Page 94 - Decoding Culture

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SITUATING SUB E C TS 87
distinctive features of film. This arises in part from his background
in Bazinian film aesthetics, and it haunts all three phases of his
work. In this early period he is inclined to argue that film is inher­
ently thus-and-thus and that, in consequence, cinesemiotics is
restricted in specific ways. In the second phase of his work, how­
ever, this essentialist commitment recedes far enough to allow him
to embrace a rather different role for the semiologist. Now the
analyst's task is to construct codes which will make sense out of
what we know about filmic communication. A code, he writes
(Metz, 1974b: 101), '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'. Inevitably, such codes are in complex
interaction with others, and it is in the intersection of all the many
codes applying to a text that the 'pluricodic' uniqueness of that
particular text is found. In general, then, a code is (1) a construct
of (2) a system which (3) explains the ways in which the elements
of the text(s) interrelate. To understand the codes that govern
'film language' is therefore to understand the underlying order
that makes filmic communication possible, even though that pro­
ject is no longer cast in terms of a traditional concept of langue. The
ultimate aim, Metz says, is a formal model of each code, though he
suggests that such an achievement may still be very distant. A
code is, however, always a 'logical entity' intended by the analyst
(who constructs it) to 'explicate and elucidate' the workings of the
relevant text(s). A specific film cannot be reduced to such codes; it
is created from an unpredictable conjunction of the available coded
practices.
In Langage et cinema Metz goes on to elaborate at great length
upon a range of codes and sub-codes, paying particular attention to
what he calls 'cinematic specificity'. It is here that his earlier con­
cern with the essence of the cinematic image returns in a new

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