Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

such as Citizen Kane, for instance, represents a whole new cinematic language in which
Welles extended the filmmaking techniques to the extreme and ended up creating a rather
unique film aesthetic, whereas most other natural languages are not so open to initiative
and creativity.
In Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (1974) Metz (whose purpose, as he
himself defined it, was to “get to the bottom of the linguistic metaphor”) refers to
cinesemiotics as a discipline that has learnt much from the linguistic models of Ferdinand
de Saussure, but declines, however, a theoretical model for film based on verbal language.
According to him, a shot is not like a word which already exists in a dictionary, and neither
can it be divided or reduced into smaller units like the word which is a purely virtual
lexical unit that is more or less organised in a semantic field. For that matter, he tried to
compare shots and words (which illustrates his strong links to linguistic semiotics) and he
states that “the image discourse is an open system, and it is not easily codified, with its
non-discrete basic units (the images), its intelligibility (which is too natural) its lack of
distance between the significate and the signifier” (Metz 1974:86). I would argue here that
at the core of the medium the meaning in film comes mostly through conventions which
began as figures, and which for Metz, are normal marks of an irrational discourse which
becomes gradually ordered. He conceives film operating semiotically (through grammar
and syntax and the already mentioned invariant relation of signifier to signified);
rhetorically, with figures getting involved with the signified, and thus destabilising its
relation with the signifier; and psychoanalytically, with the forces and processes being
articulated with the dream work (basically what Freud referred to as rhetorical figures –
antithesis, parallelism, reversal, etc).
In practice this meant supplementing categories of semiotics (codes) and a new
dimension in the discourse theory (syntagms, paradigms, aspects of narration). Like
rhetoric, this discipline of looking into cinema through an examination of cultural facts and
through tropes of metaphor and metonymy added a new vision of the structure of cinema.
Henceforth the study of figures, rather than codes, must be dominant in an assessment of
cultural artifacts. In relation to film this is even more suitable, especially when analysing
film genres as a collection of strategies rather than a well-ordered system.
Psychoanalysis was another theory within this figural process of condensation and
displacement coming from Freud (regarding the unconscious and disordering). One can
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