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The relationship between film and language is a problem of long standing with no definitive answer. In attempting to explicate film as art or communication a number of proposals use linguistic and literary models to describe film. While these ideas go back to the earliest writings on film, they often serve only to confound what they would clarify.
These efforts seem to come in waves; the group of linguistically sophisticated attempts under the rubric of semiotics is the latest surge.1 However, their linguistic sophistication may mask fundamental problems. An examination of the simpler pre-semiotics proposals can prove useful in an attempt to gain some understanding of the hazards - from the viewpoint of film - in applying language-based models to the explication of film.
Linguistic terminology abounds in the writings about film. Vachel Lindsay in 1915 posited the idea that film was similar to hieroglyphics with different shots representing determinate meanings.2 Pudovkin later urged that "to the film director each shot of the finished film subserves the same purpose as the word to the poet."3 Phrases like "film language." "film syntax." and "film diction," flow through the writings of Eisenstein. 4 This early line of thought reached a peak with Spottiswoode's A Grammar of Film.5
Some contemporary writers utilize classic grammar terminology. The Language of Film is a recent volume which referred to "nounal concepts" and "actions that were . . . verblike in nature."8 Lawson wrote of movement as "the verb in a cinematic sentence." And with only slight apology Lawson suggested that "internal montage resembles the intransitive verb while cutting . . . is transitive."7
Phrases like "the grammar of film" are harmless enough conceits when they are used metaphorically or as a claim to some kind of prestige. In fact, words like "semantics" and "syntax" may be useful subsuming concepts for meaning and structure within any sign system. Linguistic terminology causes problems when it is taken seriously and warps the analysis of perhaps essentially distinct sign systems.
Another common language-based model for film uses literary ideas about metaphor as analogies for what seems to happen in montage. The Russian silent film theorists were among the first to postulate the idea that moving picture scenes could be manipulated similarly to words with resulting...