signifies  the idea here as a gun and perhaps below it those sequence of squiggles that we take to mean  the word tree signify the idea of a tree mince's point here is to say that there is not a clear  analogy between the way that the image of the gun signifies here is a gun and the way that the word  tree signifies the idea of a tree let me explain that a bit further by turning to fernando cesaur's  course in general linguistics fundamenta

l to this book is the idea that language is composed of  signifieds and signifiers when i speak the word tree to you that sound that's coming out of my  mouth tree is a signifier the idea of a tree that forms in your mind when i say that word tree  or that sound tree is the concept the signified now one of ferdinand disosaur's main points is  this the relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary well what does he mean  by that well what he means is that that sound that is co

ming out of my mouth tree has no resemblance  has no motivated connection to that thing that's outside that has bark and leaves and that sways  in the wind think about all the kinds of signs that you encounter in life a painting of a tree is  indeed a sign of a tree because it brings to mind that thing that we have in our minds which  is called a tree but a painting of a tree is not an arbitrary relationship to a tree it's  motivated because it looks a lot like a tree but the word tree as it's c

oming out of my  mouth in english or the word arbol in spanish those sounds have no motivated attachment to that  concept it's completely arbitrary it depends on the code of the language and how you learn that  language in the same way those squiggles that you're seeing that form the letters t-r-e-e have  nothing to do with that actual thing of a tree they're arbitrary they signify within the language  and that language gets you to that idea of a tree now if we were to compare this relationship 

between signifier that is the thing doing the signifying and the signified that  is the concept that comes to our mind if we were to compare that way of it  working in language to how it works in film we might see something different so the  signifier in film might be the shot of a gun and the signified is the idea here is a gun but  notice the way that the image of the gun and how it signifies is not similar to the way that  the sound tree signifies the idea of a tree the sound tree and the wa

y it's written has  an arbitrary relationship to that concept of a tree but can we say that the image of a gun  which really really really resembles a gun has an arbitrary relationship to the idea here is a gun  of course it doesn't it resembles a gun and that resemblance is the reason it's not an arbitrary  relationship it's motivated it's connected it's in christian metz's words way too close  a relationship between signifier and signified so mats will say this cinematographic  signification i

s always more or less motivated never arbitrary that's because narrative films are  not abstract they are condemned to recording the world and when you record the world you're picking  up images that resemble things within the world but when i speak to you the sounds that are coming  out of my mouth are not recordings of the world they're a completely abstract set of sounds  that you have learned to master as communicating concrete things within the world so those are the  ways in which cinema i

s not a language system but we still haven't quite explained what it means  to say that cinema is still a language one of the first ways that we'll begin to understand that  cinema is a language is to give you an example of how we might study cinema as a language and  the first thing that christian mets will say is that if we're going to do this right we're  going to study denotation and not connotation well what do i mean by that well let's go back to that  example of jimmy stewart looking and

then cutting to the thing he's looking at these two shots  indeed signify and if i'm speaking strictly of denotation i might say this about the second shot  i might say the second shot by virtue of following the first shot represents or denotes that this  is the contents of jimmy stewart's optical point of view right that is one way to say communicate  the denotative meaning of that second shot connotation however is any kind of certification  that goes beyond what is immediately communicated as

narrative information if you're interested  in say the symbolism of the antagonist thorwald wearing a crisp white shirt then that kind of  meaning that you want to make as an interpretation is not denotation at all it's connotation it  has to be dug for it has to be explained it is not say the bare bones narrative signification  that is communicated through film codes that a shot of someone looking followed by an image  is largely going to communicate that that image is an example of what they'

re in fact looking  at what else does matt say about denotation well he kind of summarizes what can count as studying  film denotation here he says how does the cinema indicate successivity precession temporal breaks  causality adversative relationships consequence spatial proximity or distance these are questions  of film denotation what are examples of these so for example temporal breaks the fact that in  classical hollywood cinema a fade generally means a major temporal ellipsis well that is

a code  that has been instantiated through multiple uses it tells me the relationship between those two  shots is one of major temporal ellipses or a dissolve a dissolve in classical hollywood cinema  generally signifies a minor temporal ellipsis and we might even say something that is less codified  but more innovative like this famous match cut from 2001 a space odyssey is still operating in  terms of denotative meaning in other words if i watch this film and i watch it correctly i know  that

that cut from the bone to the satellite is signifying a very very very long temporal ellipsis  that's not a symbolic interpretation that's denotation so that's an example of how film can  communicate temporal breaks what about precession the idea that what i'm seeing now actually comes  before what i just saw so one word that we have for the idea that a shot shown in succession  can come before the shot that it came after is flashback this is a famous flashback from the  film casablanca if you

watch this film and you watch it correctly you're not going to struggle  to figure out the idea that when we do this slow blurry dissolve from humphrey bogart's face to the  arc de triomphe we are in fact going back in time the denotative meaning of that line between  the first shot and the second shot is denoting precession and you know that because you've  watched films before you inherit the code of the film language what about spatial proximity  or distance when i watch this little clip of a

sequence of faces i'm getting all this denotative  information about the relationship between those two faces i get the sense that they're looking  at each other not toward the same direction one of the reasons is because i've inherited the  code of the 180 degree rule in my bones that if one character looks screen right and he's followed  by a character that looks screen left i'm going to probably believe even though it might not be  true in pro filmic terms that those two people are looking a

t each other i'm also getting the idea  that they are distant from each other not standing right next to each other right how do i get that  information of spatial proximity or distance well i get it through cinematic codes that i've  inherited like a language so so far i've given you a basic rundown of some of the major points  that metz is going to make about the question is film like a language and to what extent is film  like a language but i don't think we've gotten to the meat of metz's st

udy so the next question i'm  going to look at in the next video is this what would a mezzan semiotic analysis of film look like  it gets a lot more interesting than this so stay tuned for the next video where we're going to look  at film the way that nets looks at film thanks