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This essay was originally published (and is freely available) in the Journal of Digital Information, Volume 1, Issue 7, (December 2000), and is reproduced here with permission.
There is a syntax of the cinema, but it remains to be made and could be done only on a syntactical, and not a morphological, basis. . . . The shot is the smallest unit of the film chain . . . the sequence is a great syntagmatic whole. One should examine the richness, exuberance even, of the syntagmatic arrangements possible in film (which will bring one to see the problem of montage under a new light), and contrast it to the surprising poverty of the paradigmatic resources of the cinema. (Metz, pp. 67-8.)
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