Semiotics and the Language of Film - Christian Metz

Cinematographic Signification is always more or less MOTIVATED, never arbitrary. 

 1. Narrative cinema only 

2. The shot is not analogous to a word - its' a phrase 

3. Cinema is a language (langage), not a language system (langue) 

4. In Film studies, we still study denotation, not connotation 

Denotation = "the second shot, by virtue of following the first shot, represents or denotes that this is the content of Jimmy Stuarts optical point of view. (Film Code - How does the cinema indicate successivity, precession, temporal breaks, causality, adversive relationships, consequence, spatial proximity or distance? These are questions of film denotation.) 

Connotation = A kind of signification which goes beyond what is immediately communicated as narrative information.

Film is like a language (langage) because editing forms signification along a "syntagmatic chain."

Syntagmatic = of or denoting the relationship between two or more linguistic units used sequentially to make well-formed structures.

....as opposed to its' opposite

Paradigmatic = of or denoting the relationship between a set of linguistic items that form mutually exclusive choices in particular syntactic roles.

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Syntagmatic relationships are the actual relations between words in a sentence and Paradigmatic relationships are the potential relations between the words that could be used.

Syntagmatic structures can create meaning.