Christian Metz, Film Language

Metz, Christian. Film Language. New York: Oxford UP, 1974

I know, I should have read this book a long time ago.

In the days when the cinema was a novel and astonishing thing and its very existence seemed problematical, the literature of cinematography tended to be theoretical and fundamental. It was the age of Delluc, Epstein, Balazs, Eisenstein… Every film critic was something of a theoretician, a “filmologist.” (Metz 3)

Metz’s book has a lot of resonance with the theoretical and fundamental debates in academia around computer games these days, both “ludological” and otherwise, which strive to describe, formally and operationally, what a game is, and what distinguishes it from other forms of art or activity. Metz is analyzing film in general, within the contexts of linguistics and semiotics.

From this viewpoint, film distinguishes itself in several ways. According to Metz, film operates on levels of spectacle, giving us an impression of reality; it “releases a mechanism of affective and perceptual participation in the spectator”; it “commands a large audience” and is communal in a way that other public art forms are not (Metz 4).

All these distinctions were a lot less problematic in 1974, before CGI, VCR, and DVD all entered into public discourse , but film is still a mass audience form in a way that, I would argue, most games are not… maybe not even MMOGs, which encourage knowledge communities more than casual mass audiences. Interesting, though, that these characteristics all have as much or more to do with the cinema as a social structure and as a perspective on social gathering than they actually do with film as a representational form or technology.

A following does not become an audience until there is at least a minimum numerical and sociocultural difference between the creators and the spectators. (Metz 4-5)

Cinema has a “presence” and a “proximity” that “realizes” its subject, whether that subject is realistic or fantastic (Metz 5). Cinema has an immediacy (in temporal terms, not in Remediation terms) and, due to its phenomenon of motion, a reality the audience can experience. Yet cinema is at the same time unreal;

I’m looking forward to skimming through Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation again with this book in mind.