New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

50 CINE-SEMIOLOGY
CODES AND SUBCODES
Although lacking a grammar or phonemic system, Metz argues in
Language and Cinema (published in French in 1971 and translated into
English in 1974), 3 film still constitutes a quasi-linguistic practice as a
PLURICODIC MEDIUM. Like any artistic language, the cinema manifests
a plurality of codes. In cinema, numerous codes remain constant across all
or most films; unlike language, however, film has no "master code" shared
by all films. Filmic texts, for Metz, form a structured network produced by
the interweaving of SPECIFIC CINEMATIC CODES, i.e. codes that
appear only in the cinema, and NON-SPECIFIC CODES, i.e. codes shared
with languages other than the cinema. Metz describes the configuration of
specific and nonspecific codes as a set of concentric circles ranging on a
spectrum from the very specific—he inner circle—or example, those codes
linked to film’s definition as deploying moving, multiple images (e.g. codes
of camera movement and continuity editing), through codes shared with
other arts (e.g. narrative codes, shared with the novel and the comic strip,
or codes of visual analogy, shared with painting) to demonstrably nonspecific
codes which are widely disseminated in the culture (for example,
the codes of gender roles). Rather than an absolute specificity or nonspecificity,
then, it is more accurate to speak of “degrees” of specificity.
Examples of specifically cinematic codes would be camera movement (or
lack of it), lighting, and montage; they are attributes of all films in that all
films involve cameras, all films must be lit, and all films must be edited,
even if the editing is minimal. (Avant-garde attempts to do away with even
these basic traits, as in flicker films, reveal the covert dependency of Metz’
model on classical cinema.) The distinction between specifically cinematic
and non-cinematic codes is obviously often a tenuous and shifting one.
While the phenomenon of color belongs to the arts generally, the
particularities of 1950s technicolor belong specifically to film. While a
recorded voice seems non-specific, a voice recorded in Dolby sound for a
“concert film” approaches the specific. While gestures and mimicry are
common to film, theatre, and everyday life, there also exist specifically
cinematic forms of acting. Even non-specific elements, moreover, can be
“cinematized” through their simultaneous coexistence with the other
elements featured on other “tracks” at the same moment in the filmicdiscursive
chain.
Within each particular cinematic code, cinematic SUBCODES represent
specific usages of the general code. Expressionist lighting forms a subcode
of lighting, just as Eisensteinian montage forms a subcode of editing,
contrastable in its typical usage with a Bazinian mise-en-scène that would
minimize spatial and temporal fragmentation. According to Metz, codes do
not compete, but subcodes do. While all films must be lit and edited, not
all films need deploy Eisensteinian montage. Metz notes, however, that