I’ve been reading Metz again. This morning, I was amazed, and rather chuffed, to find that I had already mused over many of the ideas included in his books. Yesterday, I decided that one of the major differences between film and writing is that writing always requires a human who follows a set of fairly rigid rules. In writing this, I am pressing buttons on my keyboard according t the principles of spelling and grammar.. I would have to do this whatever I wrote. I could only break away from these rules if I were to stop using letters or words: that would be to scribble on a piece of paper, which would produce no meaning.

On the other hand, you could point a camera at anything, press record, and it would still make sense. A ninety minute tape of the CCTV recordings in Tesco would sill be a film, albeit quite a dull one. Dad, over morning coffee, suggested an equivalent might be to write cabbage many times on a piece of paper, but this analogy is flawed in that A) the word cabbage makes meaning according to rules of spelling, requiring a human presence, and B) unlike the CCTV film, such a page would make no sense. Thus, in film, you cannot ‘scribble’: you cannot help but make sense. Thus film is below the level of a language. Moreover, as Metz points out, this also means that filmic grammar is entirely superfluous: the CCCTV film still makes sense without cutting or editing of any kind. On the other hand, written language needs structure, as we all know.

As I approach the end of this book, I’m realising that Metz is answering questions I had intended to pose in my PhD. The linguistic approach to film is moot thanks to his work. This is kind of cool, because I can work using Metz as a starting point. He ma have thoroughly charted the linguistic paradigm, proving it a dead end, but structuralism is far from dead. Metz does not deal with the shot itself, rather he concentrates on the grammar of editing. But it is how shots are composed themselves, as well as their relationship to editing, which interests me. It is here, I believe, that work is yet to be done.