Week 3 - Is Film/TV a Language?

The theme of the third week was looking at is film and television, a ‘language’ we can

understand and interpret. The first reading looks at the significance of sound and image in

TV. Ellis believes that sound plays a more important role in the duo as it is sound which

gains people’s attention, it is also sound which keeps the attention of the audience when

they’re “not in front of their television.” (Ellis, 1982:128 – 131)

Ellis in ‘Broadcast TV Narration’ looks at the narrations between non-fiction and fictional

films and television, stating that non-fiction films are “non-existent” within cinemas.

Broadcast television on the other hand carries large amount of non-fiction content from

news to documentaries to announcements and weather reports. (Ellis, 1999:145)

Ellis also feels that the narration of TV needs to be represented as ‘one model’ that is

‘capable of inflection of functional or non-functional concerns.’ (Ellis, 1982:145) Ellis states

that there isn’t in fact a real difference in narration form between news and soap opera

however, distinction “is that of the source material.” (Ellis, 1999:159)

In the lecture the main focus was looking at the difference between the language of film and television. Film can be tackled from an historical approach looking at how its evolved, considering whether it really is a language. We then moved onto how film has communicated, how its used the audience banding together and sharing ideas and opinions to keep its longevity and conversation going. By looking at film as a language we can understand that it is simply a construction, an entity of elements formed together to create an ‘end goal’.

Christian Metz and Michael Taylor do a good job in (Film Language: A semiotics of the Cinema, 1974) discussing the semiology of film and the elements of film looking at traditional Hollywood films.

Nowell Smith on the other hand looks into why films ‘mean’ stating it is a process people take when they are making “sense of something they’ve been confronted with”. (Smith, 2000:10) Smith then looks and considers cinema as a language however struggles to differentiates whether cinema is in fact a separate language or an entire different language/concept in itself.

However, the theme between the two is film and television have a ‘meaning’ to the audience. Whilst Nowell looks at film ‘meaning’ to an audience, Smith dissects what generates this ‘mean’ or lust to watch, whether it is sound.

References:

Ellis, John (1982) Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video, Routledge: London - pp. 127-159

Gledhill, C and Williams, L. (2000), Reinventing Film Studies. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey (2000) ‘How films mean, or, from aesthetics to semiotics and half-way back again’