In this final subsection, we discuss some of the developments that were made subsequently to Metz’s proposals. These developments were in-
tended to deal with specific problems that had arisen with the initial application of the grande syntagmatique and focused on the kinds of dif- ficulties raised in passing above. We will see again that these proposals generally suffered from the lack of precision with which the necessary semiotic categories were understood at that time. On the one hand, this commonly led to only superficial analyses, which were then interpreted as demonstrating the failure or inappropriateness of linguistic categories when applied beyond the linguistic domain; and, on the other hand, the proposals for extensions naturally suffered similar problems to the original model they were trying to rescue.
As we shall now progressively demonstrate and as suggested above, one of the fundamental problems exhibited by Metz’s formulation in its original form was precisely the lack of clean definitions and descriptions of mechanisms for the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes of organisation. Although these axes are in principle relatively straightforward, their accu- rate application and use had not at the time of Metz’s writing had much opportunity for development. Even in linguistic descriptions there were few accounts that had really brought out the different mechanisms and principles required. Some confusion was then inevitable.
Metz himself, for example wrote in his definition of the grande syntagma- tique the following, very symptomatic but problematic account:
“The large syntagmatique category outlined above also constitutes a paradig- matic category—since, at any moment in the making of his [sic] film, the film-maker must choose from a limited series of types of syntagmatic order- ing.”(Metz, 1974a: 137, original emphasis)
Metz’s formulation here suggests a degree of ‘overlap’ or mixing of syn- tagmatic and paradigmatic description; this occurs in several places in Metz’s writings, for example elsewhere we also find the even more direct statement:
“Thus, the terms of the syntagms (A-B) are at the same time members of the paradigm (A/B)” (Metz, 1974d: 171)
Such statements link the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic axes closely, as is necessary, but far too strongly in that the elements involved are assumed to be the same. It is clear loosely what is meant but in fact this provides a poor basis for effective formalisation and further development. We have already commented above on this tendency, sometimes even evident within linguistic accounts. For example, the potential for confusion was equally present in our first example of the paradigmatic/syntagmatic distinction in Figure 3.4 in Section 3.2. There we found syntagmatic chains apparently consisting of terms such as the–dog–ran intersecting graphically with paradigmatic sets such as{the, a, this}, {dog, cat, man}, {ran, sat, ate}, etc.
We need to look rather closely to see that this does not actually fit with how Metz is describing the relation between syntagms and paradigms above: the paradigm sets in the linguistic case do not overlap with syntagm
‘sets’—i.e., the terms the and dog are not found in any paradigm set{the,
dog} since, as we explained above, these terms are never in meaningful opposition. This rather implicit property is sometimes obscured by the graphic representation of the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes as two dimensions on the page but is in fact essential: we need to pull the criteria for grouping and combining elements apart along the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes far more clearly in order to show the central contri- butions made by each. This is the important function of adopting quite distinct descriptive mechanisms for the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes as begun in the previous chapter.
Thus, although Metz was aiming at a closer connection between the paradigmatic and syntagmatic, between potential and actual, he lacked the theoretical mechanisms for making this work. Similar deep foundational problems then reoccurred in most of the attempts made subsequently to refine Metz’s formalisation. These approaches commonly took their lead, as did Metz, from formalisations proposed within linguistics but, at that time, there was either a foregrounding of syntagm, making the paradigmatic a loose derivative or, less often, a foregrounding of paradigm at the expense of syntagm. We can show this here by drawing on two brief examples of subsequent attempts made to develop Metz’s account further. Both examples reveal a clear awareness of the need to capture syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships, but lack the technical resources necessary for achieving this; they are also discussed at greater length in Bateman (2007).
The first revision we discuss was developed by Michel Colin (Colin, 1995b: originally published 1989). Colin tried to redefine the grande syntag- matique by making direct use of several representational devices developed within Chomskyan linguistics. His starting point was standard phrase structure rules as used for describing regularities of syntactic structure. Such rules are expressed as ‘re-write’ rules, in which some syntactic cate- gory is ‘re-written’ as the categories that constitute it. Thus, for example, the syntactic regularity that a Sentence (as a syntactic category) is made up of a noun phrase (e.g., ‘the dog’) followed by a verb phrase (e.g., ‘runs’) is captured by the rule:
S→ NP VP
Colin adapted this for the requirements of the grande syntagmatique by re-interpreting the relation between elements on the right-hand side of these rules as disjunction rather than the usual concatenation (which he described not entirely appropriately as conjunction). In this reconstruction a rule such as
was taken to mean ‘if A, then B or C’. The grande syntagmatique could then be written straightforwardly as a set of ‘rules’ of the form:
syntagma → diegetic 2-parallel
diegetic → specific 3-bracket
specific → narrative 4-bracket
etc.
This brings out particularly clearly that Colin was attempting to get at a paradigmatic description—i.e., a description of choices—but did not have an appropriate descriptive apparatus for the job. Using phrase structure rules for paradigmatic description is formally confused since it mixes properties of the syntagmatic axis and properties of the paradigmatic axis. Carrying out the ‘re-writes’ of these revised phrase structure rules then produces a ‘structure’, as is the case with their traditional use in syntax, but a structure that is quite non-standard and with uncertain formal properties and consequences. Colin calls this structure, summarized by Colin (1995b: 67) in the tree structure shown in Figure 4.5, the selection-tree available to the film-maker. The terminal nodes (i.e., leaf nodes—nodes without further substructure) identify the syntagmatic types.
Figure 4.5 Michel Colin’s reworking of the grande syntagmatique as a ‘selection-tree’ (with Metz’s numbering of the syntagmatic types maintained to ease comparison)
This, as even the most superficial consideration of the contrast between this ‘structure’ and a syntactic structure shows, moves us into rather strange territory. A linguistic syntactic structure is never an account of selections ‘available to a speaker’—it is a representation of the results of such selections, not the selections themselves. Nevertheless, despite this ‘detour’ via phrase structure rules, the formalisation did enable Colin to start attempting more rigorous and discriminating definitions of the categories involved.
This is shown in the use that Colin makes of the non-terminal nodes of the selection-tree. These are now taken as providing definitional attributes of the nodes below them. Thus, moving through the tree from top to
syntagma diegetic 2 parallel specific 3 bracket narrative 4 descriptive linear 5 alternating inclusive 7+8 sequence 6 scene
bottom, he first distinguishes between the parallel and bracket syntagmas by proposing that the former do not play a role in advancing the narra- tive (i.e., diegetic vs. non-diegetic or ‘parallel’). Second, when there are consequences for the narrative, these can either be specific, i.e., relating particular events of the narrative, or non-specific (or ‘bracket’), i.e., con- cerned with general facts or states of affairs involved in or important for the narrative. Third, specific narrative syntagmas either concern some ‘hero’ or main protagonist(s) or describe particular states of affairs supporting the narrative—this distinguishes descriptive syntagmas from narrative syntagmas proper. And within the narrative syntagmas proper, there can be either linear or alternating syntagmas.
This reorientation to the definitional attributes is an important step towards bringing out the paradigmatic organisation inherent in the grande syntagmatique. It invites explicit consideration of the extent to which the classification is complete and internally consistent. It was then natural for Colin to start proposing further attributes in order to better distinguish the syntagmas being described. For example, the feature ‘inclusive’ is newly added by Colin in order to indicate a relationship between the spaces involved in juxtaposed shots, a move also argued for by Burch as we saw in the previous chapter. The space of some second shot may on occasions be included within a common spatial framework provided by the first. This allows the account to distinguish more rigorously a sequence from a scene.
A sequence is some ‘itinerary’ that a main protagonist follows; this can range over a variety of distinct locations and so receives the spatial feature of not being ‘inclusive’ (Colin, 1995b: 74). Segment 2 taken from Adieu Philippine above when Michel leaves the television studio to fetch some headphones from the mobile van outside, meets Liliane and Juliette on the way, and then brings them both back inside the studio to watch the recording, is a clear example of this.
Once the paradigmatic distinctions are recognised, they can begin to exert their own independent influence on the description. One problem often noted in critiques of the original grande syntagmatique was how certain choices seemed to be ruled out arbitrarily. For example, when a segment is classified to be presenting cases of a more general order, as in a ‘bracket’ syntagma, then no temporal organisation may be considered within the segment as these lie on mutually exclusive branches of the selection-tree. However it is certainly not uncommon to find film segments which appear to include elements of both, i.e., presenting cases but with temporality nevertheless providing a component of their organisation—in Chapter 7 below we will discuss the opening segment of Adieu Philippine in precisely these terms. Colin therefore tried to provide a more flexible scheme for the selection of syntagmas by focusing on the definitional attributes rather than the selection-tree.
For this he also drew on descriptive resources adopted from linguistics, this time recasting the account in terms of ‘lexical subcategorization’ rules.
Such rules allow each particular syntagmatic type (in Colin’s case then the Metzian syntagmas) to be associated with a set of discriminating features rather than simply being fixed by their position in a tree structure. This migrates the definitional nodes of the selection-tree to features that may hold or not in order to describe particular syntagmas independently of any hierarchical organisation amongst those syntagmas. For example, it was then possible with the following rule (cf. Colin 1995b: 73 and the original version in Colin 1989b) to state that a descriptive syntagma (type 4) was, on the one hand, non-narratival but, on the other hand, nevertheless linear:
descriptive syntagma → < +diegetic, +specific, −narrative, +linear > This therefore permitted a more effective description of the co-occurrence possibilities of features since it avoided the requirement of the tree represen- tation that certain features be automatically excluded at one branch even though they appear to be potentially relevant along some other branch.
The final move taken by Colin was then to improve the account still fur- ther by attempting to capture dependencies between the applicability of the defining features. This pulls apart once and for all the taxonomic structure of the grande syntagmatique and the internal organisation of its defining fea- tures. The mechanism employed for this was that of ‘lexical redundancy’ rules whereby syntagmas are characterised by feature combinations and dependencies as follows:
syntagma → < ±syntagma, ±diegetic >
<+syntagma> → < ±linear >
<+diegetic> → < ±specific, ±narrative, ±inclusive > This opens up the ‘generative potential’ of the framework in that many more syntagmas are posited than those of the original grande syntagmatique. This was argued to offer a more empirically adequate characterisation of the possibilities actually taken up in film.
Although it is rarely presented in these terms, what Colin in fact achieved with this was one of the first clear separations of the paradigmatic and syntagmatic information inherent in the grande syntagmatique. Unfortu- nately this result was largely hidden by the more problematic artefacts introduced by the intrinsic syntagmatic orientation of the Chomksyan framework. Nevertheless, the distinguishing features that Colin identi- fied belong to the paradigmatic description, while the syntagmas they give rise to are formally separated as part of the syntagmatic description. As a consequence, Colin’s proposed lexical redundancy rules then translate straightforwardly to the paradigmatic system network shown in Figure 4.6, using the conventions for system networks introduced in the previous chapter. Here we can see, for example, how Colin’s second ‘lexical redun- dancy’ rule above that the feature ‘+syntagma’ leads directly to a choice between ‘+linear’ and ‘-linear’ corresponds exactly with the uppermost branch of the network in Figure 4.6.
Figure 4.6 Reworking of Michel Colin’s revised grande syntagmatique represented as a paradigmatic system network
The difficulty in reducing the constraints to a strict hierarchy promoted within the Chomskyan-derived approach then disappears—indeed, the kind of inter-dependencies revealed here is completely typically of more complex semiotic strata and their paradigmatic organisations. This transfer of the original Metzian account into a broader, more empirically-motivated paradigmatic description of film is then precisely the direction that we continue below.
A similar set of problems arose in the experiment undertaken by M ¨oller- Naß (1986) as part of his particular critique of Metz’s approach. A sub- stantial component of this criticism centred on the assumed nonsensicality, again inherited from Chomskyan syntax, of ‘meaning’ without ‘grammat- icality’; we explained in Chapter 2 how, prior to the more recent devel- opments in discourse semantics and its mechanisms, it was completely unclear how meaning could be constructed without syntactic constraints to support compositionality. The advances now available in discourse semantics have rendered this particular issue obsolete. However, still apposite today is M ¨oller-Naß’s discussion of Metz’s formalization from the perspective of the more formal foundation for linguistic structural representations then emerging. In particular, M ¨oller-Naß criticises the ‘tree’ organisation employed by Metz, correctly observing that there is an equiv- ocation concerning the features that are used to classify syntagmatic types and the types themselves—precisely as we saw in Colin’s ‘selection-tree’ in Figure 4.5 above.
M ¨oller-Naß’s approach to improving on this is to reorganize the hier- archy so that it properly reflects features and to explain that each syn- tagmatic type should be characterised by a unique feature combination, similar again to how we have now seen Colin’s approach to work. M ¨oller- Naß suggests, however, that there are two distinct kinds of features, those concerning segmentation and those concerning temporal relations. He captures each of these in the form of a structural dependency tree and states that, to do proper justice to the independence of the two dimensions represented, the tree concerning segmentation should be repeated as a sub- tree of all the nodes of the other tree (M ¨oller-Naß, 1986: 338). M ¨oller-Naß then
configuration + syntagma - syntagma + diegetic - diegetic + linear - linear + specific - specific + narrative - narrative + inclusive - inclusive
goes so far as to suggest that the need for this degree of complexity shows that there is no overall system that can be sensibly described (M¨oller-Naß, 1986: 349).
What we actually have here, however, is the direct ‘multiplication’ of options that we illustrated in the previous chapter with respect to the alter- natives described by Burch. There we noted that although simultaneous systems of choice commonly give rise to many distinct alternatives, their representation as paradigmatic networks provides precisely the theoret- ical and descriptive apparatus necessary to keep that complexity under control. This option was not available to M ¨oller-Naß making the problem he had uncovered seem insurmountable. In Chapter 6 we will see that a subnetwork capturing segmentation can be included in parallel to other networks of choice within a single description as long as (i) we properly separate the paradigmatic and syntagmatic contributions and (ii) employ a resource such as that of the system network for capturing the necessary paradigmatic interdependencies.
In summary, both Colin’s proposals for employing lexical redundancy rules and M ¨oller-Naß’s reorganization of the Metzian hierarchy show the original paradigmatic nature of the grande syntagmatique attempting to express itself—the descriptions developed could in some sense be called ‘proto-paradigmatic’ in that they strain to capture paradigmatic options within the mechanisms of syntagmatic representations. Both Colin and M ¨oller-Naß drew attention to what they saw as the explosive complex- ity involved in combining features running along different dimensions. However, as observed above, cross-classification is actually a common property of properly paradigmatic descriptions of complex semiotic sys- tems, such as verbal languages, and is a consequence of the fact that the features proposed are independent of one another: i.e., they can be ‘chosen’ independently in the description of a single unit.
Modern paradigmatically organised grammars, such as those common- place in systemic-functional linguistics (cf. Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004), have hundreds of such combinations of features and remain useful and powerful representations of the grammatical systems of natural languages. This therefore provides us with a far more adequate foundation for the development we undertake below.
4.4
Summary and Conclusions
In this chapter, we have seen how the most influential linguistically- inspired semiotic account of film, the grande syntagmatique of Christian Metz, fell foul of a range of problems caused by the lack of a developed semiotic view at that time. Although the Metzian efforts may appear relatively modest today, the grande syntagmatique was for many years un- usually successful in driving scientific discourse concerning film because
it suggested for the first time both how film constructions, or syntagmas, could be captured in the form of an, at least in principle, complete and conceptually clean taxonomy and, moreover, how a method of successive refinement in the form of a ‘if not this, then that’-progression could be applied to suggest a more effective analytic access to film structures. As we have seen, however, arguments concerning the inherent limitations and problems of the grande syntagmatique came subsequently to dominate. The discussion showed that the concepts developed from the linguistics of the time could not hold their own against the demands of film.
Now, with the more powerful semiotic foundation we have motivated in previous chapters, we can take up the task of Metz’s account again, relying on a thorough and precisely defined set of definitions in order to remove the analytic uncertainties that Metz’s original description left open.
Further Reading
Good introductions and discussions of the grande syntagmatique are given