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It suffices to vary one of these elements [angle of composition, etc] by a perceptible quantity to obtain another image. The shot is therefore not comparable to the word in a lexicon; rather it resembles a complete statement (of one or more sentences), in that it is already the result of an essentially free combination, a "speech" arrangement. On the other hand the word is a syntagma that is precast by code - a "vertical" syntagma . . . . Let us note in this connection that there is another similarity between the image and the statement: Both are actualized unites, whereas the word in itself is a purely potential unit of code. The image is almost always assertive - and assertion is one of the great "modalities" of actualization, of the semic act. It appears therefore that the paradigmatic category in film is condemned to remain partial and fragmentary, at least as long as one tries to isolate it on the level of the image. This is naturally derived from the fact that creation plays a larger role in cinematographic language that it does in the handling of idioms: To "speak" a language is to use it, but to "speak" cinematographic language is to a certain extent to invent it. (Metz, pp. 100-1.)
Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
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