christian metz and the semiology of the cinema author(s): alfred

Christian Metz and the Semiology of the CinemaAuthor(s): Alfred GuzzettiSource: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 3, No. 2, Film as Literature and Language (Apr.,1973), pp. 292-308Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3831037Accessed: 15/12/2009 11:28

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ALFRED GUZZETTI HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Christian Metz and the

Semiology of the Cinema

THE THREE BOOKS1 and numerous articles that Christian Metz has written since 1964 give him fair claim to be considered the most

important film theorist since Andre Bazin. To Bazin's question What is Cinema? he has replied cinema is a language. Though he is not the first to give this answer, he is the first to inform it with a sophisticated understanding of modern linguistics. Using models drawn from this discipline, his work attempts to confer on film theory the virtues of systematization, objectivity, and precision.

Metz is, to use his own term, a semiologist, and, as such, groups natural language with signifying systems as diverse as those of myth, dress, food, cinema, kinship, politeness, painting, poetry, and car-

tography. These systems are taken not simply to serve a function

analogous to natural language but to be open to the sort of analysis developed in its study. For these reasons, linguistics plays a double role in semiology. As the source of method, it is the parent disci-

pline; and as the study of a single signifying system, it is a branch of the more general, though still embryonic, science.

Since neither semiology nor the school of linguistics on which it is based is very well known in the United States, I shall try to give a brief outline of its premises and the place of Metz's work with relation to them. Semiology derives its linguistic framework from Ferdi- nand de Saussure, who furnished the indispensible distinction between the general term langage (e.g. French, English, Russian,

'These are Essais sur la Signification au Cinema (Paris, 1968), Langage et Cinema (Paris, 1971), and Prolo- sitions Methodologiques pour L'analyse du Film (Universitatsverlag Bochum, Germany, 1970), the last of which I have not been able to locate. My translations of quotations from the first two of these books (abbreviated as Essais ... and Langage .. .) are incorporated in the text of this essay.

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etc.) and langue, the system within a langage that comprises such elements as the phonetic, syntactic, and semantic sub-systems, which together permit the intelligibility and multiplicity of utter- ances. For the term langue, which refers specifically to natural language, Metz substitutes the less prejudicial word "code," which is defined in opposition to the complementary term "message." The code is composed of signifying elements and the message of signified elements, called respectively signifiers and signifieds. A code, to merit the name, must be instanced in more than one texte, a word that I shall leave in French in order to indicate its pertinence to any division of any discourse, whether a poem, a painting, or all the films of Jerry Lewis. A texte may embody a single code, many codes, or no code at all. In any case, the respective messages will be the counterparts of the codes and not coextensive with the texte. Although code and message are complementary terms, their signifiers and signifieds may not be isomorphic. Metz illustrates this point by citing Gilbert Ryle's observation that the division of the verbal signifier "Fido" into its four constituent phonemes does not entail a corresponding division of the signified, which is, of course, a mental response to the signifier, not the real animal. By contrast, in the case of the cinematic image, a signifier which shows a dog will, if divided, effect a corresponding division of the signified; that is, it will signify a portion of a dog. Thus the relation of signifier to signified, and of code to message is a complex matter informed by problems specific to particular textes and languages.

Finally, there is the distinction between syntagm and paradigm. Following Roland Barthes's suggestion in Elements of Semiology, this may be envisioned as a pair of Cartesian coordinates in which the syntagm is the horizontal dimension and the paradigm the verti- cal. The syntagm is the dimension, whether temporal as in the case of music or a-temporal as in painting, along which the message un- folds, and the paradigm is the system of alternatives that comprise the code. The paradigm portrays the code as a system in which a given signifier takes its meaning through opposition to others which are possible but absent in a given place on the syntagm. Semiologists prefer to organize these oppositions in binary or bifur- cating structures.

Metz's use of this general theory is characterized by his resistance to a literal interpretation of the analogy between natural and cinematic language. From the outset he has denied that there is any-

ALFRED GUZZETTI

thing in cinema resembling a langue. However, he also denies that the intelligibility of the cinema can be entirely explained through its

iconicity, that is, the resemblance of the sound and image to the

perceived world. Cinema is a discourse and as such must depend on codes. Metz has tried to show that these codes are irreducibly mul-

tiple and that no one of them occupies a central or definitive place. Yet they can be, at least initially, divided into those which are found

only in films and those which are also found elsewhere. The first

group he calls cinematic ("cinematographique") and the second filmic ("filmique"). Among the second group there is a sort of heir-

archy, since there exist codes that cinema shares with its double, television, and others with the novel, and still others which it embodies uniquely. Metz denies, however, that this heirarchy suffices to give any of the codes a place like that of the langue in natural

language. This position has consequences both for the semiologic study of

the cinema and for non-semiologic efforts at theory and criticism. In the first case, it puts a decisive end to fruitless attempts to identify the langue of cinema, to isolate its minimal units, and to enumerate the cinematic equivalents of the phoneme, morpheme, sentence, and grammar. In the second, it shows the futility of trying to base normative definitions of the cinema on arguments about the nature of the medium. Metz is firm in his insistence that the medium, or in his terms the matiere de I'expression, is manifest only through the codes it will support and permit, and that it is only in terms of these codes that cinema as a signifying system can be defined. Since no one or group of these occupies a controlling position, the semio-

logic study of the cinema will not authorize a normative position, thus superseding "theories" like Eisenstein's and Bazin's, which are at best criticism in disguise.

More now needs to be said about the seminal concepts code and

systeme. The code is defined in relation to the message: "The code is that which is not the message" (Langage ..., p. 65). The opposition code/message is parallel to systeme/texte: "The word 'systeme' for us has no sense other than that given by its opposition to 'texte' " (Langage .. , p. 65). The systeme is the code-like configuration, the formal principle of a texte. Every code is a systeme and every message a texte, but not the reverse, since a systeme is a sin-

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gular instance bound to a given texte while the code occurs in more than one texte. Both systeme and code are abstract entities: "A code (in theory) is defined exclusively as a relationship of logic, as pure form" (Langage. . ., p. 165). The "relationship of logic" obtains between the elements of the paradigm, the signifiers. The systeme has a similar definition: "What defines the systematique (that is, the non-textual) is its character as an ideal object constructed by analysis; the systeme has no material existence, it is nothing more than a logic, a principle of coherence; it is the intelligibility of the texte: what one must suppose in order that the texte be comprehensible" (Langage..., p. 57).

Using this vocabulary, Metz distinguishes the work of the semiologist from that of both film-maker and viewer. The semiologist's task begins where the film-maker's finishes; it does not lead toward the film, but away from it, toward its systemes. This movement parallels that of the viewer but differs in one respect: while the viewer wishes to understand the film, the semiologist wishes to know in addition how the film is understood ("en outre comprehendre comment le film est compris"). His reading is a "meta-lecture" as opposed to the "lecture 'naive' (en fait: a la lecture culturelle)" of the viewer.

In the passages quoted, Metz's own text supports two distinct read- ings. In thefirst,systeme isthe namegiven to thefactof intelligibility in the texte. It is the process of comprehension ("comment le film est compris") and is pictured as the interaction of reader and texte within the culture that they share. The semiologist makes a naive-that is, cultural-reading and a simultaneous meta-lecture; he is the reader who, as he comprehends, enunciates the process of comprehension. This enunciation is the systeme or, in the case of multiple textes, the code. Both terms refer not to the texte, which can be isolated from its cultural context, but to the lecture, which cannot. The meta-lecture does not displace but rather subsumes the lecture. Therefore, the analysis remains culturelle, and the propositions of the semiologist are linked on some level to psychology, sociology, or political theory, as Chomsky's linguistics is to psychology.

In the second reading, the systeme is a fact logically (though not chronologically) prior to the intelligibility and comprehension of the texte. It is not implied by the texte but constructed ("construit") by the analyst in opposition to the texte. To accomplish this, the semiologist must first pass through and discard a cultural lecture in

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order to achieve an analytical meta-lecture, the systeme. Thus the systeme, and the code along with it, liberated from its cultural circumstances, becomes an "objet ideal."

Despite hints of the first interpretation, it is the second that pre- vails in Langage et Cinema. Whatever the validity of this position, it has several inescapable consequences for the central concepts code and systeme. First, it weakens the meaning of "intelligibilite," "lecture," and comprehension by locating these processes exclusively within the texte. Though the lecture is required and presupposed, only the meta-lecture is expressed, or even reflected, at the level of the achieved theory. This isolation of meta-lecture from lecture requires an opposition that Metz willingly accepts of "analytique" to "culturelle." The analytic statement, the systeme or code, can therefore be tested only against the texte, within which the processes of the lecture have, somehow, been subsumed. In addressing the texte, the semiologist can dismiss as "cultural" the problems of how its messages were encoded and how they are to be decoded. The process of signification thus becomes a synchronic textual fact whose author is superfluous, his work finished, and whose "reader" is demoted to the role of witness.

The abstract, difficult concept of a code that emerges from this analysis can perhaps be better understood through two examples. The first, drawn from the Essais sur la Signification au Cinema (pp. 121-146 and 105-107), is Metz's most ambitious attempt to describe a particular cinematic code. According to his scheme, the image in fiction film can be sorted into eight categories, or syntagms.2 One of these, the montage alterne or alternating syntagm, is sufficient here to suggest the character and structure of the code as a whole. It is defined at the level of the signifier by two types of shots, called, in Langage et Cinema, A and B. The alternating of the signifiers A and B yields at least three signifieds with respect to temporal denota- tion. It may indicate that the two signifieds are continuous in time (e.g. alternating views of the two tennis players in a game of sin- gles), or simultaneous (alternating views of fugitives and their pur- suers in a chase), or a-temporal (the alternating shots of the situation comedy and singing auditions in Milos Forman's Taking Off). The syntagm "A'-B'-A2-B2-A3-B3-etc." is made possible by the

2The eight syntagms are described in "Film and Language, Film and Literature," IML, II (September 1971), 154-160.

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sorting of the shots into two classes according to a criterion like "pursuer versus pursued," that is, by a paradigmatic relation "A/B." This relation obtains not between shots or types of shots but between two classes defined by their mutual opposition. Its basis is logic, not the texte of a given sequence.

The second example, described in Langage et Cinema (pp. 149- 150), is based on Bazin's essay "La meilleure femme ne vaut pas un bon cheval." Bazin describes the well-known pattern in Westerns in which the figures of woman and horse are charged with symbolic meanings (domesticity versus freedom, for example) and presented to the hero for choice. This configuration, according to Metz, is a genuine code since it is common to numerous texts and depends not simply on the presence of a woman and a horse in the story but on the condition of their co-presence, which qualifies the opposition woman/horse as a paradigm. The modest code thus formed, unlike that of the eight syntagmatic categories, is extra-cinematic, or filmic, because it occurs in novels and songs as well as films.

It is true by definition that a code is common to multiple textes, but the claim that those textes may belong to different "languages"-one a song and another a film-requires some discussion, particularly concerning the concepts of the message and the signified. It should be recalled that the message is not the global meaning of the texte, but the set of meanings produced by a single code. A texte may be the locus of more than one code (for example, as Metz points out, the sentence "Voudriez-vous tenir ceci, s'il vous platt?" ["would you hold this please?"] displays, among others, a code of phonemes and a code of politeness) and hence of more than one message. In this respect the message, like the code, is a function of the point of view of the analysis.

I admit to some confusion on the question of exactly where or what the signified and message are. In the case of the alternating syntagm one of the possible signifieds is "simultanaeity." But it is not, evidently, the word I have written on the page nor what was projected on the screen to provoke it-since these can only be signifiers. It is rather the idea of simultanaeity within what Metz calls the diegesis, that is, the fictional world of the film. Metz assures us that one cannot speak of the diegesis or its constituent signifieds directly or in isolation from their signifiers. In other words, the message and its signifieds belong neither to the texte nor in the head of its reader, but to the explanatory abstraction of the lecture.

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Since the signified can be approached only through its signifiers, which are, in turn, bound to a particular signifying system, how can it be said that two or more languages may embody one and the same code? This problem is approached through a complex argument entitled "Interferences Semiologiques entre Langages" (Lang- age..., p. 160ff). Its premise is that a code, and hence a message, is

by definition a logical relation without physical existence. However, this premise has a limiting condition: namely, that codes always oc- cur in a matiere de I'expression, a physical material, which affects and restricts their possible configuration. Thus it is impossible for a code with temporal signifiers (though not temporal signifieds) to exist in a matiere like painted canvas which does not extend

through time. This limiting condition is outlined by three paradigm cases. The first, relatively inconsequential for semiology, concerns the borrowing by one language of a fragment of a code belonging to another. Metz's example is Faulkner's use in prose fiction of a narrative technique resembling montage alterne, which is, as ex-

plained earlier, a fragment of the code of the image in narrative cinema. The second, and most important case is the manifestation of one and the same code in two languages (or arts). Metz's example is the code of chiaroscuro, light and dark, in painting and color photography. These languages, like any two, necessarily differ with re-

spect to their sensory base, or matiere de I'expression. The critical point-and the one that distinguishes this category from the third- is "that the differences between the two matieres concern traits not

pertinent to the code in question" (Langage, p. 163). The third cate-

gory fails to meet this condition and hence is a weaker version of the second; it concerns two languages (or arts) whose differences of matiere will not permit the manifestation of the same code, but only of similar, or "isomorphic," codes. For example, the code of light versus dark may be shown directly in a painting, but in a novel its signifiers must be translated into words, which render the code in a similar, though by no means identical, form.

Can the condition of the second category be met in reality? I have difficulty considering this in the context of Metz's example, since I do not know precisely what the code of chiaroscuro is, unless it is the opposition between light and dark. It seems true enough that such an opposition is possible equally in a color photograph and a painting. Yet the two languages cannot have the same signifiers, since analine dye is not the same as oil paint, nor therefore the same signifieds. Metz's contention, I think, would be either that the

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differences between these matieres would not truly change the signifiers (any more than speaking French with an American accent

does) or that the opposition of signifiers, which is logique relationnelle, remains identical despite changes in the signifiers. This iden-

tity, however, is postulated, rather than proved; hence the argument is circular. As logic, codes may be exempted from the material conditions which embody them, but is it true that one may perform analogous surgery on the mati'ere de I'expression, taking from it

only the traits relevant to the codes? Standing before a particular painting and a particular color photograph, is it possible to regard the two systems of light-dark opposition apart from their material context? This may be conceivable as a mental operation, but is this

operation other than a thesis whose meaning consists in a contin-

uing relation and return to the matiere? In the absence of this relation, how is the code capable of signifying? If the code is severed by definition from the matiere, this does indeed authorize the erection of the second category, but does it not at the same time annul its

power as an analytic tool?

Perhaps a more central question is why Metz needs such a cate-

gory in the first place. His position in the Essais is that cinema is a

langage without a langue, and his argument throughout is keyed to this denial. Apart from a few hesitant hypotheses, the work is unre-

mittingly critical and distrustful of any wide-reaching claims for the role of codes in cinema. Cinematic imagery is "a rich message with a poor code, a rich texte with a poor systeme" (Essais, p. 74). Or "Goodbye, paradigm! Its poverty is the counterpart of a richness distributed elsewhere: the film-maker, different in this respect from the speaker of a language, can express himself by showing us di-

rectly the variety of the world; in this way the paradigm is quickly overwhelmed" (Essais, p. 75).

Langage et Cinema gives these denials the positive terms of a

theory by pursuing to its conclusion the definition of cinematic lan-

guage as an "ensemble" of codes. To do'this, the three categories of "interference" are by themselves insufficient, since they only serve to indicate the further problem of describing the limiting conditions imposed by the matiere de I'expression. Metz's response is to

classify the languages bordering on cinema-still photography, painting, the photo-roman, comic strip, radio and television-ac-

cording to such traits of matiere as iconicity, temporality, and prov- enance of the image. The resulting taxonomy, in conjunction with the crucial second category of "interference," suggests a method of

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defining the relations between languages in terms of their shared codes. In this way, it is possible to identify the set of codes common to, say, cinema and the photo-roman and distinguish it from the set common to cinema and still photography. This network of inter-relations replaces the dichotomy "specific/non-specific," which is the

descriptive basis for such normative statements as "Cinema is the art of movement." The analysis also implies that the "ensemble" of codes

comprising a given language is not simply an inventory, but has a structure that may, Metz suggests, itself be code-l ike. Thus, one could complete the definition of cinematic language bywriting the "formule

codique de sa specificite"-a prospect that both resolves and reflects the skepticism of the Essais concerning the explanatory power of codes regarded individually. However, Langage et Cinema stops short of attempting such a definition since Metz's position is sufficiently established simply by indicating the possibility.

* * * * *

Is this theory truly without norms? To approach this question, I want to sketch an alternative explanation of the syntagm of the film

image and compare Metz's to it. In my account, the telecast image of a football game may stand as a paradigm case. In order to understand what he sees, the viewer must know that the syntagm on his TV screen alternates among the views of a small, fixed number of cameras. It is-with apologies to Chomsky-a surface-structure whose deep structure may be visualized as the configuration of monitors in the control room, each of which displays the view of a

single camera. It is unnecessary for the viewer to have the slightest knowledge of the circumstances of production in order to understand either this structure or the rules that link it with what appears on his screen at home-just as the native speaker of a language is said to know its deep structures even if he cannot describe them. The

proof that this understanding is at work is that when the program deviates from the rules that transform the deep structure into the surface structure, this must be signalled; for instance, an instant replay must be identified either with superimposed titles, spoken comment, or the clear presence of slow motion, so as not to be confused with the live transmission; otherwise, the telecast lapses into unintelligibility.

The film-image is a more complex, but similar case. Again, the structure has two layers: one which appears on the screen, and its

deeper counterpart, which may be represented by the unedited

footage. Here too it may be said that the viewer understands the

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deeper structure even if he knows nothing about the production of motion pictures. If he did not infer it while watching films, he would, like certain early audiences, be confused and disoriented by every disjuncture of time and space, even when they are masked by the continuity of action within the diegesis. To understand the

deep structure means, in part, to know that the syntagm is not a transmission, but an assemblage of pieces filmed discontinuously in time and space. This knowledge is reflected in the word "cut," which

signifies not simply a change like the switch between television cameras, but a joint. To object that the deep structure is here a superfluous concept because the viewer only "knows" the portions of it that reach the surface is to miss the point; the viewer's ability to comprehend consists of his knowledge of the rules that connect the two. The lecture, therefore, in certain respects parallels the composition of the film, rather than occurring after it, as in Metz's model.

To take the simplest example, consider a dialogue scene in which bits of two camera-shots, or takes, A and B, alternate. Undoubtedly the viewer infers, as Metz maintains, on the basis of continuity in the dialogue that the alternating image signifies continuity in time. However, neither this observation nor its implied oppositions between temporal continuity and simultanaeity and between alternat-

ing and linear syntagms accounts for the structure of alternation. It

explains, so to speak, how the structure is absent, but not how it is

present. One must add that the viewer also understands the prove- nance of the alternating shots, the model of which is the unedited takes A and B. If this were not so, dialogue scenes articulated by jump-cuts, like those in Breathless, would be, at least for the origi- nal audience, not simply novel or shocking, but unintelligible, or- what comes to the same thing-they would require a new category in the taxonomy of the image-syntagm. In fact, they are intelligible because their relation to the deep structure is intelligible. The role of this deep structure in the specific case of the alternating syntagm is demonstrated clearly by the "dialogue" scene in Persona in which the camera-takes A and B, which show in one-shot Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson respectively, are not intercut and do not alternate, but run in their entirety one after the other: A, then B. This repeti- tion in the diegesis does not, however, impair the intelligibility of the sequence. Rather, its effect is to point to and illuminate the

deep structure in a way that is not only locally intelligible, but in- dicative of the director's concern elsewhere in this work with the

processes of cinema and representation.

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Metz is also aware that exceptions test the rule, and in the Essais

(pp. 213-215) he cites an image-sequence from Pierrot le Fou which does not fit any of his eight categories; it is the sequence, consisting of many short shots, in which the protagonists, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina, flee Paris. For Metz, the problem is two-fold: first, the shots are out of chronological order, though the glimpses of the action that they permit allows the viewer to reconstruct the likely chronology, and second, they show some bits of the action more than once and in slightly differing versions. Metz takes the se-

quence to be an instance of the diachronic processes of history at work, altering and adding to one of the codes of cinema. His re-

sponse as a semiologist is to give the excerpt the provisional name of a "potential" syntagm, since it allows neither a definitive nor

chronological version of the action. Whatever the paraphrasable meaning of its structure, the se-

quence is intelligible. As in the much simpler scene from Persona, the viewer is referred to the deep structure of the shots, which is, as

always, open to an organization that contradicts the chronology of the diegesis. Godard goes further than Bergman, however, when he includes corresponding bits from different camera-takes in which the action happens to differ slightly. Though few viewers would describe this process as I have, in terms of shooting and cutting, everyone would, I think, recognize the director's gesture toward the deep structure and would understand that our normally unconscious

knowledge of it is here being invoked. Presumably Godard makes such a gesture because at this moment he sees no alternative but to ask us to participate in his work of examining the world by means of the cinema, not because he is unsure how things happened and can

give only a "potential" account. For after all, nothing "happened"; the story is made up, and its author would seem intolerably pre- tentious if he demanded that we forget this fact in the midst of a sequence that so clearly shows his hand.

The differences between my account of this sequence and Metz's suggest, among other things, the extent to which his thinking is bound to the narrative film. In all of his writing, I could not cite a single example from another source. In the Essais (pp. 96ff.) he de- fends the historical basis of this commitment. His recognition of the relevance of this diachronic question is remarkable in light of his usual contention that his is an exclusively synchronic discipline. His attitude elsewhere toward writing history is the same as toward the creation of individual textes: the semiologist begins his work where the film-maker, and likewise the film-historian, finish theirs. He

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minimizes the importance of the moments at which the work of

production, history, and semiology must touch a common point; he

maintains, for example, that the semiologist's choice of a texte for

study may be influenced by the problems currently seen as urgent within his discipline, but is in itself as indifferent as the linguist's decision to study a particular dialect; and, as I have tried to show, his notion of signification neither incorporates nor permits refer- ence to the composition of the texte.

The version of film history given in the Essais stresses the central-

ity of "la rencontre du cinema et de la narrativite," the meeting of cinema and narrative. It holds that in the beginning film was purely iconic-that is, it signified exclusively by means of the resemblance between its imagery and the visible world-and that its association with narrative resulted in the gradual invention and super- imposition of various codes over its iconic mechanisms. The reper- tory of codes pertaining to the image was complete by the time of D. W. Griffith, and those of image and sound formulated during the thirties, stabilizing in the style Bazin called "decoupage classique." In this view, the Soviet school of the twenties, despite the magnifi- cence of its production, is a cul-de-sac. Metz is clearly hostile

(though respectful) both to Eisenstein's attempt to give montage the status of a "langue" (though, of course, Eisenstein would not use the term) and to his reading of film history, which groups Grif- fith with the Soviets as the dominant school. In short, Metz's history is like Bazin's, except that he does not acknowledge Bazin's charac- terization of the two warring tendencies in film history. Nor does he concede that the reliance of his synchronic theory on this version of history in any way compromises its claim of objectivity.

What is at stake here is not simply the importance of narrative film but the controlling place of narrative within film theory. The contrast between Metz's account of the articulation of the image and the alternative that I sketched should make this clear. The basis of his analytical method is to refer the structure of the image to the narrative. In cases where the practice of the cinema itself challenges the explanatory power of the narrative, as does the sequence from Pierrot le Fou, his response is to avoid the problem by inventing a new narrative category. The history of film as he rehearses it conve-

niently minimizes examples of this kind and at the same time au- thorizes his methods of dealing with them. Supported by this version of history, his synchronic theory affirms a notion of signification in which the spectator, in order to understand the structure of the image, refers not to the real world where films are financed,

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shot, cut, printed, sold, projected and criticized, but to the fantasy world that the films present-what is clinically called the "diegesis."

At first glance, this tendency is less clear in the vastly more abstract text of Langage et Cin&ma. There (pp. 142-143) Metz denies that the syntagmatic categories of the image in narrative film merit the status of a langue, or even an especially important code, of the cinema. The denial harmonizes with the book's argument that the codes of cinema form an "ensemble," to which the notions of hier-

archy, centrality, or specificity are simply not applicable. On the surface, this seems a neutral, a-historical, and objective definition. Yet on examination it turns out, I believe, to be only the position of the Essais slightly modified and projected into more abstract terms.

To support this contention, let me reopen the discussion of the crucial second category of "interference," the instance of one code in two languages, by adducing an example from the Essais. Though in context the example relates to some notions of Pasolini's that seem remote from "interference," it presents issues that are, I think, easier to grasp than those of the light-dark code in paintings and color photographs:

Certainly, the total comprehension of any film would be impossible if we did not carry within us this vague but quite real dictionary of "im- segni" of which Pasolini speaks, if we did not know-to take only one example-that Jean-Claude Brialy's car in Les Cousins is a sports-car, with everything that this signifies in twentieth-century France, the diegetic period of the film. But we would know all the same, because we would see it, that it is a car, and this would be sufficient for the comprehension of the (tenotecd meaning of the passage. One may not object that an Eskimo with no priorcontact with industrial civilization would not even recognize it as a car! For what that Eskimo would need is acculturation, not translation .... (Essais, pp. 209-210)

To analyze this example in terms of Metz's scheme of "interference," we may note that the sports-car belongs both to a "language" of consumer items in twentieth-century France, like those described by Roland Barthes in Mythologies, and to the filmic language of Les Cousins. The matieres de I'expression of these two languages, in the first case the visual, three-dimensional presence of the real objects and in the second their two-dimensional image on film, do not differ in the traits relevant to the code in question. For example, the paradigm sports-car/sedan, in which the sports-car signifies luxury, is possible equally in twentieth-century France and in a film. Like most of the visual codes of culture, the one that includes this paradigm can be rendered in the iconic terms of the cinematic image, and thus is an instance of the second category of "interference": the manifestation of one and the same code in two languages.

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The argument that establishes this instance also-and more im- portantly-opposes the notion that Metz calls "cinematographisa- tion." His analysis of "interference" implies that a code like the one of our example does not become "cinematic" by virtue of its mere presence in a film; it is an instance of the second category, not the third. The sports-car in Les Cousins not only has the significance it would also have in twentieth-century France-at least in part-but obtains this significance by the same means: "Thus is it necessary to insist on the fact that filmic code is not necessarily cinematic, since a code (in theory) is defined exclusively as a relationship of logic, as pure form, and is therefore not 'ied to a particular matiere de I'expression, for example, the cinema's" (Langage..., p. 165).

Although it is a subtle and difficult matter to say how looking at a painting differs from looking at a color photograph, everyone can tell the difference between a sports-car and a picture of one. Metz does not deny this difference. Rather, he passes over it in silence, speaking only about the place the object occupies in a discourse. This silence is the counterpart of his contention elsewhere that one can sever the code from its mati'ere and hence that none of its meaning consists in, or arises from, its situation in the matiere. Here the difficulties begin. For-to return to the example-when we are before the actual automobile, the paradigm sports-car/sedan and the code which subsumes it can hardly be said to inhere exclusively in "logique relationnelle," but belongs at least partly to the concrete relation between the object and us. We are in the world where we may not address the object except as, say, an owner, cus- tomer, envier, producer or viewer-all relations in which the code, admittedly abstract, is at work. None of these relationships can en- ter unaltered into a film, where there is no longer the possibility of- to keep to the example-an economic relation between us and the object, but only the quite different opportunity to project this relationship onto, or extract it from, the world that is represented.

Yet filming is not simply the loss of a certain sort of relationship. The object filmed, it is true, is in one sense reduced to a phantom. But at the same time it becomes another sort of object-a picture. The code that describes our relation to an actual automobile has a proper analogy only in our relation to the commodity we call a movie, not to what is signified by the movie. Going to the movies and buying a sports-car can even be said to form a paradigm, since they have, as an opposition, the power to signify, and there exist situations in which such a choice may be read as a discourse. I do

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not mean to insist on the economic basis of this analysis (it is only an illustration chosen to suit Metz's example), but rather on the

centrality in signification of the relation between the viewer and the matiere, from which the code as a signifying mechanism is not detachable. Consequently, all codes, even those of natural lan-

guage, are "cinematographized" when they pass into films; hence Metz's second category is without true examples.

This argument does not deny the points of similarity between, say, a film and a song that share the theme "The best woman isn't worth a good horse." Rather, it refuses such similarities the status of

language, as that term is understood by Metz. This disagreement is

reproduced and elaborated in Metz's critique of Pasolini's semiot- ics, from which the discussion of Les Cousins is taken. Pasolini maintains that cinematic language has two articulations, the second more or less equivalent to Metz's specific codes, and the first a rather ill-defined and partly to-be-invented lexicon of "im-segni" (image-signs), which have meanings within culture and therefore

comprise a kind of language prior to the intervention of the film- maker. Metz argues that this first articulation is not only question- able but superfluous, since it can be adequately replaced by the

concept of iconic analogy; he insists on "the perceptual and cultural status of these 'im-segni,' opposing it to the language-like character of the codes that are properly cinematic" (Essais...,p. 210n).

I do not wish to associate myself with Pasolini's position, least of all with the problemmatical concept of the "im-segno." But I do sympathize with Pasolini's motive, which is, I think, less to intro- duce economies into the semiologic study of cinema than to place its most fundamental premise, and hence the discipline itself, within a perceptual, cultural, and ultimately political context. Metz is not only unpersuaded of the necessity of this step, but sees an antithesis between the terms "cultural and perceptual" on the one hand and "language" on the other.

In thus opposing the signifying process to its cultural and perceptual setting, Metz exposes the basis of his conception of the cinema. Though his approach to particular questions is always distinguished by the sophisticated application of linguistic method- ology, the effect of these methods is to attribute to the cinema a sort of transparency, to imagine it as a glass distinct from culture but through which culture is visible. Cinema emerges in his portrait as an instrument that is as indifferent to ideology and value as he sup-

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poses natural language to be, as a system whose workings are logical rather than material and whose history is the immaterial accretion of these processes in the realm of pure logic and pure form. It is a conception that, despite the linguistic vocabulary in which it is stated, recalls Bazin. For Bazin bequeathed to Metz not simply the question What is Cinema? but an answer of his own, namely that cinema is an image and substitute for reality, whose history is the gradual aesthetic and technological perfection of the power of illusion. Metz rejects the wishful, almost religious aura of this position. He discards its normative arguments, fills in its si- lences on the structure of cinematic discourse, and banishes its aesthetic of illusionism if not from the description of particular codes, then at least from the higher, more abstract levels of the theory. Yet, despite all this, he preserves and elaborates Bazin's assumption that the cinema is something one looks through but not at and studies in isolation from the circumstances where it is made and seen.

This shared assumption indicates what is truly at issue in Metz's distinction of his work from that of other theorists and critics. For example, Eisenstein's concept of montage, which Metz patron- izingly calls "montage-roi," is, unlike any of the seminal concepts of Metz's theory, rooted in the material world of culture and percep- tion. It locates the process of signification in the interaction of spectator and screen. The relation of frame to frame, of image to image, and of the parts of an image to each other is not merely a fact of the texte, but a relation which the film-maker creates and which produces ideas, emotions, and comprehension only by acting on, and being re-enacted by, the viewer. In a comparable way, Paso- lini, whose conception is in other respects close to Metz's own, maintains that from the outset the discourse of cinema is entangled in its cultural origins, from which not even the image, for all its iconicity, can be entirely extricated.

Faced with such profound and consequential disagreements, no reader can ignore either the need for judgment or the search for criteria on which a judgment may be based. Despite the subordi- nate place habitually given to the discussion of particular films and parts of films in Metz's writing, and despite his repeated denial that such discussions are either urgent or germane to his work as a semiologist, I would argue that it is not only inevitable but fair that they should stand as a measure of his theory. Must one not ask what light is shed on the sequence from Pierrot le Fou by giving it the name of "potential" or by testing it against the eight supposed syn-

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tagmatic categories one at a time? Are we told any more about The Outlaw by calling its theme of woman-versus-horse a code? Or can

any plausible rationale be conceived for preferring the long analysis of Intolerance in Langage et Cinema (pp. 81ff.) to Eisenstein's sup- posedly unscientific and normative discussion of the same work in

"Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today"? Can one deny that Metz's detailed description of Griffith's parallel montage is simply less than Eisenstein's effort to relate it to the film's ideology, than to submit that ideology to a critique based on a reading of history? Whatever the talent of these two men as critics, and whatever one's attitude toward what they value, is there any possible conclusion but that Metz's ideas produce what is by comparison to Eisenstein a diminu- tion and abortion?

But Eisenstein is not to be taken as the measure of Metz's writing. The point is rather that Metz's effort to excise from cinema the

process of signification and, in the name of language, to set it in a realm of abstract logical relations is in the end both meaningless and futile. The analogy between natural and cinematic language is not perfect enough in itself to authorize or sustain such an effort. Cinema as a signifying system lacks, as Metz concedes, both arbi- trariness in Saussure's sense and the paired systems that permit both distinctive and significative articulation. Moreover, it is, unlike natural language, the outcome of industrial production-a fact with

inescapable consequences for its means of signification. When the world, whether coded or not, passes into the sounds and images of

cinema, it is not merely reduced to the configurations of an abstract

system, but transformed into a concrete object of another kind. The difference between these sounds and images and the objects and codes that they reflect, though it has no stable meaning, nonethe- less always and of necessity enters into the process of signification. It is not within the power of the film-maker's intentions, or of their reflection in the film's style, to dissolve this difference. Even if it were, we as spectators are not simply prisoners of those intentions, but are free and co-present in the world where the images and sounds exist as objects. The conditions of this world, its social, economic, and political structure, impose on us, spectators, critics, theorists, and film-makers alike, the obligation to analyze, interpret, and criticize the cinema as it reflects and embodies these conditions. In this light, Metz's retreat to the realm of logic and abstraction that he calls "language" can be seen as not simply anti- normative, but, despite its methodological precision, anti-critical and anti-analytical as well.

christian metz and the semiology of the cinema author(s): alfred

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