Essay Networks

Since the beginning of film history, film-makers and film-theoreticians have tried to compare “film” with verbal language in a serious attempt to justify the film medium. The debate over a special “film language” is in itself problematic. The main difficulty lies in the use of the term “language” to describe words and images. It is very surprising that the concept of “film language” has been around since the time of the earliest films. Even though cinematography occupies a position between moving images and storytelling, it seems to have grown into a technical, visual competitor to spoken language. From there something resembling an international language theory has developed.

In the early stages of cinematography, the montage was seen as the language of the film director. Wdelovod Pudowkin recognized that the union of the film sequences has a strong influence on the cinematographic statement of the regisseur. He was the first person to consider comparing film and language to each other and the first to equate film images with words.

Sergej Eisenstein also concerned himself with this comparison. He went further, from comparing words and images, to comparing images with hieroglyphics and ideograms, using the images as a sort of optical words.. Eisenstein viewed sequenced images as the vocabulary of the “written” language of film. At this level, Eisenstein believed it was the responsibility of film theoreticians to establish the semantic form and the meanings of idiomatic images.

The counter-movement to the “montage”, the so-called “Mise-en-Scene”, comes from France, and its pioneer Andrej Bazin responded to those who sought a deeper understanding of the developing problems of the film craft. For him, film language is intrinsic within the film’s arrangement and form, and he views the creation and assembly of individual images as more important than the montage, the art of putting together these pictures together. He speaks with the syllables of design and lighting and newly developed film techniques, all of which provide the viewers with a form of independence and freedom.

In early German film theory, language-related theories appeared only rarely. One exception is Bela Balazs. Inspired by the non-verbal processes in film, he conceived of film language as a “universal language” on the same level as mime, gestures and symbolic images. The analogy of film to language is, for him, metaphorical.

Film-makers have always been interested in ways to portray the world as realistically as possible. With the introduction of sound in 1927 the acoustic environment could now be represented and the world could be portrayed more realistically. For example, sound allows the feelings and the motivations of the characters to be clearly defined and presented. The introduction of audiovisual films was not welcomed by everyone. Directors like Charlie Chaplin vowed never to make a 100% audio film. The development of sound technology really cuts both ways. On the one hand, spoken words can be viewed as superfluous elements in film since the images can tell the complete story. On the other hand, spoken words play a dramatic role in film by enriching the elements of the film. The silent film-makers declined to use “gramophone reproductions of sound and voices” for the reason that it had no place in artistic life. Others see in film the possibility to portray both the audio and the visual aspects of the world, and thereby the ability to portray reality.

With the later development of the audiovisual medium and its related artistic processes another conception of film language was developed. Directors like Jean Cocteau, Andrej Tarkowski and Theodoros Angelopoulos enlarged the cinematic arena for artistic expression and form. Beyond meaningful film language, they introduced the art of poetic film language. They use pictures and sound as raw material for the resulting cinematic artwork. Hidden meanings become uncovered and dreamlike worlds are constructed in front of the viewers’ eyes. Some masterpieces of poetical language are Jean Cockteau’s “Orphe” and “La belle et la b?te”, Andrej Tarkowski’s “Nostalghia” and Theodoros Angelopoulos’ “O Thiassos”.

In the early 1960s a new category of thought developed known as semiotics and its pioneer Ferdinand de Saussure defined the “language” as a “system of sketches from which ideas emerge “. He showed that the language material had no meaning in itself, but instead that it produced meaning. By “sketches” he meant the union of “acoustic pictures” (alias “signifiant”) with “concepts” (alias “signifie”). One example of this: the collection of letters and sounds in the word “cinema” is the “acoustic picture”, and what the word represents, a room with a screen and a projector, is the “concept”.

The developing and understanding of “film semiotics” has its roots in the linguistic term of “semiotics”. Its pioneers (Roland Barthes, Christian Metz and Umberto Eco) did not seek to answer the issue of the “essence” of films. Instead, they searched for a natural language structure in film, and considered film as an exercise in “signs”.

Yet it is not so simple to transfer semiotic theories to the medium of film, because: (a) The typical film is not a conventional sign like words are, according to Saussure. In a film image, “signifiant” and “signifie” are almost identical to each other. The picture of a rose is much closer to the actual object than is the word “rose”. (b) Film is not a language in the same sense as the English or French languages are. It is practically impossible to be “grammatically incorrect” in film. It is also unnecessary to learn a vocabulary. Studies show that children as young as 8 or 10 years old can understand film images as well as adults. They can understand the issues and themes in images well before they can understand them by reading. While, in a natural language, an endless number of meanings can be extracted from a small number of words, in film you cannot identify a small unit like a “word”. Neither the image nor the presentation is coming into question here. (c) The film signs system does not attain the semantic exactness of language expressions.

In other ways, film has much in common with language: (a) It is structured like spoken language. It confronts the recipient with a multitude of meanings. (b) One can learn to “read” a film. People who are visually educated and who have seen many films can see and hear with greater clarity than those who rarely see films. Experience in the “language” of films enables that person to have a higher interpretive ability, and they can find a greater number of meanings. The same phenomenon can be observed in the area of verbal language. Literature can only be understood when the recipient has the ability to read the printed letters.

Is there a “film language”? If every system of communication is a “language”, while English and French are “language systems”, then in a similar fashion, film can be viewed as a system of communication but not as a language system. In the classic semiotic definition, images take on a verbal form. In this view, film is not understood as a language. It does not have grammatical structures and it is impossible to find the equivalent of the “word”. A sentence like “A woman goes walking in the park” can be “translated” in pictures, but it is impossible to define the correct way of translation. Every filmmaker can use the pictures the way he wants to, without being grammatically “incorrect”.

In my opinion, film is a related phenomenon to language. The images need only be read correctly for the recipient to appreciate the strength of the medium. The better one reads an image, the better one understands it. Far from the differentiation of words, film can express things that words cannot formulate. This phenomenon has characteristics similar to language, and language concepts are used metaphorically. Bela Balazs writes: “This man came to Kiev for the first time and watched his first film. A simple [Douglas] Fairbanks story. Our man stared with furrowed brow, in utmost concentration at the screen, shaking and breathless from excitement and effort. He was completely exhausted upon coming out. ‘So how did you like it?’ asked my friend. ‘Very much! It was tremendously interesting. But … what actually happened in this film?’ He had not understood the film. The plot, which the children had so effortlessly followed, he could not comprehend. Then it had been a new language which all the city dwellers were familiar with, but which he, the so-called intellectual, had not yet understood.