CONTEMPORARY FILM THEORY: THE COGNITIVIST APPROACH

THE DEAD-END METAPHOR (OR, WHY CINEMA IS NOT A LANGUAGE)

Since its beginnings film has been considered a language, and since early film criticism this analogy has been used as a loose metaphor. However, beginning with Eisenstein and the other Soviet montage filmmakers-theorists, many film scholars have tried to prove that there is more to this than just a superficial analogy. In the 1960s and early 1970s semiologists such as Christian Metz, Umberto Eco, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Gianfranco Bettetini have tried to apply linguistics concepts to films and thereby prove that film and language share the same structure.

Metz claimed that film is a language without a language system, while Eco and Pasolini disagreed with him about the number of articulations in film. All they managed to show was in which way films and language differ, yet the conviction that film in some essential way is a language has remained. Both John M. Carroll and Michel Colin have tried to apply Chomskyan generative linguistics to film theory. While this approach has given some interesting results, the problem with the film/language analogy remains unsolved. Accordingly, I argue that we should abandon this analogy completely and instead utilize a broader cognitivist approach. Our film experience has more in common with our everyday experience, and this is not mediated by language. As Daniel Dennett has pointed out, most of our cognitive processes are already shaped before we form utterances in a natural language. The fact that films can narrate and describe things and events, or that we can talk about them does not prove that they are themselves a language or that they have a linguistic structure.

Boris Vidović