An Anti-Axiom in The Archaic Debate of Film Theory: ‘Cinema is not a Language!’ Cover Image

Film Teorisinin Arkaik Tartışmasında Bir Karşıt-Aksiyom: ‘Sinema Bir Dil Değildir
An Anti-Axiom in The Archaic Debate of Film Theory: ‘Cinema is not a Language!’

Author(s): Cem Çınar
Subject(s): Semiotics / Semiology, Structuralism and Post-Structuralism, Film / Cinema / Cinematography
Published by: Serdar Öztürk
Keywords: Film Theory; Semiotics; Linguistics; Structuralism; Saussure;

Summary/Abstract: Since the emergence of cinema as an art, structuralist and formalist theories have quite been influential in the field of film theory. Most of the theoretical studies in this field argue that cinema has strong communicative qualities and that as much as it has a means of artistic expression, it has language (fr. langue) or human speech (fr. langage) as well. The convention built on these assumptions claims that cinema has strong semiotic possibilities and can only be understood correctly in this way, namely through semiotics. Thus, the methodological approaches of linguistic research come to the fore as the dominant theoretical approaches used both during the investigation of the quality that what is cinema as an artistic discipline and in the interpretation of cinema works singly. Almost all of these approaches accept Saussure’s linguistic theory as the source theory. Assigning this specific linguistic approach as the ground of film theory and the effort to understand the original artistic existence of cinema only through analogies established with this approach, determined the nature of the debates on the cinema language relationship. In this context, this article aims to investigate the consistency of the connection between cinema theory and linguistics.

  • Issue Year: 6/2021
  • Issue No: 11
  • Page Range: 858-884
  • Page Count: 27
  • Language: Turkish