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Jean Mitry Semiotics and the Analysis of Film Indiana University Press, 2000 ISBN 079143558X
Trans. Christopher King
Jean Mitry (1907-88), an essential figure in European film theory, and author of the near-classic The Aesthetics and Psychology of Film, was Professor of the History of Aesthetics and the Semiology of Film at the University of Paris. This recent translation, by British film-maker Christopher King, nimbly captures Mitry's irritable wit and an effervescent, spoken quality of voice even in the most densely theoretical passages.
This book began as a series of articles challenging the influence of a younger semiologist named Christian Metz, who, Mitry argues, wrongly imposed the methodology of structural linguistics onto the study of film. The result, to Mitry's apparent disgust, was to presume an essential equivalence between the language of film and the language of verbal structures. In an early chapter on film terminology and the history of semiotic analysis of film, Mitry distinguishes between "word" and its supposed counterpart in cinema, "image". Since the cinematic image duplicates empirical reality, it is a "formal" sign because it is "identical in form" to the reality it reproduces, while a linguistic sign is conventionally rather than formally or substantively related to its signified (16). Moreover, as a cinematic sign, the image is specific, signifying, for example, "that specific dog, seen in that specific place, from that specific angle, never a dog in generar...