ABSTRACT
The publications of Christian Metz are particularly suited to the purpose of a brief review of film analysis as a form of applied semiotics. In the first place, the widely eclectic sources and references brought together (Metz, 1974a) allow for an interpretation of Metz's ideas as a 'crystallisation' of tendencies, attitudes and practices of cinema related scholarship at large. In the second place, Metz's ideas seem fairly representative of a type of 'semiotics applied to art' that is scattered over a considerable range of the humanities, and in which the shadows of Saussure, Levi-Strauss and Barthes loom large.
