Cinema through the lenses of linguistics: conceptual dialogues

Abstract

The approximation between linguistics and cinema, although occurring since the first decades of the 20th century, has its great effort recognized in the context of French structuralism, in the 1960s, starting with Christian Metz, when the author resorts to the assumptions of linguists Ferdinand de Saussure and Louis Hjelmslev, to engender their cinematographic semiology. Under the influence of Metz, we propose to revisit key concepts for linguistics, such as value, syntagm, paradigm, sign, text, system and code, and rethink them in the context of cinema. This dialogue between different languages will raise questions about the structural nature of the film as a text, about the minimum significant unit of a film and about Metz's conception of cinematographic code in the light of the Saussurian system.