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Nevertheless the shot, a "sentence" and not a word (like the proverb), is indeed the smallest "poetic" entity.
How is one to understand this correspondence beteen the filmic image and the sentence? First of all, the shot, through its semantic content . . . is closer, all things considered, to a sentence than to a word. An image shows a man walking down a street: It is equivalent to the sentence "A man is walking down the street." The equivalence is rough, to be sure, and there would be much to say about it: however the same filmic image corresponds even less to the word "man," or the word "walk," or the word "street," and less still to the article "the" or to the zero-degree morpheme of the verb "walks."
The image is "sentence" less by its quantity of meaning (a concept too difficult to handle, especially in film) than by its assertive status. The image is always actualized. Moreover, even the image - fairly rare, incidentally - that might, because of its content, correspond to a "word" is still a sentence: This is a particular case, and a particularly revealing one. A close-up of a revolver does not mean "revolver" (a purely virtual lexical unit), but at the very least, and without speaking of the connotations, it signifies "Here is a revolver!" It carries with it a certain kind of here . . . Even when the shot is a "word," it remains a kind of "sentence-word," such as one finds in certain languages.
. . . The image is always therefore speech, never a unit of language. (Metz, pp.66-7.)
Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
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