We saw in the previous chapter that it is in part the plasticity of the representational medium that gives film its expressive potential. This raises the question of how to characterise the representational capacities of film. There are two kinds of answers that have been given to this question. The first holds that film is a kind of language. This answer has been very influential in film studies, and will be criticised for traditional cinema in the first section below and for digital cinema in the second section. The second answer holds that film is a pictorial medium and that pictures are not language-like. This will be the answer returned in this chapter. It follows that we should pose the question of the nature of cinematic realism at least partly in pictorial terms. I consider seven kinds of realism in cinema, concentrating in particular on the view that pictorial images can be transparent.

FILM AS A LANGUAGE

Much in common thought about film supports the idea that film is a kind of language. We speak of the language of film, of film as text, of the development of new languages of film and of reading a film. The idea of film as a language has also received much (though not universal) support in film theory. The Soviet filmmakers and theorists Lev Kuleshov and Vsevelod Pudovkin held that the shot played the role of a word, and the edited sequence of shots the role of a sentence.