I suppose these last few days I’ve been feeling down. I’ve been worrying about leaving home; concerns about my car; there has been friction between myself, my parents and a good friend of mine, which I utterly loathe; and so on. Yet, on the reverse side of it all, I have, possibly for the first time in my life, the feeling that I can deal with it all. I know what I have to do to solve these problems, and know I can do them.

Of course, this is helped by the news that I got a first for my Classical Hollywood cinema essay. I popped over to Crewe yesterday, and bumped into my film tutor. We got chatting – I told him of my intentions to do a PhD in film there, and he seems to think it was a great idea. I’m still intrigued by the question of filmic linguistics: how, exactly, does film work at the level of the shot? What ‘drives’ meaning from one shot to the next? Is it the principals of ‘montage or bust’, as Eisenstein had it? Is it through sheer necessity, rather than anything bore complex? Or – and this is the part which fascinates me – does synesthesia play a role? Further, the other day I was pondering visual / pectoral languages, and it occurred to me that I could potentially draw lessons from minspeak, for there pictures are used to make meaning, but because the minspeak user often selects two buttons (thereby modifying the selection made to make a third meaning) the relationship between sign and signified is more arbitrary in the sesseurean sense. Now, I may be completely barking up the wrong tree, but the question is could film be functioning in a similar way, albeit unconsciously? Could the juxtaposition of two shots be combining to make a third meaning, slightly arbitrarily? As I say I am fascinated by the whole plethora of questions this (admittedly reductivist) approach to film gives rise to, and I am eagerly looking into it.

In the meantime, I am eagerly looking forward to this weekend. With luck, I’ll be able to get more acquainted with Minspeak, perhaps enough to work out if it is of any theoretical use in my film work. If it is, and something similar to minspeak is operating within film (thereby bypassing Metz’ major reservation over whether film constitutes a language) I’ll be very excited. Either way, I can’t wait to see the 1voice kids this weekend – if last year was anything to go by, it’ll be one hell of a weekend. I just hope I don’t bore them too much.