Language, sight and sound

pp. 194-220

in: Stephen Heath, Questions of cinema, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1981

Abstract

"Cinema and language" has been in many ways the great theoretical impetus for work on film over the last few years: the attempt to pose with regard to cinema the fact and the analogy of language, to determine similarities, connections, terms of interaction. In many ways again, we seem now to be emerging from the hold of that impetus, from the kinds of questions it produced; emerging from them, it should be stressed, on the basis of the demonstration of their limits, and then, perhaps, against them, with different questions, or with some of the old questions differently. What follows is a brief account of something of the present context of "cinema and language", a consideration of one or two points that are important in its current discussion.