Cinema E Conversazione

As an intentional communication tool between an ideal transmitter and an ideal receiver (film-maker and spectator), narrative cinema can be considered a language. But if it is, how does this language work? Is it perhaps based-as some authors have claimed-on a sort of "language of cinema," that is, on a codified system of signs, supported by conventions, and having a grammar? The main thesis of this book is that narrative cinema needs neither semantics nor syntax, but only pragmatics, such as the pragmatics outlined by Paul Grice in his seminal paper "Logic and conversation" (1967). That which in natural languages is done by syntax and semantics, in cinema is done by the simple duplication of images and sounds. A narrative film is a semiotic phenomenon not as a syntactic/semantic phenomenon, but as a pragmatic one.