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Pier Paolo Pasolini attempted to define a "Cinema of Poetry" in 1965, in part as a response to Christian Metz's and other critics' work in defining a film language. Some critics, such as Jean Mitry and Metz himself, had already referred to poetics, either in a stricdy linguistic sense (Metz) or an aesthetic sense (Mitry). Yet they generally failed to determine a cinema of poetics adequate for critically evaluating films that in a real, critical sense may be said to be "poetic" (as opposed to, for example, mere sentimentality casually termed "poetic"). This critical poetic sense escapes qualitative analysis and is beyond the limits of structural linguistics. Metz's structuralist linguistic models of film criticism make interesting connections between structures of filmic and verbal texts, and other semioticians, Pasolini in particular, have worked toward this end. But, as I have said, a critical reliance on linguistic models for the purposes of film analysis betrays an inevitable failing to assess the poetic quality of not only an essentially visual medium, but also the specific formal possibilities of that medium. However, I hope to suggest a specific model of poetic semiotics to demonstrate the visual signification of iconic images and to show how these images, and their accompanying narratives, through repetition, pacing, juxtaposition, and framing, signify through an aesthetic more closely aligned with poetry (discovered meaning) than with theory (made meaning).
Semiotics seems to be an effective way to approach this question, but is it sufficient? By "language" of cinema do we mean its signifying possibilities or its narrative structure? In this study I would like to consider these two expressions as a way to examine the relationship between image and (verbal) language. Also, drawing on a semiotics of poetry suggested by Michael Riffaterre, I will examine this relationship as it functions in Krzysztof Kieslowski s film La double vie de Véronique.
Since Metz's important essay "Le Cinéma: langue ou langage" in 1964, critics have been trying to define a language of film for the purposes of understanding film as an ordered system of signification. However, it remains that the essential distinction between film and language - that film is fundamentally visual and concrete, while language is a system of representation - is at the heart of the...