ABSTRACT
In Part I we spoke of the rise of linguistics as a kind of master discipline for the contemporary era. The cinema, for its part, has hardly been immune to the magnetic attraction of the linguistic model. Indeed, the notion of FILM LANGUAGE was already a commonplace in the writings of some of the earliest theorists of the cinema, even those untouched by the theoretical movements and schools of which we have spoken. One finds the metaphor in the 1920s writings of Riccioto Canudo in Italy and Louis Delluc in France, both of whom saw the language-like character of the cinema as linked, paradoxically, to its non-verbal nature, its status as a “visual esperanto” transcending the barriers of national language.1 One finds the metaphor in the writings of poet-critic Vachel Lindsay, who spoke of film as “hieroglyphic language,” as well as in the work of Hungarian film theorist Bela Balazs, who repeatedly stressed the language-like nature of film in his work from the 1920s through to the late 1940s.2
