Modern (or ‘contemporary’) film theory marks a decisive break with the classical film theory of Rudolf Arnheim, André Bazin, Bela Balàsz, Siegfried Kracauer, and Victor Perkins. We can characterize this break as a transition from an extensional semantic to an intensional (or immanent) semantic theory of meaning. Classical film theory is a theory of cinematic representation premised upon mechanical duplication (upon the existential relation between film and referent) and is therefore based upon an extensional semantic theory of meaning. In contrast, modern film theory, beginning with the film semiotics of Christian Metz, corresponds to an intensional semantic theory of meaning, for it drove a wedge between mechanical duplication and cinematic representation and then defined the latter, not externally – as the effect of an existential link between film and referent – but internally – as an effect of codes.

Furthermore, the evolution of modern film theory can be characterized as progressing from an intensional semantic to a pragmatic theory of filmic meaning. Pragmatists study how successful communication is achieved on the level of language use. This is because, they argue, language's meaning is not determined in advance of its use.

During the eighties, film studies gradually adopted ‘new’ methodologies from cultural studies and the social sciences, which displaced the speculative ideas of film theory. Rather than construct hypotheses and models about the general structure and spectators' experience of film, film studies has moved toward the ‘something else’ enumerated by Janet Bergstrom. However, a number of film scholars, in both Europe and North America, have persisted with film theory's most difficult conceptual problems, which they tackle from the perspective of cognitive science. This book is a report on the knowledge generated by these cognitive film theorists. But because this knowledge is fragmentary and incomplete, I have endeavored to expand and develop it in new and unforeseen ways.

However, for the most part, I do not report on the knowledge generated by the well-known cognitive film theorists in North America (David Bordwell, Noël Carroll, Edward Branigan, Joseph Anderson, among others) but discuss the much lesser known film theorists working in the cognitive tradition in Europe – particularly Francesco Casetti, Roger Odin, Michel Colin, and Dominique Chateau.

My aim in this book has been to outline the film spectator's cognitive capacity as theorized by the cognitive film semioticians, whose work is united by the same project: to combine film semiotics and cognitive science, with the objective of modelling filmic competence - that is, the spectator's knowledge or intuitions about filmic meaning. To offer an outline of this work I have had to mediate between the insights of the Language Analysis tradition and cognitive science (the twentieth century version of epistemology). As we saw in Chapter 1, these two traditions are usually opposed to one another, since the Language Analysis tradition replaces the epistemologists' assumption that we have immediate access to our own thoughts with the assumption that we only have indirect access to our thoughts via language and other intersubjective sign systems. Chomsky's linguistics creates a synthesis between epistemology and Language Analysis, thus avoiding the idealism and first person perspective of epistemology and the (quasi) behaviorism of the Language Analysis tradition. Chomsky's work on competence therefore epitomizes what this book is all about.

Two historians meet at a conference. The one asks the other: “What do you think are the main consequences of the French Revolution?” To which the other responds: “It is too early to tell.” In this book I argue that it is still too early to tell what are the consequences of another revolution – the rise of the Language Analysis tradition, whose origins are to be found in the work of Saussure, Peirce, Wittgenstein, and so on, at the beginning of the twentieth century. As is well known, the Language Analysis tradition has already had a decisive impact on the formation and development of modern (or ‘contemporary’) film theory from the sixties onwards. One reason it is still too early to determine the consequences of the tradition is that the revolution it inaugurated is not complete. The main characteristic of this tradition is that it opposes the philosophy of consciousness, which dominated Western thought from the seventeenth century up to the work of the British idealists at the end of the nineteenth century. The Language Analysis tradition challenged the idealism inherent in the philosophy of the subject and replaced it with a new mentalité that reorients thinking toward language and other semiotic systems.

The conflict between the Language Analysis tradition and the philosophy of the subject can be understood today as a conflict between linguistics and cognitive science (or non-linguistic areas of congnitive science).

One indication that linguistics has become a mature science is its ability to handle in a formalized manner the problem of ‘grammaticality’, or to define in formal terms the boundary between ‘grammatical’ and ‘ungrammatical’ sentences. A technical formulation of this boundary was one of Noam Chomsky's primary aims in his transformational generative grammar (TGG). We can claim that film theory has reached a relatively mature stage (in comparison with other disciplines in the humanities) thanks in part to attempts to develop a film ‘grammar’ based on Chomsky's early theories of TGG.

David Bordwell has expressed his surprise “that theorists who assign language a key role in determining subjectivity have almost completely ignored the two most important contemporary developments in linguistic theory: Chomsky's Transformational Generative Grammar and his Principles-and-Parameters theory.”

Throughout his career, Christian Metz was preoccupied – either directly or indirectly – with reflexivity in film. It is possible to identify three key moments: (1) his study of mirror constructions (construction en abîme) in Fellini's film 8½; (2) a theory of enunciation based on Emile Benveniste's distinction between histoire (hi/story) and discours (discourse); and (3) his seminars of the late eighties, culminating in his book L'Énonciation impersonnelle ou le site du film. In this chapter I will be investigating Metz's cognitive film semiotics (his theory of impersonal filmic enunciation), outlining the concepts it is based upon – particularly reflexivity, but also metalanguage and anaphora – and contrasting it with Francesco Casetti's cognitive film semiotics, a deictic theory of enunciation based on personal pronouns. I shall attempt to articulate what I see to be the main difference between Casetti and Metz: Whereas Casetti models his theory on speech (on face-to-face conversation), Metz implicitly models his theory on writing. Metz rejected a pronoun-based theory of enunciation because, he argues, pronouns are not appropriate to describing the ‘reality’ of film. But Metz also rejected all deictic concepts (concepts that designate how film is oriented to its contexts of production and reception).

In conjunction with that of the other cognitive film semioticians I have already discussed in this book, Roger Odin's semio-pragmatic film theory is preoccupied with researching the film spectator's competence, the tacit knowledge that constitutes each spectator's psychic disposition (or mode of attention) when engaged in the activity of watching a film. Odin regards filmic competence as predominantly pragmatic, with the result that meaning is determined, not by the internal, semantic constraints of la langue, or contingent grammatical rules, or by deictic markers, but by a multitude of external constraints.

Odin calls these external constraints ‘institutions’, a concept central not only to pragmatics, but also to sociology and anthropology. For Bronislaw Malinowski, an institution