Uploaded January 2022 | Updated September 2026, 3 days ago
This is the second and final video on Christian Metz's film semiotics, where we're looking at Metz's book Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. In this video, we're examining the positive side of Metz's argument that cinema is a "language" rather than a "language system" by learning about how film signifies through a "syntagmatic" chain.
The video defines the distinction between the terms syntagmatic and paradigmatic by looking at how these terms were employed by Ferdinand de Saussure, and then it gives an example of film as syntagmatic chain with the opening of Strangers on a Train (Hitchcock, 1950).
This is the second and final video on Christian Metz's film semiotics, where we're looking at Metz's book Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. In this video, we're examining the positive side of Metz's argument that cinema is a "language" rather than a "language system" by learning about how film signifies through a "syntagmatic" chain.
The video defines the distinction between the terms syntagmatic and paradigmatic by looking at how these terms were employed by Ferdinand de Saussure, and then it gives an example of film as syntagmatic chain with the opening of Strangers on a Train (Hitchcock, 1950).
