Christian Metz's Semiotic Film Theory

This video provides an introduction to the semiotic film theory of Christian Metz as it is outlined in his book Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. The video primarily discusses the chapter "Some Points in the Semiotics of the Cinema" and secondarily discusses the chapter "The Cinema: Language or Language System."

Topics include the influence of Ferdinand de Saussure's structural linguistics as laid out in his Course in General Linguistics, the distinction between signifier and signified, the distinction between language (langage) and language system (langue), the distinction between denotation and connotation, and the way that Soviet Montage theorists analogized film to language.