Page 93 - Decoding Culture

86 D E C O D ING U L TURE
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tell us; it is the fact that the movies tell us stories that enables us to
learn to understand these procedures.
Because the relation between signifier and signified in the film
sign is analogical rather than arbitrary, Metz believes that it makes
no sense to think in terms of a distinctive film langue.
Comprehending a film image is not a matter of social convention,
as it should be if Saussurian concepts are to be used. Film has,
Metz argues, no 'second articulation', no identifiable units equiva­
lent to the phonemes of linguistics. The shot is not, as some have
claimed, the equivalent of a word - if anything it resembles a sen­
tence. The film image is itself the film's speech, and there is not a
limited lexicon of images as there is a limited lexicon of words.
Taken together, these and others of Metz' arguments in his early
essays would appear to render cine semiotics a dubious prospect,
for if we once accept that cinema does not have a langue then what
is there for the semiologist to study?
We have already had a clue to Metz' answer to this question in
his claim that we understand film's 'syntactical procedures'
because we have first understood narrative. If this is indeed the
case - that it is primarily in relation to narrative that movie syntax
has developed - then it is on this that semiotics must focus. But,
even in this rather more limited sphere, the endeavour remains
fragile: 'Filmic narrativity . . by becoming stable through conven­
.
tion and repetition over innumerable films, has gradually shaped
itself into forms that are more or less fixed, but certainly not
immutable' (ibid: 101) . In short, Metz can find no distinctive film
language outside of those procedures relating to narrativity, and so
it is that he comes to focus attention not on langue but on the analy­
sis of syntagmatic sequencing in narrative film. This is his
influential grande s y ntagmatique (ibid: 1 1 9-146).
Note that there is a kind of un-Saussurian essentialism apparent
in Metz' discussion here, a desire to focus upon the uniquely

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