Christian Metz

*Academic Book Review* Killer Tapes… is a fascinating book with rigourous theoretical content and effective challenges to entrenched modes of thinking about movie spectatorship. Benson-Allott outlines a new phenomenology of spectatorship, but this reader is left with important questions regarding certain denials of intent  and limits in surveying the postcinematic landscape and in defining a postcinematic movie culture. In this sense, Killer Tapes… finds its ideal readership in those who are eager to further Benson-Allott’s own ideas and help to scope-out the full field of postcinematic movie culture.

In the early cinema era, there were a lot of authors who inquired into the nature of this new medium, taking into account both its artistic value and its specificity. Among the various approaches, the theories of Bela Balázs stands out, who maintains in his work Visible Man, or the Culture of Film (Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films, 1924) that the film has the potential to redeem the curse of Babel since it uses a universal language. Thus, it goes so far as to affirm that it is the first time that a language of this type exists, since it is articulated from facial expressions and physical gestures. And that is the reason why it is so important: it is perfectly opposed to the hegemony of the written text, that diminishes the immediate expression and reduces the possibility of expression of the mother tongue of humanity, that is, of the primordial language.
Similar positions are those defended by Louis Delluc, Ricciotto Canudo or Vachel Lindsay, arguing the latter that the cinema offers a universal language through image-writing. That is what led him to assimilate it to hieroglyphic images, stating that it can lead the viewer towards a new vision-gaze. This universality of language was not only valued by the early film theory: it was also analyzed by the semiotic theory, standing out the figure of Christian Metz, who studied whether we should refer to the cinema as a language or language system. Therefore, the purpose of this communication is to assess how it has been speculated about the potential of cinema as a suppressor of language barriers, as a new communication system and as a universal language.

《電影符號學：從古典到數位時代（新版）》是電影理論工作者齊隆壬長期研究的成果，詳細耙梳並剖析符號學的發展源流與變革，以及著名學者的理論，如索緒爾、李維史陀、羅蘭巴特、皮爾斯等。接著帶出電影理論的關鍵人物──克利斯蒂安．梅茲，闡釋他如何把符號學，以及相關領域如語言學、結構主義、精神分析運用至電影分析，奠定電影符號學在電影理論界的重要地位。也因電影符號學涵蓋的範圍甚廣，而讓電影分析有了更多可能性。除了回顧西方符號學與電影符號學的理論與沿革，作者也把討論拉回台灣與中國大陸，介紹電影符號學在兩岸的發展脈絡與特點。

　　在理論層面之外，作者也引用許多影片分析的範例，清楚說明電影符號學是如何應用於電影研究之中。而近來電影科技日新月異，已進入數位電影時代，因此第九章即在討論電影由膠卷轉為數位影像的變革，除了提及古典電影如《波坦金戰艦》、《月球之旅》等必會出現的經典例子，更舉《阿凡達》、《全面啟動》、《雨果的冒險》為例，把電影符號學理論連結至最新的影片發展上。

　　電影符號學雖看似古典，在現今的數位環境中非但沒有過時，反而受到電影理論學者大量援用，依然能夠提供理論架構和基本論點。而本書由符號學的發展開始，一直到電影符號學與數位電影的連結，提供了全面且獨到深入的見解，堪稱是近期電影理論的重量級著作，研究電影者不可不看！

Attraverso l'indagine del meccanismo testuale e della ricostruzione del contesto di produzione, il saggio propone uno studio su Empirismo eretico e sullo stretto rapporto tra teoria semiotica, critica letteraria e impegno politico che ha contrassegnato il lavoro pasoliniano degli anni Sessanta. Lo scopo è quello di mostrare come Empirismo eretico, nonostante la sua asistematicità, la sua fram-mentarietà analitica e il taglio polemico delle sue argomentazioni, abbia rappresentato per Pasolini il laboratorio in cui portare avanti la propria indagine teorica intorno a numerose questioni emerse nel corso della sua attività di scrittore, regista e intellettuale impegnato.

Tres grandes ciencias se han dedicado al estudio sistemático del cine: Sociología, Psicología y Semiótica. He decidido centrarme en esta última porque se encuentra en la base de la problemática cine de poesía vs. cine de prosa que nos plantean Pasolini y Rohmer, además de ser una de las empresas más fructíferas y con mayor rigor filosófico de la teoría cinematográfica. Esta lucha de perspectivas se convertirá en una constante en la historia del cine y tal como apunta Adriano Aprá en la introducción al texto, la polémica Pasolini-Rohmer si bien no fue una discusión real, pues no hubieron réplicas, sendos ejercían de heraldos de las grandes visiones de su tiempo sobre el cine-guarda semejanzas con el conflicto entre los cineastas soviéticos a principios del cine sonoro (1931-1934). Se enfrentaban, por un lado los formalistas puros, con Eisenstein de estandarte, defendían un "montaje poético"  con el objetivo de extraer todo el potencial que tienen las imágenes en sí y que no sea subsumidas por el sonido; otros autores como Yukevitch y Korintsev, cuya idiosincrasia se va aproximando hacia lo que en un futuro se convertirá el realismo de Bazin, apostaban por un lenguaje más narrativo, no alegórico como el de Eisenstein, ya que pensaban que estos métodos llevan a la anulación del hombre, a un distanciamiento de los verdaderos sentimientos humanos. Como vemos la problemática que estamos tratando ya surgió en los inicios del cine. Cuando Christian Metz aplicó los métodos semióticos al estudio del cine arrojó algo de luz sobre la sempiterna lucha entre formalistas y realistas, al plantear la pregunta: "El cine: ¿lengua o lenguaje?"  , siendo estos partidarios de interpretarlo como lenguaje y aquellos como lengua. Para Metz el cine es un lenguaje, pero un tanto particular, pues  desde esta perspectiva la imagen no estaba destinada a describir o mostrar fielmente la realidad, sino que ya incluyera un juicio estético y moral, por lo que exigiría un mayor esfuerzo interpretativo por parte del espectador.

Qual è la natura del segno cinematografico? Che relazione c’è, secondo la semiotica, tra immaginemovimento e realtà? L’articolo sintetizza le differenti posizioni di Gilles Deleuze, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Christian Metz e Umberto Eco, evidenziando raccordi e contrasti, e mettendo in luce le difficoltà della semiotica nel definire il segno dei linguaggi audio-visivi.

La nozione di "blocco simbolico" di Raymond Bellour, da lui utilizzata solamente con riferimento al cinema classico, in particolare quello di Alfred Hitchcock, viene ripresa e utilizzata nell'analizzare Apocalypse Now, provando così la sua validità anche con film slegati dal periodo classico di Hollywood.

This course aims to introduce you to film theory through a variety of foundational texts, important essays, and screenings of both familiar contemporary works and works of historical and theoretical significance. The material presented in the course aims to foster a dynamic and inquisitive environment where you can engage with cinema as a popular medium that is problematized by its medium specificity, ideological impact, and struggle for artistic and philosophical authenticity.

Social constructionism is the idea that all knowledge, including science and history, is deeply imbued with the biases and preconceptions of the person who holds the knowledge and the society in which that person lives, so that knowledge can be said to be created rather than discovered. This dissertation examines the influence of social constructionism in film and media studies with reference to the humanities more generally, and argues that social constructivist arguments have, in general, been accepted too readily. Careful attention to the substance of social constructivist arguments and to the practice of knowledge gathering in the humanities reveals the significant flaws in social constructionism as an epistemology.

This work traces the history of social constructionism from the philosophy of science and from theorists such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. It considers the ways in which the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s influenced the rise of social constructionism in the academic humanities. The particular uses of social constructionism in 1970s film theory are then described and considered.

The argument for epistemological realism herein is based on three broad principles, laid out in chapters three through five. In chapter three I consider the work of theorists whose work has been influential in the rise of social constructionism – Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, and Richard Rorty – arguing that despite the varying benefits of the projects these theorists undertake, they either fail to fully consider the implications of their position or are unable to account for its weaknesses.

In chapter four I consider the implications of the social construction of history and argue that social constructionism is not necessarily a politically progressive epistemology, drawing on Oliver Stone’s JFK and D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation to demonstrate my point. In this section I also analyze the work of Hayden White and Vivian Sobchack

In chapter five I argue that the theory of social constructionism is not reflected in the practice of knowledge gathering in the humanities and is useless for that practice. The limits of postmodern concepts of knowledge are best revealed in their inappropriateness for fundamental academic research.

Ritwik Kumar Ghatak, the maverick Bengali filmmaker remains one of the most celebrated cinematic auteurs of Indian cinema. Dismantling the conventional constructs of commercial cinema, Ghatak along with Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen laid the foundation of the alternative or parallel cinema in Bengal during the 60s and 70s. This paper attempts to semiologically study the multiple layers of meanings and functions in Ghatak's seminal film, Subarnarekha (1962) and explore the impact of Partition and the tragic predicament of the innumerable immigrants which has been portrayed through the skillful cinematic technique in which Ghatak has blended melodrama with social realism. In addition, it is also aimed at discussing the linkage between communication and semiotics and is expected to generate positive contributions in underlining the significance of semiotic theory and further researches in related fields or specific areas.

The present paper is intended to explore the various ways in which cinema 'communicates' meaning, making use of the five materials of film, namely three of an auditory nature and two of a visual nature: dialogue, soundtrack (music) and noise, on the one hand, and images and graphic elements, on the other. This is not all there is to it, because all these materials are unavoidably appropriated by filmmakers in the guise of various signifiers, each with its own signified, along the trajectories of two signifying axes of meaning, to wit, the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic, respectively, on both of which certain codes are audiovisually inscribed. But even a thorough overview of these elements of meaning-generation is not sufficient to understand the way that film communicates-one has to follow Deleuze in his radical philosophy of the cinema, and scrutinize the difference between the cinema of the movement-image, and the cinema of the time-image. And I would like to claim that this complex intertwinement of signifying elements is the way that film communicates. Relevant films will be discussed to demonstrate how this happens.

Министерство образования и науки Украины Полтавский национальный технический университет имени Юрия Кондратюка Министерство образования и науки Украины Днепровский национальный университет имени Олеся Гончара Квалификационная научная работа на правах рукописи Константинов Михаил Владимирович УДК 165.75(091) ДИССЕРТАЦИЯ Ю. ЛОТМАН И ВИЗУАЛЬНАЯ СЕМИОТИКА ВТОРОЙ ПОЛОВИНЫ ХХ ВЕКА (ИСТОРИКО-ФИЛОСОФСКИЙ АНАЛИЗ) Специальность: 09.00.05-история философии Отрасль знаний: Философские науки Подается на соискание ученой степени кандидата философских наук Диссертация содержит результаты собственных исследований. Использование идей, результатов и текстов других авторов имеют ссылки на соответствующие источники __________________ (М.В.Константинов) Научный руководитель Аляев Геннадий Евгеньевич, профессор, доктор философских наук ПОЛТАВА 2017

Technē/Technology is the up-to-date critical volume on the theories, philosophies, and debates on technology and their productivity for the fields of film and media studies. Comprehensive as well as innovative, it is not organised around a single thesis - except the assertion that technique is a major concern for film and media scholars, whether this is approached in terms of philosophy, techno-aesthetics, semiotics, apparatus theory, (new) film history, media archaeology, the industry or the sensory / cognitive experiences. Technē/Technology deliberately includes contributions by film and media experts working in very different ways on a wide range of technology-related issues. A major questions to be addressed in this book is how the new philosophies (of technology) created in relation to major technological transformations - such as the new philosophies of (media) technology formulated by Benjamin, Heidegger, McLuhan, Kittler, or Stiegler - could or did contribute in turn to the modification of film theory and some of its key concepts.

Amalar of Metz’s On the Liturgy (the Liber officialis, or De ecclesiastico officio) was one of the most widely read and circulated texts of the Carolingian era. The fruit of lifelong reflection and study in the wake of liturgical reform in the early ninth century, Amalar’s commentary inaugurated the Western medieval tradition of allegorical liturgical exegesis and has bequeathed a wealth of information about the contents and conduct of the early medieval Mass and Office. In 158 chapters divided into four books, On the Liturgy addresses the entire phenomenon of Christian worship, from liturgical prayers to clerical vestments to the bodily gestures of the celebrants. For Amalar, this liturgical diversity aimed, above all, to commemorate the life of Christ, to provide the Christian faithful with moral instruction, and to recall Old Testament precursors of Christian rites. To uncover these layers of meaning, Amalar employed interpretive techniques and ideas that he had inherited from the patristic tradition of biblical exegesis—a novel approach that proved both deeply popular and, among his contemporaries, highly controversial.

This volume adapts the text of Jean-Michel Hanssens’s monumental 1948 edition of Amalar’s treatise and provides the first complete translation into a modern language.

From 1968 to 1991 the acclaimed film theorist Christian Metz wrote several remarkable books on film theory: Essais sur la signifi cation au cinéma, tome1 et 2; Langage et cinéma; Le signifiant imaginaire; and L’Enonciation impersonnelle. These books set the agenda of academic film studies during its formative period. Metz’s ideas were taken up, digested, refined,reinterpreted, criticized and sometimes dismissed, but rarely ignored.

This volume collects and translates into English for the first time a series of interviews with Metz, who offers readable summaries,elaborations, and explanations of his sometimes complex and demanding theories of film. He speaks informally of the most fundamental concepts that constitute the heart of film theory as an academic discipline — concepts borrowed from linguistics, semiotics, rhetoric, narratology, and psychoanalysis.

Within the colloquial language of the interview, we witness Metz’s initial formation and development of his film theory. The interviewers act as curious readers who pose probing questions to Metz about his books, and seek clarification and elaboration of his key concepts. We also discover the contents of his unpublished manuscript on jokes, his relation to Roland Barthes, and the social networks operative in the French intellectual community during the 1970s and 1980s.

http://en.aup.nl/books/9789089648259-conversations-with-christian-metz.html

*Junior Yr Undergrad *Annotated Bibliography* The most compelling concept that was developed throughout my research related to the work of Metz and Balazs regarding the inherent self-conscious character of film and its ability to raise a double naturally through identification with the spectator. Although, I was not able to find a translated edition of Irzykowski’s The Tenth Muse, I did find some references to it that lead me to believe the work could be a valuable addition to my research with regard to understanding Metz’s theories of identification in film.

This chapter discusses how Christian Metz was inspired by the French filmology movement. Filmology, having been founded in the years after WWII, endeavoured to study cinema in its psychological, sociological, and philosophical complexity. Metz was impressed by the distance filmology took from the institutions of film production and criticism. Also, several important terms introduced by filmology found their way into Metz's writings. Furthermore, the essay speculates about the more subcutaneous influence of two essays by Roland Barthes from the "Revue international de filmologie". Although Metz never discusses these texts in detail, they may have played an important role in formulating his own project. By sketching this possible line, this essay contributes to the genealogy of Metz's thinking.

This chapter casts a critical eye on various classifications of reflexivity that have been proposed by film and media scholars over a number of decades. These center on the reflexive content of films, their self-referential communicative structures and functions, and intended effects of reflexiveness on spectators. In this context I differentiate (self-)reflexivity and related terms/concepts—metafiction; metacinema, mise en abyme, allusion and intertextuality, self-conscious style and narration—from a twenty-first century standpoint, and outline an alternative classification of reflexive forms in celluloid and digital cinema. The latter are distinct from specific reflexive devices (e.g., the film within the film, direct address, display of the cinematographic “apparatus”) and general modes (e.g., political, formal, ludic). As illustrated through concrete examples, the five transmedial forms posited—environmental; trans-art and intermedial; generic; creator-centered; performance-based—typically occur in complex combinations. Their identification, and the new conception of cinematic reflexivity this typology represents, aids in the analysis and interpretation of reflexive and metacinematic films and styles.

Bu çalışma, İtalyan sinemasının en nitelikli yönetmenlerinden biri olan Federico Fellini’nin 1963 tarihli 8½ filmini konu edinir. 8½, başarılı bir yönetmenin yeni bir film çekme sürecindeki duygusal kaybolmuşluğunu, hayallerini, pişmanlıklarını ve kadınlarla yaşadığı sorunlu ilişkilerini beyazperdeye taşır. Filmin hikayesi büyük oranda yönetmenin kişisel deneyimleri üzerine kurulmuştur. Dolayısıyla yönetmen, bu kişiselliği yansıtabilmek için çeşitli sinemasal anlatım biçimlerine başvurur. Çalışmada, Fellini’nin bu biçimleri kullanarak nasıl film içinde film anlatısı inşa ettiği incelenecektir. Çok katmanlı film evrenlerinin özelliklerini irdelerken ise “naratoloji” disiplinin analiz çerçevelerinden faydalanılacaktır.

Critics of semiology, and of Christian Metz's work in particular, often alleged that he was not a cinephile, that he had no interest in films (since he hardly ever analyzed a film), and that semiologists like Metz were putting aside everything that made cinema an art and a source of aesthetic pleasure. In short, Metz was frequently attacked for being indifferent to film as an aesthetic artefact. This chapter seeks to develop a more nuanced view by examining the place that the aesthetic occupies in Metz's intellectual trajectory as well as its links with semiology. This place can be divided, broadly speaking at least, into three 'sites' between which the aesthetic moves: expressiveness, stylistics, and poetics.

This essay will discuss three important thinkers and creative artists that have made a significant contribution to my research topic in the field of filmdance, film theory and subjective camera technique. The three key people are Christian Metz (French film theorist), Sally Potter (British film maker and choreographer) and Maya Deren, (Russian/American film theorist, experimental film maker, dancer and poet). In my critical analyses of Metz, I will specifically look at his theories on the musings of Pablo Pasolini, an Italian filmmaker and critique of narrative cinematic language, and Metz’s critical dialogue with Pasolini’s theorem, im-segni.

Christian Metz is remembered today as having almost single-handedly transformed the culture of film studies. This widely held view was summarized by one commentator, who wrote that "with Metz a new research paradigm is born, as well as a new generation of scholars. The ontological theories are followed by methodological theories." 2 According to another, "Metz exemplified a new kind of film theorist, one who came to the field already 'armed' with the analytic instruments of a specific discipline, who was unapologetically academic and unconnected to the world of film criticism." 3 Of course, Metz didn't just surge like a meteor on the scene of film studies. His arrival was "prepared" by the filmologie movement spearheaded in Paris by Gilbert Cohen-Séat and by two early film semiology essays published by Roland Barthes in La Revue internationale de filmologie. 4 Yet it is Metz who is rightly remembered as the figurehead of film semiology.

*course design + syllabus* In brief summary, the preparation of a proposed syllabus for examining the textuality of the xenomorph reveals an expansive discourse on the Alien franchise and its key figure. The Alien franchise is ever-growing , lending strength to the thesis that the xenomorph is a rich textual object of media. After completion of the reading list and assignments, the goal would be to turn to Henry Jenkins’s work on ‘fan-text poaching’ in order to distinguish the hermeneutical relationship between ‘fan texts’ and ‘franchise texts’. The xenomorph can potentially be shown to have a varied textual quality (both open and closed) depending on the media and texts in which the xenomorph is represented and discussed. This claim could prove to be valuable to the general discourse on textuality, semiotics and hermeneutics.

This paper offers a new take on an old story: the tale of first-time moviegoers, who, upon seeing a moving-image train barreling from background to foreground, ran screaming out of the theater for fear of being run over. The old debate among film historians has centered on whether this and similar stories are evidence of the radically novel perceptual experience that motion pictures entailed, or whether they corroborate the cinema of attractions thesis by demonstrating that audiences expected to be shocked and astonished at early film exhibitions. Missing from this debate are two things this paper addresses: First, close readings of the original newspaper articles that describe panicking audiences, and second, theorization of the affective function these stories served for those who wrote and consumed them. My close readings reveal profound power differentials between the narrators who observe audiences panicking (who were typically white men) and the individuals allegedly doing the panicking (who were invariably members of marginalized groups, such as women, Native Americans, or working class people). As such, I argue that we should understand the panicking spectator trope as an imaginary construction. I adapt Christian Metz’s concept of “partial identification” to a critical race theory framework and argue that the pleasures enabled by partial identification with the imaginary Other spectator depended on cultural and historical phenomena specific to the politics of American imperialism and white supremacy at the turn of the twentieth century.

Christian Metz writes that cinephilia represents, in part, the impulse to preserve and protect the good object, to save it from obliteration -not the fi lm itself, the celluloid, nor the institution, but rather the social memory embodied in the cinemaobject. Two well-known art installations, The Five Year Drive-By (1995) by Douglas Gordon and Super Mario Clouds (2003) by Cory Arcangel, would seem to make this point explicitly. In both, the impulse to save and protect -the desire to retain the affective infl ections of the past -is linked to the artists' childhoods, and thematised in the texts that provide the artists with their source material -The Searchers (1956) by John Ford and the video game, Super Mario Brothers -both of which have plots that revolve around rescue. The two installations can be read as a way of maintaining these objects in what Metz calls an 'imaginary enclosure of pure love ' (1986: 13).

(Based on a presentation given at the "Film Music and Narrative" study day, School of Arts, Culture and the Environment,  University of Edinburgh, June 28th, 2011)
Adopting an aesthetic perspective, as distinct from a strictly narrato- logical one, this article centres on the represented reality of a film that the concept of diegesis in its various formulations posits. In particular, it addresses this reality’s experience by viewers, its figurative location, and its relation to other aspects of a narrative film work, as well as the real world. Although concurring with some significant criticisms of the diegetic/nondiegetic framework, it also calls for preserving aspects of what some theorists argue constitutes the semiotic and experiential character of diegesis. Including, for example, the existence of a distinct referential (denotational) level of a film, and the sort of variable gap between what is within and without the world of characters and narrative events (and fluid ‘border crossings’ between the two) that is suggested by Robynn Stilwell. These views are taken up into a different model, a topological one, which entails conceiving both fictional representations and narrative(s), together with film sound and music, as artistic elements within a fundamentally multi-layered whole. Equivalent to the created and experienced totality of a film’s presentation, this whole may, for short, be termed a film world as distinct from a represented, fictional, or diegetic world.

This research will look at four of Sharits films, Ray Gun Virus (1966), Piece Mandala/End War (1966), T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968) and N:O:T:H:I:N:G (1968).  A phenomenological and semiotic theoretical framework will be applied in order to argue that Sharits’ films reveal and make manifest an invisible aspect of cinema that is common to the entirety of film but very rarely seen.  It will be argued how this invisible aspect of cinema is a constituent of all film experiences, revealed by Sharits’ deconstruction of dominant, narrative traditions.  A further argument will be how the revelation of this invisible aspect of cinema exposes new modes of meaning and therefore new articulations within film.

Esthétique, phénoménologie, textes plurilingues Collection dirigée par Mauro Carbone L'oeil n'est pas seulement l'oeil. Voir, c'est davantage que voir. Voir c'est aussi sentir, voir c'est déjà penser. En ceci l'art donne à penser. En ceci l'esthétique ne pense pas seulement l'art, mais le sentir lui-même. En ceci elle est au coeur de toute philosophie. La phénoménologie ne cesse de l'enseigner, et le débat actuel de l'affirmer. La collection « L'oeil et l'esprit » tente d'en rendre compte : avec l'oeil et l'esprit tournés vers l'Europe, et au-delà.

The paper focuses on the widespread resurgence of the animated GIF in the contemporary me-diascape. This outdated digital format's current significance seems to lie in its ability to resolve the age-old dualism between still and moving images. The GIF's looping structure is analysed as symptomatic of many facets of today's online environment in relation to issues of embodiment, indexicality and desire. The GIF is investigated as an object of longing, a source of mirth, and a tool used to enrich online interactions. Finally, the performance of the self that it entails is interpreted as centred on the category of affect.

Do we tend to 'project' too much on to film studies? Discuss with specific reference to psychoanalytically-inspired film theory.
Using the Star Trek cinematic franchise to show how psychoanalytical theory can add meaning to film and how it can be used alongside narrative, ideological and aesthetic film theories.

In his last book, L'énonciation impersonnelle, Christian Metz tackles the question of enunciation in cinema in order to show that fijilmic enunciation is not anthropomorphic but textual, impersonal, and metadiscursive. According to Metz, fijilmic enunciation 'is the semiological act through which some parts of the text speak to us of this text as an act'. In consequence, 'the last I is always outside of the text'. Discussing autobiographical cinema, this chapter explores how Metz's conception of impersonal enunciation can be reconciled with autobiographical discourses that seem opposed to his theory, and how some of its shortcomings can be overcome by resorting to Vivian Sobchack's semiotic phenomenology of fijilm experience and Käte Hamburger's phenomenological narrative theory.

The paper investigates the ways through which semiosis in general and cinematic semiosis in particular reach toward the “exo-semiotic” realm. It attempts a meta-semiotic and epistemological approach, based on Ferdinand de Saussure’s tradition of semiotics, and particularly on Louis Hjelsmlev’s model of the sign-function, as introduced in his 1954 essay “La stratification du langage”. It investigates the sign-function’s relations to its referent and to its expressive materials, and then attempts to apply Hjelmslev’s model to cinema. I hope to achieve the double aim of re-situating some lingering debates in cinema theory, while also exemplifying some questions regarding semiosis in general. The paper starts by summarizing the main axes of Saussure’s definition of the sign and its formalisation by Hjelmslev. It then shows how the de-essentialisation of semiosis leads to significant re-arrangements of the traditional premises with regards to the sign’s relation to both the referent and the expressive medium. Finally, it surveys the central issues that formed the discipline of the semiotics of cinema, stressing the conventionality of the cinema sign-function and the heterogeneity of its expression-plane. The paper thus shows that Saussure’s and Hjelmslev’s insights with regard to general semiotics can assist in untangling theoretical misunderstandings with regard to how cinema functions, while understanding cinematic semiosis can contribute to deepening and enriching our understanding of the function of semiosis in general.

Il saggio proposto si pone l’obiettivo di offrire una panoramica su come il dispositivo cinematografico si rapporti all’alterità non-umana. Nello specifico, verranno seguite due direttrici teoriche: la prima ruota attorno al concetto di immunizzazione, dove l’incontro con l’animale non-umano non mette mai in discussione né i confini dell’ontologia umana, né la morfologia dell’immagine; la seconda, invece, riguarda un cinema che si apre al fallimento, all’incapacità di controllare e ingabbiare l’alterità non-umana lasciando così che l’imprevedibilità di questo incontro ridefinisca i contorni di una nuova immagine cinematografica e, con essa, a meccanismi disidentificativi.