Raymond Bellour & Christian Metz

1. Raymond Bellour & Christian Metz • Director of Research at the Centre Nationale de Recherches Scientifiques • 1964-1980. The inseparability of Metz’s and Bellour’s research • the former working in the context of a general semiology, the other developing concepts through the close textual analysis of individual films. • Both in a close working relationship with Barthes

2. “Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film” • In order to understand the filmic code, or the existence of a film language, why does Metz focus on a syntagmatic analysis? • How can we test Metz's categories? How can we put them to work in the analysis of the narrative form of films?

3. Filmic narrativity is a "language without a langue." • There are no filmic "signs" because • of the irreducibility or indivisibility of the shot. • Due to the overwhelming impression of reality in the cinema and its analogical fullness, the image (signifier) is inseparable from, and indeed coextensive with what it refers to (its signified). • the photographic image is universally meaningful--a “natural” sign where there is a motivated or nonarbitrary relation between signifier and signified. • film images escape definition as a langue because of their connotative richness.

4. Filmic narrativity is a "language without a langue." • For Metz, the closest linguistic equivalent for the shot is what he calls an enoncé, an oral sentence or statement. • The closest linguistic equivalent for an image of a gun is "Here is a gun!." • The image is, like a sentence, "a complete, assertive statement." • The film scene or sequence, with its complex and partially systematic articulation of image-statements, is more like the novel, an aesthetic discourse.

5. The "shot is less unlike a statement than a word, even though it does not necessarily resemble a statement" (115). • 1. Like statements and unlike words, shots are infinite in number. • 2. Like statements and unlike words, shots are creations by an individual. • 3. Like statements and unlike words, the shot presents a complex unit of undefined length; it presents the receiver with a quantity of undefined information. • 4. Like statements and unlike words, the shot is an assertion, an actualized unit of discourse, expression not signification. • 5. Like statements and unlike words, the meaning of the shot is organized syntagmatically (in relation to sequence or order) rather than paradigmatically.

6. Film denotation: a rhetoric or a grammar? • Rhetoric organizes predetermined orderings of undetermined elements. Predetermined orderings are units that: • are expressive; • are discrete; • are of large magnitude; • and belong properly to the cinema and are common to all films.

7. Film narrativity and the grande syntagmatique • Because of the absence of a cinematic langue, films are considered as texts or as discourse rather than as language. • As a semiological phenomena, films escape analysis as langue in the strictest sense, but in this they are like poetry or literature-- • organized narrative structures whose smallest meaningful unit is the enoncé or statement. • The idea of a textual system applies more to individual films, than to an idea of a grammar or langue shared by all films.

8. “Notes Toward a Phenomenology of Narrative” • Narrative structure in general is defined by: 1. Closure: a beginning and an ending. 2. A temporal sequence. 3. Discourse rather than langue; that is, an artistically realized language. 4. Imaginariness: narratives are unreal in the sense that they take place in a displaced time, a once upon a time, the there-then. 5. Basic parts that are the represented events. The essential divisions of narrative are actualized statements or narrating sequences.

9. A syntagm is a group of signs ordered in a meaningful, linear sequence. • ". . . film, which by nature one would think adapted to a transversal reading, through the leisurely investigation of the visual content of each shot, becomes almost immediately the subject of a longitudinal reading, which is precipitous, "anxious," and concerned only with "what's next." The sequence does not string the individual shots; it suppresses them" (45).

10. Why shouldn't the grande syntagmatique be considered a grammar in the strictest sense? • Individual creativity: artist creates his or her own variants; latitude for new forms. • Diachrony or historical change: stylistic change and innovation of narrative forms evolve faster than ordinary language. • Wider latitude for innovation includes greater tolerance for deviation from code, mishaps as well as creativity: • artistic discourses will always be much less systematic than the fundaments of ordinary language; • linguistics is a science; film analysis is an art.

12. Types of autonomous shots • Nondiegetic insert. Comparative, symbolic value like parallel syntagm. • Subjective insert. An absent, imaginary moment: memory, dream, hallucination. • Displaced diegetic insert. Displacement of related image into a "foreign" syntagm. • Explanatory insert. An enlarged detail, usually implying subjective pov.

13. Revision of the grande syntagmatique

14. Revision of the grande syntagmatique 1. Bracketing: Thematic linking of images. 2. Descriptive: Establishes place of dramatic action. 3. Parallel: Thematic or symbolic associations implied by comparing or two or more chains of images. 4. Sequence-shot: Narrative event covered in one, continuous shot. 5. Scene: Narrative event characterized by very strong unities of time, place, and action. Several shots linked by strict temporal continuity.

15. Revision of the grande syntagmatique 6. Ordinary sequence: Narrative event characterized by unity of action in spatially contiguous settings. Small temporal and spatial ellipses, usually represented by inserts, pov shots, or alternation with a single diegetic space. 7. Episodic sequence: Strong temporal condensation of prolonged narrative event. Definite ellipses of space and time across series of images linked by dissolves. 8. Alternate sequence: Two or more narrative events are intercut. Temporal relations may be: • simultaneous (pursuer and pursued); • consecutive (point/glance); • displaced (flashbacks and forwards).

16. Subtypes of the alternate sequence • Alternating: cross-cutting two or more actions within same diegetic space. • Alternate: cross-cutting two or more actions from discontinuous diegetic spaces (telephone call), within a consecutive time. Discontinuous space with consecutive time. • Displaced: discontinuous in space and time.

17. Raymond Bellour, “Segmenting/Analyzing” • Behind the apparent simplicity and obviousness of classic, Hollywood cinema, a complex weaving of non-specific and specific codes into a textual system. • The repetition-resolution effect • Patterns of symmetry and dissymmetry that bind together the textual system from its largest to its smallest parts. • The effect of rhyming on both a horizontal dimension, and in the relation of parts to wholes. • “Le blocage symbolique.” • The importance of sexual difference in organizing relations of conflict and resolution, symmetry and dissymmetry in classic Hollywood narration. • Oedipus as the symbolic structure governing the elaboration of textual form, mirrored from throughout the text from supra-segment to the weaving of codes in individual scenes.

18. Rhyming, repetition, and resolution in Gigi

19. Rhyming, repetition, and resolution in Gigi • Repeated elements tend to contract and group together as the film comes to a close. • Motifs and actions dilate and contract at the expense of the “autonomy” of segments. • From ideology of consorts to that of bourgeois family. Gigi’s education as consort gives way to Gaston’s education into family life. • Reconciliation of aristocratic and middle classes. • “Mistake” of Honoré and Mamita rectified by Gaston-Gigi • The role of Oedipus and the resolution of an incest fiction: • “This then is the story the film tells us, within a narrative which makes of the segmental the textual condition for a happy slide from the familial into the conjugal, and so assigns itself as an object the resolution of Oedipus.”