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Criticism 45.2 (2003) 197-222



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Camera Movements in Hollywood's Westering Genre:
A Functional Semiotic Approach

Brian O'leary


Ce qui, par rapport au problème du panoramique, confirmerait l'hypothèse vectorialization de gauche à droit, ce serait la plus grande fréquence des panoramiques de gauche à droit. Il semble bien que cette prédominance existe. . . . Sans mésestimer ces raisons technique qui ont pu amener les techniciens à opter pour telle form plutôt que telle autre, il ne semble pas qu'elles suffisent à expliquer le phénomène.

With respect to panning, what would confirm the left-to-right vectorialization hypothesis would be a greater frequency of left-to-right pans. Indeed, it seems that such a preponderance does exist. . . . Without slighting the technical reasons that could have caused cinematographers to choose one form over the other, they do not seem to be sufficient to explain the phenomenon.

Michel Colin, Langue, film, discours:
Prolégomènes à une sémiologie générative du film
1

IN RE-EVALUATING NEGLECTED AREAS of film theory, one of the most obvious places to begin is in the once-prominent area of linguistic approaches. Film as language was a frequent metaphor in the pre-theoretical phase of film studies: the shot as a word, the scene as a sentence, the sequence as a paragraph, and so forth. When theory emerged in the discipline, specifically in the early work of Christian Metz, linguistic ideas again were at the fore, this time in the form of structural linguistics (which, however, was already an obsolete form of linguistics at the time Metz was writing, having been supplanted by generative grammar). When post-structuralist "high" theory arrived around 1975, Metz (in his "imaginary signifier" phase) abandoned the language paradigm, as did the rest of mainstream film studies, or so it would seem. Thus matters stood for about two decades, until the rise of cognitivism promised to offer renewed openings for a film theory based on a newly emerging cognitive linguistics. 2 [End Page 197]

However, this is not the whole picture. In the intervening years there continued to be some little-known "underground" film-as-linguistics activity, including work published by John M. Carroll, Michel Colin, and Theo van Leeuwen (often writing with Gunther Kress). Carroll attempted to create a generative theory of film, thus tapping into the dominant mode of linguistic thought. His work was also exemplary in devising psycholinguistic experiments to test his theories; however, they remained largely unknown, perhaps because he was something of an outsider in the field. 3 Space precludes a critique of Metz's and Carroll's linguistic contributions, which would serve to justify my dismissal of their current utility; similarly, I will not address why cognitivism has yet to produce a recognized linguistic film theory. However, the other two writers mentioned above, Colin and van Leeuwen, have pointed the way to just such a theory.

Coexisting with the widely accepted forms of generative and cognitive linguistics has been a minority strain called functionalism, most notably in the Prague School and the UK/Australia-oriented "systemic functional" grammar of Michael Halliday. The possible relevance of functional linguistics to film and visual narrative art was recognized by Colin and van Leeuwen, both coincidentally formally trained in linguistics and film studies. Beginning in the 1980s they independently published visual semiotic theories (judging from a lack of cross-references, they were unaware of each other's work). Michel Colin ambitiously combined ideas from Halliday and the Prague School, plus French linguistic concepts, to develop a system he called (somewhat inaccurately) generative semiotics. 4 His death in a cycling accident left his theory in a rudimentary state. Two of his colleagues, Odile Bächler and Dominique Chateau, published a few supportive articles at about the same time, but the overall project seems to be in a hiatus. 5 Theo van Leeuwen used ideas from Halliday extensively, but combined them with metaphoric (i.e., non-linguistic) concepts, to develop a visual semiotics that he called (somewhat vaguely, I feel) social semiotics. 6 His work...

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