Film Semiotics: Metz and Wollen | Gilbert Harman

Formalist theories (modernist/constructionist) emerged in the 1920s-1930s during silent cinema's golden age. These theories value manipulating cinematic perception through the apparatus of cinema. For formalists, cinema's artistic value lies in its ability to break from mechanical reproduction and create anti-mimesis—representations that do not resemble the real world. Key techniques include montage and close-up. Formalists seek to invent new forms rather than reproduce reality, using cinematic apparatus to create something that does not exist in reality. Key authors include Hugo Münsterberg, Béla Balázs, Rudolf Arnheim, and Sergei Eisenstein.

Classical film theory emerged even before formal texts existed, evident in early cinema company names and viewer experiences. Edison's kinetoscope, Lumière's cinematograph (giving us 'cinema'), and Vitagraph/Biograph all contain theoretical propositions about the medium's uniqueness—terms emphasizing movement and life. In 1896, Maxim Gorky described viewing Lumière films as entering 'the kingdom of shadows,' a gray world without sound or color that felt almost real yet remained clearly an image. Gorky articulated two ways of experiencing cinema: as a photograph with added movement, or as a world lacking sensory richness. He captured cinema's uncanny nature—images feeling lifelike while remaining clearly artifice. A single film like 'Baby's Breakfast' contains multiple description levels: basic narrative, detailed actions, moments revealing artifice, and unplanned contingencies like moving leaves. These early encounters reveal how cinema's uniqueness lies in creating perceptual experiences that transcend simple categorization.

Formalism in cinema is an approach that elevates filmmaking tools—production design, lighting, costumes, and editing—to create an artificial, stylized reality rather than recreating our own world, existing on a spectrum between realism and classicism; it emerged from early filmmakers like Georges Méliès and German Expressionists who embraced artificiality, and reached its peak in genres like musicals (Minnelli, Powell & Pressburger) and directors like Eisenstein, Greenaway, and von Trier, who made their form and artifice deliberately visible to audiences.

Formalist film theory is an analytical framework that examines how films are constructed through technical elements such as color, sound, set design, and editing, which began with early filmmakers like the Lumière brothers in the 1910s-1920s and continues to influence modern directors like Wes Anderson and Woody Allen; this approach forces audiences to focus on visual and auditory details rather than narrative, making technical mastery essential to effective storytelling.

Film theory divides into two opposing camps: formalism and realism. Realist theorists (André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer) focus on film's capacity to reproduce physical reality, arguing filmmakers should harness this natural ability through aesthetic conventions. Formalists (Arnheim) believe film transforms reality rather than merely reproducing it. This binary applies to filmmakers: Lumière brothers represent realism through naturalistic documentation, while Georges Méliès represents formalism through special effects. Movements similarly align—Italian neorealism with realism, Soviet montage with formalism. Arnheim's project addresses whether film can be art by examining what makes cinema distinct from both other arts and human perception. He argues that film's limitations—being flat, having rectangular boundaries, lacking color and three-dimensional depth—actually constitute its artistic potential. This leads to the concept of 'partial illusion,' where film is always simultaneously a flat picture and a scene of living action, possessing enough representational power while maintaining formal qualities that qualify it as art.

Alexander Astruc's concept of 'caméra-stylo' (camera-pen) proposed that cinema is becoming a language—a form in which artists can express abstract thoughts and translate obsessions exactly as writers do with essays or novels. This concept challenged the notion that film should simply be a visual translation of pre-existing literary texts. Astruc argued cinema could tackle any subject including philosophy, psychology, metaphysics, and ideas, and that contemporary life philosophies could only be properly expressed through cinema.

Cinema has certain expressive means such as montage, camera angle, camera movement, and shot size. These are technical means, but it has been understood for over 100 years that these means are connected and form a system rather than just a list of actions. The crucial point is that when these elements are connected, they have the ability to generate meanings. This ability to generate meaning is what makes this collection of expressive means a language, and cinema itself is this language.

Cinema functions as a language and as writing with moving images and sounds. This conceptualization positions film as a textual medium that records, preserves, and communicates experiences. The cinematographer functions as a writer who captures moments in a format that allows them to be revisited and re-experienced indefinitely.

The combination of Kuleshov's montage theory, Griffith's parallel editing and off-screen space, and the concept of shot progression created cinema as a language. These techniques allowed filmmakers to construct meaning through the arrangement of shots rather than just recording reality. This established the foundation for silent cinema and all subsequent film genres.

Cinema communicates emotions, facts, dreams, realities, and fantasies through images and sounds. It is a language of images with its own vocabulary, syntax, and grammar. The director uses this language to communicate with the audience.

Althusser's theoretical enterprise occurred in a precise moment of French intellectual history: the French structuralism movement, which marked a before-and-after in the history of French intelligence. According to Balibar, structuralism was a particular moment in French intellectual history where critical consciousness was awakened. It was a research program that sought to formalize human facts according to the signalization of Jean-Claude Milner, or more generally, an atmosphere where converging domains and objects, though dissimilar, possessed common points and points of intersection.

This section provides historical context for structuralism as a French intellectual movement. The section traces structuralism's emergence from the crisis of French intellectual life following World War II, when traditional philosophical approaches had failed to address fundamental questions of meaning and certainty. The section distinguishes between linguistic structuralism (focused on language and literary criticism) and social science structuralism (focused on human societies and cultures). The section emphasizes that structuralism cannot be understood without understanding the specific historical and cultural conditions of France in the early 20th century.

Jean Baudrillard (1927-2007) developed a distinctive intellectual project distinct from Marxist radicalization. His trajectory includes: doctoral thesis (1966) → 'The System of Objects' (1968) → 'The Society of Consumption' (1970) → 'Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign' (1978). This progression shows his increasing focus on consumption as primary lens for social analysis. Structuralism emerged from Saussure's linguistics, which established language as scientific object distinct from historical philology. Structure is defined as complex whole where parts modify each other based on their relationship to the whole. This framework enabled interdisciplinary applications: semiotics to anthropology (Lévi-Strauss), psychoanalysis (Lacan), literary criticism (Barthes, Kristeva), and political science. A key feature is dissolution of subject within structural frameworks, treating social processes as autonomous systems where meaning emerges from relationships rather than subjective intentionality.

Structuralism emerged from Saussure's linguistic theories and became a dominant intellectual paradigm across multiple disciplines. The movement began with Saussure's 'Course in General Linguistics,' compiled by his students, which established linguistics as an academic science. Structuralism then extrapolated these ideas to philosophy, anthropology, literary criticism, and sociology. This intellectual tradition gave rise to Russian Formalism, American New Criticism, and Postmodernism, all sharing the core principle that human phenomena are determined by underlying structures rather than individual agency or biological factors. The convergence of these schools reflects their shared foundation in structuralist methodology applied across different academic domains.

Structuralism emerged as a major 20th-century French intellectual movement founded by thinkers like Levi-Strauss, Piaget, and structuralist linguists. Rooted in Cartesian and Platonic rationalist traditions, it sought to apply mathematical and logical rigor to understanding human behavior. Unlike positivism and empiricism which were unpopular in French culture, structuralism offered a logically rigorous method tracing back to Descartes and Plato. The core ambition was to find underlying regularities—mathematical or logical rules—that govern human behavior beneath surface appearances. This approach was inspired by structuralist mathematics developed by mathematicians under the pseudonym Nicolas Bourbaki, which was then applied to diverse fields including linguistics, kinship systems, and mythology. The fundamental assumption was that there exists some universal 'ur-stuff' of human thinking that remains constant across all cultures and historical periods. Both Freud and Marx can be understood as structuralist thinkers who sought underlying structures beneath surface manifestations, with Freud analyzing the unconscious and Marx examining ideological transformations.