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Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
autonomous segments

Metz argued in considerable detail that the minimal unit of organisation in cinema was not equivalent to the linguistic semiotic model of the word (and its consituent parts), nor derived from a normative grammar, but was rather constituted by a combination of its literalness and how these 'literal' bits were ordered.

Film's literalness resided in its photographic realism, that a shot or sequence of a horse is always and primarily understood to be a particular horse in a particular place, and so not needing the material sound or marks of a language (whether as letters or sounds - what semiotics calls the 'second articulation') which provides the substrate for the idea of the horse. Indeed, the image of the horse always exceeds the model of the word, as the image will portray specific qualities about the horse that the word, or even phrase, simply will not be adequate to.

This means that any element of a film is already linguistically meaningful, that they are more like statements (the cliche that "a picture is worth a thousand words" comes to mind), and the paradigmatic process - choosing which from the paradigmatic series to place in the syntagmatic chain - is considerably diluted in film as the paradigmatic field is made virtually trivial, and the syntagmatic ordering is similarly weakened. In other words, in a sentence the choice of words is constrained to some extent by what choices are available within a vocabulary, and then by the grammar which constrains what can appear where. When composing a film image there is no substantive paradigmatic series that the sequence most be chosen from within, and then once a shot is composed, its location within a syntagmatic series (a sequence) is similarly much more open than that offered by a linguistic grammar.

Because of this filmic freedom, Metz defined basic narrative units in the cinema as 'autonomous segments'. They gain their autonomy by virtue of their independence, yet they retain their status as segments because they are part of a larger whole that is the film. An autonomous segment is not equivalent to a single shot (though a shot could in some circumstances be an autonomous segment) but is more like what we ordinarily understand to be a sequence, it is a part that forms the film but not, as Metz rather typically says "not a part of a part of a film" (Metz, p. 123.).

Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
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