Film Language A Semiotics of the Cinema ( PDFDrive ) (original) (raw)
French under the title Essais sur la signification au cinema-TRANSLATOR. ** Except in one case, where the repetitive passage was too long and was removed, the reader being informed of this deletion in a footnote. † It is principally in Chapters 3, 4, and 6 that the reader will encounter these rather exhaustive notes. This is especially true of Chapter 3, "The Cinema: Language or Language System?" which is the earliest of the articles reprinted ´ xi xii PREFACE On the other hand, I have allowed myself to make various minor corrections and adjustments in wording, for the purpose of clarification. The exception is Chapter 5, "Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film." I have taken this opportunity to bring together (and to add to considerably) three earlier articles bearing on related topics, but each one giving only a partial treatment (furthermore, there were certain discrepancies among the articles). This chapter has, therefore, not heretofore been published in its present form, although many of the passages in it have been published. In attempting to improve the phrasing of the original articles, in adding notes wherever necessary to account for more recent developments, and, finally, in striving, in Chapter 5, to give a general and current description of the main problems at issue, my goal has been, in the still new and developing field of film semiotics, to present the reader with a work as coherent and up-to-date as its nature permits. I wish to express my thanks to the five publications in which the texts that make up this volume originally appeared: Revue d'esthetique, La Linguistique, Cahiers du cinéma, Image et son, and Communications, as well as to the Centre d'Étude des Communications de Masse (École Pratique des Hautes Eludes, Paris) which publishes Communications, the Polish Academy of Sciences, which organized the international symposium where one of the papers that constitute Chapter 5 was first read, and the Festival of the New Cinema (Pesaro, Italy), which organized the round-table discussion during which the last chapter in this volume was originally presented.